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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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