A familiar, relatable story of dependence and repentance, filtered through the glam of Hollywood.
The star-filled career of one of America’s most famous entertainment show anchors, complicated by true confessions of a spectacular fall from grace.
When Charlie Sheen tells you, “That was an excellent effort, my man,” it’s probably time to take stock of your life. That’s where O’Brien (Talkin' Sports: A B.S.-er's Guide, 2008, etc.) found himself in 2005 when a series of sexually graphic, drug-and-alcohol–fueled voice-mail messages appeared in the tabloid press. Recorded during an epic drunken blackout, the messages were just one red flag for a man racing toward destruction. “Mine is a story of daydreams and fulfilled and unfulfilled ambitions,” he writes in the introduction, “of the craving for love from strangers and for belonging at the table, of failure and of redemption.” From there, the author tells a rich and well-written—if not overly complex—history of his rise from modest roots in South Dakota to becoming one of the most well-known media commentators in the country. In addition to being quite entertaining, there’s something for everyone in O’Brien’s story. Sports fans will thrill to anecdotes about legends like Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson, told with obvious nostalgia for the 1980s and ’90s, when the author covered the Olympics, NBA Finals, Final Four and Super Bowl, among other sporting events. Consumers of tabloids will enjoy the juicy tales from a host who readily admits he’s a name-dropper. “And it goes both ways; there’s a reason people want to talk with us,” he writes. “We are the link to the fans. So, it’s not me, folks, it’s the profession. If I didn’t get to know people, I wouldn’t be around long.” In the final third of the book, O’Brien covers his dramatic descent into a brutal, life-threatening alcoholism that took two stints in rehab to survive, complete with notes from his doctors that read, “Surrender or else.”
A familiar, relatable story of dependence and repentance, filtered through the glam of Hollywood.Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-312-56437-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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