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
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
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