A witty rock memoir delivered with arty, aphoristic verve.
The former Soul Coughing frontman recalls moments from a musician’s life that are funny, infuriating, or just too strange not to share.
Doughty’s debut, The Book of Drugs (2012), was a relatively conventional addiction memoir, relating how his appetite for narcotics was exacerbated by his status as a famous-ish 1990s bandleader. In this follow-up, the author dispenses with an extended narrative arc and instead constructs the book out of brief anecdotes, some as short as a paragraph, relating tiny epiphanies and disappointments. Many of them turn on the phrase “the world was absolutely new,” usually relating to moments of musical revelation—e.g. hearing Nirvana and the Replacements for the first time or playing with an idol like the MC5’s Wayne Kramer. But Doughty’s earnest proclamations of glowing fandom have a counterweight in his seeming knack for attracting low-grade calamities into his life. There’s the roommate who climbed onto a fifth-story ledge, drunk; the producer of a Soul Coughing best-of album who sowed discord with his estranged band mates; a supposedly game-changing invitation to write a song for an X-Files soundtrack that ultimately fizzled; moments of disorientation in Kyoto, Shanghai, and a Las Vegas strip club’s Champagne Room. It’s all relatively inconsequential stuff in isolation, but Doughty has a finely honed, smirking style of observation that justifies most of the vignettes: The strip club’s bathroom was “as bright and cold as a Whole Foods”; a Tinder date “had written her profile in half-disguised twelve-step argot”; Shanghai’s skyscrapers “look like they were drawn on a coaster.” Together, the book accrues an entertainingly bemused, why-is-this-happening-to-me vibe, and Doughty’s terseness evokes the simple quirkiness of a Lydia Davis short story. Fans will appreciate his stories of struggling to finish his breakthrough solo album, Haughty Melodic, but he’s a talented observer in many contexts.
A witty rock memoir delivered with arty, aphoristic verve.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-306-82531-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
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 virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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