A satisfying if sometimes-dark read for Palin’s many fans. Those interested in the inner workings of showbiz will find much...
Now is the ’90s of our discontent….
It’s not exactly a decennium horribilis that Monty Python member and world traveler Palin (The Truth, 2013, etc.) describes in this journal. As the author notes at the start of this third volume, he closed the late 1980s with the sense that he’d been frittering away his life, someone “who had reached his mid-forties with no great adventures to show for it.” Be careful what you wish for, for Palin immediately found himself swept up in what would become a quarter-century–long series of televised adventures, beginning with sturdy vehicles such as Around the World in Eighty Days and Pole to Pole and spinning off in all sorts of directions. In between, though, were the standard press junkets: show up for a screening, a book signing, a gallery opening, “pontificate on the Python years and become pretentious.” Palin reveals himself to be a serious, sympathetic fellow most of the time, if sometimes given to self-doubt and moping. At turns, he is speaking in hushed tones with Fergie, the Duchess of York, and finding her more congenial and substantial than he might have thought (“She paints a depressing, almost frightening, picture of the royal life”); worrying at world events such as a renewed IRA bombing campaign in London (“they kill out of an intensity, a fierceness, a dogged, deep unshakeable belief, as people have done throughout history”); and trying to pull together sometimes-warring factions into a reunion (“the unsatisfactory Python stage show business pushes itself, once again, into the front of my mind”). The decade’s worth of notes ends on a rather dour note, befitting a gloomy English new year that, of course, he could escape by hopping on a jet to some more tropical clime.
A satisfying if sometimes-dark read for Palin’s many fans. Those interested in the inner workings of showbiz will find much of value, too.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-07707-3
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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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