An up-and-down collection that often blurs the line between ha-ha funny and odd funny.
A tour diary from the veteran comedian.
A lot of performers insist that they live for the hour or two onstage and that the rest is just tedium. Barry, “the massively famous comedian,” as he describes himself with ambivalent irony, has not only captured that tedium; his tour diary wallows in it. There are 54 very short chapters, one each devoted to his experience playing a comedy club in a smaller market. Many of these clubs have bad bathrooms, which makes him all the more appreciative of the occasional ones that don’t: “The hand soap situation at SPACE was quite impressive. Not just that they had any, which is always a nice surprise, but that it was that high-end Mrs. Meyer’s stuff that comes in scents like basil and geranium.” Sometimes shows are undermined by drunks and hecklers or by the seating arrangement or by Barry’s displeasure over people who have asked to be on the guest list but never show. There is very little of his actual performance in the book and almost none of what is conventionally considered humor, though his deadpan wryness has charm. He often feels compelled to switch rooms in hotels or even switch hotels. He’s a picky eater, and though he claims that he tries to eat healthy, he’s as prone as anyone to junk food on the road. Though his travels have taken him from coast to coast, he doesn’t seem to focus much on regional diversity in his observations. Instead, every place, and every day, is pretty much like the next or the last. “I flew from Oakland to Los Angeles,” he writes. “Things got off to a terrible start at LAX when I ordered a bagel and it was toasted in a panini press. I can’t defend why it bothered me, but I bet they can’t defend why they toasted a bagel in a panini press.”
An up-and-down collection that often blurs the line between ha-ha funny and odd funny.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1742-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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