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SEVEN DIRTY WORDS

THE LIFE AND CRIMES OF GEORGE CARLIN

Sullivan isn’t able to fully penetrate Carlin’s inner life, resulting in a fairly standard showbiz praise narrative. Still,...

Straightforward biography of George Carlin (1937–2008), who survived countercultural excess to become a seminal American stand-up comedian.

Boston Globe contributor Sullivan (The Hardest Working Man: How James Brown Saved the Soul of America, 2008, etc.) portrays Carlin as a singular cultural figure, connecting the 1950s’ “Silent Generation” to ’60s hippies, ’70s stoners and ’90s slackers, through a unique combination of shrewdness and provocation. “George Carlin was a natural born transgressor,” he writes. The author meticulously chronicles Carlin’s career, which intersected with many formative cultural trends of the ’50s and ’60s. He began as a regional radio DJ, moved into mainstream comedy while observing the “sick” club scene epitomized by Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce, toured extensively and became an early favorite on television, particularly late-night shows. Sullivan ably captures a sense of the entertainment industry at the time—glamorously competitive and fiercely insular. After years honing his comic chops and caricatures like the “Hippie-Dippy Weatherman,” Carlin aligned himself with the “freaks” at the right moment, becoming a hugely popular campus comedian and releasing Grammy-winning LPs. This culminated in his notorious 1972 Milwaukee arrest that eventually landed him before the Supreme Court on charges of obscenity. Sullivan argues that the incident has informed our (often incoherent) national conversation about free speech and obscenity ever since. The author also dutifully covers Carlin’s personal life. Not surprisingly, he used drugs for a time, but by his own account weaned himself off them by the ’90s. Alcohol, however, proved a harder addiction. Less well-known is his frequent personal generosity toward other comedians and his steady romance with Brenda, his wife of 36 years, who died after a brutal bout with liver cancer.

Sullivan isn’t able to fully penetrate Carlin’s inner life, resulting in a fairly standard showbiz praise narrative. Still, this is an apt, detailed memorial to a groundbreaking performer.

Pub Date: June 8, 2010

ISBN: 978-0-306-81829-5

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Da Capo

Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010

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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

NOTES ON THE FIRST 150 YEARS IN AMERICA

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

Awards & Accolades

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  • Kirkus Reviews'
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  • IndieBound Bestseller


  • National Book Award Winner


  • Pulitzer Prize Finalist

The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.

Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

Pub Date: July 8, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7

Page Count: 176

Publisher: Spiegel & Grau

Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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