In a blood sport littered with casualties, this is an account of an unlikely survivor.
A comedian’s life is no laughing matter in this memoir of short chapters that examine the author’s source of material as a series of open wounds.
Rarely has an entertainer’s account of his life been so lacking in self-glorification. “There really is no business like show business,” he told a group of his peers as the keynote speaker for the 2011 Just for Laughs Comedy Festival in Montreal. “Except maybe prostitution. There’s a bit of overlap there.” The speech provides the penultimate chapter of Maron’s first book and shows why he enjoyed the respect of so many better-known comedians even before he resurrected his career by shifting it from the comedy club to his garage with his popular podcast WTF with Marc Maron. In his introduction, he explains the development of the cyberseries, which appeared to be a last-ditch effortand which went viral through the host’s interviews with guests such as Conan O’Brien. Though he’d appeared on O’Brien’s show more than 40 times, he treats that exposure like an afterthought, as he explains the secret of success that O’Brien shared with him and which he now believes explains his own: “ ‘Get yourself in a situation where you have no choice.’ And that’s what I’m doing, because I had no choice. I was broke and broken and lost when I started WTF.” If such desperation pushed the comedian beyond his comfort level (presuming he had one), his book might do the same for readers, as Maron recounts his dysfunctional childhood, his two failed marriages (and his part in each split), his addictions, recovery and sobriety, and his ambivalence toward pornography (which he both likes a lot and really doesn’t). In that same speech, he says, “we comics are out there on the front lines of our sanity. We risk all sense of security and the possibility of living stable lives to do comedy.”
In a blood sport littered with casualties, this is an account of an unlikely survivor.Pub Date: April 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9287-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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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