23 posts tagged “books”
I am a huge fan of Saturday Night Live, especially the early days, so I eat up anything to do with that era of the show. This autobiography falls into that category.
Tom Davis, as few of you may know, was part of the comedy team "Franken and Davis" with current Minnesota Senator Al Franken. Both became writers on the first five years of SNL and were also featured performers during that time as well. They also came back for a second stint in the 80s-90s.
This autobiography is unlike any that I have ever read. It reads less as a form of narrative than Davis presenting the facts of his life as he thinks of them. He jumps back and forth in time at will where most writers of memoirs would present the facts in strict chronological order.
This gives the book the feel that you are sitting with Davis somewhere and having a conversation with him.
Davis has had an interesting life outside of SNL. The book details his friendship with the Grateful Dead and Timothy Leary, a trip to India, several run ins with the Rolling Stones. There are enough anecdotes in his life that he could fill seven books.
Davis is also an excellent writer. The first mention of John Belushi's death in book is so poignant and moving that you can't help but be affected by Davis' words.
If you are a fan of the early days of SNL, then this book is a must have. He might not have been a break out star on the show, but he lived one hell of an interesting life.
Devil's Cape is part of what I hope will become a trend in books--comic book stories delivered in novel form. Much like the recent Soon I Will Be Invincible, it deals with costumed heroes and villains.
And it is one great book. I would dare say one of the best that I have ever read. Seriously.
The title refers to the setting for the novel, a town in Louisiana. It is a town were evil has won. They control the police, they have their hands in all the businesses, nothing happens inthe town without their sayso.
Any hero that rises up against them loses, and usually is slaughtered mercilessly.
However, a trio of new heroes enter the scene. Each has their own ties to the violence of the city. Some lost family members to the villains that run the city, some have family members in the villains number, some were villains themselves.
This was Rob Rogers first novel. But you would never believe that by reading it. He weaves a unique and realistic world like he's been writing novels for years.
His characters are vibrant and realistic. He plays with the reader's expectations of them like a master. The ones you think will end up good guys turn bad, and vice versa. And never to any of them ring untrue.
He uses the passage of time excellently. The first eleven chapters span 35 years, providing the exposition in an interesting and effective way. And the way he jumps back and forth through time during the climax enhances the drama and suspense and makes it a real page turner.
If you are a fan of comic books, or just a fan of a good, easy to read page turner, then I can't recommend Devil's Cape highly enough. After reading this, I get the feeling that I am getting in on the ground floor of and author who will be a major talent in the future. Pick this book up and you can say you have been reading Rob Rogers before he hit big.
I had been inspired after reading Steve Martin's memoir to further read about stand up comedy in the 1970's. Lucky for me, Richard Zoglin decided to write a book about it.
This book is pretty comprehensive for any fans of comedy. It starts with the metamorphosis of both George Carlin and Richard Pryor and the effect on the generation of comedians that started after them.
Zoglin talks to almost all the major players: Robin Williams, Carlin, Albert Brooks, and even the recluse, and hard to interview David Letterman.
The story spans both coasts and traces the rise of the comedy clubs and the importance of Johnny Carson and the Tonight Show on many a career.
The one flaw about the book, and it is a minor one, is that Zoglin is a bit repetitive with his anecdotes. Say, the same story by Jerry Seinfeld speaking on how Robert Klein influenced him appears when Zoglin talks about Klein and about Seinfeld. And it is repeated almost word for word. That is a bit distracting.
But, like I said, that was relatively minor. This book is an excellent history of a unique artform. If you like comedy, you'll like this one.
It all started with James Frey, who gained national infamy when his some of his claims in his memoir, "A Million Little Pieces" were shown to be untrue. You'd think that after that, authors and publishers would wise up and that sort of thing would never happen again. But in the last two weeks, now less than two other memoirs were exposed to be factually challenged. More so than even Frey's book.
Last week, it was revealed Misha Defonseca's book, "Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years," in which she claims that, as a Jewish child, she lived with a pack of wolves in the woods during the Holocaust, was untrue. She didn't live with wolves, nor in the woods. She wasn't even Jewish. Her parents were killed, but not because they were Jews, but rather because they were resistance fighters.
You'd think that the publishers might have been a little suspicious about the fact she claimed to live in the woods, being protected by wolves. But I guess they didn't doubt her truthiness because she mentioned the Holocaust. I mean, who would be a scuzzy enough to lie about the Holocaust for personal gain.
