A unique perspective of the development of identity comedy in the 21st century.
The “sociopolitical comedian” shares his opinions and stories from his life.
Best known for his socially conscious, political style, Bell, the host of CNN’s United Shades of America, offers readers more of the same in his first book. The author riffs on pop-culture topics such as being a “blerd”—i.e., black nerd—his childhood love of superheroes, why Denzel Washington is the greatest actor of all time (an idea he originally discussed in a podcast series), the film Creed, and social issues such as sexism and racism from personal experiences. Fittingly, he also dedicates chapters to his thoughts on the recent presidential election and the state of the Democratic Party. Bell’s brand of comedy is insightful at times, but oftentimes the punch line or message is immediately obvious from the outset, and there is a one-dimensional tendency to many of his bits that begins to grow tiresome after a few chapters. The author is at his best when he recounts his early stand-up career in the 1990s and the comedy business in general. He recalls how the comedy boom of the ’80s had burst, and he was left trying to find his personal and professional identity in this new era. It was then that Bell learned to use current events as source material—though during his first experience doing so, in which he joked about the Rodney King beating, he was booed offstage. It wasn’t until 2007 that Bell began to truly find his voice with his one-man show The W. Kamau Bell Curve: Ending Racism in About an Hour, which mixed “personal stories, late night theories, and topical news stories” and incorporated what would become his signature social critique. Though Bell’s social commentary is hit-or-miss, he is establishing himself as one of the most outspoken comedians of our time.
A unique perspective of the development of identity comedy in the 21st century.Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-98587-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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