On the 28th of October, my girlfriend, Allison, and I celebrated our fourth year together (see writeups for our third and second; the first predates this blog). What began sixth months ago as the vague intentions of going to see something on Broadway eventually morphed into a weekend-long celebration that involved a lot of driving.
The Worst Person in the World You likely either hate Keith Olbermann or you love him. If you’re a regular watcher of Fox News Channel, you probably fall in the former category. If you’re part of the same crowd that adores Jon Stewart, Keith Olbermann’s probably your cup of tea. Despite all the conservative ranting about the “liberal” media, there of course is no such thing. Olbermann’s just about the only unabashedly progressive fixture on network news, which is likely where he gets a lot of his viewer base. Plus, he’s just a good journalist.
The Worst Person in the World is just over 200 transcripts from the similarly-named segment on Olbermann’s show, Countdown. The segment is a mixture of Darwin Awards, News of the Weird, and a fair amount of political venom as well. Olbermann skewers everything from stupid robbers to oblivious school boards to crooked politicians. His favorite, however, is hammering his ratings and ideological opponent, Bill O’Reilly. The FNC star has a habit of saying stupid things, and Olbermann quotes him, shames him appropriately, and we all laugh later when O’Reilly refers to such quoting—quoting, mind you—as “smear campaigns.”
Olbermann also includes a prologue and an epilogue that I at first assumed were original pieces for the book, but I realized that the epilogue, anyway, is a slightly modified transcript of Olbermann’s castigation of O’Reilly’s repeated and stubbornly impenitent mistake with regards to the slaughter of US troops at Malmédy during WWII (see a video of that segment on YouTube here).
The piece, though moving, naturally paled in comparison to Olbermann’s baritone delivery on the air—say what you want about the man’s politics, but he actually has a grave delivery like that of his hero, Edward R. Murrow. Most of the book is like that: the segments are curious and funny for the silly antics they unearth, but watching the Worst Person in the World segment on Countdown is a significantly more fulfilling experience.
It’s worth a read if you haven’t seen many episodes of Countdown, but there’s certainly nothing new in The Worst Person in the World, and nothing to make it better than its broadcast counterpart. It’ll take you all of a night to read, too, so if you spot it at your local library and feel like a laugh, pick it up.
From 1988 to 1992, I lived in Silver City, New Mexico, a withered shell of a mining town that now housed a major university (Western New Mexico University, to be precise). From my school’s playground, I could look up and see the old silver mine that gave the town its name, now picked clean and dormant. The county seat of Grant County, Silver City had just over 10’000 people as of the 2000 census, though how many people it housed when my tiny self roamed its streets is a detail not worth the effort to find.
You’ve likely never even heard of Silver City unless you watched the movie Rat Race—even then, you’ve never seen Silver City, because the movie filmed those scenes in Nevada. But for four years I called the place home, and while my parents are quick to state that it was a great place to retire but not a great place to raise a family, I look back on my time there and yes, I remember that parts of it that were sleazy, dirty, or cringe-worthy, but also the truly wonderful things about it. Maybe that’s just childhood.
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid First, let me say for the record that I firmly believe Bill Bryson can do no wrong. I have read each of his books, and each has been pure delight. Something about his mix of dry wit, occasional potty humor, awe of the beautiful, and immense research always strikes me as one of the best literary combinations there is. If, for some reason, you were hoping to see a negative review here, you won’t find it.
Bryson, despite writing most of his books either from England or New England, grew up in 1950s Iowa, perhaps as disparate a pairing as one could ever achieve. Having been a Midwest boy myself (except the four years spent in New Mexico), I feel a certain connection to Bryson’s past (some of which has failed to be changed by 40 years): perhaps that connection would be lost to some readers. But while this blazes familiar territory to those familiar with Bryson’s The Lost Continent, I feel like it has the most in common with Made In America, specifically the parts about the mid-20th century and its associated franchises and products. When Bryson slips into factual mode in Thunderbolt Kid, it takes me back to my joyous moments reading Made in America for the first time.
While everything Bryson does has a touch of the personal, this is the first time he’s attempted a memoir, and in some ways it’s almost strange to read, having in recent years become accustomed not so much to his travel accounts, but rather to his more scholarly work (e.g. A Short History of Nearly Everything). I call Thunderbolt Kid a memoir, but in actuality it’s stuck somewhere between fiction and memoir: Bryson tells the story of his childhood in a manner of a Tall Tale, describing himself at times as the Thunderbolt Kid, an alien like Superman who has the power to carbonize morons with a glare. You’ll find exaggerations throughout the book, such as when Bryson recalls neighborhood football games consisting of several thousand children. It took me a few chapters to get used to, but I found the style charming.
And Bryson is funny—oh lord is he funny. Though one would not think it, he shares some territory with famed humor columnist Dave Barry. Sometimes Bryson’s wit is dry and English, but he isn’t afraid of enough course language or bathroom humor to give his readers some cheap laughs. Take the following passage, which I attempted to read to my parents (both grew up in Iowa/Nebraska in the 1950s). I say attempted, because I was laughing so hard that tears were streaming down my face and I was having trouble speaking, but the excerpt was still funny enough to have my mother giggling so hard she almost fell over.
They insisted on knowing strange things, which I found bewildering, If you asked to go to the restroom, they wanted to know whether you intended to do Number 1 or Number 2, a curiosity that didn’t strike me as entirely healthy. Besides, these were not terms used in our house. In our house, you either went toity or had a BM (for bowel movement), but mostly you just “went to the bathroom” and made no public declarations with regard to intent. So I hadn’t the faintest idea, the first time I requested permission to go, what the teacher meant when she asked me if I was going to do number one or number two.
“Well, I don’t know,” I replied frankly and in a clear voice. “I need to do a big BM. It could be as much as a three or a four.”
My mother, perhaps wanting to cover up her own amusement at crude humor, also indignantly remembered aloud that her teachers really did always want to know which sort of waste you were going to be excreting, and come to think of it, why did they want to know?
Strangely, Bryson would sometimes slip out of his Midwestern reverie and muse about events in the world at large. At least an entire page late in the book was dedicated to some of the awful things that happened to black men in the south during that time, apropos of nothing except to give context to his own unexceptionable first experiences with blacks a chapter later. But he also talks about world politics a bit, and this prose, too, is enjoyable as ever, but tends to disrupt the flow of a memoir so playfully confined to the imagination of young Billy.
I mentioned at the beginning of this review that I would have nothing bad to say about Bryson. That’s true: I never do, and the thrill of having anything by him come out easily overcomes any deficiencies that may or may not be in the book. The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is expectedly sheer joy to read.
I’d been vaguely aware of the existence of this word, but never heard it really used or pronounced (thus I thought it was something like “cog no sen tee” instead of “kon yuh shen tee”). Seeing as how I can never remember how to spell “connoisseur,” this may be just the word I’m looking for to describe a specialist. When I want to be a snobbish asshole about beer, I can call myself a “cognoscente” and not have to worry about misspelling.
The word comes from Anglo-French (post- Norman invasion) by way of Latin cognoscere, or “to get to know or understand,” which is itself a combination of the Latin prefix co-, or “together,” and gnoscere, or “to know.”