Unstrung Heroes

by Franz Lidz

Book Overview

Franz Lidz recalls his unusual childhood spent in the care of his four wildly eccentric uncles. Unstrung Heroes will touch the hearts of millions when it hits the big screen this September. The major... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394569881
• ISBN13: 9780394569888
• Release Date: February 1991
• Publisher: Random House (NY)
• Length: 194 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The Memoir Hollywood Hacked To Bits

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.

Expertly executed, endlessly amusing and heartbreaking

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.

A rollicking memoir, crisply told

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.

A sad, sidesplitting memoir that Hollywood just didn't get

The funny, touching, unflinching memoir was totally eviscerated by Hollywood hacks. The book is full of whimsy and gentle irony; the film trades on sentiment and Rodeo Drive wisdom. The book is a small-scale Dostoyevsky novel in which the awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as it is terrible. The film is a cliched dying-mother tearjerker that panders to its Disney audience. The book brings to life a whole gallery of people; people of bone, flesh and blood all caught in a web of circumstance. It engulfs its characters in dramatic situations and drives them headlong with passionate desperation. In the film, these characters are cartoons who walk through predictable paces and have the most banal of revelations. In the book, their blood is warm, red and their hearts beat on.

Unflinching, devastatingly sad and yet fall-over funny

Unstrung Heroes is one of the most touching and simutaneously disturbing books I've read in quite a while. In an unforgettable series of memoirs, Lidz succeeds in retelling the astonishing events of his life in an affecting and heartfelt manner. Somehow, through all of this, he keeps you rolling on the floor in laughter.