Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I've Learned » (Reprint)

Alan Alda played Hawkeye Pierce for eleven years in the television series M*A*S*H and has acted in, written, and directed many feature films. He has starred often on Broadway, and his avid interest in science has led to his hosting PBS’s Scientific American Frontiers for eleven years. He was nominated for an Academy Award in 2005 and has been nominated for thirty Emmy awards. He is married to the children’s book author/photographer Arlene Alda. They have three grown children and seven grandchildren.

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...

The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley

It all adds up to an amiable, occasionally amusing book. The man inside the actor peeks out from time to time and seems to be an agreeable sort, glad to have won a measure of fame but not entirely comfortable with it. As to the odd title, it comes from an equally odd incident in Alda's childhood from which he draws an apt and useful moral. It's one of many stories that Alda tells here, and he tells them well.