The parts are better than the whole, but the message is clear: Loosen up and enjoy the show.
Comedy historian Nesteroff tackles the tangled story of how the performing arts have long been “dragged into the Culture War and used as a scapegoat.”
Put someone on stage or screen and let them speak a line or two, and someone is going to be offended. Take the much embattled Smothers Brothers, whose TV show often drew letters such as one that read, “I for one am fed up with looking at [N-word]s, [N-word]-lovers and long-haired fruits on your and every other show on TV.” Thus, it has always been: Vaudeville shows were hounded for presumed violations of Jim Crow segregation and obscenity; books of every sort were suppressed by the likes of Anthony J. Comstock, who believed that reading “breeds lust”; drag performers since time immemorial, not least the comedian Milton Berle, were censored and suppressed. If all this sounds depressingly familiar, it’s because the campaign has never really lifted. Right-wing leaders are busily hounding targets, but now, too, so is the left, a process that began in the 1990s. “Just as Democrat Tipper Gore had demonized heavy metal,” writes the author, “Republican politicians like Oliver North and Dan Quayle demonized rap music as part of a greater political strategy.” Nesteroff paints a broad picture, and his narrative is often little more than a shallow recitation of incidents: The Girl Scouts are tarred as Soviet stooges, the Dixie Chicks are pilloried for denouncing George W. Bush, and so forth. There’s also a lot of repetition, especially of the complaint, voiced by Groucho Marx half a century ago and reiterated by Sam Kinison, Dave Chappelle, and even the anodyne Jerry Seinfeld, that comedy is impossible in the face of all the delicate sensibilities arrayed against it.
The parts are better than the whole, but the message is clear: Loosen up and enjoy the show.Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2023
ISBN: 9781419760983
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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