Four-time Emmy winner Zimmer, best known as Reva “The Slut of Springfield” Shayne on Guiding Light, chronicles her career and shares behind-the-scenes gossip from the daytime drama.
Achieving longevity on a soap opera is no mean feat, and the author can’t help but brag about surviving daytime TV as a manic-depressive, cancer-surviving, time-traveling vixen for close to three decades. Weaving between her own life and that of her character, the author lets it all loose as she revisits her career both on and off the screen. “I had it made,” she writes. “I got to have affairs and live out almost every fantasy possible through the characters I played on TV.” Zimmer shares the laughs and tears she experienced with fellow cast and crewmembers, her real-life struggle with alcohol and subsequent DUI arrest and a look at the zany scripts that led to her character being thrice-resuscitated from the beyond. That all came to a screeching halt in 2009 when the network pulled the plug on Guiding Light after a 72-year run (it began life as a radio serial in 1937). Ratings were down, core characters were pushing retirement age and a new writer and producer couldn’t manage to turn things around. But Zimmer’s here to relive it all as both herself and Reva. As one fan recently moaned to the actress-turned-author, “You’re my family. What are we supposed to do now?” Die-hard Guiding Light fans should enjoy the book. Others? Not so much.
Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-451-23343-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
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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