Very dry, with a twist.
A memoir from a writer who doubles as a comedian.
Though Hodgman has been a bestselling author with his books of “fake facts” (That Is All, 2011, etc.) and has written weekly for the New York Times Magazine, his renown is less literary or journalistic than multimedia, in which everything pretty much cross-promotes everything else. Many fans know him mainly as a correspondent for the Daily Show, which resulted from his books, or his podcast that also builds on his demographic reach and extends it. He has perhaps been most widely seen through his Apple campaign, in which he portrayed the stodgier PC to the hipper computer devices. Having exhausted his fake facts through his earlier books, Hodgman turns to the feeling of being a white man in his 40s, a Yale graduate with a wife who has long been with him and two children he refuses to name to avoid feeding their egos. He reveals to readers, “the central conflict of my life and this book…is this: I OWN TWO SUMMER HOMES.” One is in Massachusetts, bequeathed by his family, and the other is in Maine. Little wonder that a friend once described his work as “white privilege comedy,” though the author actually came to his privilege late. He grew up in a middle-class household and scuffled through a freelancing life and a stint as a literary agent. Hodgman’s comedy is more deadpan than laugh-out-loud funny, aimed at a too-hip-to-chuckle readership for whom this might be metacomedy, in which the very notion of trying to be humorous is the big joke. The author senses an affinity with “Maine Humor,” which elicits “a kind of low inner chuckling, so dry and so deep inside you that you may not realize it is happening.” Though Hodgman explores the landscape of his area of Massachusetts, the title refers to Maine, where he struggles with critters and their waste, ordering propane, and getting along with the locals when you’re “from away.”
Very dry, with a twist.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2480-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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
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 2025 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.
