Smart, sassy and surprisingly wise.
An actress and comedian’s episodic ruminations about the painful blunders that helped shape her as a person and a successful stand-up comic.
For Tyler, comedians are a breed apart—“lack of shame is our superpower [and] humiliation is fuel for [our] art.” She demonstrates her commitment to her calling by transforming stories drawn from her life into fodder for laughter. The daughter of two African-American vegetarian hippies, Tyler was “seven kinds of weird” from the start. She was also an accident-prone bungler. When she was just 5 years old, she managed to slice herself from “nose to navel” after getting thrown from a rusted hobbyhorse. At 7, she nearly set herself on fire and burned down her apartment after a kitchen experiment in deep-frying went hopelessly awry. Her teenage years were equally rife with embarrassments. Wearing clothes that made her look like “Boyz II Men had gotten in a fight with an angry thrift store,” she managed such ignominious feats as getting followed, and then caught, by her father at an underground San Francisco nightclub, taking the SAT with a massive hangover, and spewing vomit on two boys she liked two separate times. Tyler did her first comedy sketch—which involved her dressing in drag as a drunken frat boy—for classmates at Dartmouth. From that point on, she was “completely in love” with comedy, although she would not pursue it seriously until after she discovered that working for a living “suck[ed] major ass.” Tyler’s work is refreshing not just for its unabashed candor, but also for its humorous insights into the human capacity for screwing up and bouncing back. Things “will go wrong. Terribly mind-blowingly wrong.” But under no circumstances should it stop someone from pursuing their dreams.
Smart, sassy and surprisingly wise.Pub Date: July 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-222377-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: It Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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