According to NPR commentator Garfield, the American Dream is less about white picket fences and two cars in the garage and far more about ``the pursuit of happiness.'' As the humorist proves, the pursuit, while often noble, is just as often fruitless. Garfield divides his book into four parts, including the quest for ``world-changing'' ideas; get-rich-quick schemes; his trials and tribulations in pursuit of the American Dream; and a selection of his radio commentaries. Although he may be best known for his droll sense of humor, the tales in this book are not, as Garfield himself points out, always meant to evoke laughter. There is, for instance, the story of cosmetics entrepreneur Jan Stuart, who, after initial success in the industry, launched a hunger strike to protest the way in which big business squeezed him out. Similarly, the piece entitled ``A Whorehouse Christmas''—about legal prostitution in Nevada—ends with the lament of a 21-year-old hooker wondering aloud why God put her on earth. At times, Garfield can be glib to the point of offensiveness, as in his story about Charles Wixom, of the Institute of Food Technologies, a frozen-food development company, who has the misfortune of having to compete with the genocide in Yugoslavia for attendees to his news conferences. Ultimately, the problems with the book are those that afflict many such collections: a lack of continuity, combined with a poorly defined overall concept. Garfield is best when writing about himself, and the book is partly redeemed by the section on his own pursuits, which contains essays on tourism, house and car shopping, and hunting, all in a Dave Barryish vein.
Pub Date: June 6, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-83218-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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