Confessional humor at its warm and wicked best.
Actor and bestselling author Fry’s (Stephen Fry in America, 2009, etc.) at times meandering but always charming memoir of “a late adolescence and early manhood crowded with incident.”
In this second installment of the author’s ongoing autobiographical project, the British comedian tells the story of his student years at Cambridge and early professional life at BBC radio and television. After a youth filled with “suicide attempts, tantrums and madness” and a stint in prison for petty theft and fraud, Fry buckled down and demonstrated his ample intellect by winning a scholarship to read English at Queens’ College. He immersed himself in the Cambridge arts scene and joined the prestigious Footlights Club, which had also nurtured the comic talents of Eric Idle and John Cleese. Fry also developed close and enduring friendships with such future luminaries of the stage and screen as Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson. His voice and unrepentantly Wildean wit became signature trademarks, and although he “loved every single thing about acting,” he found even greater success as a writer. While he was still an undergraduate, his comic play Latin! played to sold-out audiences at the 1980 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Five years later, his revised version of the musical Me and My Gal became an award-winning smash hit on Broadway and London’s West End and the vehicle that propelled him from BBC respectability and into stardom. Punctuating the detailed accounts of Fry’s professional triumphs are the funny, at times heartbreaking revelations that truly define him. With humility, he describes his tooth-destroying sugar addiction, financial excesses and the “vulnerability, fear, insecurity, doubt, inadequacy, puzzlement and inability to cope” he hid from others and that would eventually lead him down even more destructive paths than those he had already traveled as a youth.
Confessional humor at its warm and wicked best.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-59020-714-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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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