These books will keep going as well, as long as there’s a market for them.
A third volume of memoir from the street-wise, no-filter comedian, assisted again by Bozza.
By his own admission, Lange (Crash and Burn, 2013, etc.) is a self-destructive overachiever, two qualities that wouldn’t seem to go together but for him are flip sides of the same coin. “I get the same jolt of adrenaline when I lose as I do when I win,” he insists. “That’s because when I lose, I lose big. My losses are like a huge ship passing by, trailing a wake of chaos, and there I am, having the time of my life, just an asshole on a Jet Ski catching air off the backwash.” He took a big risk when he left steady work for show business, a field where he’d shown no aptitude, and he reaped big rewards for it. Lange writes that he was by no means the funniest guy in his high school and that he was awkward at stand-up, but he eventually found himself in a high-profile position as a radio accomplice to Howard Stern, which opened doors to all sorts of opportunities. These included plenty of sex with strippers and porn stars, who wanted to hear their names on the show (and their websites promoted), which helped torpedo his relationship with his girlfriend (which was also a running part of the show). The author now dismisses Stern’s show as “the perfect example of how political correctness has ruined comedy. His show is so unbelievably safe, boring and just bad.” Some of the episodes that highlighted Lange’s previous books are revisited here, but his extracurricular misadventures with the HBO series Crashing shows that he isn’t mellowing with older age. “My life is basically a misconceived Hollywood film,” he writes. “It’s not as bad as Lost and Found [the movie he considers his worst]; it’s a different kind of bad. It’s the kind of movie that should end but keeps going.”
These books will keep going as well, as long as there’s a market for them.Pub Date: July 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-12117-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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