Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I’ve Learned
By Alan Alda. (2006)
From Amazon.com: “He’s one of America’s most recognizable 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 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 just begun to grow.
It is the story of turning points in Alda’s 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, both
personally and professionally, Alda learns the hard way that change,
uncertainty, and transformation are what life is made of, and true happiness is
found in embracing them.
Never
Have Your Dog Stuffed, filled with
curiosity about nature, good humor, 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 Alda has ever played on the
stage or screen.”