Laughs served up just right on every page.
Veteran comedian Gaffigan (Dad Is Fat, 2013) once again proves that the surest way to the American funny bone is through a mouthful of cheeseburger and fries, followed by a milkshake chaser.
Most love stories are complex affairs, and the author’s torrid relationship with pizza and bacon and everything else that is bad for you—but also so darn tasty—is no exception. In his latest book, Gaffigan waxes downright poetic about beef, barbecue, Chinese takeout and a smorgasbord of other gastronomic delights that no overweight man his age and girth can resist. The author’s passion for deliciously trashy food manifests itself in a mouthwatering map of the United States that gleefully replaces red and blue states with much more representational porterhouse steaks and ribs. Gaffigan admits to never being hungry because he simply never stops eating—not that he’s proud of this potentially tenuous state of affairs, because as the relentlessly self-deprecating wit implies, he is not. It’s just that the gifted author is one love-struck schlub who is completely honest about the power his beloved addiction has over his life. For as many dishes as he professes to adore, there appears to be an equal number of food items that he despises. His culinary no-fly list runs the gamut from seafood to American cheese. “What’s the difference between anchovies and a sweaty eyebrow?” Gaffigan wonders. “Whenever I see an anchovy I think, Someone has attacked Tom Selleck. Why would you want to put that on a pizza?” The author seasons each carton of comedy goodness with all the right seasonings: a dash of domesticity here and a pinch of zesty dialogue there. In freely exploring his ardor for all things fried, baked and sugary, Gaffigan somehow manages to work “clean” without ever becoming sickeningly saccharine.
Laughs served up just right on every page.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8041-4041-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
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 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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