I agree with most of what Lindy West says in this book. I feel bad giving it two stars. But I’m gonna, because this is a book with Problems.
The firstI agree with most of what Lindy West says in this book. I feel bad giving it two stars. But I’m gonna, because this is a book with Problems.
The first Problem is that West didn’t offer me any new insights or ideas. She didn’t challenge me in any way. What she did, over and over, was take a compelling hook -- she’s great at hooks -- and then pivot to Donald Trump. (Occasionally she pivoted to climate doom or something instead. Like. Three times?) Almost every essay leads back to Donald Trump. She can’t stop namechecking him. I’m sick of reading about him, but even more, I’m sick of journalists acting like they aren’t a huge part of the problem because they’re so obsessed with Trump they can’t shut up about him. (“But I’m raising awareness!” Yes, you are, and that’s exactly the problem. Shut. Up. Treat him like the disgusting nonentity he’d be without you credulous nitwits propping him up.) West acts like yelling (at her audience, who already agrees with her) “Donald Trump is a BAD MAN” is accomplishing anything. If it is, it’s actively causing harm.
And problem number two is that almost all of this book is actively causing harm, because it mostly consists of yelling at people to do things we already desperately want to do but cannot make happen. Defeat Trump! Save the planet! End structural inequality! Yes, great, got a plan? Some way I can chip in? Concrete actions? No. It’s just the yelling. I’ll be honest: if I want someone all-capsing at me about how doomed we are, I can get that anywhere online. I don't need to check out a book for that.
The third problem is a failure of research, I guess? And I’m going to explain this with an example where I give way too much detail, but it's such a perfect example of how West fails to come to grips with the complexity of the problems she identifies. In an essay, West discusses how her husband’s Seattle [Music] Gear Swap Facebook community managed to get rid of their dozen or so racists, and then she says:
“Twitter could do this. Facebook could do this. ...All of them are desperate to keep you away from the truth: that they could make their platforms safe, constructive, and non-Nazi-infested for all users, but they choose not to.”
To which I say: Lindy, if you know where the “Get Rid Of All The Awful People (But Only The Awful People)” button is, you are about to make MILLIONS. Because all the major platforms have been frantically looking for it since they started, and they haven’t even figured out what planet it’s on yet.
“But the Gear Swap!” Imaginary Lindy West responds in my head. Yes, Imaginary Lindy. The Gear Swap moderators did great. But they probably have a few tens of thousands people in their group, and their methods -- basically monitoring everything, telling jerks to cut it out, and banning them -- do not scale. Facebook as a whole has THREE BILLION users. They speak many, many languages. And they’re humans; they engage in more different kinds of bad behavior than any one of us can possibly imagine.
“But if you just hired enough people --” Okay, so you need 300,000 people to scale up this solution, just by ratio alone. (For comparison, Facebook, as far as I can tell, currently has around 15,000 contractor moderators and around 70,000 full time employees in every section of the business.) Except you’re going to need way more than that. Add, say, another 50,000 second-line decision makers for all the edge cases. (There will be SO many.) Add in 35,000 managers. That's 385,000 *new* employees.
Then consider turnover. The Gear Swap members are not, I’m guessing, posting the kind of stuff that is actively traumatizing to see (like (view spoiler)[child sexual assault or graphic violence (hide spoiler)]). So the Gear Swap mods are not being harmed by the work they’re doing, and they can keep on. Your 385,000 people (more than the population of Cleveland) are going to be harmed. They’re going to burn out. They’ll have a huge turnover rate. You’re going to need a new Cleveland’s worth of people *every two years.* And you need to somehow train all these people (probably thousands of new hires EVERY WEEK) to recognize every subtle, coded way people communicate their horrible thoughts and deeds. In every language on earth. For every different mode of communication in every one of those languages, all of which are constantly evolving. Lindy, if you can make this happen, you’re the hero we need, so get going.
Do I expect West to understand how the internet works? I do not. But I do expect her to be able to ask someone who does, to do some research, to think things through. If she can’t do any of that, why is she writing essays?
And she demonstrably can’t do any of that. She makes so many sweeping statements, and a little research would tell her they’re wrong. So, like, she says Lil Bub was the first viral internet cat, but that is not the case. Lil Bub was just the first one West noticed; two minutes on Wikipedia would have told her she wasn't the first. Much worse, in her essay about Joan Rivers, she says when Rivers was coming up, there were only two ways to be a female comedian: bend or break. (Become a misogynistic nightmare or stop being a comedian, basically.) Lindy, you might want to research some comedy history before you make that statement. (Or any other statement about comedy. She also said “The Simpsons are the original high bar of comedy.” About a television show that started in 1989. People writing about comedy have GOT to stop assuming comedy started when they started paying attention to it.)
