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FAILURE IS AN OPTION

Name: FAILURE IS AN OPTION
Author: H. Jon Benjamin
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4216-4

AN ATTEMPTED MEMOIR

by H. Jon Benjamin ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2018

More a collection of gags than a thoughtful examination of a life, the book is best experienced in bits and pieces in order...

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Voice actor and stand-up comedian Benjamin structures a free-wheeling memoir of his rather uneventful life around the many failures he has experienced.

The author, who voices the title characters of Archer and Bob's Burgers, grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he watched a lot of TV and recorded interviews with himself. He bounces lightly through his childhood in chapters such as “The Sleepover (and How I Failed to Have One)” (cold tent) and “The Teen Years (How I Failed Hosting a Bar Mitzvah Party)” (the DJ played AM oldies). Then he moves on to stories about failing to move to France, get a graduate degree in Holocaust studies, sell a TV pilot, and ride a motorcycle. Every time Benjamin starts to get into potentially heavy emotional territory, he leaps out and moves onward with a joke. The most effective chapters of the book are those that give a sense of the author’s trials and tribulations as he recognizes his shortcomings and goes on with a shrug. These chapters are interspersed with brief intermissions, most of which are padding. Benjamin also initiates long—and increasingly annoying—interchanges of letters with scholars, asking them to explain how failure expressed itself in history, to which they respond with polite confusion. He inserts a sophomoric collection of line drawings of failed sexual positions and a more successful set of failed pickup lines: “Do you work out, or are you just naturally tense?”; “Has anyone ever told you you look like my mother?” Benjamin's descriptions of self-humiliation can get uncomfortable for readers, as in the case of a protracted chapter involving diarrhea, a rental car, and a hotel.

More a collection of gags than a thoughtful examination of a life, the book is best experienced in bits and pieces in order to avoid the impression of being trapped in an elevator for hours with a stand-up comic.

Pub Date: May 1, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5247-4216-4

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Dutton

Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)