It might work as standup, but when transferred to the page this shtick is a groaner.
Disjointed, lackluster musings on her promiscuous social life, by directionless if cheerful Handler.
The L.A.–based standup comic here relates the meandering story of her many sexual misadventures. She starts with a not-very-amusing incident: at six years old, she was persuaded by her sister to take a picture of her parents having sex. (Dad was pissed: imagine that.) Moving on to her teenaged adventures at the Jersey shore, Handler invites us to find it hilarious that she picked up a good-looking man, had sex with him immediately, and dated him for months despite the fact that she couldn’t stand talking to him. The joke in the next section is that while her father was a racist, she personally dated a wonderful black man, and it inspired her to want to sleep with many more of them. Next comes what’s supposed to be an entertaining misunderstanding involving her sisters and the fact that Handler did not in fact have sex with the naked midget they found in her hotel room. In one genuinely funny moment, the author was dismayed to find that the handsome stripper she picked up wanted to tell her his real name and discuss the fact that what he really wanted to do was act—it figures that she would get stuck with the guy who wanted a real relationship. There is more: the one-night stand who showed up at the restaurant where she worked and was seated in her section, with his girlfriend (Handler pretends she is her own identical twin and has never seen him before); the friend who plays a practical joke on her by telling Handler’s date that she has a terminal disease and just wants to cuddle; the gay friend invited to be her date for a wedding who terrorized her family.
It might work as standup, but when transferred to the page this shtick is a groaner.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-58234-618-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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