Essential for Shandling fans and a good choice for readers interested in stand-up and comedy writing.
Garry Shandling's family, friends, and colleagues paint an affectionate portrait of a driven, introspective artist who had a hard time getting out of his own head.
Apatow (Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy, 2015, etc.) never thought his comedy mentor and buddy was the kind of guy who liked to hold on to things. After all, the self-deprecating comedian was a practicing Buddhist. Nevertheless, following Shandling’s 2016 death at age 66, Apatow discovered that his teacher and former boss had actually kept everything—including a revelatory trove of journal entries and personal notes stretching back decades. The discovery led to the HBO documentary The Zen Diaries of Gary Shandling. Here, Apatow uses those earnest entries in conjunction with additional interviews to further explore the legendary comedian’s often besieged psyche. Despite stellar successes that included two seminal TV series (It’s Garry Shandling’s Show and The Larry Sanders Show), Shandling could never shake the death of his older brother, Barry, who died from cystic fibrosis when Garry was just 10. Under that dark shroud, Shandling additionally obsessed about award show monologues, TV scripts, and his unrelenting ego. “He had rage,” notes Sarah Silverman. “He could really hold on to stuff and be troubled by things that to other people might seem small, but he was always working on that, always trying to process it and understand it." Throughout his professional life, that diligence both helped and hampered Shandling, whether he was writing TV scripts for Sanford & Son or breaking into the movies with the ill-fated What Planet Are You From? In the latter case, Shandling’s mix of insecurity and perfectionism proved too much for director Mike Nichols, and the film flopped. Professional highs and lows aside, Shandling is remembered as a man who spent his entire life seeking and generously giving of himself—even if that self was the cause of most of his woes.
Essential for Shandling fans and a good choice for readers interested in stand-up and comedy writing.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-51084-0
Page Count: 472
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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