Bossypants is a weird mix: one part autobiography, one part collection of comic essays, with a little bit of serious social relevance, and dash of business book for good measure. Not only does Fey offer some decent advice for managing a creative team, her guidelines for improvisation are mostly applicable to a big-deal sales call. [...]
Entries Tagged as 'biography'
Tina Fey : Bossypants
04 Oct 2011 · No Comments
Tags: autobiography · b-title · f-author
Tim Wakefield, Tony Massarotti : Knuckler, My Life with Baseball’s Most Confounding Pitch
08 Aug 2011 · No Comments
I love the knuckleball.
I don’t know how any nerd could not love the knuckleball, or, as I prefer to call it, the “chaos pitch.” It’s thrown — at the velocity of a cheetah, mind you — with almost no rotation. Its path to, and hopefully over, the plate is determined, as much as anything else, [...]
Tags: baseball · biography · k-title · m-author · sports · w-author
Derek Sivers : Anything You Want
27 Jul 2011 · No Comments
A couple of Derek Sivers stories:
My first CD Baby order was #17697, for 8 discs, in 2000. When I got the now-famous colorful shipment notice I thought I’d actually been the first brand new customer to order as many as 8 albums. I thought the email had been crafted for me, in particular. I [...]
Tags: a-title · autobiography · business · s-author
Pat Benatar : Between a Heart and a Rock Place
29 May 2011 · No Comments
Reading Between a Heart and a Rock Place was a lot of fun. It was definitely a read-a-lot-of-excerpts-to-my-wonderful-and-tolerant-wife book. Benatar’s career trajectory is kinda unusual in rock’n’roll, given that it doesn’t involve a trip to rehab (or its conspicuous lack). It’s sadly more typical in that one defining characteristic of that career is ongoing disputes [...]
Tags: autobiography · b-author · b-title · c-author · rock
Phil Sutcliffe: AC/DC – The Ultimate Illustrated History
02 Jan 2011 · No Comments
Sutcliffe’s history of rock’s Down Under bad boys is lucidly written, with a rather reportorial remove. (Sutcliffe for instance is always careful to note whenever the attribution of a quote is difficult to definitively establish.) The book is clearly marked as “not licensed or approved by AC/DC,” but it’s scarcely adversarial. Sutcliffe will occasionally note [...]
Tags: a-title · biography · rock · s-author
Clifford Irving: Fake! The Story of Elmyr de Hory the Greatest Art Forger of Our Time
22 Aug 2010 · 1 Comment
I’m not even trying to separate my reaction to this book from the backstory: Irving, a novelist (a fraudster, in other words, because a novel is a pack of lies upon the credibility of which its success depends), here offers a purportedly non-fictional book about art forger Elmyr de Hory (a profession which combines fraud [...]
Tags: biography · f-title · i-author
Joyce Linehan & Joe Pernice: Pernice to Me
20 Jul 2010 · No Comments
I’m probably over-thinking my reaction to this book.
Joe Pernice, if you don’t know the name, has one of the most honeyed voices in all of indie rock and a heaping helping of songwriting skill, displayed for the past several years/records in his band Pernice Brothers. Joyce Linehan is Pernice’s partner in Ashmont Records. This book [...]
Tags: autobiography · business · l-author · p-author · p-title · rock
Chelsea Handler: Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang
07 Jul 2010 · No Comments
Here are some of the page-count inflating techniques on display in Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang:
half-page half-tone snapshots
a purported multi-page e-mail* thread between Handler and her siblings
a purported multi-page letter of complaint from a tenant of her father’s rental property
whining (in multiple chapters) about the need to write another “stupid book.”
Otherwise it was sometimes amusing and [...]
Tags: autobiography · c-title · h-author
Chelsea Handler: Are You There Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea; My Horizontal Life
02 Jun 2010 · No Comments
I enjoyed these books more when I stopped thinking of them as literal, factual memoirs, and more as fiction in the uncomfortable-funny vein of Michael Scott or David Brent. Handler’s character is less a poster-girl for bad decision-making (although there’s some of that for sure) than a celebration of unchecked id. I suspect for [...]
Tags: a-title · autobiography · h-author · m-title
Julie Klausner: I Don’t Care About Your Band
10 Apr 2010 · 1 Comment
I had to read this book because of Klausner’s back-cover crack about “guys in their thirties who’ve never been married, ride their bikes to work, and really like Death Cab for Cutie,”* since that acurately described me when my fiancée and I started dating. (I’ve since given up on my thirties and on DCfC (I [...]
Tags: autobiography · i-title · k-author