A brave attempt to blend research, memoir and humor, but the result is not always smooth.
A freelance journalist and a professor hop around the globe cracking and waxing wise about humor.
McGraw (Marketing and Psychology/Univ. of Colorado) and former Westword staff writer Warner both contribute to the content, but the voice belongs to Warner, who employs the first person throughout—and tries (sometimes successfully) to show us what a funny guy he is. At the beginning, the authors provide an origin story (how the two met) and describe how they decided to team up to explore the world of humor. McGraw heads the Humor Research Lab, a research project at Colorado, and he has developed a theory that humor is based on what he calls a “benign violation”: Something seems wrong, threatening, whatever—but isn’t. As the two hopped, skipped and jumped around the country and the world, they didn’t discover much to invalidate his theory. The authors mix memoir and discussions of academic research throughout, and they made some interesting journeys and scored some major interviews (one with Louis C.K., who seems less than thrilled with the opportunity). Among their visits, discussions and interviews: Las Vegas, a comedy club in Los Angeles, the New Yorker’s cartoon caption contest, a comedy writer in New York, Tanzania (where, back in 1962, there was a laughter epidemic in a school), Japan, Denmark (where the Muslim political cartoons ignited fiery protests abroad), Israel and Palestine, where the intrepid researchers explored perilous places that will both amaze readers and inspire their admiration. The authors also chronicle their trip to the Amazon in the company of the actual Patch Adams and a group of healing clowns, as well as a jaunt to Canada, where McGraw performed at a comedy festival and did…OK. He bombed a year earlier in Denver.
A brave attempt to blend research, memoir and humor, but the result is not always smooth.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6541-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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