Pythonophiles will find this essential, of course. But fans of good writing should dip into these pages, too, for...
Renowned funnyman and world traveler Palin surveys the ruins of the British Empire and heads outward in the follow-up to Diaries 1969–1979: The Python Years (2007).
In 1980, following the release of the films Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Life of Brian, Palin and his fellow Pythons seemed poised to conquer the American film industry, with their representative asking more than $6 million for a mere treatment for Paramount. Eight years later, as this installment in the author’s journal closes, the sextet has effectively stopped working together, and Palin is about to embark upon the global adventures that yielded Around the World in 80 Days, Pole to Pole and other travelogues. In between, the author writes about all manner of things connected to the film and TV business and the more learned reaches of entertainment. He kvetches about Hollywood’s creative accounting (“The upshot is that not only will there not be a penny profit from America from a movie which was one of the top 40 grossers of the year in the US, but the earnings will hardly cover half the production cost”) and about the conception of various projects such as Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits, which, despite the contributions of Sean Connery and the general merriment, Palin still wants to call Terry Gilliam’s Greed. Throughout, Palin is sharp, literate, shrewd and sometimes harsh about the people he encounters. It will not please fans of The Songlines, for instance, to learn that Palin found Bruce Chatwin “rather sneery about things in a slightly aggressive, camp way which I don’t awfully take to.” Neither might Mel Brooks forgive Palin’s description of their chance encounter, which would seem to demonstrate definitively that “Brooks has an almost pathological inability to accept competition—it’s all a reduction of his own world.”
Pythonophiles will find this essential, of course. But fans of good writing should dip into these pages, too, for Palin—Michael, not Sarah—knows his way around a book.Pub Date: March 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-68202-6
Page Count: 680
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
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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