In a series of funny, tender, and touching dialogues, former Saturday Night Live writer Zweibel recalls his buddy-and-almost- lover friendship with SNL actress Gilda Radner, who died of ovarian cancer. Zweibel claims he ``merely scribbled the dialogues playing in my head,'' and, indeed, these recreated conversations have a neurotic, sarcastic, and vulnerable air of authenticity. The actress and writer become fast friends on the SNL set and segue into personal revelation. Their friendship produces some wonderful scenes, such as when Radner pretends she's Zweibel's girlfriend to flummox a high school rival of his they meet on a train. There are scenes of awkwardness (Zweibel rushes over to Radner's to inform her of a break-up with his girlfriend and intrudes on her date), great affection (Radner has a flight attendant tape a note of apology to Zweibel on an airplane toilet ``because toilets make [him] laugh''), and petty pique. Wearied by a public quick to claim familiarity, Radner asks Zweibel to call her ``Gilbert,'' and she reveals that she says ``Bunny Bunny'' as a talisman against danger. Other dialogues involve Zweibel's venture into marriage and parenthood, and Radner's romance with Gene Wilder. But when Radner learns she has cancer, Zweibel's comedy takes on a more urgent task: to keep her laughing through her pain. His note to her on a transfusion pouch: ``I knew I'd finally get some fluid of mine into you one way or the other.'' And shortly before Gilda dies, Zweibel, with wisecracking tenderness, suggests that they somehow ``just forgot'' to get married. ``Spirits just don't die,'' Zweibel said at a 1989 memorial service, and he has created a moving and entertaining tribute. And he will donate all proceeds to Gilda's Club, a cancer support center in New York City. (Pen-and-ink illustrations) (Literary Guild alternate selection)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-43085-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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