An up-and-down collection that often blurs the line between ha-ha funny and odd funny.
A tour diary from the veteran comedian.
A lot of performers insist that they live for the hour or two onstage and that the rest is just tedium. Barry, “the massively famous comedian,” as he describes himself with ambivalent irony, has not only captured that tedium; his tour diary wallows in it. There are 54 very short chapters, one each devoted to his experience playing a comedy club in a smaller market. Many of these clubs have bad bathrooms, which makes him all the more appreciative of the occasional ones that don’t: “The hand soap situation at SPACE was quite impressive. Not just that they had any, which is always a nice surprise, but that it was that high-end Mrs. Meyer’s stuff that comes in scents like basil and geranium.” Sometimes shows are undermined by drunks and hecklers or by the seating arrangement or by Barry’s displeasure over people who have asked to be on the guest list but never show. There is very little of his actual performance in the book and almost none of what is conventionally considered humor, though his deadpan wryness has charm. He often feels compelled to switch rooms in hotels or even switch hotels. He’s a picky eater, and though he claims that he tries to eat healthy, he’s as prone as anyone to junk food on the road. Though his travels have taken him from coast to coast, he doesn’t seem to focus much on regional diversity in his observations. Instead, every place, and every day, is pretty much like the next or the last. “I flew from Oakland to Los Angeles,” he writes. “Things got off to a terrible start at LAX when I ordered a bagel and it was toasted in a panini press. I can’t defend why it bothered me, but I bet they can’t defend why they toasted a bagel in a panini press.”
An up-and-down collection that often blurs the line between ha-ha funny and odd funny.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1742-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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