Another full-on blitz of 40-something white-male rage, lightened very little by the occasional potty-humor anecdote.
Former Man Show co-host and podcast phenomenon’s manly-man memoir about the awfulness of poverty and the crappiness of wealth and fame.
Carolla (In Fifty Years We’ll All Be Chicks, 2010, etc.) supplements his income as a famous podcast-show guy by doubling as a writer—or more specifically “ranter,” as in this latest autobiographical harangue. Warming to the author’s sense of humor depends on how you relate to a 47-year-old male who still calls women “chicks” and uses junior high scatological terminology like “ass mud.” Here Carolla takes vengeful aim at all the human beings who’ve pissed him off over the years, which seems to be pretty much everyone he’s come in contact with except his stepgrandfather. He rags on his over-the-top hippie parents for their un-American voluntary poverty and humorless activist causes; he rebelled against them in high school by becoming an obnoxious jock. His early 20s were full of crappy jobs and gonzo hijinks with buddies whose existences appeared to center around getting wasted and peeing on stuff. Carolla admits his love for lighting farts and recreational flatulence in general, gaseous coming-of-age hobbies that, not surprisingly, proved useful in his first gig as a host on Loveline in the mid-’90s. He got his big TV showbiz break when he met established comic Jimmy Kimmel and created the Man Show; next thing he knew, he was making serious dough and living in a house in the Hollywood Hills. The first half of the book showcases Carolla’s unrelenting bitching about all the manual-labor jobs he toiled in; the next chronicles his firsthand discovery that Hollywood success pretty much sucks too—except now he can pay his bills and doesn’t have to share his apartment with someone who isn’t a hot chick.
Another full-on blitz of 40-something white-male rage, lightened very little by the occasional potty-humor anecdote.Pub Date: June 12, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-88887-7
Page Count: 327
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