Oh, one final note: West uses “dicklicker” as an insult in this book. Really? Is there a way to read that that isn’t homophobic? Because I’m not seeing it.
Basically, there’s no point to this book that I can see. Like, I definitely read this at the wrong time -- hoo boy does this all look incredibly naïve now. But there was never a right time for me to read this, because there's almost no content in here worth my time. (I’m still giving it two stars, not one, though, because she did make me laugh once, and a genuine laugh always gets an extra star.)...more
There seems to be a tradition of well-respected Oxford professors writing a late-career book on a hobby of theirs, and honestly: maybe they shouldn't.There seems to be a tradition of well-respected Oxford professors writing a late-career book on a hobby of theirs, and honestly: maybe they shouldn't. But that's kind of harsh, since I did enjoy this book and learn a lot about the mathematics behind games from it. It's just -- a really imperfect book.
Okay, so first, the author absolutely should not have been seduced into this Eighty Games malarkey. It means that games that are very different from each other are grouped together and very similar games are far apart. And since du Sautoy wanted readers to be able to jump from section to section, the entries for those similar games are repetitive. It would have worked so much better to simply group games by general type.
It also could have worked better to go for a strictly chronological approach. Right now, very ancient games are discussed right next to modern ones, and it means the reader doesn't get much sense of the development of games. (There is a sort of attempt at chronology in some places, but it's really hampered by du Sautoy's insistence on clinging to the geography thing.)
I appreciated du Sautoy's attempts at inclusivity, at finding the games of indigenous peoples. He does that in Australasia and in South America, and in both cases it's really fascinating. (One benefit the geography focus has is you do get a sense of what each area of the world most values in its games.) And then he gets to North America and discusses -- Monopoly and Ticket to Ride. We have an awful lot of indigenous peoples, Marcus. They are still right here. And they definitely played games before the Europeans got here. Did you forget to ask them?
Basically: this book needs to be differently organized (and possibly entitled The Mathematics of Games) and it needed someone to ask du Sautoy some hard questions about what he was leaving out. If it had had those things, it would potentially be a five star book. It ... is not. (Also, keep in mind that because of the discussions of mathematics behind games, you will not want to read this as a bedtime book. Du Sautoy is not making those discussions easy on the reader, let's just say, and he expects you to keep up.)...more
I tell you what: it is a lowering experience to discover that you're too much of a nerd for an event called Nerd Nite. But that's what this book taughI tell you what: it is a lowering experience to discover that you're too much of a nerd for an event called Nerd Nite. But that's what this book taught me. I spent much of the book saying, "Yeah, I know." Which, fine I'm prepared to read through things I know to find things I don't, except the rest of the time I was saying, "Yeah, but that's not the interesting part! Why are you stopping before you get to the interesting part?" Or, worst of all, "That is, uh, factually incorrect."
The central problem with this book is probably baked into the concept. What these authors, very few of whom write popular non-fiction professionally, have been asked to do is:
1. Write a very short essay (hard) 2. On a fun, interesting, unusual subject (also hard) 3. That most of their ill-defined audience won't know about (eek) 4. And that is converted, in many cases, from a speech (oh no) 5. And also there is no coherent theme or guidelines (and we're out)
I can tell that number five is true because these essays are all over the map. You've got your straight-up ads. You've got your oversimplified basic concepts. (Oddly, there are no "too deep, too abstruse" essays. Or else this is me being too nerd for the Nite again.) You've got dull recitations of facts in what amounts to a bulleted list. You've got your "if this was right when you wrote it, you must have written it a decade ago" essays. And you've got just a couple of solid narrative essays that do what this book needs every essay to do. There's absolutely nothing coherent here in terms of style or theme or content.
And, also, look. The task was incredibly hard, so it's no wonder most of the authors couldn't do it, but the results are. Bad. We have essays that use the immortal phrase "[X] dictionary defines [Y] as..." There's one so patronizing I wanted to stab the author, a tone failure the editors should have caught. There's one that is about sex ed myths like "jumping jacks won't keep you from getting pregnant," and let me remind you that this is a book for adults -- why is that HERE? There's one that says we tend to think of Google as "a fuzzy warm blanket friend with all our best interests at heart." There's ones that get trepanation or NASA or SEO just plain wrong, and there's one that might've been right ten years ago but is very wrong now. It's a mess, is what I'm saying.
