More a collection of gags than a thoughtful examination of a life, the book is best experienced in bits and pieces in order...
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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