A modest account of an eventful comedy career.
Mason (The Complete Idiot's Guide to Ventriloquism, 2010) looks back over his life and career as a ventriloquist in this debut memoir.
Sometime in the 1960s, when the author was a young boy, he took a sock and pulled it over his hand, trying to mimic the famous ventriloquist Shari Lewis and her puppet Lamb Chop. His grandmother, a seamstress, added eyes and hair to his puppet—and thus began his lifelong fascination with ventriloquism. In this memoir, he recalls his childhood in Illinois, during which he describes himself as “a pudgy, piano-playing, puppet-loving, scared-of-the-bullies dweeb.” Later, he found himself to be a natural “hitter” on the football field, and he went on to play college football at the University of Illinois, where he also performed stand-up comedy at frat parties. Mason brought ventriloquism into his act and began cutting his teeth at Chicago comedy clubs. In the 1980s, he says, he crossed paths with other budding comedians, including Jerry Seinfeld and Richard Lewis. Some of his peers disparaged ventriloquism, but the author remained steadfastly committed to his art, developing a successful career that saw him perform at Carnegie Hall and even open for Tina Turner. The strength of this memoir lies in the transparency with which Mason describes the development of his act, from his various puppets—including a life-sized sumo wrestler, which some readers will find offensive—to serendipitous moments, as when a secretary gave him performance advice. Mason’s writing does possess an endearing, straightforward honesty: “My little trick is to advance by failing. I’m falling upwards. I write and perform so many jokes that, sooner or later, something is going to work.” He effectively demystifies how comedians hone their sets, with an apparent aim to encourage others. His prose isn’t laugh-a-minute funny, but there are many amusing moments, as when Mason wins over a tough crowd at a Warren Zevon concert by playing a piano. The memoir will prove a delight for Taylor’s fans, and informative for those starting out in the comedy industry.
A modest account of an eventful comedy career.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984569-66-0
Page Count: 358
Publisher: XlibrisUS
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 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
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