Detailed, objective, and valuable. (b&w photos)
Lenny Bruce’s career was a rhapsody in blue material. His comedy made him a master of free speech; his death sanctified him. Here, two thoughtful lawyers explore in depth some of the comic’s tribulations and trials.
There’s not much about the man himself. (For straight biography, readers should go back to Albert Goldman’s controversial Ladies and Gentlemen: Lenny Bruce!, 1974.) This is, rather, an exhaustive study of the comedian’s obscenity trials. The legendary prosecutions for dispensing dirty words a generation ago is the topic of discussion. It’s a narrative of how a hipster who worked with junkie jazz bands and hooker strippers became a defender of the Constitution simply by repeating common words for body parts, excreta, and sexual activity. His misdemeanor trials were widely—and inaccurately—reported. The authors set the record straight from the first arrest in San Francisco in 1961. Arrests followed across the country, culminating with the most hotly contested trial in New York. By 1970, the case against Bruce’s co-defendant (operator of the club where he uttered the words) was overturned. But it was too late for Bruce. He died more than three years before of a morphine overdose, booked, it seemed, more frequently in police stations than into clubs, sick, bankrupt, and killed, some said, by the law. The application of the law by both prosecution and defense is deconstructed even-handedly. The major problem may have been the defendant, who fancied himself a legal expert. Playing a shtarker Jewish lawyer, Lenny communicated improperly with judges, missed court dates, dismissed counsel. He wanted to do his act in court; judges wanted to wash his mouth with soap. Today, Bruce is venerated not because he worked blue or talked trash, but because he was truly funny and, more importantly, because he offered honest, seminal social commentary. An audio CD is included so readers may hear, among redundant exposition, the comedian himself, spritzing and killing at top speed.
Detailed, objective, and valuable. (b&w photos)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-57071-986-1
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
SEEN & HEARD
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