Though this represents the first volume in the Odenkirk Memorial Library, it isn’t likely that the author will abandon his...
A humor collection from the postmodern jack of many trades.
The creator and star of the cult TV favorite Mr. Show, Odenkirk (co-author: Hollywood Said No!, 2013) reached a larger audience with his dramatic role in Breaking Bad and has written for both Saturday Night Live and the New Yorker. There is plenty here that the latter would never print, particularly in its more fastidious days—e.g., the opening “One Should Never Read a Book on the Toilet,” addressed to students at a young women’s finishing school and advising that there “are appropriate postures for both reading and for defecating, and neither is compatible with the other.” Addressing a particular public is one of the collection’s recurring motifs, encompassing the obligatory commencement speech, the attempts by various politicians to come clean with particularly embarrassing revelations (“The media will, no doubt, suggest that there is something weird about me wearing a blindfold while having sex with two people I’d met a few hours before, but I assure you I was on Ecstasy and would have tried almost anything”) and, most audaciously, “Martin Luther King Jr.’s Worst Speech Ever.” Odenkirk takes the concept of sacred cows to greater extremes as the butt of his humor, returning repeatedly to Jesus (or “a fairy tale about someone named ‘Jeebus’ ”). And there are some fairly funny pieces on fairly easy targets, including consumer reviews for the likes of Amazon (“This album aspires to claptrap. No wonder they refused to put their faces on it!! Now I know why it has no title and is called ‘The White Album’—because you can’t put the word ‘SHIT’ on the cover of a record album”) and a BFF’s character testimonial for Phil Spector (“he has enriched my world with music, good conversation, and gunshots”).
Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-938073-88-5
Page Count: 112
Publisher: McSweeney’s
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The much celebrated master of nonfiction works his magic on Macbeth, using the ingredients of a mere monograph to conjure a vision of politics, theology, and theatrical practice in King James's England. Wills, winner of a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Critics Circle Award for Lincoln at Gettysburg (1992), argues that Shakespeare's Macbeth should be understood in the context of the contemporaneous Gunpowder Plot of 1605. This attempt to blow up England's king and Parliament gripped the British imagination then much as the Red Menace and the assassinations of the 1960s dominated postwar American consciousness. Wills frames his examination of Macbeth with such parallels. The heart of his book, which grew out of lectures given at the New York Public Library, shows how the play bristles with the ideology prevalent in the Plot's aftermath, when King James and his spokesmen condemned the Jesuit-led rebellion using metaphors of witchcraft. Wills juxtaposes close readings of the play's language, imagery, and stage history with details of the Plot's representation in propaganda and popular culture. Shakespeare's famous witches take center stage as Wills shows how they draw the regicide Macbeth into their circle. Explicating Shakespeare's demonization of verbal ``equivocation,'' purported to be the Jesuitical method for dissembling in an unfriendly realm, Wills forges a new understanding of the play's second half. He justifies its attentions to the witch Hecate and to the Scottish prince Malcolm as crucial to Shakespeare's exploration of rituals of truth in demonology and kingship. Envisioning Macbeth as an integrated rhetorical presentation of a theological politics, Wills hopes, will enable us to once again find theatrical power in the whole play—especially given the neat conjunction of England's 160506 crisis with our contemporary obsessions about plots and princes. Wills's latest essay portends a renewed Macbeth for the theater; his critical performance, meanwhile, manifests the power of literary criticism that is simultaneously scholarly and popular.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-19-508879-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A sweet call for the unsullied love of children that frequently derails under the weight of dubious argument.
Forget Iran and North Korea. The locus of evil is the institution of the family, says poet Stannard, who died in 2004.
“They fuck you up, your mum and dad,” wrote the poet Philip Larkin. Stannard heartily agrees: The dominant-submissive arrangement crushes children, preempting their need for security and affection and stifling their healthy anger, punctuating their days with episodes of verbal and physical abuse. Children become little engines of hate, says the author (though hate can also have positive value, expressing indignation and a sense of self-love). As a child, the author suffered sexual abuse and was the constant victim of her mother’s cruel scorn. The author’s expressiveness testifies to an inner voice, a self-helper, bringing an awareness of suppressed grief and forgotten wounds. She tenders an unrestrained critique of the Bible as a how-to guide for vindictiveness and violence, a reflection of “a corrupt and brutal mankind,” with its God “the biggest hater of them all.” She also calls out Sigmund Freud for back-pedaling when he abandoned sexual trauma as the source of hysteria. Eventually, her broad generalizations detract from her message: Yes, the family can be an abomination, and yes, it’s certainly plausible that hate is often the manifestation of a hurt, frightened child. It doesn’t necessarily follow, however, that “happy families are largely a mirage,” treating children as “inferior species” and “losers.” The author is also prone to such ridiculous statements as, “that the great Gandhi mistreated his children only proves that parents don’t know how to bring up children.”
A sweet call for the unsullied love of children that frequently derails under the weight of dubious argument.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 20.00
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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