An uneven Hollywood memoir with a bit of divinity thrown in.
A tale of two Tobolowskys, divided by a positive midlife crisis.
In the author’s latest, ostensibly a memoir but difficult to characterize, prolific character actor Tobolowsky (The Dangerous Animals Club, 2012) revisits his past with an eye toward finding some order, and some religion, in the chaos. The first half of the book follows the author’s life from his childhood in Dallas to the heady years of his burgeoning acting career in the 1980s. In the second half, Tobolowsky focuses on people and concepts related, in some way or another, to his return to Judaism. The two halves are very different in tone, subject matter, and approach. The author’s banal account of his early career mirrors the sort of hedonistic life story one might expect from a baby boomer in the entertainment world: drugs, parties, and money (or the lack thereof) dominate many of the storylines. Readers will be only mildly amused by the time Tobolowsky quips, “do you know how hard it is to spend $800 a week on yourself when you are not buying cocaine? In 1985 dollars?” The concept of faith doesn’t figure largely in the author’s story until the mid-1990s and his rather sudden return to traditional Judaism. At this point, the memoir gains more gravity but also becomes less streamlined, turning from a TMZ–style tell-all to a collection of vignettes about faith, difficult decisions, and people important to him. To be sure, Tobolowsky includes some truly worthwhile stories, not the least of which is a lengthy treatment of an Auschwitz survivor he came to know and whose story he decided to share through film. The author succeeds as a writer in that his prose captures the imagination and keeps readers’ attention; as a memoir, however, the book is aimless, oddly structured, and only tangentially related to his supposed theme.
An uneven Hollywood memoir with a bit of divinity thrown in.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4767-6646-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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
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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