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 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
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