A polished and touching piece of work.
Tony Hendra’s daughter explains why she went public with the story of his incestuous sexual abuse.
Tony was one of the guiding lights of the National Lampoon during its glory days in the 1970s. In his bestselling memoir, Father Joe (2004), he wrote in very vague terms of his “misplaced sexual guilt.” Reading rave reviews that commended Tony for his supposed honesty, his daughter Jessica was shocked. At no point in the book, she saw, did he acknowledge the times that he forced her to commit incest. She decided to finally talk about her secret, in a public way that prompted an investigation by the New York Times. Her excellent memoir starts at this shocking moment, then winds back to tell the story of her life with Tony in a clipped, naturalistic voice. A British comedian who had once performed with John Cleese, Tony moved to L.A. to work in television, but never got a big break. Jessica was six years old in 1971 when the family relocated to New Jersey to further her father’s career. Not long after that, the first abuse happened, quickly followed by publication in the Lampoon of Tony’s disturbing and purportedly funny piece that gives Jessica’s memoir its title. (As depicted here, much of Tony’s “humorous” writing seems more like an attempt to rub people’s faces in his own emotional problems.) In gripping, straightforward prose, Jessica depicts her childhood among frenetically drug-fueled and rage-prone comics like John Belushi and Saturday Night Live writer Michael O’Donoghue. She lays out in an unadorned fashion her drift into self-hatred and anorexia, as well as Tony’s increasing megalomania, sexual obsessions and drug consumption. It’s hard not to see him as a monster—a label that Jessica assiduously avoids in her uncommonly fair and evenhanded memoir.
A polished and touching piece of work.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-082099-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
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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