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I KNOW I AM, BUT WHAT ARE YOU?

The book will certainly please longtime fans, whether or not it attracts new ones.

A hit-and-miss debut collection of humorous essays from Daily Show correspondent Bee.

The best pieces here are very funny, and the author’s skewed, satirical perspective, honed on the show, is evident throughout most of the book. Particularly memorable essays cover the Canadian writer’s pubescent crush on Jesus (“I didn’t need to be a bride of Christ. I was comfortable just dating Him, and if things got a little more serious, then that was cool, too…I had a notebook dedicated to ironing out the details of my postmarital name change. Samantha Christ. Mrs. Jesus Christ, Lamb of God”); her propensity for attracting pedophiles trying to ply her with free pizza, and with strange men exposing themselves to her (“A penis is a fair-weather friend at best, but for some reason it’s always sunny in Bee-town. And I don’t mean that as a compliment”); her courtship with her husband Jason Jones, also a Daily Show correspondent; and the couple’s misadventures in children’s theater (“Children’s entertainment was a natural fit for me because (a) I dislike other people’s children, and (b) I was unemployable in virtually every other aspect of show business”). Bee is at her best in “May December Never Come,” about the yuckiness of dating across generations and having your boyfriend mistaken for your father, or vice versa (“the only way to describe how this makes me feel is to say that it makes my vagina nauseous, if that’s even physically possible”). Lesser pieces meander, making it hard to find the point, while others are too scattered. Her conversational phrasing suggests an engaging monologist, but as a writer she would benefit from a stronger edit.

The book will certainly please longtime fans, whether or not it attracts new ones.

Pub Date: June 1, 2010

ISBN: 978-1-4391-4273-8

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: April 16, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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

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