For this, I largely blame the editors, who probably know a lot about putting together events and relatively little about putting together an anthology. This was not a great way to learn, guys!
Basically, I can't recommend this to anyone. Two solid essays (plus a third that would be solid if it didn't make me deeply concerned about the author's relationship to alcohol) isn't enough of a hit rate to make this book worth your time. ...more
This is a perfectly good book that I didn't enjoy as much as I thought I would.
The problem was mostly my expectations. I pick up books like this for This is a perfectly good book that I didn't enjoy as much as I thought I would.
The problem was mostly my expectations. I pick up books like this for facts, as many and as fun as possible. This book is a lot more about speculation and missing pieces. (And also the author's various personal experiences with fungi and mind-altering substances, both of which I was fine with.) There are facts, but they're interspersed with philosophical musings and all the things we don't know, and after a while the philosophy wore on me. I just wasn't in the right place for it. I wanted to get back to Fun Fungus Facts.
The other problem was my fact-checking alarm. When I'm reading non-fiction and I happen upon something that's in an area I know something about it, and it's not quite right, the irrepressible fact checker who lives in my brain somewhere starts making noise. The noise gets louder and louder with every incorrect thing I find. In the worst case scenario (looking at you The Archaeology of Hollywood: Traces of the Golden Age), that noise eventually becomes an endless scream. In this book, I only found a few things I knew were wrong, so it just stayed a background hum. But even that hampers my enjoyment a bit.
Other than that: well, there definitely ARE fun fungus facts. I'm not sorry I read it. It just wasn't quite what I was looking for. Read if you'd like to learn about mushrooms and the questions they make Merlin Sheldrake ask about the world. ...more
I loved this! It is rich in fun science facts, and also if you want to create alien races from scratch, let's just say you could do worse than choosinI loved this! It is rich in fun science facts, and also if you want to create alien races from scratch, let's just say you could do worse than choosing, say, an elephant fish and going from there. Basically, read this to find out all the weird stuff life can do here on earth and then realize that science fiction writers and alienfuckers simply aren't going hard enough.
(One tiny note, from me to Yong: I realize writing about COVID for years has probably given you a really low estimate of how much science the average human knows or wants to know, but in future please remember that your books are written for people who want to read them! In other words, we pick up your books going, "Hell YES, give me all your science facts on this topic." We don't need apologies for the science existing! And apologizing for science existing or making it sound all exhausting and difficult actually encourages people to think of it that way. Trust your readers!)
I do recommend skipping the chapter on the pain sense if you're sensitive to animal harm. I did not think to until much too late.
But, seriously, overall just a super fun book (except for the last part) and filled throughout with fascinating facts to learn and know. Do recommend, both for science fact lovers and science fiction writers....more
This book is a textual proof of the theorem "ball is life." Because, yes, it is about basketball -- street ball, high school basketball teams, collegeThis book is a textual proof of the theorem "ball is life." Because, yes, it is about basketball -- street ball, high school basketball teams, college ball, the Cleveland Cavaliers, and most of all LeBron James. But basketball provides the framework (literally; the book is structured like a basketball game) for Abdurraqib to talk about his life: his family, his history, his grief and loss, and his very occasional moment of soaring joy. It's an intense ride. It also straddles the line between poetry and prose, except when it comes down decisively on the side of poetry, so it's more work to read than your typical memoir. But it's worth it.
This is a true fan memoir, and it beautifully demonstrates all the things I know to be true about a fandom. Abdurraqib shows how a fandom can become the trellis on which (and through which, and around which) your life grows. He also shows, at length, how you find in the fandom what you need, how it becomes about whatever your life is currently about.
(This book also contained one moment of genuine culture shock for me. Abdurraqib discusses his period of being unhoused, and he talks about the mercy his friends and family showed him by not asking how he was doing or what was up -- not asking why someone else was living in his apartment, not asking why he was wearing the same clothes for multiple days, all of that. If I were in that same situation, if no one asked me, if no one offered me help, I wouldn't take it as mercy. I'd assume they just didn't care about me. It took me a while to see how letting someone struggle alone, even when he's drowning, might be a kindness.)
