Not a great read, then, but fans may be interested.
The life of the actor, best known for his starring role in the long-running sitcom Benson.
The illegitimate son of an abused and emotionally unstable mother, Robert Guillaume was born in 1927 in St. Louis, where he grew up in poverty, raised mostly by his grandmother, a cleaning woman, and got his first taste of performing by singing in the church choir. He’d had a successful career as a stage actor, singer, and comedian, most notably in the revue Jacques Brel Is Alive and Living in Paris, before being offered the part of Benson, the sharp-tongued butler on the comedy Soap, for which he won an Emmy in 1979. The character was later spun off into his own series, which ran for seven seasons on ABC, from 1979 to 1986. When Benson went off the air, Guillaume continued to work steadily, appearing in several short-lived television series and starring in the title role of the Los Angeles production of The Phantom of the Opera. His career almost came to a halt in 1999 when he suffered a minor stroke on the set of the critically acclaimed “dramedy” Sports Night (on which he played producer Isaac Jaffee), an incident that was put into the show’s plotline to avoid writing out the character. Since then the actor has been slowly recovering—hence the reflective mood this autobiography finds him in. Although he’s endured more than his share of hardship—the poverty and racial discrimination of his youth, his stroke, the death of his son Jacques from AIDS—he doesn’t succumb to hand-wringing, and while the prose is often stilted, and the pacing somewhat uneven, he comes across as serious about his craft and candid about the mistakes he’s made along the way.
Not a great read, then, but fans may be interested.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-8262-1426-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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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