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A review by nick_jenkins
All the Answers by Michael Kupperman
4.0
Absolutely fascinating as history, a little by-the-numbers as memoir. In some ways, the book would have been more effective without the frame of a son trying to recover his father's memories--a frame that at times felt almost as if the son/author was losing interest in.
Joel Kupperman would be a terrific subject for a more conventional biography: in addition to his Quiz Kids fame and the cultural import of that career, he had a second career as a successful moral philosopher who--judging by his bibliography--attempted to bring Asian texts into dialogue with the Western tradition. Michael Kupperman nodded at that aspect of his father's life but left it fairly untouched--a puzzling absence given the way he ends the book with explicitly moral questions about duty and interpersonal (particularly familial) obligations.
Michael Kupperman also obscured the fact that his mother had a quite successful academic career, too, and that element--a portrait of an academic marriage and the life and career of Karen Ordahl Kupperman--would be yet another important and interesting facet of a fuller life of Joel.
Joel Kupperman would be a terrific subject for a more conventional biography: in addition to his Quiz Kids fame and the cultural import of that career, he had a second career as a successful moral philosopher who--judging by his bibliography--attempted to bring Asian texts into dialogue with the Western tradition. Michael Kupperman nodded at that aspect of his father's life but left it fairly untouched--a puzzling absence given the way he ends the book with explicitly moral questions about duty and interpersonal (particularly familial) obligations.
Michael Kupperman also obscured the fact that his mother had a quite successful academic career, too, and that element--a portrait of an academic marriage and the life and career of Karen Ordahl Kupperman--would be yet another important and interesting facet of a fuller life of Joel.