EVERYTHING I EVER NEEDED TO KNOW ABOUT _____* I LEARNED FROM MONTY PYTHON

Name: EVERYTHING I EVER NEEDED TO KNOW ABOUT _____* I LEARNED FROM MONTY PYTHON
Author: Brian Cogan
ISBN: 978-1-250-00470-3

*HISTORY, ART, POETRY, COMMUNISM, PHILOSOPHY, THE MEDIA, BIRTH, DEATH, RELIGION, LITERATURE, LATIN, TRANSVESTITES, BOTANY, THE FRENCH, CLASS SYSTEMS, MYTHOLOGY, FISH SLAPPING, AND MANY MORE!

by Brian Cogan ; Jeff Massey ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2014

An interesting take on the Pythons, but it might have trouble finding an audience, as it doesn't offer anything truly new to...

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And now for something completely different about something completely different.

Consisting of John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam, Terry Jones and Graham Chapman, England's Monty Python is arguably the only contemporary comedic entity that has transcended generations. (Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges are among those that have transcended all generations, but the fact that Monty Python is deservedly mentioned alongside those icons demonstrates their importance to filmed, scripted comedy.) Their fans are passionate to the point that more people than you suspect can quote large chunks of sketches from the long-running TV show Monty Python's Flying Circus or their classic film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Here, Cogan (Communication/Molloy Coll.; Encyclopedia of Punk Music and Culture, 2006) and Massey (English Language and Literature/Molloy Coll.; co-editor: Heads Will Roll: Decapitation in the Medieval and Early Modern Imagination, 2012) pose the question, "How can we put this useless (albeit hilarious) knowledge to good use?" The authors decided that Python—with their dead parrots, French taunters and reverence for Spam—can be used as a teaching tool, and believe it or not, they're right. Similar in tone and intent to Blackwell’s “…and Philosophy" series, Cogan and Massey apply Python's lessons (such as they are) to history, sport, art, theory and “everything else.” For example, in the history chapter, the authors deliver a lengthy discussion about Python's iconic Spanish Inquisition sketch and how it utilizes and relates to the real Spanish Inquisition. The book is exhaustive—the authors touch on nearly every decent Python moment—and while it's a clever concept, it's a tough beginning-to-end read and is best attacked in bite-sized chunks.

An interesting take on the Pythons, but it might have trouble finding an audience, as it doesn't offer anything truly new to hard-core Pythonites, and newbies may gravitate toward one of the many quality Python bios.

Pub Date: March 18, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-250-00470-3

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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ODD LOTS

SEASONAL NOTES OF A CITY GARDENER

by Thomas C. Cooper ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1995

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A devoted gardener offers a meandering collection of brief essays that may hold some charm for others of the same ilk. As the editor of Horticulture magazine, Cooper contributes a regular column whose intent, he says, is ``to capture the world in and around a garden.'' This translates into fragmentary and scattered musings, mainly about his own backyard gardens in Massachusetts, so don't look for practical assistance or even the occasional clever idea here. Although the columns are not dated or presented chronologically (for example, the reader sees Cooper's daughter age eccentrically from three to two to six), they are grouped by month. January finds the author poring over nursery catalogs and drafting resolutions (``Stop accepting plants as gifts, no mater how tempting . . . just imagine they are offering a tray of zucchini seedlings''), while by April he is yearning for a spiffier potting shed and delighting over the arrival of packages from mail-order nurseries. A number of columns are little more than the verbal equivalent of puttering, but then, as Cooper says, gardeners do ``raise puttering to the state of high art.'' Occasionally, pieces that were written to be read one at a time are diminished by being crowded together: Although July's articles on water and wateringmusing on a watering can, noting the desirability of an efficient soaker hose, and admonishing readers to learn from water shortages out Westare separated by forays into other matters, they lose some of their effect when read within the space of half an hour. This one is for people who nod sagely at the line, ``There is only so much Geranium endressii one person can handle,'' and whose hours not spent in the garden are spent talking about being in the garden.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-8050-3741-1

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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THE DEATH OF SATAN

HOW AMERICANS HAVE LOST THE SENSE OF EVIL

by Andrew Delbanco ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1995

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In a brilliant review of how American writers of the last two centuries have confronted evil by depicting it, Delbanco (Humanities/Columbia Univ.; The Puritan Ordeal, not reviewed) suggests that our postmodern inability to name evil puts us in danger of being dominated by it. The Puritans' notion of the devil, argues Delbanco, was largely as a figure of inner temptation, exemplifying both the sin of pride and St. Augustine's doctrine that evil is essentially a deprivation of good. By contrast, 18th-century thinking replaced the soul with a mechanistic notion of the mind and exalted pride and ambition as entrepreneurial virtues, with the result that evil was viewed more as an external, objective reality. Delbanco believes these opposing outlooks run through American literatureand therefore the American soul. He takes Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin as their classic exponents and sees in Emerson the American civil religion of the (blameless) self; the projection of evil onto the ``other'' reaches an apogee in Ahab's crazed pursuit of Moby-Dick. Delbanco ranks Lincoln as ``the most morally consequential figure in American history'' because he insisted that evil lay in the limitation of the Union rather than in the enemy; but in postbellum racism our author discerns an ominous externalizing of evil, overflowing into cults of physical fitness to show one's racial superiority and, in the '20s and '30s, into eugenics and the sterilization of criminals. Drawing on writers like Reinhold Niebuhr, Susan Sontag, and Richard Rorty, Delbanco concludes with an analysis of our present situation, which he sees as poised between belief and irony, full of moral concern yet unable to articulate a coherent basis for morality beyond the cult of victimization and the blamable other. From his confident grasp of American literature, Delbanco has produced a stimulating portrait of what he calls the nation's ``spiritual biography.'' (illustrations, not seen)