A lively, raucous, and immensely entertaining love letter to the funny business.
A comprehensive history of American stand-up comedy, from vaudeville to Twitter.
At the beginning, Nesteroff, a former stand-up comedian and host of Classic Showbiz Talk Show, makes two important assertions. First, he sets out to dispel the myth of the tragically flawed funnyman who uses comedy as a way of hiding his insecurities. While there is some truth to the trope, not all comedians fit the stereotype of the tragic clown figure. Second, Nesteroff states that comedy does not age particularly well. It is an art form very much of its time, one that is not typically designed for posterity. It’s a worthwhile distinction, because while the author describes the acts of the comedians he profiles, clearly explaining their differences and similarities, he is careful not to excerpt too much of their actual acts. A good comedian is principally judged by his peers, and Nesteroff reclaims the legacy of many of the older, forgotten comedians. For instance, the name Shecky Greene has long been shorthand for out-of-touch and dated comedy, but Nesteroff restores some of Greene’s credibility by showing how his contemporaries considered him “one of comedy’s great nonconformists” and a “genuine comedian’s comedian.” Developing out of vaudeville, stand-up comedy was officially created by Frank Fay, who began emceeing in between acts to entertain the crowd. Nesteroff’s narrative follows the form through the mob-run nightclubs of Las Vegas and Miami Beach, radio and TV, and the emergence of comedy-specific clubs in the 1970s. The author skews toward midcentury comics with only a passing mention of the new millennium, but this is in part because that was when comedy was a business and culture unto itself. The high stakes of comedy at its peak is perhaps best evidenced by the purported assassination attempt on comedian Jackie Mason in 1966. Anecdotes, firsthand recollections, and gossip like this are what distinguish Nesteroff’s history as a definitive volume.
A lively, raucous, and immensely entertaining love letter to the funny business.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2398-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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