Essential for Python fans, who for once will not know all the punch lines.
Well-liked comic and world traveler Palin (Himalaya, 2005, etc.) turns in affable notes toward a memoir of a whirlwind decade.
Equating keeping a diary to giving up smoking—painful and no fun at first, then patently the right thing to do—Palin chronicles a time when he and his fellow Monty Pythons were setting to work making comedy history. The beginnings of the BBC series that no one quite knew what to call (The Toad Elevating Moment? Owl-Stretching Time?) were, he allows, “very bizarre,” with sketches devoted to “the death of Genghis Khan, and two men carrying a donkey past a Butlins redcoat, who later gets hit on the head with a raw chicken by a man from the previous sketch, who borrowed the chicken from a man in a suit of armor.” There are epoch-making moments: we may never know whether the pet shop of November 12, 1970, was the epicenter of the dead parrot sketch, but we now can be sure that March 29, 1971, a Monday, marks the birth of the “Grimsby Fish-Slapping dance—which ends up with my being knocked about eight feet into the cold, green, insalubrious waters of the Thames.” Python completists will be fascinated to learn that relations between the troupe members were occasionally strained, as were personal budgets; Palin reveals that they often took on ad-writing jobs for Guinness beer and such to have a few extra pence to spend. Less madcap than some of his fellows, comfortably married with children and on the quiet and bookish side to begin with, Palin still gets into misadventures and scrapes, among them with the censors who objected to the line “We make castanets of your testicles” from Holy Grail. Nonetheless, he is mostly gentle toward his foils, some of whom, such as an Indian-food-scarfing, Lumberjack-Song-quoting George Harrison, emerge as even more lovely than before.
Essential for Python fans, who for once will not know all the punch lines.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-36935-4
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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