by Bob Barker with Digby Diehl ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 6, 2009
Hard-core fans will undoubtedly enjoy their hero’s happy reminiscences, but nothing here will entice less starry-eyed...
For TV mainstay Barker, it’s all been fun and games.
A more-than-familiar face after some five decades on national television, including an astounding 35-year stint hosting The Price Is Right, the author delivers an unfailingly pleasant and breezy memoir…which is a problem. The supremely affable Barker’s account of his 85 years is mild to the point of nullity. The only dark notes are the premature death of his father and the loss of his beloved wife to lung cancer after 36 years of marriage. The author doesn’t mention the controversy and lawsuits (which included claims of sexual harassment) attending the firings of several glamorous on-set models for the show, nor his romantic relationship with one such model, Dian Parkinson, which also ended in legal action. Barker instead waxes nostalgic about his childhood on a South Dakota reservation (he is one-eighth Sioux), his training as a naval aviator in the last days of World War II (peace was declared before he saw combat) and his epic tenure as host of the longest-running game show in TV history. Stubbornly upbeat, he gives no indication that circumstances were ever less than hunky-dory for his neighbors on the reservation, paints his military service as a lark-filled romp and rhapsodizes endlessly about the fun and high spirits of his game-show days. Barker drops the names of many celebrity acquaintances—bizarrely, he studied karate with Chuck Norris—but his observations are limited to bromides like this characterization of fellow tanning enthusiast Julio Iglesias: “He was a really good guy. He was a lot of fun.” Even on the subject of animal-rights activism, a cause the author has tirelessly promoted for decades, he musters only generalities about the issue, along with a few cute stories concerning personal successes with rescued critters.
Hard-core fans will undoubtedly enjoy their hero’s happy reminiscences, but nothing here will entice less starry-eyed readers.Pub Date: April 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59995-135-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Center Street/Hachette
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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