An entertaining memoir by a humorist who has gained enlightening insight into living an authentic life.
A memoir in essays by the former host of The Late Late Show.
In this follow-up of sorts to his 2009 memoir America on Purpose, comedian and former talk show host Ferguson has assembled an eclectic volume of introspective essays that broadly reflect on his life experiences and travels. The author covers some familiar ground from his previous memoir: his Scottish heritage, bouts with alcoholism and path to sobriety, marriages and children. Here, he directs his attention to some of his more memorable moments, including a conversation he had as a teenager with a young dying woman that has haunted him years later; an interaction with an Australian bartender that brought his issues with drinking into sharp focus; and confronting his fear of flying by taking flying lessons. “What flying taught me wasn’t just how to control an airplane,” he writes. “It taught me about perspective. Not just the view from the plane but about myself, where I am in the world and the extent of my abilities. It taught me to be honest about myself.” Ferguson rarely references other celebrities, refreshingly avoiding name-dropping. When he does mention a well-known figure, he uses it to great effect, as in his story about meeting Princess Diana. Within the context of a broader discussion of mortality, his few lines on Diana capture her luminous qualities. “I remember her eyes and her hair and her whiter-than-white teeth—like an American’s—but what I remember most vividly is how easy it was to make her laugh….I forgot about my nerves while I talked to her; she made me forget myself for a while. I can’t say anything much nicer about a person.” Ferguson is a natural storyteller, sharp-witted and acutely observant of his surroundings. He’s capable of maintaining a light touch yet his stories often transcend whatever humorous incidents may occur. Collectively, they serve as often poignant meditations on the long journey toward his late-middle-aged self.
An entertaining memoir by a humorist who has gained enlightening insight into living an authentic life.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-53391-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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