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
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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