A series of slightly augmented columns from Barry’s newspaper gig smashed together in a very funny book. Barry muses on grammar, sex, grammar and sex, Justin Bieber, air travel, what women think about (see grammar), and what men think about (see sex). Interestingly, there is one long piece in the book. Barry describes his 10-day synagogue tour to the Holy Land. Turns out visiting Israel was sufficiently moving that there wasn’t much to laugh about. I forgive him and so do God and the Israelis.
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Still Foolin’ ‘Em by Billie Crystal *** (of 4)
Billy Crystal is turning 65 years old and writing his memoir. It’s one-third stand-up (far and away the best part), one-third autobiography, and one-third Hollywood hokum. Really, every famous name he drops is his best friend and a wonderful human being. His life is interesting enough. He’s a hard worker and a nice guy. You can’t help but think he would be a really pleasant dinner guest. It is his comedy, however, that makes the book worth reading, or better still, worth listening to. Several chapters are read aloud before a live audience and his take on the trials of getting old, at least for us oldsters, is painfully accurate. We have hands that look like chicken feet, balls that hang to our knees, and urinate in morse code, and more if only we could remember what it was we were talking about. Also, if you are listening, his impersonations of Muhammad Ali, Johnny Carson, Howard Cosell and other legends of the air that our children never heard of are delicious. -
That Old Ace in the Hole by Annie Proulx *** (of 4)
Proulx spins a tall Texas tale about a loner named Bob Dollar sent to the mythical panhandle town of Wooly Bucket. His objective is to scout sites for an environmentally devastating pig farm for an international conglomerate called Global Pork Rind. Proulx has done her research leading readers rather forcefully to despise corporate agriculture and lament the loss of the good old days. She is at her best when she is pushing her farce as far as it will stretch, loosening up enough to become laugh aloud funny by the book’s end. Her descriptions of land, history, people of the earth, climate, even the buzz of insects before a thunderstorm are spot on and make the book worth reading. A few of her polemics drag. She lets oil drillers and the farmers who ran the regional aquifer get off the hook, too, in her single minded focus to give hell to businesses that raise pork units in deadly tight quarters. Read Proulx for her sense of place and character rather than for politics and plot. -
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt *** (of 4)
A tall tale of the Old West. A pair of brothers, Charlie and Eli Sisters, with the self-importance of Keillor’s Dusty and Lefty and the banter of Tom and Ray (Car Talk) work as hired guns. Traveling on a pair of “found” horses, Tub and Nimble, from Oregon to the 1851 Gold Rush town of San Francisco they encounter a crying man and a lone Indian. They shoot people that bother them, ponder the nature of love, cope with crippled horses, endure back-country dentists, drink to excess, and sleep in the woods even when they are coping with painful hangovers. These are the kind of guys that use extra large words unnecessarily and refuse to engage in the use of verbal contractions. One of them misses his mother. I listen to many recorded books and I found John Pruden’s reading of The Sisters Brothers to perfectly capture the personalities, era, and farce of this story. -
Travels with my Aunt by Graham Greene *** (of 4)
Nobody quite does a comedy of manners like the British and Graham Greene’s paean to the superiority of living life on the edge is a masterpiece with its tongue firmly placed in its cheek. Henry, an aging, retired, 50-something bank manager finds himself entangled in the adventures of his 75-year-old Aunt who leads anything but a normal life. Extracted from his dotage tending dahlias, Henry is whisked away into his Aunt’s smuggling underworld of Turkey, South America, and Paris. I smiled all the way through. -
The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett **** (of 4)
The Queen of England, nearing the age of 80, and bored with the routine of the Royal Wave, Royal Art opening, and Royal Ship inauguration discovers reading when a gay scullery employee delivers a book from the traveling library cart. As the queen devours one book after another, she learns about a world outside the Royal Bubble, about feelings and compassion, and her tolerance for Royal Drivel diminishes much to the chagrin of those that depend on the Queen for their authority. Alan Bennett, a British dramatist, captures British upper crust society with piercing accuracy in this short novella that made me laugh aloud. -
The Case of the Man who Died Laughing by Tarquin Hall *** (of 4)
The second in the series of Tarquin Hall mysteries taking place in contemporary New Delhi. In this one our food-loving detective, Vish Puri, whose assistants he has nicknamed Tubelight, Handbrake, and Facepaint, go after the murderer of Dr. Jha, an Indian Guru-buster. Jha, fed up with India’s surplus of money-hoarding Gurus and Swamis makes his living unmasking fraudulent healers until he dies mysteriously while attending a meeting of an Indian laughing club. He perishes during a particularly hysterical knock-knock joke and Puri suspects foul play. Good, bad, funny, pathetic, wild, contradictory, modern, and ancient India are all lovingly displayed in a mystery that seems rather secondary to the main character: India at the crossroads from the 18th to 21st century. -
Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman **** (of 4)
It takes equal parts chutzpah and talent to write a fairy tale for adults, but Gaiman has the skill to have you open the cover and not close it until the last page. This is a variation on the African myths of Anansi the spider whose cleverness and hijinks make him the subject of countless stories. In this one, Mr. Nancy (the senior Anansi) dies in a bar while flirting with much younger women to the great embarrassment of his son, Charles “Fat Charly” Nancy. Fat Charly attends the funeral, learns he has a brother he never knew of, called Spider, finds himself caught up in an uninspiring marriage engagement, a dead-end job, under the nosy influence of four aging (hysterically funny) Caribbean grandmothers, and ultimately a murder mystery. The protagonists are well-meaning, but trapped by forces, some overwhelmingly real, others phantasmagorical, who do their best to muddle through. Never really scary, but nearly always quite funny, if you have any chance to listen to the reading narrated by Lenny Henry, by all means do so. His voice impersonations of the senior Mrs. Callyanne Higler, the cool, hip Spider, and the slimy Grahame Coats will bring life to characters you will recall with a smile for weeks after you are done. -
The Frozen Rabbi by Steve Stern *** (of 4)
A Chasidic Rabbi from the olden country goes out to meditate on the meaning of God, falls into a trance, and then a lake that freezes over him, where he lies, smiling, encased in ice before being discovered and chipped out by Yossl King of Cholera. His frozen body is preserved for more than a century before thawing out during a 1999 power failure in the Memphis freezer of a discount furniture salesman. The Rabbi wakes, learns English and channels a southern revivalist, kabbalistic preacher. while we, the readers, While the Rabbi becomes a huge business success, we, the readers, simultaneously follow his frozen journey through the generations of Jews that protected for this Yiddisher ice cube from shtetl to Tennessee. Often, laugh out loud funny — the more Yiddish or Borscht belt humor you know, the funnier — and occasionally too obtuse. There are deeper messages in this text about spirituality, God, Kabalah, and family, but I’m afraid they were just far enough below the surface I couldn’t quite bring them to focus. -
Squirrel seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris *** (of 4)
A very deft interplay of human characteristics and foibles overlain upon our stereotypes of animals. Thus, we meet with mice who taken in homeless animals they really shouldn’t, rodents who fall madly in cross-species love and then run out of things to say to one another once the sex has become mundane, annoying stork adolescents who receive their comeuppance, and so forth. The book is hard to put down because each story is so short and tasty, but it is best when read one story at a time with long intervals in between. Treat it like a box of chocolates. The illustrations by Ian Falconer are wonderful.
