An entertaining and well-intentioned biography that lacks a deeper understanding of its subject.
Journalist Cook (The Last Headbangers: NFL Football in the Rowdy, Reckless ’70s, 2012, etc.) gives a largely forgotten TV pioneer his due.
Raised in a brutal environment of poverty and abuse, New Jersey native Flip Wilson (1933–1988) became an overnight success in the 1970s as the first African-American host of a TV variety show but not before more than a decade of honing his comedy act in dives and nightclubs across the United States, creating routines and characters such as the legendary “Geraldine.” Cook promises readers the “inside story,” and he does not shy away from presenting the less-than-savory aspects of a life on the road and the stage. Wilson was driven to succeed from the start, and he did not hesitate to clean up his nightclub act for a wider, and whiter, TV audience. He was able, however, to walk a line between comedians like the edgeless Bill Cosby, whose early crossover success both enraged and motivated Wilson, and the unpredictable Richard Pryor, who clearly learned valuable lessons on how to make it big from his time on Wilson’s writing staff, alongside fellow future comedy legend George Carlin. Unlike those and others of the time, Wilson’s work is mostly absent from the airwaves today, and Cook’s readable narrative will hopefully go some way toward rectifying that situation. However, despite the book’s level of detail, including some you-are-there creative license on the author’s part, readers do not come away with a real appreciation for what made Wilson tick, beyond a desire to entertain and get rich.
An entertaining and well-intentioned biography that lacks a deeper understanding of its subject.Pub Date: April 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-0670025701
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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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