Unstrung Heroes

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.

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: As Good As His New Book
Review: I just finished Unstrung Heroes after reading Lidz's terrific new book Ghosty men. In my opinion, this one is every bit as good. I can't remember the last time I laughed so hard. I hope it gets reissued.

Rating:
Summary: The Memoir Hollywood Hacked To Bits
Review: It's interesting to watch the jagged leaps and bounds by which this hilarious, unsentimental Lower East Side memoir became a sentimental tearjerker about a beautiful mother dying of cancer in L.A. That Hollywood gets Jewishness wrong again and again should come as a surprise to no one (Remember Melanie Griffith in "A Stranger Among Us"?) But the story of "Unstrung Heroes" is a rather spectacular example of Disney not getting anything about New York at all. The movie is a sanitized ode to motherhood, that is that it is practically impossible to watch without crying. I cried (many times) while reading the book, but somehow the tears felt more honest.

Rating:
Summary: Very Funny and Inexpressibly Sad
Review: Mr. Lidz's wit stings like a mosquito. He has a swift, clear, gently ironic style, and tells his story not as an act of judgement but as a searching inquiry into madness.