There's nothing truly new in this book, nothing shocking or surprising, but the way Abdurraqib interacts with things, explains them, elaborates on them -- that is new. And it's so well done. I loved it. But take your time. This book is a tough read on multiple levels....more
This is a lighthearted look at the experience of losing a parent, which -- I've been there, but it was long enough ago that I can handle someone beingThis is a lighthearted look at the experience of losing a parent, which -- I've been there, but it was long enough ago that I can handle someone being lighthearted about it. Even so, I didn't find this book particularly funny or compelling. It's fine! It's some words! They're okay to read! I think maybe Kilmartin is better at stand-up humor than writing humor.
I also found it frustrating in places, and then I got frustrated with myself for getting hung up on what my own dead dad called "other science facts." But, like there's a reason they haven't cured cancer yet! (It's not one disease. It's a bunch of them, and they are constantly mutating. Also, curing cancer is really, really hard because it's not a separate entity: it's literally a part of the sick person. It's not because cancer researchers aren't trying hard enough.) Also, Laurie, when you compared Jonas Salk and Henry Heimlich, uh. Did you talk to any Boomers about vaccines? My parents DID sometimes call it the Salk vaccine, to distinguish it from the Sabin vaccine. (One is a killed virus vaccine. The other is attenuated.) The real proof that Salk was selfless was that he didn't patent his vaccine. There was a lot of stuff like that, where my sense of humor was nullified by a voice in my head shrieking, "But that's factually WRONG."
I do think there's a market for death-related humor writing; there is a point where you're desperate to feel anything but grief, and a genuinely funny book (that isn't full of stuff that's wrong) could work really well for that. I just don't think this is the specific book we need. ...more
I'd really love to know who came up with that subtitle. This is not a history of travel, nor is it particularly irreverent. It's a thoughtful critiqueI'd really love to know who came up with that subtitle. This is not a history of travel, nor is it particularly irreverent. It's a thoughtful critique of travel (which does include some information about the origins and history of travel) by someone who loves to travel, with some personal narrative thrown in for flavor. It's an interesting book and well worth reading! Just -- wow, that subtitle is doing it absolutely no favors. Even "A Personal History of Travel" would have been better.
As for the content of the book -- it is what it doesn't say on the tin. Habib analyzes who travels, how they travel, why they travel, and what it means to travel. She travels while brown, as an immigrant to the US from India, and so her experience of it is different from how rich-country tourists travel. I appreciated her perspective and especially her analysis of the difficulties and history of passports. (I already knew about what she calls passportism; if you have friends from poorer countries, you very quickly learn about the different classes of passports and travelers. But it was nice to see it all laid out like this.)
I will say, though, that as someone who does not travel -- I fully agree with Habib's father that travel is just avoidable discomfort, unless there are people who love at the other end of it, in which case it is necessary discomfort -- it was amusing to read such a critical commentary on travel written by someone who seems to travel more in a year than I have in my adult life. But, hey, the best criticism comes from a place of love!...more
Cassidy summarizes the research, findings, and theories to make stories about a bunch of early firsts -- first invention, first joke, first person to Cassidy summarizes the research, findings, and theories to make stories about a bunch of early firsts -- first invention, first joke, first person to die of smallpox. (That last isn't a greatest first, but we'll put that to the side for now.) He also chooses to tell stories about the extraordinary people, giving them names and backgrounds and explaining a little of how they lived, but of course these stories are 90% (or more) fiction. It's kind of a trade off -- he's making things more memorable by making them less factual.
Cassidy also reports things as settled fact even when they can't be. For every theory, there's a counter-theory, and archaeology is a very challenging discipline to find definitive proof in. But Cassidy rarely says "some people believe this, some others believe that, and one lone but very esteemed loon in Chicago believes something entirely different." This kind of made it tough for me to buy the facts he offers as definitive.
(Also, an absolute side note, but I got partway into the chapter on smallpox and went to check the date this book was published. It was hallucinatory reading about R0 and zoonotic diseases and pandemics, all explained like these things were very historical and hypothetical, while living in the third of act of very recent pandemic. But it was a fun look back in time -- this book was published after we all knew what an R0 was, but it was written before that. An era-spanning book!)
