Unstrung Heroes

Rating:
Summary: Expertly executed, endlessly amusing and heartbreaking
Review: A marvelously nuanced, subtle, and unillusioned recounting of one boy's life among the strangest of families. This offbeat gem has the makings of a classic.

Rating:
Summary: Astonishing, hilarious, angry, poignant, always pointed
Review: A miniature Brothers Karamazov, a real-life tragedy masquerading as a screwball comedy.

Rating:
Summary: Engaging and beautifully written
Review: A small, meaty, funny memoir that is powerful and deeply moving. Like another Franz (Kafka) in his story The Judgement, Lidz sees his father as the source of "my own severe decree against myself." In its vivid evocation of growing up among the looniest of loons, Unstrung Heroes represents Lidz's reintegration with his past.

Rating:
Summary: Engaging and beautifully written
Review: A small, meaty, funny memoir that is powerful and deeply moving. Like another Franz (Kafka) in his story The Judgement, Lidz sees his father as the source of "my own severe decree against myself." In its vivid evocation of growing up among the looniest of loons, Unstrung Heroes represents Lidz's reintegration with his past.

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Summary: A Meditation on The Book and The Film
Review: At the other end of this decade I wrote a childhood memoir ("Unstrung Heroes") that recounted my mother's six-year struggle with breast cancer. From my ninth birthday, in Year Two, almost every step she took was a step going down. "Her hospital stays were becoming longer and longer," I recalled. "I measured them by the nights that she was away. And I didn't like it now when she was home. She had become unpredictable. She wasn't dying like some movie heroine. She could be sullen and bad-tempered. I resented her." And yet when Disney adapted the book for the screen in 1995, my mother, Selma, was shown dying EXACTLY like a movie heroine. No anguished outbursts. No unkind thoughts. No endless days lying mute and tubed and suctioned in grim hospital rooms. My mother's celluloid counterpart (Andie McDowell) was a secular saint whose main cancer symptom was that she tripped over furniture. What I had described as a long, painful, ugly death was made quick, painless, almost pretty. On film, the more the cancer spread, the more luminous my mother became, as if she were pregnant, not ill. The way Disney spun cotton candy around my mother's suffering reminded me of Ali MacGraw's blissful description of her six-minute struggle with cancer in "Love Story" (1970). "It doesn't hurt, Ollie, really it doesn't," Ms. MacGraw, as Jenny, told her husband (Ryan O'Neal). "It's like falling off a cliff in slow motion. Only after a while you wish you hit the ground already." The way Disney killed off my mother -- after fixing pancakes, she praises her kids, plants a perversely passionate kiss on her husband's lips and, to soulful strains of "You Are My Sunshine," drifts off to die in a comfy armchair -- reminded me of Mad magazine's send-up of "Love Story." Instead of cancer, the diagnosis for Ms. MacGraw's character was Old Movie Disease. "In the old days, they used to die beautiful glamorous deaths!" a cartoon oncologist tells O'Neal. "Your wife is going to die such a beautiful death, it'll take your breath away before it takes her breath away." The Big C has always been a fruitful subgenre of Old Movie Diseases. Actresses from Bette Davis ("Dark Victory," brain tumor, 1939) to Debra Winger ("Terms of Endearment," lymphoma, 1983) to Diane Keaton ("Marvin's Room," leukemia, 1997) have received Oscar nominations for playing cancer victims. The latest Hollywood divas to brave cancer on the screen are Meryl Streep ("One True Thing") and Susan Sarandon ("Stepmom"). Both play well-off, middle-aged domestic goddesses, but only Ms. Streep is made to look ravaged by the disease. Her skin pale gray, her eyes rimmed red like a Kabuki's, she becomes so gaunt and frail that in the film's most affecting scene, she has to be lifted out of the bathtub by her daughter. Reduced to a miserable shell, she weeps, rages, endures Bette Midler songs and yet -- inevitably -- maintains her nobility. "Terminal illnesses can inspire