Life as a loser makes wan humor. Wait for the movie.
Another excessively candid memoir from a stand-up comedian.
As Nichols reached middle age after having failed at just about everything, his feckless life somehow became the focus of an independent film. Despite his well-heeled, WASPy genes, the author is afflicted with a speech impediment, ADD, dyslexia and a mild case of Tourette’s. A slob with poor hygiene, he stutters and is fearful of New Balance shoes. Dysfunction is his shtick. He’s botched virtually every endeavor since boarding school and college, during which he concentrated solely on alcohol, various drugs and misbehavior. After a disastrous bike tour through Europe, Nichols landed on Wall Street, where he lasted for one year. A slew of odd jobs followed, including house painting, a stab at dictionary sales and, mostly, substitute teaching to supplement the college and club bookings. The lonesome loser sank a yacht and burned down his family’s lake house. He spent a lot of time at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, which he attended to meet women and push his stand-up career. These days the author abstains from booze and blow, but he notes that he “put down the drink and instantly picked up sugar, coffee, and cigarettes—all okay and sanctioned within the confines of society.” He’s got a girl and a license as a fishing-boat captain. Comically, Nichols focuses on bodily conditions and emissions. Like many contemporary stand-up comics, the material is simply sullied shock talk masquerading as whimsical banter. Despite avowals that it’s all quite funny, the story of how one 40-year-old juvenile became a better person is really just indecorous solipsism.
Life as a loser makes wan humor. Wait for the movie.Pub Date: July 7, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9916-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2009
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
