A breezy, slightly overlong account that will interest fans of African-American culture and TV comedy due to its up-close...
A history of the development of the hit TV show In Living Color and the comedy dynasty of the Wayans family.
Freelance culture and entertainment writer Peisner (co-author, with Steven “Steve-O” Glover: Professional Idiot, 2011) argues convincingly for In Living Color’s cultural importance at the dawn of the 1990s, as it brought an underground tradition of confrontational yet reflective African-American comedy into the mainstream. Although he quotes many of the show’s principals, he focuses on Keenen Ivory Wayans (and his siblings), starting with his hardscrabble 1960s New York childhood. Following a youthful fascination with Richard Pryor, Keenen determined to pursue a comedy career. He found some early success, including a Tonight Show appearance, though, as the author notes, “it’s almost impossible to overstate what a wasteland Hollywood was for African-Americans in the early eighties,” with the exception of Eddie Murphy. Still, Wayans was part of a formative generation of comics and directors, including Robert Townsend, Spike Lee, Arsenio Hall, and Chris Rock, all of whom crossed paths with him or were involved with ILC (or skewered by its sketches). After years of such scuffling, Wayans found opportunity via the unlikely venue of Fox, “still a new network [that] felt distinctly minor-league.” While Wayans recalls “getting a blank check from Fox, ‘total freedom’ as he put it,” Peisner notes that stories regarding the show’s origins are contradictory. Still, the show won an Emmy Award in its first season and became a phenomenon. The author ably captures these glory days and later seasons, when a mixture of grueling production norms, competition and conflicts among cast and writers, and network difficulties caused a clear decline, culminating in Keenen’s departure during the fourth season (and the show’s cancellation following the fifth). Since then, “the Wayans brothers have become essentially a parody factory.” Peisner’s telling is casual and sometimes repetitive, but he effectively pulls together the recollections of many involved with this influential enterprise.
A breezy, slightly overlong account that will interest fans of African-American culture and TV comedy due to its up-close detail and numerous sources.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-4332-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: 37 Ink/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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