voyeurism," Jackson Peyton, a public health consultant in Washington, said in a telephone interview. "Unable to find meaning in their own lives, some people seek it through the drama of the fatal sicknesses of others. But the hard reality of dying is brutally disappointing. For the most part, the deaths of cancer victims don't play out like characters in 19th-century novels or 20th-century films. The truth is that most suffer terribly, and many unload their bitterness on their loved ones." Old Movie Disease-driven films support their romantic agendas by evading and overlooking hard realities. The chaos and horror of cancer are papered over with sentiment and sanctimony, then packaged as a higher state of being. Hollywood cancer mutates ordinary people into angelic beings who straighten out the lives of all the mixed-up souls around them. In "Marvin's Room," the selfless Ms. Keaton draws on an inexhaustible fund of goodness to teach her selfish sister (Ms. Streep) to be more humane. In "One True Thing," the upright Ms. Streep is sacrificed so that her icily ambitious daughter (Renee Zellweger) can learn "life lessons" and turn compassionate caregiver. In "Stepmom," cancer works curative wonders on Ms. Sarandon's prickly perfect homemaker. She remains hostile toward her ex-husband's trophy wife-to-be (Julia Roberts) until, succumbing to the dynamics of the honeyed plot and repeated dosings of her own cancer theme song ("Ain't No Mountain High Enough"), she wearily slouches toward canonization. The more advanced the cancer, the more potent its redemptive powers. Terminal cancer trumps a relatively benign strain in "The Doctor," a 1991 tearjerker in which William Hurt sinks from lordly physician to lowly patient. Stricken with a treatable form of throat cancer, the chilly, insensitive heart surgeon befriends a fellow patient (Elizabeth Perkins) with an inoperable brain tumor. This doomed (and, of course, radiant) young woman guides him on one of those journeys of self-discovery that can begin and end only in Hollywood. Along the way, he learns to appreciate sunsets, desert dancing and rooftop pigeons. Watching this once heartless cardiologist transform into a benevolent St. Francis, replete with birds, I was reminded of another exchange in Mad's spoof. The oncologist tells a shaken Ryan O'Neal: "I'm afraid it's out of our hands." "You mean medical science is powerless?" O'Neal asks. "What medical science!? I'm talking about CINEMA science! Think back! What have we got so far? A corny soap-opera plot! Unbelievable dialogue! A schmaltzy piano music background! Can't you see? If the producer doesn't have a tragic, sobbing ending to make all this garbage seem meaningful, he's got absolutely nothing!" Someday somebody may find a cure for cancer, but the terminal sappiness of cancer movies is probably beyond remedy.

Rating:
Summary: captures completely and viscerally how a mad family feels
Review: can't write about writing so will simply say that i find it excellent, very strong and moving - all the visual writing in particular - it seems to me of the highest order.

Rating:
Summary: Witty and Compulsively Readable
Review: Franz Lidz has written an absolutely brilliant, intelligent, sensitive, meticulous and - yes - affectionate memoir. Best of all, this book enriches our understanding of the strange, wonderful, richly complex men who were his father and uncles.

Rating:
Summary: A rollicking memoir, crisply told
Review: Franz Lidz is a natural storyteller. The recollections that make up Unstrung Heroes are sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, but always intelligent, perceptive, surprising, and most importantly, human. Most novels are disguised memoirs; this memoir is a disguised novel.

Rating:
Summary: Ohhh, my gosh. This is the best book ever!
Review: Franz Lidz's life is like a painting, some parts sad and lonley, sometimes happy and exciting! I have never heard of a book so truly moving. If you read this book Iam sure you will be crying the whole way. Sometimes crying from laufter, sometimes with sadness.

Rating:
Summary: A wonderful, intelligent book
Review: His eccentric characters remind me of J.D. Salinger's. I wish he'd write another.