Though her approach might be a "shock to the system" for some, it will be crass and tedious to many.
The career arc of a TV personality who has "made a career and an art form out of swearing."
First-time author Keagan—the host and producer of VH1's Big Morning Buzz Live and the co-creator and lead anchor of YouTube's No Good TV—has thrived with her alternative to the tame, publicist-approved celebrity interview; instead, she encourages her invitees to be spontaneous and unfiltered, including the freedom to curse. When she tells her guests that "anything goes," they drop their guards and admit they feel liberated. While they are unrestricted, the challenge for her was to walk “a fine line between being fun & friendly, flirty & filthy, and being respectable…while I was being R-rated, the goal for me and my writers was to do it with intelligence and precision. More Howard Stern than Stuttering John.” Through her thousands of interviews, Keagan has learned that celebrities have "a penchant for profanity,” and she encourages readers to embrace vulgarities and reject prudish, proper language. Under the pretense of being authentic, the author describes Hollywood players and the pecking order with hundreds of inane synonyms for sex acts and body parts. This extends to dozens of sophomoric expressions for her own breasts. Keagan also includes several interview transcripts (Sandra Bullock, Nelly, Matt Damon, Quentin Tarantino, and others); unfortunately, they aren't especially humorous on the page and will make readers wonder if they were funnier on-screen. Despite the author’s endless enthusiasm and claims that these conversations were transgressive, they just don’t translate to print. Readers who agree with Keagan's premise that "people tend to get too hung up on words instead of the intent behind them”—or enjoy reading dozens of instances of celebrities swearing—will find plenty to entertain, but the author’s lack of sophistication and pointed social commentary make this 400-plus-page book a chore.
Though her approach might be a "shock to the system" for some, it will be crass and tedious to many.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-02620-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2016
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
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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