Jewish comic scorned—venting, revealing, regretting and maybe even meaning it.
Tell-all memoirs of the tempestuous, sometimes tortured relationship between two personalities cast by fate and a whole bunch of money as comic and straight man.
Give Lewis credit for selective candor, but what he reveals about himself in the process of telling his side of the Martin (1917–95) and Lewis story is often more trenchant than his conflicted report of what went wrong, and occasionally right, with the partnership that lasted a lime-lit ten years. While Lewis opens and closes with heartfelt admiration and—yes, at one point they do affirm it to one another—love for what he calls the best straight man ever to tread a stage, in this book’s long interim, Martin’s character suffers the death of a thousand condescensions. Even as Lewis starts by recalling their last, choked-up performance together in 1956 at New York’s Copacabana, for example, he muses that while “truth was my greatest ally . . . Dean could lie if it would spare someone’s feelings. I had difficulty with that.” And from the beginning, it’s the older Martin, in a “big brother” role Lewis conjures for himself, introducing the kid to hard liquor (although Martin’s later boozy TV persona was a well-calculated act), mobsters, marijuana and, most of all, “other” women. Jerry eventually rationalizes philandering as just part of showbiz; he confesses they made the scene together with peaches-’n’-cream MGM actresses June Allyson and Gloria DeHaven (both married to Hollywood actors at the time) in what is described as an extended Manhattan shack-up. It’s Martin’s consistent insensitivities and ingratitude, often tinged with ridicule, that start to grind, however. He plays golf and reads comic books while Lewis deals with business, etc., and at one point is a no-show at a charity commitment. Lewis blows up (he claims he initiated the split), and after a nasty onstage fall—solo—winds up gobbling Percodans.
Jewish comic scorned—venting, revealing, regretting and maybe even meaning it.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2005
ISBN: 0-7679-2086-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
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 standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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