The author has a good time laughing at himself, but he needs more interesting stories to tell.
The up-and-coming comedian shares—and occasionally overshares—tales from his nerdy, manic-depressive youth.
In the introduction to his debut collection of personal essays, Gethard proclaims that he has “always wanted to charge headlong into outlandish situations at the first sight of them.” Outlandish situations are in dispiritingly short supply here, though: Gethard’s predicaments are largely of the garden-variety teen and 20-something variety, from awkward sexual experiences to moving violations. Growing up in New Jersey, the author was an introvert whose relatives were prone to violent verbal explosions, and the title story reveals how he inherited some of that barkiness. Alas, too often Gethard oversells moderately irritating experiences as hyper-wacky, emotionally cataclysmic events. When he balances his self-deprecating posture with some genuinely humiliating moments, he can be funny: In “White Magic,” he recalls an ill-fated stint playing a pimp for a Z-grade pro-wrestling league, and “The World’s Foremost Goat” is an amusing fable-like yarn about how his attempt to get an easy A in college led him to care for a goat in a harder-than-expected agriculture class. The stories run in chronological order, and as Gethard becomes more involved in the New York comedy scene the book acquires something of an arc: Self-hating funny guy comes to terms with his depression. (He breaks down on the phone with his mom more than once.) So he’s easy to root for toward the end in “Jiu Jitsu,” in which he ties his modest martial-arts success to his hard-won emotional equipoise. But to get to it, readers have to get past the self-explanatory “Colonic,” and Gethard isn’t funny enough to justify detailed discussions of his bowel movements.
The author has a good time laughing at himself, but he needs more interesting stories to tell.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-306-82030-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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