How nothing could become something or how a national TV audience learned to live in a Beckett-ian world. Perfect for...
Welcome to an upfront seat at one of TV’s most popular sitcoms.
How does a TV studio replace the loss on Thursdays of Cheers, one of the greatest sitcoms of all time? With one that may be even better. Former Entertainment Weekly staffer Armstrong (Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: And all the Brilliant Minds Who Made the Mary Tyler Show a Classic, 2013, etc.) believes that Seinfeld was special. Its “trademark bouillabaisse of cultural references and inside jokes” created “portals between its fictional world and reality,” its actors had rich characters to inhabit, and its talented writers, including star Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, wrote smart scripts. Armstrong unfolds the show’s history chapter by chapter. Here are Jerry and David, two hardworking stand-up comedians, talking in a late-night diner, coming up with an idea for a TV show based, essentially, on them, a metashow in which little happens. At first it was The Seinfeld Chronicles. Jerry wanted it changed, and NBC president Brandon Tartikoff agreed. Armstrong then covers the “players,” how four characters were created by four talented actors, followed by the “network,” the “production,” the “writers,” and the “bizarros” (the show’s many odd ducks, including the Soup Nazi and J. Peterman). It all came together to create a masterpiece. The show’s tickets were always free, and tapings could last three hours. Even the show’s relatively minor characters became national sensations. America Online’s numbers plunged when Seinfeld was on. Just before the eighth season, David decided it was time to go. Jerry was worn out too. NBC offered him $5 million per show; he was already making $1 million. He passed, and the ninth season would be Seinfeld’s last. Armstrong’s intimate, breezy history is full of gossipy details, show trivia, and insights into how famous episodes came to be.
How nothing could become something or how a national TV audience learned to live in a Beckett-ian world. Perfect for Seinfeldians and newcomers alike.Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5610-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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