I’m Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand Up Comedy’s Golden Era

In 1972,The Tonight Show moved from New York to Burbank, California and with it went an entire generation of comics, most of whom would go on to become the biggest stars of the comedy boom of the 1980s. In William Knoedelseder’s 2010 book I’m Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand-up Comedy’s Golden… Continue reading I’m Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Stand Up Comedy’s Golden Era

Riding with the Mongol Horde: A Review of Under and Alone

If you’re addicted to Gangland reruns, Under and Alone (2005) is the book for you.  ATF agent William Queen tells the story of going undercover in the vicious Mongol biker gang, rising through the ranks to become a fully patched member and eventually the Mongols’ treasurer.  The information he risked his life to gather became… Continue reading Riding with the Mongol Horde: A Review of Under and Alone

Why Ladies Can Do Stuff Now: A Review of Gail Collins’ When Everything Changed

Everybody knows that most governments treated women as little more than chattel for a good deal of history.  Thank goodness that all changed overnight in America when women got the right to vote… Except it didn’t.  Suffrage was an essential first step, but just one of many that got modern American women to relative equality… Continue reading Why Ladies Can Do Stuff Now: A Review of Gail Collins’ When Everything Changed

Review of Top of the Rock: Inside the Rise and Fall of Must See TV

In the early 1980s, NBC was a television network ranked dead last. They trailed behind CBS and ABC (Fox didn’t arrive until the late 80s), and considered themselves in the business of “event programming” in lieu of scripted dramas and comedies. The joke at the time was that NBC was in “fourth place in a… Continue reading Review of Top of the Rock: Inside the Rise and Fall of Must See TV

Everybody Loves Our Town — Review

Krist Novoselic: We were these young people, from southwest Washington; we were Ill-equipped. We didn’t have the emotional support or the experience at all to deal with this. And we were just whisked away, whisked, whisked up into it and it went up, and up and up like the spaceship challenger. And then it exploded.… Continue reading Everybody Loves Our Town — Review

Twenty Soundtracks to Twenty Different Lives: A Review of the Essay Collection Heavy Rotation

An old roommate of mine worked for a company that organized trade conferences, and one day he came home from a publishing conference with a pile of free books.  “You like books, right?  Here…”   I sold some of them on Amazon and gave others to Goodwill, but one I hung on to was Heavy Rotation:… Continue reading Twenty Soundtracks to Twenty Different Lives: A Review of the Essay Collection Heavy Rotation

Not Your Mainstream Novels: The Anomalies and Torture the Artist by Joey Goebel

Way back in another life, I worked at a children’s publishing house in New York City. One of the perks was people who worked at other publishing houses would trade review copies of books with us, and people would put the ones they didn’t want in boxes around the building. The books inside were free… Continue reading Not Your Mainstream Novels: The Anomalies and Torture the Artist by Joey Goebel