From
the inside flap
“From
his rapid-fire stand-up riffs to his breakout role in Mork & Mindy
and his powerful Academy-award winning performance in Good Will Hunting.
Robin Williams was a singularly innovative actor and comedian. He often came
across as a man possessed, holding forth on culture, politics, and personal
revelation─all with mercurial, tongue-twisting intensity as he inhabited and
shed one character after another.
“But
as Dave Itzkoff shows in this. . . biography, Williams’s brilliance masked a
deep well of conflicting emotions and self-doubt. In his comedy and in
celebrated films such as Dead Poets Society; Good Morning, Vietnam;
The Fisher King; Aladdin; and Mrs. Doubtfire he showcased
his limitless gift for improvisation, bringing his characters to life and using
humor to seek deeper truths.
“Itzkoff
also shows how Williams struggled mightily with addiction and depression and
with a debilitating condition at the end of his life that affected him in ways
his fans never knew. Drawing on more than a hundred original interviews with
family, friends, and colleagues as ewll as extensive archival research, Robin
is a fresh and original look at a performer whose work touched so many of
our lives.”
Review
Robin is an
excellent, relatively thorough, funny, nostalgic and sometimes sad biography of
a gifted man who hid a lot of his pain─like a lot of comedians─behind humor and
whimsy. If you are a fan of Williams and can put up with a few sad parts, this
is worth reading.
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