Last Words: A Memoir
by George Carlin

Last Words took about 17 years to write. As the story goes, Carlin commissioned it in 1993 with Tony Hendra, but it wasn’t until Carlin died in 2008 that Hendra finally pulled together all of his recorded conversations, notes, and other materials and cranked out the more or less definitive semiautobiography of George Carlin, and Last Words is that book.

I need hardly explain who George Carlin is or why he is important—if you don’t know, this review will be meaningless to you—but for those of us well-acquainted with his unique and sometimes unpredictable views, Last Words is really quite illuminating, and I was surprised by not only the general quality of its craft, but the depth of its information, as well.

In accordance with the book’s jacket copy, Carlin’s story begins literally at birth, as he provides a few choices about the intersection of his almost-aborted 9-month-old self and his mother Mary’s vagina. For those hoping that the book would incorporate much of Carlin’s uncensored spirit, the very first pages are proof enough that this isn’t a dry, tame eulogy, and that either its content came straight from Carli without overly much manipulation, or Tony Hendra is very good at channeling Carlin.

It may surprise some (though I was vaguely aware) that the blue George Carlin we know and love from the last twenty or so years was not always the George Carlin that was popular or famous. Though Carlin begins by describing the turbulent times of his family, especially vis-a-vis his deadbeat father, the familiar material only begins to emerge when the story arrives at Carlin’s stand-up career. But in those days, Carlin was more or less a family-friendly acting, performing schtick like “The Indian Sergeant” on primetime television and event, yes, to sold-out crowds in live venues. At that time, with a wife and a young child, Carlin was living a comfortable—if boring—life as a comedian.

Soon, however, things began to change, and the world-weary ire for which we tend to know George Carlin arose—but so did a number of years of controversy, on-and-off success, and drug abuse by both he and his wife, Brenda. He gets arrested for obscenity in Milwaukee; he starts in a children’s television show. In some ways, Carlin is remarkably glib about his prolific career and profligate personal life: based on the text alone, you wouldn’t guess that Carlin was one of the most important comics of the past half century.

Initially, it was observational—Carlin decries it as naval-gazing—which predated Seinfield’s “And what’s the deal with XYZ?” schtick by a number of years…. gave birth to it, more accurately. Sometimes it was harmless, like observations about the physical properties of boogers; other times it was more controversial, such as his seminal “Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Say on Television” from his 1972 album. Especially when it came to language, Carlin was blazing new and important trails: I can remember listening to some of these early bits as a child, and it no doubt helped to spark my interest in language and semantics.

As a simple chronicle of Carlin’s career, it is brief but informative; remember, after all, that this story was most from Carlin’s mouth, and so doesn’t seek to be an exhaustive listing of his engagement or life. What’s far more interesting to me is to see Carlin’ philosophize about how his life influenced his comedy—attributing his love of language to his mother, for instance, or admitting that his yearning to be loved by crowds is a feeling which stretches back to his childhood. Then, too, his eventually shift to a countercultural comic came from somewhere as well, at one point roiling out of Carlin in a career-threatening wave. Carlin’s struggle for both success and self-respect is the meat of the book, and it occupies the most space. Unlike, say, Tracy Austin’s autobiography, Last Words isn’t a facile recollection of random anecdotes, or a feel-good storybook with big print, or a simple cash-grab with writing so dull it render less mortals catatonic….. no Last Words is, as I began this review, surprisingly engaging, remarkably honest, and decidedly Carlinesque.

Dr. Seuss & Mr. Geisel
by Judith and Neil Morgan

Dr. Seuss might just be one of the most beloved children’s authors of our time. Growing up, I distinctly remember Green Eggs and Ham, The Butter Battle Book, and my personal favorite for some inexplicable reason, Scrambled Eggs Super!. It’s always been easy to glibly jibe about the relative ease of Seuss’s job (“just make up words when you can’t rhyme anything else”) but of course the man was an immensely talented crafter of stories that will remain popular long after his death.

Though he never made any particular secret of his life, digging into the history of sometime who was known more by his pen name than real name is always a bit of an adventure. It’s almost strange to thing of a revered figure like Seuss being a young boy or a petulant college student.

Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel is a dense, thorough affair, which I admit takes some of the charm away from Seuss. However, it is ultimately interesting to watch him go from a doodling college student to a successful children’s author. He took the pen name “Seuss” when he incurred the wrath of Dartmouth administrators after holding a drinking party during Prohibition. He met his wife, Helen, at Oxford, where he was pursuing a PhD in literature without any enthusiasm. Initially, he wrote jokes and cartoons for national publications, as well as doing commercials advertisements for companies like General Electric.

It was after World War II that Seuss began writing some of his most famous material. The Cat in the Hat came about as a sneaky sort of grammar for schoolchildren. From there on out, Seuss did two different styles of books: simpler “Beginner Books” for young children, and more complicated pieces for older children.

I won’t list the man’s whole life, of course: if you’re interested in it—and you should be really interested if you read this book—go ahead and read Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel. If you aren’t, maybe reading his Wikipedia entry would suffice, and you can spend the rest of the afternoon reading Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

Shakespeare: The World as Stage
by Bill Bryson

Let me first say, in the interest of full disclosure, that I am absolutely crazy about Bill Bryson. Really, the man can do no wrong. I think perhaps the worst thing I’ve ever said about his books is that his very first one was kind of dry. I therefore look forward to each new Bryson release with a fervor most people save for Harry Potter.

Shakespeare: The World As Stage is a short book, written as a (sort-of) one off project for Bryson. The book is one in a series of brief biographies. Luckily, it’s not as short Bryson’s African Diary, but I was disappointed nonetheless, not by the quality of the book, but by my selfish desire for an endless amount of Bryson’s prose.

Bryson does manage to pack his 200 pages with excellent material, however. Writing a biography about Shakespeare is a difficult process, because despite being one of the most revered authors in the English language, he is shrouded in mystery, his legacy built by a canon of plays and poetry and piecemeal legal documents and snippets of text. If you were to play a drinking game wherein you did a shot every time Bryson uses phrases like “We can’t know for certain” or “It’s impossible to know,” you’d be comatose by the end of the book. Yet, as Bryson points out early on, we know more about Shakespeare than any other English playwright of that era. Much like I thirst for new Bryson material, so society at large thirsts for information about this demigod of Elizabethan/Jacobean drama.

Given the relative paucity of direct historical data about Shakespeare, much of Bryson’s biography is told with context: he talks about the era, and the places where Shakespeare would have likely been. He talks about the vagaries of playwriting and performance; he talks about Shakespeare’s father John, and Shakespeare’s various and sundry relatives. He also talks about what others of the time had to say about Shakespeare. He even, ironically enough, transmits a great deal of information about the lack of information about Shakespeare.

Finally, and with great gusto, Bryson deals with the conspiracy theorists: those that think Francis Bacon is Shakespeare, or that Ben Jonson is Shakespeare. Or that a slew of different people are Shakespeare. The author comes down hard on the conservative side, insisting that despite the many holes in our history of Shakespeare, there’s no convincing evidence for most of the marginal theories about his life. The truth is simply that Shakespeare was an exceptional writer that left us very little about himself.

Bryson does all this without fawning or obseqious language; he manages his trademark blend of anecdote and information. Like every other Bryson book, this one is fantastic and you’re a horrible person if you don’t read it.