I'm not sorry I read this. It was fun and light and easy to digest. Just possibly a little too light for my tastes....more
A solid book covering the history of timekeeping and some interesting aspects of humans' relationship to time. This probably would have been a five-stA solid book covering the history of timekeeping and some interesting aspects of humans' relationship to time. This probably would have been a five-star book if it had had more illustrations; Struthers' descriptions of mechanisms were sometimes hard for me, a personal with the mechanical ability of a snail, to follow. I definitely still enjoyed this look at time and history, though....more
This was a fun book to read, but possibly the best aspect of it was encountering horror authors I remembered from the Midnight Society/Midnight Pals bThis was a fun book to read, but possibly the best aspect of it was encountering horror authors I remembered from the Midnight Society/Midnight Pals back on Twitter, so I'd recommend reading that first. (If you can find it.) And the second best aspect of it was all the weird shit I ended up googling as a result of it. (Ivy League New Pentacostalists speaking in tongues! The PMRC's Filthy 15 and where they are now! And so on.) The book itself comes third, and that's why it's getting three stars. But I did enjoy it, and since this is the closest I'll ever get to reading most of the books featured here, I'm glad I read it.
Also, it features this truest of statements: "Since time immemorial, humankind's greatest natural predator has been the clown." That by itself is worth at least three stars....more
I didn't know much about this when I got it from the library, and I wouldn't have chosen it if I had known what it was about. I very much enjoyed it aI didn't know much about this when I got it from the library, and I wouldn't have chosen it if I had known what it was about. I very much enjoyed it anyway. Chast manages to write about a truly difficult, painful situation with humor and honesty, and it's a topic relevant to all of us. (After all, the one thing we're all guaranteed to do sooner or later is die.)...more
Look, Maggie Smith is very good at words, and my rating reflects that, but it also reflects serendipity. I put this book on hold at the library last DLook, Maggie Smith is very good at words, and my rating reflects that, but it also reflects serendipity. I put this book on hold at the library last December with no knowledge of what it was about. Just -- hey, I like memoirs, I like some of Maggie Smith's poetry, why not give it a try? At least this time I knew why the author was famous! Two days ago, I spent the morning talking to my friend about her divorce, the divorce she found out she was having only a few weeks ago. That afternoon, my hold came in at the library and I opened this book, and it sort of felt like I was holding my friend's broken heart in my hand.
Maggie Smith writes the feelings of divorce, the feelings of betrayal, amazingly well. Is there resolution in this? Not really, but sort of. (She proves herself capable of standing on her own. That's actually all the narrative this needs, although I also appreciated (view spoiler)[that his house ends up full of bees (hide spoiler)].) But every word fits here; every word works. At times, this is a memoir; at other times, it's a prose poem. Either way, it's entirely worth reading. I can't say I enjoyed this book, because it too closely echoed the pain someone I love is living with every second right now. But I sure felt it....more
This book is the weirdest, dullest combination of "what I did on my summer vacation," lies, and offensive bullshit.
The book isn't actually about the This book is the weirdest, dullest combination of "what I did on my summer vacation," lies, and offensive bullshit.
The book isn't actually about the archaeology of Hollywood, which I assumed (I think fairly) from the title and summary. Instead, it precisely recreates the experience of your incredibly boring great uncle telling you at unnecessary length about his trip to Los Angeles. The "facts" (more on those scare quotes later) are exactly the same kind of thing you'd get if you took a couple of bus tours in the area, and the pictures are, well. Someone's vacation snaps. Bahn went to the Guadalupe Dunes, some theaters, some museums, and a whoooole lot of parking lots, and he is happy to tell you all about them, including every single address he visited. (He apparently didn't go to Universal Studios, though, because he talks about the millions of people who take the studio tour but fails to mention that it is a theme park and that's why they go there.) Bahn does spend a little time at the ends of the chapters imagining what an alien archaeologist might make of the material remains of Hollywood's past, but that is, actually, fiction.
But then, a lot of this book is fiction. (Extremely dull, poorly written fiction.) I am not an expert or even a fan of golden age Hollywood. I just live in Southern California and read the occasional book on the subject. I should not be able to find tons of errors in this book, and yet here we are. Some of my favorites of his errors:
- He gets Mary Pickford's age wrong. How do you write a book on golden age Hollywood without knowing when Mary Pickford was born? - He calls Sessue Hayakawa S. I. Hayakawa. Those are two different people. S. I. was an academic and politician. Sessue was an early film star, and again: if you love the golden age, I would think you'd know that. - He reports multiple urban legends as facts. Joni Mitchell has said multiple times that Hawai'i was the inspiration for "Big Yellow Taxi." She's been very clear! Bahn says that a Hollywood hotel called the Garden of Allah inspired the song, which is fully an urban legend, and not even one that makes any sense. - Bahn also says, without any qualifiers at all, that Thomas Ince was murdered. There's no way to know for sure, but he probably wasn't, and Ince shouldn't be alongside, say, William Desmond Taylor in a list of early Hollywood murder victims, let alone first on the list.
