Both the light and dark sides of the man who made the country both laugh and gag.
A warts-and-all biography of the creator of “Li’l Abner.”
Co-authors Schumacher and Kitchen bring a unique set of tools to their excavations. The former is the biographer of Allen Ginsberg, Eric Clapton, Phil Ochs and, most recently, comic pioneer Will Eisner (Will Eisner: A Dreamer’s Life in Comics, 2010). Kitchen is a cartoonist and publisher—Al Capp’s Complete Shmoo, 2011. From 1934 to 1977, Capp’s “Li’l Abner” strip appeared in hundreds of newspapers. Its creator, born Alfred Caplin in 1909, lost his left leg in a traffic accident at age 9 but soon realized his artistic and humorous talents. He worked for a while with cartoonist Ham Fisher on his “Joe Palooka” feature, but the two fell out and remained bitter competitors for decades. Once “Li’l Abner” began, it took off quickly, and as the authors show, Capp was a master of self-promotion and marketing. Movies and TV shows did not work out too well, but the 1956 eponymous Broadway show was a success, as were a number of his characters, both human (Daisy Mae) and non (the Shmoo). His Sadie Hawkins Day remains a tradition in many schools and colleges, though probably few teens could now identify the source. Capp had a couple of marriages and some family conflicts (especially with brother Bence), but when the 1960s roared in, the formerly liberal Capp veered right and charged high fees to visit college campuses, where he ridiculed student activists and fiercely attacked the left. And it was on some campuses that his libido ended all. Some highly publicized attacks on young women students in his motel rooms cost him both his popularity and his career.
Both the light and dark sides of the man who made the country both laugh and gag.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60819-623-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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