Raunchy, disorderly memoir from the man who bestowed The Gong Show, The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game, and other entertainments on the American public. Barris devotes much—too much—space here to his recent retirement years in St. Tropez, focusing on his friendships with some eccentric Frenchman and his obsession with the game of boule. He also ventures such comments on his current hosts as, ``Frenchmen never change their clothes...And Frenchmen don't bathe, at least most of the Parisian taxi drivers don't.'' But the one-time (mostly 70's) Nielsen darling hasn't completely forgotten his audience, and in between the French sections he serves up a ribald account of his time at the top, going right for the groin on his opening page, a description of the notorious episode on The Gong Show (on which bad acts performed until a celebrity judge slammed a mallet into a giant gong) that featured the Popsicle Twins, pretty teenagers who performed fellatio on orange popsicles. Readers who venture further will learn about the early days of Barris's first show, The Dating Game, originally plagued by obscenity-spouting contestants; about the author's first big TV special, featuring rock-'n'-roller Cass Elliot, who ``was most definitely fat. And dank''; about how Barris was masturbated during dinner by a 17-year-old ``with the face of a sad horse'' while future Hollywood powerhouse Mike Medavoy danced with a lampshade on his head; and about how, back in France, Ted Kennedy cavorted on Barris's yacht. There's a bit of introspection, too (``some of those antics of mine can make me moan with embarrassment''), perhaps prompted by a 60-ish Barris's recent, failed comeback attempt, schlepping projects around L.A. to no avail. Which isn't surprising, judging from this latest Barris product, which deserves, with little ado, a big...Gong! (Photographs—not seen) (First printing of 40,000)
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-7867-0002-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1993
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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