Stanhope offers good evidence that if our own families are messed up, there’s always someone who’s got it worse. Lively and...
In his first book, stand-up comedian Stanhope delivers a sympathetic though unenviable portrait of his multiply addicted, much troubled mother.
“After thirty-some years of ruthless drinking, it’s more than probable that I’ve fucked up a few details.” So run the author’s first words to readers, a warning that substance abuse and blue comedy are in the offing. Stanhope’s comedy, growing from the tradition of Bill Hicks and Sam Kinison, is built on sharp political and social observations mixed with the insistence on shocking with details of drug abuse, sexual escapades, and the like. His book is no disappointment in any of these regards: there are dog genitalia (“touching a dog’s dick is gross, and your mother touching a dog’s dick is far grosser, and gross equals hilarious”), oxygen tents, crack, deathbeds, adultery, suicide, and sundry other things not often mentioned in polite company. Stanhope pokes fun at himself most of all as he recounts a wandering, messed-up youth doing crap jobs while learning comedy by trial and error until hitting on some universal truths—e.g., “farts are the funniest things in life, and if you disagree, then you have no soul.” Underneath the humor lies an affecting character study of the author’s late mother, who, for her manifold faults, was his fiercest defender and ally. The book is Stanhope’s often rueful record of trying to come to terms with her while reckoning with his own emotions and trying to build a career through a haze of his own making. “In my head,” he writes, “she was just a bad drunk who felt abandoned and didn’t have the patience to wait for me to sort shit out. If anything, I begrudged her for the timing.”
Stanhope offers good evidence that if our own families are messed up, there’s always someone who’s got it worse. Lively and smart and, in the manner of the best comedy, as sad as it is funny.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-306-82439-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
PROFILES
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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