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
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A unique, incandescent memoir.
A lyrical, soul-stirring memoir about how an acclaimed Native American poet and musician came to embrace “the spirit of poetry.”
For Harjo, life did not begin at birth. She came into the world as an already-living spirit with the goal to release “the voices, songs, and stories” she carried with her from the “ancestor realm.” On Earth, she was the daughter of a half-Cherokee mother and a Creek father who made their home in Tulsa, Okla. Her father's alcoholism and volcanic temper eventually drove Harjo's mother and her children out of the family home. At first, the man who became the author’s stepfather “sang songs and smiled with his eyes,” but he soon revealed himself to be abusive and controlling. Harjo's primary way of escaping “the darkness that plagued the house and our family” was through drawing and music, two interests that allowed her to leave Oklahoma and pursue her high school education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Interaction with her classmates enlightened her to the fact that modern Native American culture and history had been shaped by “colonization and dehumanization.” An education and raised consciousness, however, did not spare Harjo from the hardships of teen pregnancy, poverty and a failed first marriage, but hard work and luck gained her admittance to the University of New Mexico, where she met a man whose “poetry opened one of the doors in my heart that had been closed since childhood.” But his hard-drinking ways wrecked their marriage and nearly destroyed Harjo. Faced with the choice of submitting to despair or becoming “crazy brave,” she found the courage to reclaim a lost spirituality as well as the “intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors.”
A unique, incandescent memoir.Pub Date: July 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-07346-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
SEEN & HEARD
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