“Humor writers are funny people who are constantly in the process of convincing the world that they are indispensably...
Katz fits snugly into his self-described role as an “emotionally needy joke writer” for the Clinton administration, though readers get all 40 of his years in this memoir.
Clinton was in the market for what Katz had to sell: self-deprecating humor, the idea being that if you step in it, it's better to join in the merriment than to be laughed at. Of course, the president gave his gagman lots of good raw material. But Katz’s favorite topic is himself, so he starts at the beginning, with his years as the grade-school clown, and gets off some good lines when he moves on to college (“Once an East Coast epicenter of 1960s social activism . . . the Cornell I attended was a petri dish for Yuppie scum”) and post-grad studies (“Law school was the Vietnam of my generation, a quagmire where promising young lives were needlessly wasted or damaged forever”). Biding his time as Daniel Moynihan's gofer, Katz gets a crack of writing humor material for Michael Dukakis—can't say he doesn't like a challenge—and here he tenders some of his better stuff, from “Hi, I'm Mike Dukakis. And these are my eyebrows” on the low side to “Some people say I am arrogant, but I know better” on the high. Katz is looking for a job soon enough, but school chum George Stephanopoulos rescues him from ad copywriting. What follows mostly explains (in considerable detail) how he arrived at the jokes Clinton slung at the Gridiron Dinner or the Correspondents’ Dinner. For good measures, Katz throws in scenes of jousting with nemesis Al Franken and bares his self-doubts: “Writing these semantic jokes that were narrowly construed to fortify falsehoods, had I finally turned into a goddamn lawyer?” All of which begs the question: Who was paying this guy's salary?
“Humor writers are funny people who are constantly in the process of convincing the world that they are indispensably funny.” In a nutshell. (b&w illustrations, not seen)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7868-6949-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
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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