Like a couple of hours with Columbo, minus the genius—inessential, but still pretty good company.
Life and times of the man in the dirty raincoat.
Actor Falk’s distinctive persona is so familiar that it’s impossible to read any of this whimsical autobiography’s many bite-size chapters without hearing the man’s raspy mumble; that’s the principal source of charm here, perfectly complementing the digressive (read “unfocused”), no-big-deal account of the various jobs and colleagues that have marked Falk’s haphazard path. His career, which includes the iconic television role of Columbo (the deceptively brilliant detective—Sherlock Holmes in dumb-schlemiel drag) and stints with John Cassavetes and Neil Simon, is impressive, but Falk describes the work in a manner so unpretentious and offhand that he undercuts the justification for writing an autobiography in the first place. One wishes for a more in-depth account of, say, the making of Cassavetes’s seminal Husbands, but Falk is content to call the auteur a genius and leave it at that. He is reliably witty on his early career as a diffident government bureaucrat, and his indomitable independent streak is good for a number of anecdotes involving arrests in foreign lands. The Columbo sections are amusing, as Falk describes developing the detective’s mannerisms and appearance—the actor reveals much of his technique in these passages, and it is surprisingly beholden to the “outside-in” approach associated with classically trained actors, rather than the Method style suggested by the tortured improvisations that characterize Cassavetes’s work. But these insights are largely incidental. Falk admits at the outset that he fears his story will bore the reader, and his strategy is to set it down in easily digestible chunks with weirdly funny titles, such as “The Raisin Story” and “On the Role Overcoats Play in an Actor’s Career.” This approach indeed makes for a painless read, but underscores the general impression of inconsequence.
Like a couple of hours with Columbo, minus the genius—inessential, but still pretty good company.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7867-1795-5
Page Count: 280
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
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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