SPEAKING VOLUMES I'm Dying Up Here is about what it's subtitle suggests: Heartbreak and High Times in Standup Comedy's Golden Era . The people pictured on the cover -- David Letterman, Jay Leno, Richard Lewis and Andy Kaufman -- are some of the central players in the drama -- and it is a drama, despite the plethora of jokes retold...
SPEAKING VOLUMES Lyricist Fred Ebb and composer John Kander were not only collaborators for more than 40 years -- longer than any songwriting partnership in Broadway history, notes their biographer James Leve -- but also fast and inseparable friends for those four productive decades. It seems that only something as sudden and definitive as Ebb's death in 2004 could have...
SPEAKING VOLUMES Phil Camp, the central character of Bill Scheft's third novel, Everything Hurts , published by Simon & Schuster, is grappling with a number of significant dilemmas as the narrative opens. For one thing, everything does really hurt; his body is a hotbed of pain. It's localized in his leg -- he has a pronounced limp at those times...
Peter Balakian is primarily a poet, with several acclaimed volumes to his credit. But beginning in the late 1990s, with the appearance of his prize-winning memoir, Black Dog of Fate , recently reissued by Basic Books in a updated edition, Balakian began delving into his family's Armenian past, and especially the fate of certain members at the hands of the...
It wasn't surprising to discover that Sheryl Kane, author of Volunteer Vacations Across America , has daughters named Aviva and Elanit, and that her mother Ruth Wolfe, who's 86, recently received a lifetime achievement award for her more than 40 years of volunteer work. By saying this, I'm not suggesting that volunteering belongs only to Jews, but I am noting...
Sivan 11, 5773
