Average comedian-writes-a-book career padding. This same material is more enjoyable in Birbiglia’s stage act.
Popular comedian Birbiglia reminisces about his wacky childhood pipe dreams, sleep disorders and occupational and social failures.
In the Comedy Central regular’s first foray into the book business, the author engages in plenty of self-deprecating put-downs, non sequiturs and underdog-loser stories. However, other than some typical bits of social unease during childhood and a late start in dating women, Birbiglia isn’t quite the loser he makes himself out to be. His father, a successful doctor, sent him to a posh private Catholic high school, and he eventually gained admission to Georgetown University. Birbiglia takes the reader through his mildly humorous failures as an adolescent break dancer, schoolboy basketball player, womanizer, rapper and science student. He also delivers predictable material on gluttony, bodily functions and sleepwalking, and he milks his parents’ inability to cope with the Internet for some reliable parents-are-so-out-of-touch collegiate humor. The most entertaining parts of the book focus on his lean years as a struggling comic in New York, complete with crappy temp jobs, absurd focus-group gigs, a chronically low bank balance and failed early gigs in college lunchrooms. When the author tries to cover more serious matters such as love and relationships, he seems unsure whether to approach these personal issues with ironic distance or to break character and attempt to cast an air of pathos. On the whole, Birbiglia ably caters to a straight-male, frat-boy audience, keeping the humor light, snappy and chock full of references to junk food, cable TV, Internet porn and general lowbrow pop culture.
Average comedian-writes-a-book career padding. This same material is more enjoyable in Birbiglia’s stage act.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5799-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
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
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