A breezy, slightly overlong account that will interest fans of African-American culture and TV comedy due to its up-close...
A history of the development of the hit TV show In Living Color and the comedy dynasty of the Wayans family.
Freelance culture and entertainment writer Peisner (co-author, with Steven “Steve-O” Glover: Professional Idiot, 2011) argues convincingly for In Living Color’s cultural importance at the dawn of the 1990s, as it brought an underground tradition of confrontational yet reflective African-American comedy into the mainstream. Although he quotes many of the show’s principals, he focuses on Keenen Ivory Wayans (and his siblings), starting with his hardscrabble 1960s New York childhood. Following a youthful fascination with Richard Pryor, Keenen determined to pursue a comedy career. He found some early success, including a Tonight Show appearance, though, as the author notes, “it’s almost impossible to overstate what a wasteland Hollywood was for African-Americans in the early eighties,” with the exception of Eddie Murphy. Still, Wayans was part of a formative generation of comics and directors, including Robert Townsend, Spike Lee, Arsenio Hall, and Chris Rock, all of whom crossed paths with him or were involved with ILC (or skewered by its sketches). After years of such scuffling, Wayans found opportunity via the unlikely venue of Fox, “still a new network [that] felt distinctly minor-league.” While Wayans recalls “getting a blank check from Fox, ‘total freedom’ as he put it,” Peisner notes that stories regarding the show’s origins are contradictory. Still, the show won an Emmy Award in its first season and became a phenomenon. The author ably captures these glory days and later seasons, when a mixture of grueling production norms, competition and conflicts among cast and writers, and network difficulties caused a clear decline, culminating in Keenen’s departure during the fourth season (and the show’s cancellation following the fifth). Since then, “the Wayans brothers have become essentially a parody factory.” Peisner’s telling is casual and sometimes repetitive, but he effectively pulls together the recollections of many involved with this influential enterprise.
A breezy, slightly overlong account that will interest fans of African-American culture and TV comedy due to its up-close detail and numerous sources.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-4332-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: 37 Ink/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.
Custer died for your sins. And so, this book would seem to suggest, did every other native victim of colonialism.
Inducing guilt in non-native readers would seem to be the guiding idea behind Dunbar-Ortiz’s (Emerita, Ethnic Studies/California State Univ., Hayward; Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, 2005, etc.) survey, which is hardly a new strategy. Indeed, the author says little that hasn’t been said before, but she packs a trove of ideological assumptions into nearly every page. For one thing, while “Indian” isn’t bad, since “[i]ndigenous individuals and peoples in North America on the whole do not consider ‘Indian’ a slur,” “American” is due to the fact that it’s “blatantly imperialistic.” Just so, indigenous peoples were overwhelmed by a “colonialist settler-state” (the very language broadly applied to Israelis vis-à-vis the Palestinians today) and then “displaced to fragmented reservations and economically decimated”—after, that is, having been forced to live in “concentration camps.” Were he around today, Vine Deloria Jr., the always-indignant champion of bias-puncturing in defense of native history, would disavow such tidily packaged, ready-made, reflexive language. As it is, the readers who are likely to come to this book—undergraduates, mostly, in survey courses—probably won’t question Dunbar-Ortiz’s inaccurate assertion that the military phrase “in country” derives from the military phrase “Indian country” or her insistence that all Spanish people in the New World were “gold-obsessed.” Furthermore, most readers won’t likely know that some Ancestral Pueblo (for whom Dunbar-Ortiz uses the long-abandoned term “Anasazi”) sites show evidence of cannibalism and torture, which in turn points to the inconvenient fact that North America wasn’t entirely an Eden before the arrival of Europe.
A Churchill-ian view of native history—Ward, that is, not Winston—its facts filtered through a dense screen of ideology.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0040-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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