If that wasn't bad enough. this week it was revealed that Margaret B. Jones lied in her memoir "Love and Consequences". In it, she claimed she, a white woman, was raised in poverty by a black foster mother and sold drugs for a gang in a tough Los Angeles neighborhood. Turns out she grew up in an affluent suburb with her biological parents. Never lived with a foster family, never lived in the Hood, never sold drugs for the Bloods.
Luckily, this trend in fake true stories is not going to change the way book publishers do business. Which is good because I have been shopping my memoir around. And unlike these others, my memoir is 100% true (wholly depending on your definition of the word "true". And "is". )
What's more, I have decided to print an excerpt from the first chapter here in my blog. I figure, what better way to get the bidding war started. The title, you impatiently ask?
RAISED BY POODLES, The Bill Gatevackes Story. A Memoir
Chapter one
Fleas are the bane of my existence.
Some might have called Sally a bitch. I called her mom.
She stood about 15 inches high at her highest point. She had intelligent eyes and grey fur which came to puffs at her ankles. She was the poodle, and she helped make me the man I am today.
How did I come to find myself in Sally's "pack". Well, I only heard this information second hand. So, I cannot verify the accuracy of this account.
My biological father is unknown to me. He could have been the lifeguard at the local pool. He could have been Englebert Humperdick. Or he could have been a member of the 1970 New York Football Giants. I just don't know. But I do know who my birth mom was.
My biological mother, I would later find out, was named Bambi Barbie, a teenage girl who found herself pregnant after sleeping with one of those 27 men. I like to think that she, freaked out by the thought of having a child at 17, gave me up to adoption and that is how I found myself in Sally's happy home. But the truth was far worse.
My mother was a Tabsca addict. You might be unfamiliar with "Tabsca", a hallucinogen with a cult popularity in the 1970s. It was a dangerous cocktail of "Tab" and "Fresca". Separately, they were refreshing carbonated beverages. Combined, they formed a highly powerful psychotropic drug 10 times as potent as LSD.
One November, my birth mother went shopping for Thanksgiving after a six day Tabsca bender. She says the last thing she remembers is freebasing a dose of the "Tan Demon" in the car right before going into the supermarket. The next thing she remembers is arriving back at her apartment and seeing a 13 lb. turkey the car seat. She assumes that while in the store, she put switched me out with the poultry. She put my jumper on the bird and left the store with it, leaving me in the refrigerated bin with the other turkeys. Such is the horrific effects of Tabsca.
When I related this tale of abandonment, people expect me more upset than I am about the event. "She got you confused with a frozen turkey!" they ask. "Doesn't that piss you off?"
I guess I should be angrier. But I take a rather zen approach to it. This is what fate had in store for me. It was supposed to happen. This is the way my life was supposed to go.
That, and I'm glad my birth mother mistook me for a turkey while we were still in the supermarket and not when she was preparing Thanksgiving dinner.
###
That's all for now. Agents and publishers, contact me if you want more. As to what to expect from future chapters, here is a little taste:
"Sally named me Wrrrraowrrr, which translates into human as "Fluffy". I guess this is an ironic reference to my being completely devoid of fur. Kind of like calling a bald man "Curly", a tall man "Tiny" or a dumb man "President of the United States""
"I remember getting that first, simple, black leather collar. I knew then that I finally belonged."
"The family cat didn't like me. I still have the scars to prove it. But I gave as good as I got."
"I remember to this day exactly what I said when social services took me away from Sally. I said, "Aaaaooorrrrrroooo!!!""
"He said "Try these man, you'll taste the raaaaiiiinnnnbooow!" That was the day my Skittles addiction began."
One of the books I brought on the trip with me was this one. I have been reading this, like I do with a lot of books, for several months. Not that it was bad, but just because I have a tenancy to jump from book to book.
This book was very good. But of course, I am a comic book fan, so I may be prejudiced.
It tells the story of two people--Fatale, a female cyborg who has just joined a JLA-like team called "The Champions (I wonder if they got the same letter from a lawyer that Marvel did) and a Dr. Doom/Lex Luthor-like Doctor Impossible.
To me, the book seemed like Grossman took a classic Marvel comic from the 1970's, and built his book around what might have happened behind the scenes.
