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Book Description
'Honest, touching and very funny - like Mr Alda himself' David Mamet, author of Glengarry Glen Ross
Product Description
He's one of America's most recognisable and acclaimed actors-a star on Broadway, an Oscar nominee for The Aviator, and the only person to ever win Emmys for acting, writing, and directing during his eleven years on M*A*S*H. Now Alan Alda has written a memoir as elegant, funny, and affecting as his greatest performances. 'My mother didn't try to stab my father until I was six,' begins Alan Alda's irresistible story. The son of a popular actor and a loving, but mentally ill mother, he spent his early childhood backstage in the erotic and comic world of burlesque and went on after early struggles to achieve extraordinary success in his profession.
Yet Never Have Your Dog Stuffed is not a memoir of show business ups and downs. It is a moving and funny story of a boy growing into a man who then realizes he has only begun to grow. It is the story of turning points in his life, events that would make him what he is - if only he could survive them.
From the moment as a boy when his dead dog is returned from the taxidermist's shop with a hideous expression on his face, and he learns that death can't be undone, to the decades-long effort to find compassion for the mother he lived with but never knew, to his acceptance of his father in him, personally and professionally, he learns the hard way that change, uncertainty and transformation are what life is made of, and the good life is made of welcoming them.
Never Have Your Dog Stuffed, filled with curiosity about Nature, good humour and honesty, is the crowning achievement of an actor, author, and director, but surprisingly, it is the story of a life more filled with turbulence and laughter than any he's ever played on the stage or screen.
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Customer Reviews
This book doesn't deal with any one topic about Alan Alda's life. It deals with both his career and his personal life, yet he never delves TOO deeply into either, yet he integrates them with a mastery i have never read before. I assume it's because, unlike a lot of actors, acting WAS a part of his private life, and so much more than just a career.
It's amazing how he writes; he can describe an amusing moment in life then turn to something more morose, yet, with the exception of his mother's last days, the humour, though cynical and sarcastic, is always there.
The only minor problem i can see is that he never really kept any track of time in the book. I constantly found myself wondering what year were we in? How old was he now?
Other than that, this is a brilliant book written by an amazing man.
Being UK-based, I didn't know that he'd presented a show based on interviews etc. with scientists, but it all made sense; who else could play Richard Feynman? This book is far more profound than those written by people who hail from more 'serious' professions; reflective, searching, pattern-seeking, independent, honourable ... of course I'd love the blow-by-blow account of what it was like to create MASH, and maybe we'll get that some time, but this is a treat of a different and remarkably nourishing order.
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