A humor book far more mean than funny.
Calling all Tucker Max fans: McInnes (Street Boners: 1,764 Hipster Fashion Jokes, 2010, etc.) delivers a monumentally unfunny memoir of being a jerk.
The author was born and raised in a boring town in Canada, the son of two “bombastic drunk Scots.” There he engaged in typical teenage hijinks like dropping acid and figuring out who could drive the drunkest. Seeing promise in such pursuits, he soon became a mainstay of the regional punk scene, forming the band Anal Chinook, and drinking, puking and having lots of sex. University led him to Montreal and his eventual founding of the magazine Vice. When the magazine became an international hit, McInnes sold it for a large sum of money. However, the book isn’t as much a linear narrative as a pastiche of the author’s many outrageous experiences. First and foremost is sex with “bitches”—or as McInnes writes, “[people] you jerk off into.” In one bit of debauchery he nearly pushed a woman’s head into the toilet while having sex with her. Then there’s the time he gave himself an STD by swallowing his own semen. Another time he pretended to be a “retard,” and people actually believed he was retarded and treated him with kindness. There are plenty of stories about drinking and fighting, and he even got beat up by a “faggot.” Occasionally there’s a story that is actually funny (the time his mother got stoned) or poignant (being in New York during 9/11). But while the author pictures himself a latter-day Hunter S. Thompson, there’s a thick line between Thompson’s inspired lunacy and the insipid callousness offered here. McInnes did eventually settle down, however, and got married; in marriage, he writes, “women become human beings for the first time ever.” Inspiring stuff.
A humor book far more mean than funny.Pub Date: March 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-1417-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2012
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
