An absolute must for any Buffy or Angel fan.
The oral history of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.
Gross and Altman (The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek, 2016, etc.) follow up on their successful two-volume oral history of an iconic work of American popular culture with a similarly organized book on an iconic TV show. They bring together hundreds of comments from actors, directors, writers, and producers to tell the story of Buffy and its spinoff, Angel. In 1992, Joss Whedon wrote the screenplay for the movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer because he wanted to see a movie in which a blonde girl confronts a monster in an alley and “kicks its ass.” That movie flopped. When the director, Fran Rubel Kuzui, asked Whedon later if he had any interest in reprising the story for the fledging WB station, he agreed. Whedon wanted Buffy to be both an ordinary teenage girl and a powerful slayer: “I want the show to be remembered as a consistently intelligent, funny, emotionally involving entertainment that subtly changed the entire world—or a small portion of pop culture.” It did just that for seven years and 144 episodes. Inevitably, repetition occurs throughout the book as different participants describe similar material, but there is plenty of insider information and trivia to please fans. Whedon had always thought of himself as Buffy’s friend Xander but later realized, “Oh, I was Buffy! The whole time.” Sarah Michelle Gellar had auditioned for the role of Cordelia (who they originally thought would be black), but Whedon knew she’d be perfect as Buffy: “I think if we hadn’t found Sarah, the series might not have happened or lasted.” Nearly half of the book deals with Angel. Although Whedon—who moved on to Firefly—wasn’t closely involved, it found success for five years and 110 episodes. Surprisingly, neither series won an Emmy or Golden Globe award.
An absolute must for any Buffy or Angel fan.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-12892-8
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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
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