Rants aside, a unique perspective on the perils of modern comedy from a survivor with a long memory.
A fast, funny and informative stand-up routine/memoir from one of the major comic stars of the 1970s.
Walker—who made his name as J.J. Evans on the sitcom Good Times—recounts his life in the ghetto, on TV and on the road. He gives a good inside look at the TV show, where he was cast as the teenage J.J., surprising producers and angering the cast by becoming the breakout star. At the peak of his fame, he would also play a supporting role in the careers of both David Letterman and Jay Leno, two of the many struggling unknown comics who wrote jokes for him. He also had a front-row seat to the decades-long friendship-turned-bitter rivalry that would lead to the late-show wars of the early 1990s; long after the dust has settled, he remains strongly Team Letterman, holding Leno in contempt. As for the rest of the competition, he admired Richard Pryor, had limited patience for Andy Kaufman and thinks Cosby is king. (He also admits he isn’t always the best judge, having once advised Steve Martin to find another career.) Walker also acknowledges certain limits that come with his choice of career: “The problem is that white comics don't have to be white, but black comics have to be black.” Other limits are self-imposed; although uninhibited in his lifestyle, this self-proclaimed “Johnny Mathis of Black Comedians” has long adhered to his friend David Brenner’s advice that you can’t be successful if you can’t work clean. He is similarly conservative in his politics. Walker, once the comic relief for Black Panther rallies, takes a little too much delight in being a “black sheep among black people.”
Rants aside, a unique perspective on the perils of modern comedy from a survivor with a long memory.Pub Date: June 26, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-306-82083-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
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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