There are also a bunch of more minor errors; it was bad enough that if I read anything I hadn't already seen in a more reliable source, I put the book down and researched it. (And a lot of times it was wrong.)
And then there are the times when Bahn misses the boat on much larger, more important topics. Early on, he notes that it's "...inevitable that the author of [a book on Hollywood] should be from the Old World," apparently because Americans are just too close to the film industry to appreciate it. My suggestion to him would be that, judging by this book, he might want to stay in his lane. Any decent Californian, just as an example, would not have said that the missions were "intended to look after the Indians' spiritual well-being," because we know how wrong and offensive that is and on how many levels. We also could have told him that there's more than just ignorance behind the loss of so many old buildings. We have earthquakes here, Paul. We have regular updates to our building codes to keep people alive. And it is really, really hard to retrofit a building to code; in some cases it's impossible. Oh, and Bahn says multiple times that it's possible to grow up in Southern California without learning anything about local history, and he's not wrong. I mean, you can grow up ignorant of history anywhere if you just believe. But I assure you, if you went to public school here and paid attention, you know some stuff about local history, including about the industry. (I think this is an old man yelling at clouds thing. The early days of Hollywood matter the most to him! Why don't they matter the most to everyone?)
There's also a touch of just absolute bewilderment in this. This book was published in 2014. It has the shortest references list I've ever seen in a non-memoir non-fiction book, and most of the references are from the 1980s and 1990s. It also has a 76 page appendix (in a 280 page book) listing a ton of celebrity graves with no commentary, something you can very easily get from the internet. Why is that there? Why is any of this here? What is the actual point of this book?
Spoiler warning: there is no point. This book sucks. It's wrong. It's bad. It's boring. It's not even well-written. (And I'm not ever going to be less mad about his addiction to exclamation points. You are not required to use one every two paragraphs, just FYI.) It's weird that it got published, and weirder that it got published without anyone ever mentioning to Bahn that he was humiliating himself in public by putting his name on this....more
This isn't a "three stars because it's okay" rating, it's a "three stars because some parts were great and some needed a LOT of work" rating.
It's preThis isn't a "three stars because it's okay" rating, it's a "three stars because some parts were great and some needed a LOT of work" rating.
It's pretty rare for an author to winnow his own audience as effectively as Fox does in the first two chapters. In the first chapter, intended to be an introduction to what comedy is, why he loves it, why he thinks it's important, and what the rest of the book will do, he -- meanders. He flails. It's not even clear what to expect from the book. He also makes overly broad sweeping statements. He starts with Seinfeld because that's where comedy started for him, but he suggests it's a common touchstone for all his readers. (It isn't. I have seen approximately ten minutes of Seinfeld ever, and five of those came while reading this book, because he said everyone would get a specific reference, so I figured I'd better become one of those everyones and went to YouTube.) And he just kind of roams over a vast territory with no map. I spent the first chapter saying, "Jesse, what is your THESIS?" and "Sooner or later, you're going to have to stop circling and land this damn plane."
The second chapter, which claims to be about audience, features a brief history of comedy, among other things -- in other words, it's way too many concepts crammed under one umbrella, without much cohesion. Again, he's got a lot to say. Again, it's badly organized and much too broad. Basically, Fox is trying too hard to cover everything, and in the process, he's covering nothing. You get a brief glance at topics that could fill a different book than the one this is. (Fox should have looked at his subtitle -- "How Comedy Conquered Culture--and the Magic That Makes It Work" -- and gone "You know what, that's two books inside one cover. I need to fix this." Jesse, buddy, if you can't even come up with a cohesive title for your non-fiction book: THAT IS A PROBLEM.)
That improves as the book goes on, but it never really goes away. Fox keeps trying too hard to include too much. He also, uh. Doesn't always live up to his own ideals. He spends whole chapters talking about the fact that no comedy appeals to everyone, but he also claims that Adam Sandler's movies do, in fact, work for everyone. (They don't. It's me, hi, I'm the exception, it's me.) He talks about how important more inclusive comedy spaces are, and how hard it is to show up to a comedy club when you know you're more likely to be the subject of the jokes than the intended audience, but never manages to connect that up to people not liking the kinds of comedy he does. He gets almost all the way to important central concepts in comedy and then fails to stick the landing. It's frustrating. (This book would really, really have benefited from a beta-reader or editor outside of Fox's usual circle, let me just say. Ideally someone who would force him to clarify what the hell he's writing about and write ???? in the margins when he makes statements he himself will later prove aren't true.)
