Fans of Parks and Recreation and Offerman’s brand of deadpan humor are sure to gorge themselves on the healthy portion he...
An actor’s comedic memoir and how-to guide for enjoyable living in the modern era.
In his debut book, actor Offerman—best known for his role as the carnivorous, hypermasculine Ron Swanson on NBC’s Parks and Recreation—summons his inner Swanson when writing of his principles for “Delicious Living.” For the author, living deliciously means dedicating more than a few pages to the wonder of meat (“If there is a God, no part of the Bible or Christian doctrine will convince me of his existence half as much as the flavor of a barbecued pork rib”), though he tackles more serious subjects as well: religion, love, friendship and the value of hard work. In a particularly prickly chapter entitled “Assholes” (in which he tackles everything from slavery to lobbyists), Offerman becomes acutely aware of his balancing act between comic and curmudgeon. “But wait, I thought this book was a lighthearted look at living one’s life deliciously?” he writes. “That’s all well and good, fat boy, but you cannot just blithely drift through life in your canoe whilst turning a blind eye to the bullshit going on around you.” Though he deems himself the “average meat, potatoes, and corn-fed human male,” his Go-West-young-man story is anything but average. From his humble roots as a pig poop–shoveling youth to his rise as a beloved actor, Offerman’s story embodies the tenets of the American dream, complete with a few more moustache jokes. Wavering between finger-shaking admonishments toward society’s ills and songs of praise for self-reliance, Offerman offers plenty of laughs, though a few head scratches as well.
Fans of Parks and Recreation and Offerman’s brand of deadpan humor are sure to gorge themselves on the healthy portion he provides.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-525-95421-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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