A truth-telling tour conducted by an agile guide.
The first openly gay comedian to perform on the Tonight Show delivers a collection of witty essays exploring his remarkable career and life.
Since 2007, Smith, a successful comedian and author of both nonfiction and fiction (Remembrance of Things I Forgot, 2011, etc.), has lived with Lou Gehrig’s disease, and even though he now communicates through his iPad, his wit is as sharp as ever: “I’d like to tell God what a dick he is for creating ALS and punch him—if I could still make a fist.” In his latest book, he writes about being a father, his past romantic encounters, his love of animals, his group of close friends he calls the Nature Boys, and his career as a comedian. Smith’s love of nature started early when he received a subscription to the children’s version of National Geographic. Engaging with the environment and all its delights and discomforts forms the core of the narrative, offering observations on a variety of natural environments and details about his trips to Santa Fe, the Malibu hills, Alaska, and Canyon de Chelly in Arizona. Each essay provides a glimpse into Smith’s thought processes on diverse subjects, including how to confront homophobic hecklers while on stage, the joys of parenthood, and his love of “all things Native American.” Smith concedes that though his disease has been a trial, it has given him the opportunity to speak openly about any topic he wishes. “I was now blessed with a free pass to discuss all religions and beliefs after I was forced to confront the fact that my relation to the universe might expire,” he writes. Though the author holds strong opinions, his essays are funny and intimate without being self-indulgent. Never moving too far from his comedic nature, Smith delivers one-liners throughout, and nothing is off-limits.
A truth-telling tour conducted by an agile guide.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-299-31050-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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