Wickedly smart, funny, and witty.
A gay stand-up comedian considers his life through personal essays that also ruminate on problems and paradoxes of modern American culture.
Branum was a born misfit who found early solace in Greek mythology. He especially loved Leto, a beleaguered goddess who taught him the importance of believing in himself when no one else did. Half-Jewish, overweight, and “intellectually aggressive,” the author struggled to find a place in his hometown of Yuba City, where Oklahoma Dust Bowl descendants fired “guns into the air and yell[ed] racial slurs” at Indian immigrants. Branum educated himself about the outside world through reading and watching old sitcoms. Suburban witch Samantha Stephens, of Bewitched fame, became his symbol for the magic he sought in order to escape a hated blue-collar existence. By high school, Branum could no longer deny the desires that had surfaced in his early teens. Still, he remained closeted. He found comfort in friendship with three Punjabi girls trapped into asexuality by the conflicting demands of their culture. At Berkeley, he wrote for the humor magazine, ran for student office as a member of his own party (CUM, the “Cal Undergraduate Masturbators”), and wrote an article about Chelsea Clinton that resulted in a visit from the Secret Service. He attended law school at the University of Minnesota only to realize that he “had no business” becoming a lawyer and mimicking straightness. After graduation, Branum stumbled into adult functionality, discovered his passion for stand-up comedy, and moved to Los Angeles. There, he worked his way into writing jobs for Chelsea Lately and The Mindy Project, all while learning to love himself in West Hollywood, the “ketamine-stoked crucible of shallow gay self-consciousness and derision.” Keenly observant and intelligent, Branum’s book not only offers uproarious insights into walking paths less traveled, but also into what self-acceptance means in a world still woefully intolerant of difference.
Wickedly smart, funny, and witty.Pub Date: July 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7022-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.
A moving, emotionally charged memoir of the renowned author’s youth in a newly created Israel.
“Almost everyone in Jerusalem in those days,” writes novelist Oz (The Same Sea, 2001, etc.) of the 1940s, “was either a poet or a writer or a researcher or a thinker or a scholar or a world reformer.” Oz’s uncle Joseph Klausner, for instance, kept a 25,000-volume library in every conceivable language, its dusty volumes providing a madeleine for the young writer, “the smell of a silent, secluded life devoted to scholarship,” even as his grandmother contemplated the dusty air of the Levant and concluded that the region was full of germs, whence “a thick cloud of disinfecting spirit, soaps, creams, sprays, baits, insecticides, and powder always hung in the air.” His own father had to sell his beloved books in order to buy food when money was short, though he often returned with more books. (“My mother forgave him, and so did I, because I hardly ever felt like eating anything except sweetcorn and icecream.”) Out in the street, Oz meets a young Palestinian woman who is determined to write great poems in French and English; cats bear such names as Schopenhauer and Chopin; the walls of the city ring with music and learned debate. But then there is the dark side: the war of 1948, with its Arab Legion snipers and stray shells, its heaps of dead new emigrants fresh from the Holocaust. “In Nehemiah Street,” writes Oz, “once there was a bookbinder who had a nervous breakdown, and he went out on his balcony and screamed, Jews, help, hurry, soon they’ll burn us all.” In this heady, dangerous atmosphere, torn by sectarian politics and the constant threat of terror, Oz comes of age, blossoming as a man of letters even as the bookish people of his youth begin to disappear one by one.
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-100878-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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