There are a lot of good characters in the book. Both leads have a bundle of insecurities which endear them to readers. You will secretly root for bad guy Impossible. And you will get payoff for your rooting.
This is a novel that will build on what comic fans love about the medium but stands as a pretty good read all on its own.
I just finished reading this book last night after getting it at Christmas, so it is a quick read.
I am a fan of Steve Martin so I was predisposed to like this. This isn't a biography, per se, but a telling of how he developed his comic sensibility.
It covers the early part of his creative life. It starts with him as a teenager working at Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm up to his last stand up comedy concert in the early '80s. We see how he transformed himself from a stage magician to a comic--how he developed his act, how he chose his jokes, and the epiphanies he found along the way.
He does touch on his private life a bit but he doesn't dwell. You don't get the lurid details of his love life or his struggles with his father. But you get the sense of how they effected him.
The book moves fast. Martin has found a way to provide just enough information in a quick pace. Let's face it, he could probably write a book about his involvement with Saturday Night Live alone. But, as it is, it gets only part of a chapter.
Don't get me wrong, you are not wanting for more or feel cheated. I just included that to illustrate the tone.
I highly recommend this to any fan of Steve Martin or any aspiring stand-up comedian.
I love it when a book that I bought might become a collector's item.
According to CNN, Chuck Norris is suing the Penguin Group and Ian Spector of a recent book collecting certain "truths" about the actor that made the rounds on the Internet.
Yes, I did buy this book (Don't look at me that way! I bought it at Barnes & Noble with a 25% off coupon on top of my member discount. It came out that they almost paid ME to buy the book.) because I though some of the entries were funny. But reading the book (one night, the night I bought it, pretty much in one sitting. It is not a deep book), I knew that this lawsuit was bound to happen.
By now, everybody out there must have seen the original website or got an e-mail with the sayings, right? The stuff like "Chuck Norris' tears cure cancer. Too bad he never cries." and "The chief export of Chuck Norris is pain"? The book has a lot of witty ones like that. But it also has a lot of crude, off-color ones as well. So many that were so raunchy that I thought to myself "No way a Republican like Chuck Norris would find that acceptable".
So, I knew a lawsuit was coming. Actually, I though there would be many. One from Chuck Norris, and loads from the posters who submitted the pithy sayings Spector used for his book. After all, even though he is listed as the author, the book is just a compilation of reader submissions to his website.
I am of two minds on this. First, Chuck Norris has gotten a bit of a career resurgence from this phenomenon. I don't believe that it's a coincidence that he started getting soda and car commercials and began being interviewed about his political views so soon after this website started. It created a buzz that he used to his advantage.
On the other hand, some of the entries are crude. Crude doesn't automatically mean funny. Crude can be funny, but it follows the same rules as anything else that is funny. The crudest entries here are going more for shock value than a witty mocking of Chuck's tough guy persona.
Regardless, if I was a man in Chuck Norris' position, I wouldn't be comfortable having some of those crude "truths" in a book, even if I knew they were in jest.
But does he have the right to sue? On the basis of what's written, probably not. He gets off a lot easier than Jerry Falwell did in Hustler and Larry Flint won against Falwell's lawsuit. But the case seems to be about the use of his name and image (both which, as you can imagine, is all over the book) without hios permission. That he might have more of a leg to stand on, I say having nary a law degree.
But oone of the things he is asking for is for publication to be ceased and all copies being recalled. Some sort of settlement is more likely, but if a recall does happen, my copy might be hitting eBay.
If you haven't heard the story behind it yet. read here:
My two cents:
Making a major character in your novels gay as a "prolonged argument for tolerance" doesn't really work if you have to explain to readers months after the last book in the series ends that he actually was gay.
I mean, I guess it didn't really come up in the series, but as far as I got in the books there was no indication as to Dumbledore's sexuality at all. Not that the opportunity presented itself, but still.
I support broadening people's minds on this subject, but this wasn't as big a weapon for gay rights that J.K. Rowling might think it is.
To be honest, I didn't make it all through this book. I took it out from the library, renewed it once and still couldn't finish it.
Why? Well, because Wolk doesn't make it easy for readers to get involved in the book.
I wonder what Wolk's idea behind this book was. On the surface, it seems that Reading Comics was to be a guide to for new readers to the world of comics. But the way he writes it is so elitist that I could see it failing in that task.
