A hilarious and effective memoir from a woman with zero inhibitions.
The provocative comedian takes to the pen in this unabashed memoir.
Before Schumer was the host of her own Comedy Central TV show, Inside Amy Schumer, and the star of Judd Apatow’s Trainwreck (2015), she was an idiosyncratic and adventurous teenager ready for any eventuality. This readiness was the product of many inconsistencies in her upbringing. Raised in a well-to-do family, Schumer basked in the financial success of her father’s furniture company. But when his business went bankrupt, their family took a hard blow: they left Manhattan for Long Island, her parents eventually divorced, and her ego shattered. Schumer, though, isn’t the type to spend hours dwelling on her unhappiness. Instead, she set out to make herself as impermeable as possible to the criticism, popularity contests, and dejections in her daily life. Structured in short essays, this memoir contains glimpses into Schumer’s roller-coaster life, from the loss of her virginity to her struggles with self-confidence. The author shares intimate excerpts from her personal diaries—with footnotes along the lines of, “I would love to know what the fuck I am talking about here. I must have been reading a heavy-handed Oprah book club pick”—and a series of family color photos. Schumer takes her readers through reminiscences by relating events that have most likely happened to all of us, and she engages readers, shedding new light on her motives and practices. Though the narrative sometimes lacks the literary appeal that distinguishes books from live comedy—and some readers might want to put it down and watch her show instead—it’s consistently funny and highly readable. “Anyone who does stand-up is delusional and masochistic….To get real laughs requires years and years. I got better little by little,” writes the author, who seems to have put the same effort into this candid, entertaining book.
A hilarious and effective memoir from a woman with zero inhibitions.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3988-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2016
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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