On the other hand, parts of this book were super interesting. When Fox stops being a generalist and starts writing specifics, he has a lot of good stuff to say, and his inside baseball was always fascinating. (This book is worth reading for a definitive explanation of The Slap, just as one example of his inside baseball stuff.) He actually does understand some of what makes comedy work, and he certainly knows a lot about it. He has tried really hard to appreciate a lot of different kinds of comedy, too.
All in all, this is a non-fiction book that suffers from some classic first novel problems: trying too hard, including too many ideas (also known as the "this is my ONE SHOT" problem), and disorganization. But if nothing else, it proves one of Fox's many theses (seriously, my guy, you have to CHOOSE): obviously, we need more writing about comedy, if for no other reason than so that people can stop trying to cover everything in every single book on the topic. (Also, it's really noticeable that I, a person who is not particularly into comedy, have read a lot of the same stuff Fox has on the topic. There's just -- not a lot out there, unfortunately.) And, again, it's very worth reading for his insights into specific areas. You just have to survive the first few chapters to get there. ...more
I don't, in fact, love baseball, but I do love how people write about it. And I've never read Posnanski before, but man is he good at writing about baI don't, in fact, love baseball, but I do love how people write about it. And I've never read Posnanski before, but man is he good at writing about baseball. Like the best baseball writers, he can make you understand a moment better reading about it than you can from watching it. I am talking, of course, about me, a person who doesn't know how to watch baseball. I remember from hockey the moment when watching it starts to make sense -- suddenly you're not just staring at a bunch of people randomly skating around a rink -- and presumably I could eventually get to understand baseball, too. But I'm not gonna, and so watching a lot of these moments was meaningless to me. But reading about them -- that was full of meaning.
And Posnanski was great, too, at making me feel the moment. I laughed at a lot of these and I cried at a couple. (I will note, though, that one of the ones that made me cry I remember. I was sort of getting into baseball just off the sheer wonder of Jose Fernandez in 2015 and 2016 -- his death made the whole sport sad to me -- and so I remember when Dee Strange-Gordon hit the Fernandez home run. I cried then. I cried reading about it in this book, too.) Honestly, this book is probably worth reading just for the introduction and first couple of chapters; they're that funny. (Also, keep reading, because you'll get to more funny bits later on, including a couple that even my incredibly sports-averse son loved.)
Honestly, this book is great whether you know the game or not. Baseball writers, man. The best of them are just so damn good at it....more
I don't know how to rate this. It was mildly entertaining, but the entire time I read it was just wondering what the heck the point of it was.
This isI don't know how to rate this. It was mildly entertaining, but the entire time I read it was just wondering what the heck the point of it was.
This is a series of short essays about a bunch of books without any particular focus. So it's not just lesser-known great books. (The Great Gatsby is in here, ffs; Kakutani opens her review by acknowledging that most of her audience will have written a paper about it in middle or high school. I know I did, and she didn't have anything to say that Mrs. Dosher didn't already teach me.) It's not just older books. (For example, On Earth We're Briefly Famous is in here, which was released in 2019, probably just before Kakutani started writing this book.) It's not on any special theme, though it feels like about half of the books are related to Trump, fascism, totalitarianism, and the decline of actual truth. (Is this stressful reading? Why yes. Yes, it is.) It's just some essays about some books she loves.
And that's part of the problem. She clearly loves these books, and she is unsurprisingly great at describing the central premise and pulling a few excellent quotes to give you a sense of the book. But one hundred raves in a row gets old. I would have loved to see some essays in here on books she hates, just so it was a little less one-note.
Another part of the problem is that, okay, sure, I didn't know about all these books. That 1981 book about Hollywood's classic romantic comedies? I'm thrilled to learn it exists! I would LOVE to read it! And I can't fucking find it, because it was published forty years ago. Meanwhile, the books I can easily get -- Educated comes to mind -- I already knew about. My mind was made up about whether to read them or not long before I read this book, and reading it didn't change anything.
Also, Kakutani is, as I said, unsurprisingly and wildly well-read, but she doesn't cover every genre with equal deftness. (No human could.) I really wish she had focused on just the areas she knows well and reads in widely, because some of her essays about books in the genres I know best made me go, "Okay, you think this is innovative because you've never read anything else in this subgenre."
