Fans of Handler’s outrageous persona will find much to enjoy; the unconverted will remain so.
Further globe-trotting adventures of the scandalous talk show host.
TV host and author Handler (Lies that Chelsea Handler Told Me, 2011, etc.) returns with another chronicle of bad behavior, this time focusing on her various fabulous vacations to such exotic destinations as Africa and Switzerland. Her shtick remains intact: an unapologetic stream of calculated outrageousness, including casual near-racism, abuse heaped on friends and family, overindulgence in various intoxicating substances, sexual frankness and scatological misadventure (“Mixing Metamucil with vodka will be successful in helping you go to the bathroom, but your timing should be strategic if staying with a friend. Once you clog someone’s toilet, they have a hard time remembering anything about you other than you clogging their toilet”). The results are fitfully funny, though the author’s grotesque sense of privilege and entitlement begins to grate; though this tone is certainly also part of Handler’s highly polished comic persona, readers not blessed with the TV star’s wealth and coterie of pampering enablers may begin to resent her petty complaints and blithe disregard for consequences. The bulk of the narrative concerns Handler’s safari expedition in Africa, and the author’s observations, when not actively offensive, are amusing. Handler is particularly adept at realizing her characters: Her traveling companions, safari guides and resort staffers emerge vividly drawn, and her ear for distinctive and telling dialogue is well-honed. She is less successful maintaining interest when going on about her dogs, a common pitfall of overly involved pet owners. The highlights of the book are a riotously funny set piece in which our heroine evacuates into her bathing suit while perilously far from appropriate restroom facilities and a reproduced email exchange between Handler and a pathetically delusional suitor. This material is by turns gross, mean and compulsively funny, which sums up the appeal of the book when Handler is on her game.
Fans of Handler’s outrageous persona will find much to enjoy; the unconverted will remain so.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4555-9973-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: A Chelsea Handler Book/Borderline Amazing® Publishing/Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Essential for fans and the definitive celebration of a show that made history by knowing the rules and breaking every one of...
Everything you ever wanted to know about America’s favorite Mafia serial—and then some.
New York magazine TV critic Seitz (Mad Men Carousel: The Complete Critical Companion, 2015, etc.) and Rolling Stone TV critic Sepinwall (Breaking Bad 101: The Complete Critical Companion, 2017, etc.) gather a decade’s worth of their smart, lively writing about New Jersey’s most infamous crime family. As they note, The Sopranos was first shot in 1997, helmed by master storyteller David Chase, of Northern Exposure and Rockford Files renown, who unveiled his creation at an odd time in which Robert De Niro had just appeared in a film about a Mafioso in therapy. The pilot was “a hybrid slapstick comedy, domestic sitcom, and crime thriller, with dabs of ’70s American New Wave grit. It is high and low art, vulgar and sophisticated.” It barely hinted at what was to come, a classic of darkness and cynicism starring James Gandolfini, an actor “obscure enough that, coupled with the titanic force of his performance, it was easy to view him as always having been Tony Soprano.” Put Gandolfini together with one of the best ensembles and writing crews ever assembled, and it’s small wonder that the show is still remembered, discussed, and considered a classic. Seitz and Sepinwall occasionally go too Freudian (“Tony is a human turd, shat out by a mother who treats her son like shit”), though sometimes to apposite effect: Readers aren’t likely to look at an egg the same way ever again. The authors’ interviews with Chase are endlessly illuminating, though we still won’t ever know what really happened to the Soprano family on that fateful evening in 2007. “It’s not something you just watch,” they write. “It’s something you grapple with, accept, resist, accept again, resist again, then resolve to live with”—which, they add, is “absolutely in character for this show.”
Essential for fans and the definitive celebration of a show that made history by knowing the rules and breaking every one of them.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3494-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This early reader is an excellent introduction to the March on Washington in 1963 and the important role in the march played by Martin Luther King Jr. Ruffin gives the book a good, dramatic start: “August 28, 1963. It is a hot summer day in Washington, D.C. More than 250,00 people are pouring into the city.” They have come to protest the treatment of African-Americans here in the US. With stirring original artwork mixed with photographs of the events (and the segregationist policies in the South, such as separate drinking fountains and entrances to public buildings), Ruffin writes of how an end to slavery didn’t mark true equality and that these rights had to be fought for—through marches and sit-ins and words, particularly those of Dr. King, and particularly on that fateful day in Washington. Within a year the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been passed: “It does not change everything. But it is a beginning.” Lots of visual cues will help new readers through the fairly simple text, but it is the power of the story that will keep them turning the pages. (Easy reader. 6-8)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-448-42421-5
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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