The first part of the book is where Wolk explains what a comic book is. At times, it appears that he went through a dictionary with a highlighter, and decided to find a way to put the biggest and most obscure words into his text.
I think I know what he was going for. He was trying to show that this is an intelligent dissection of the comic book art form. That Cahmics are Ahrt Dahling! But you can be intelligent without being obtuse.
As you can see in this blog, I use a lot of "big" words too. But not as many as Wolf did. The language of Reading Comics is not inviting. And if you are trying to welcome the largest number of people into reading comics, inviting would be better than exclusive.
The second part of the book deals with critical essays about many different comic creators. Wolk seems to go out of his way to point out something negative about each of his subjects, be they Will Eisner or Alan Moore. I suppose this is in the interests of providing a balanced view to the reader. But, if you are trying to show the good points the medium has to offer, it really doesn't do much good to tear it down in the same paragraph.
This is just my personal opinion, and all based on the idea that Reading Comics is meant to entice new readers in. If it was marketed to fans, I probably wouldn't have as big a problem with it. But as a cheerleader for the "art form", I think it is lacking.
News today of The Goldmans and Denise Brown appearing on Oprah on September 13th got me thinking about the whole "If I Did It" fiasco. Several other times along this long and windy path the scandal took I was compelled to write something about it. Now, I feel I just have to.
First of all, the idea of the book was even thought of being publish I find repugnant. Here, you have a man accused of a double homicide, found innocent by a jury of his peers, writing a book on how he might have killed them if he actually did. Am I the only one who sees a problem with it? If he did it or if he didn't do it, he, and the book publishers, are exploiting a horrible loss of life for a profit. If O.J. is guilty, he got away with murder and is making a buck of it over a decade later (although, O.J. might not have had that money for long"
Judith Reagan's defense of the project, summed up here, essentially said that she is publishing the book so O.J. could finally confess his crimes and his victims, and all victims of spousal abuse, could have some peace and closure.
This is the stupidest defense of all time. IT WS NOT A CONFESSION! If the book was a confession, it would be titled "I Did It" not "If I Did It". That "If" adds plausible deniablilty to the book and allows O.J. to keep, however slim it might be, an air of innocence. The "If" gives O.J. an out.
So, public outcry is so great that book was cancelled. I thought that the case was closed, and the whole thing was over and done with.
Then, it was announced last month that a bankruptcy court gave rights to the book to the Goldman family. You'd think the family bought the rights so no other company would pick it up and try and publish it, sparing the family grief and sorrow.
Instead, the Goldmans are going to try to publish the book and try to get a TV or Film project done in efforts to recoup some of the $33.5 million dollars in damages they were awarded in the civil case against Simpson.
Oh, and to get justice for their son Ron, as per this quote from Goldman at the time of they were awarded the rights:
"After 13 years of trying to get some justice for Ron, today's the first time that we had any sense of seeing some light at the end of the tunnel."
Justice? Justice? How is publishing this book justice?
Wasn't it enough justice when the wrongful death trial was decided in your favor?
Wasn't it enough justice when O.J.'s plans to get the books on shelves failed?
Isn't it justice enough to sit on the rights so the book will never see the light of day?
Goldman wants us to think that he is hurting Simpson by publishing the book, that he will be making money of the rights so O.J. doesn't. That's just stupid. O.J. wasn't making anything off it anyway. And I doubt that anybody would have fought for the rights if Goldman didn't scarf them up. The book was dead and toxic. I'd argue that if anybody besides Goldman got the rights, the book still would not see the light of day.
If, somehow, that by publishing this book that the case against Simpson would be reopened and he might actually be convicted of the slayings, then I would say that Goldman's justice argument might hold more water. But that can't happen due to double jeopardy and the pesky "If" in the original title.
So, what this all comes out looking like a ploy for the Goldman's to get money. Perhaps they truly believe that they are getting justice against Simpson by doing this, but in reality, they're not. Is it a shame that the Goldmans are having such a hard time collecting the funds from Simpson? Yes. And if there was something I could do to fix that, I would. But the money they make after the portion of the proceeds goes to the Ron Goldman Foundation for Justice will assumedly go right in their pockets. And that looks like they are after financial gain more than anything.
I hope Oprah asks the hard questions on the 13th. I'd like to find out what really is going on here.
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