A mundane account of a pampered kid trying to find himself that offers nothing particularly illuminating, artful or...
Phillips gets writer’s block and ends up sucked into a chain of bad but lucrative businesses as he tries to figure out what to do with his life.
TV scripter Phillips had scads of talent, it seems, but little idea of how to apply it. The shambolic manner in which he tried to figure that out provides the grist for his memoir. Fresh out of the bucolic and positive-vibe-emitting environs of Marin County, Phillips published a roundly acclaimed novel (Tuscaloosa, 1994) at the ripe young age of 24. The expectations of further great work hamstrung his writing, and four years later he found himself depressed and on meds in Austin, struggling with “a doomed second novel.” Through a series of fortuitous personal connections leading via several degrees of separation to nascent South Park cartoonists Matt Stone and Trey Parker, Phillips wound up in California with a couple of friends, putting together a series of random cultural business ventures. They formed Certified Renegade American Product (CRAP) as an umbrella company to start ultra-indie film festivals that acted like self-proclaimed “barnacles” on the outskirts of Cannes and Sundance. They started a consulting business called Quiddity, a particularly ’90s entity that gave the spectacularly non-business-savvy Phillips and his coworkers the chance to be paid ridiculous amounts of money to formulate new names for companies or products. Not much came to fruition. The film festivals were just parties, and the businesses had little reason to exist; the author’s cynicism ballooned through the years of the Internet bubble. Phillips took a shot at acting in a porn film and made a short involving his penis. A feature idea that tried to merge Blair Witch–style POV filmmaking with Thomas Harris–like serial-killer profundity and millennial anxiety ultimately proved to be an exercise in sadism and colossal ego.
A mundane account of a pampered kid trying to find himself that offers nothing particularly illuminating, artful or self-reflective.Pub Date: March 10, 2007
ISBN: 0-8021-7028-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Black Cat/Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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