The best essays are definitely the ones where she talks about what the book means to her, specifically, and links it to a time in her life or a mental state. This book would be SO much better if it were structured around any kind of theme, but I think the one I'd most like to see is her life in books. (I would read that from almost ANYONE. Tell me what books were important to you or very present in your life when you were four! Fourteen! Fifty! Whatever.)
I don't know. I can't dislike this, I can't recommend it, I can't find a feeling to have about it. It's a perfectly fine book, but I honestly cannot understand why it exists....more
I keep thinking back to 2014, when this was written, and trying to figure out if there was a point to this book then. I feel like no? But regardless, I keep thinking back to 2014, when this was written, and trying to figure out if there was a point to this book then. I feel like no? But regardless, there's definitely no point to this book now. I mean, the book itself does not have a point, but also there is absolutely no reason for this book to exist now.
This feels more like a series of blog posts than a book. The entire concept is "I want to briefly discuss some old Hollywood people I think are interesting and then tenuously connect them to a throughline so broad as to be meaningless." (That would make for a great blog or Substack! I expect a little more point from books, though.) The book is called Scandals of Classic Hollywood and the chapters aren't even all scandals. (James Dean was a tragedy, and so was Montgomery Clift.) And here's the thing: it really is a brief, not at all in-depth discussion. I know very little about classic Hollywood and I was paging through things going, "Know this, know that, know that too." And Petersen's attempts to be like "as in old Hollywood, so in the new" at the end of each little chapter are undermined by the sheer vagueness of her points. Yes, as in old Hollywood, so in the new, but also as in French theater of the 1700s, so in Hollywood, and pretty much anywhere there have been famous and charismatic people.
I also spent a lot of my reading time muttering "Citation needed," and there's a good reason for that: this felt like reading a bunch of slightly less in-depth Wikipedia pages with fewer citations. The writeups are short, full of opinion or guesses masquerading as facts, and although some articles are cited and linked, there are very, very many citations missing. I trust this book overall slightly less than Wikipedia, which is fairly pathetic given that I'm talking about a book by a professional writer with a PhD. I just do not see a reason for this book to exist in world that already contains Wikipedia.
And then there's the writing. I would call it journalistic -- basic, readable, conveys information, doesn't get fancy -- in every chapter except the one on Marlon Brando, where you can hear Petersen breathing heavily as she's typing. So many adjectives! So much intense discussion of Brando's sexiness, his raw manly hotness, his way of walking, and did I mention that he was sexy? HE WAS SO SEXY OMG. And the thing is, she's probably right -- I'm a lesbian, so I'm not the right person for the job of assessing early Brandoian hotness -- but it did start to feel sliiiiightly like TMI. I would be comfortable with that level of information in a group text, but not from a stranger. No.
I read this book for bad reasons (I want to learn about the studio system, not the stars of old and who they fucked and got fucked over by), but even knowing that going in, I found this disappointing. And pointless.
(I will, however, go to my grave wondering if she genuinely meant that Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks were "high-class, gentile, wholly above scandal, and ... perfect companions." I think she meant genteel, but antisemitism was and is very much a Hollywood thing, so. Maybe not?)...more
This is a memoir that covers difficult topics -- racism, homophobia, the AIDS epidemic, growing up Chinese-American in Detroit in the '70s and '80s --This is a memoir that covers difficult topics -- racism, homophobia, the AIDS epidemic, growing up Chinese-American in Detroit in the '70s and '80s -- with a light hand. Chin relies on his readers to get the emotion in key moments without being force-fed it, and I really loved that.
The most relatable part of the book for me was Chin's description of growing up gay, of what it was like to be gay at that point in American history. Chin isn't *that* much older than I am, so I remember parts of this, too, but I was on the other side of the AIDS epidemic, which made a huge difference. This is a fantastic look at what growing up queer used to be like.
I also enjoyed Chin's honest recounting of his Republican childhood, and his attitude of "Well, I sure wish I hadn't believed those things, but unfortunately I did, so. Gotta be honest about that." I loved his complicated relationships with his family and his city and the restaurant.
I do want to note, though, for people who don't read the acknowledgements, that Chin left one of the funniest moments for that. (view spoiler)[Jeff, the queer guy he briefly meets in college, the guy that his friends were so sure was destined to be his boyfriend, the guy who completely blew him off -- Chin is married to him now. (hide spoiler)]
I finished this book wanting to know more, which I think is a sign of a good memoir. (My readerly instinct wants to know how it all turned out! But, of course, life doesn't "turn out." It keeps on going until it stops. So a good, honest memoir doesn't tie up all the threads.)...more
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