by Nate Dern ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 8, 2017
In his first book, Dern shoots for the easy laughs, some of which he hits; however, he falls short of creating the lasting...
A collection of stories, essays, and sketches from the senior writer of Funny or Die.
For a sampling of sketches from this debut collection, see “If I Have to Shit During the 5K Charity Run, I’m Just Going to Do It,” “I’m Not an Asshole, I’m Just an Introvert,” “How Many Farts Measure a Life?” or “Only Six of My Seven Kids Have Whooping Cough, So I’m Staying Anti-Vax.” The author, who, before Funny or Die, was the artistic director of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater, stuffs his first book with absurdities and silliness, almost like an anthology of lower-brow “Shouts & Murmurs” segments from the New Yorker. Some of the sketches—e.g., “I Like All Types of Music and My Sense of Humor Is So Random” or “As the Toothbrush You Just Threw Away, I Have Some Questions about the Seven 12-Ounce Mountain Dews in Your Trash”—are genuinely funny. Others are less so, creating an unevenness that is common in such collections. Sometimes the joke is in the title, and the rest of the piece feels like padding. However, the author also includes a scattering of personal essays throughout the book, and for many readers, these will be the most engaging. In “Predator Prey,” Dern describes the “joy in being the willing dupe,” as when he visited Tunisia after college and was manipulated by a young local man. Unfortunately, Dern doesn’t go as deeply into the subject as readers may hope, and that’s the overall problem with this collection: he tends to skate along on the surface without digging for more. In the first piece, “Which One Are You?” the author describes his appearance on the reality show Beauty and the Geek and his lifelong quest for attention: “I like attention. I like it too much, so I do dumb things to get it.”
In his first book, Dern shoots for the easy laughs, some of which he hits; however, he falls short of creating the lasting ones.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2220-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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