A Review of Judd Apatow's "Comedy Nerd" and Cameron Crowe's "The Uncool"

 

It would be impossible to write the story of late 20th century-early 21st century pop culture without considering the work of Judd Apatow and Cameron Crowe. Even an abbreviated list of titles they wrote/directed/produced would be a roll call of beloved TV and filmic memories that have launched a million memes and coined troves of quotable quotes. Freaks and Geeks, The 40 Year-Old Virgin, Anchorman, Bridesmaids. Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Say Anything…, Jerry Maguire, Almost Famous.

Despite being ten years apart in age (Crowe was born in 1957, Apatow in 1967), both men have recently put out big looks back, full of delicious details of lives creatively well-lived. The Uncool is more of a straightforward biographical take, crafted out of punchy, generally chronologically ordered chapters framed by Crowe’s anxiety prior to the debut of the musical stage version of Almost Famous. Comedy Nerd is a self-proclaimed hoarder’s scrapbook of Apatow’s life, composed of recently-penned passages, lots of primary documents (texts, reviews, emails, scripts), and many, many pictures of the funny and famous.

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on October 6, 2026.

A Review of Amy Rigby's "Girl to Country: A Memoir"

 

Singer-songwriter Amy Rigby sets up the arc of her moving, charming, outsider-insider’s memoir Girl to Country poignantly in the prologue, when she considers what she might say to explain herself to Hazel Smith, who she calls “the Grande Dame of Music City,” while cheekily describing her “like…one of the Gabor sisters, if they’d been from Kentucky instead of Budapest.”

“I just want to earn a living!” I wanted to shout. “But I also want to be AN ARTIST—to create work that no one else has ever thought of doing. In addition, I’d like L-O-V-E and/or S-E-X, to live in a decent home, and to raise a happy child to adulthood. All while looking cool. That isn’t too much to ask, is it? IS IT?”

When the self-proclaimed Dean of American Rock Critics Robert Christgau reviewed Rigby’s solo debut Diary of a Mod Housewife in 1996, giving the album an A and eventually naming it his second favorite disc of the year, he wrote, “Personalizing the political for a bohemia that coexists oh so neatly with structural underemployment, thinking harder about marriage than a dozen Nashville homilizers,” he had no idea he was predicting Rigby’s next career move. For she would leave the crudy-but-cosy comforts of New York (read all about her exciting exploits there in Rigby’s first memoir, 2019’s Girl to City) for Nashville, hoping her gimlet-eyed, catchy tunes might land her a publishing deal, and therefore steady money.

Care to read the rest than do so at California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on September 2, 2026.

A Review of Ted Geltner's "Flagrant, Destructive Gestures: A Biography of Denis Johnson"

Is it possible to feel sad considering the life of someone who authored nine novels (one a winner of the National Book Award), a novella, two books of short stories, three collections of poetry, two collections of plays, and one book of reportage? That’s a damn good run for anyone, let alone someone gone at the relatively young age of 67. Still, it’s hard not to look at the life of Denis Johnson and lament.

Clearly his biographer Ted Geltner recognizes that—just check out the book’s title. Geltner, a professor of journalism at Valdosta State University, remains true to his reporter’s roots throughout, digging up vivid chestnuts of facts that illuminate Johnson’s troubled yet also uniquely charmed life. We find out who he did acid with in high school, which real life members of the Iowa City demi monde are the sources for which fictional characters in his work, get a where-are-they-now? coda for the family that inspired his classic story “Car Crash While Hitchhiking.”

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on July 7, 2026.

A Review of John Darnielle's "This Year: 365 Songs Annotated: A Book of Days"

 

If the claim “songs are poetry” drives you batty, John Darnielle’s This Year: 365 Songs Annotated: A Book of Days will give you fits. Darnielle fruitfully teases the artful line from song to poem in many of this book’s entries, even if “what poetry’s good at,” as he puts it, “dense economies of rhythm, sound, and meaning” certainly describes the majority of his lyrics. But there’s another level, too: can a written version of the heard capture a song? For he writes, “The page is not the song; it’s an echo of the song, or a wobbly mirror of it, or a clarification of its position.” (Note his love of the clause building on the clause that begins with the book’s double-coloned title.)

First, though, I’m sure I’ve already lost some of you. And want to lose you more, for I can’t help but point out this lover of the direct address in lyrics early in his book asserts: “If I have the choice between rhyming ‘you’ or ‘me,’ though, I mean that’s not really even a choice, the second person is the preferred person when possible.”

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

A Review of Werner Herzog's "The Future Truth"

 

Who better than Werner Herzog, the Bavarian mad genius, to take us on a heady time-travelling exploration on what truth might mean/be/permit? The Future of Truth is a summation of his life project, all 70+ films, both narrative and documentary, all his other books, all his late-in-life winking appearances, like the one on Parks & Recreation as a monotone depressive who wants to sell his haunted home and move closer to Walt Disney World. For as much as everyone asserts their devotion to the truth, Herzog also knows “there is such a thing as a collective willingness to be transported into the realm of poetry, of madness, and of the pure joy of storytelling.” (What a wickedly beautiful trio that is, no?)

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on December 19, 2025.

CALIRB 10 Best Books of the Year

 

As ever, I'm honored to have California Review of Books as a home for my literary criticism. Once again, they have compiled a top books of the year list, which, of course, is a semi-ridiculous quest--what lucky person gets to read enough of the books out any year to make that decision?

That said, never-as-read-as-I should-be-me made some choices, as two of my favs are listed at the link to the full slate.

A Review of "The Hounding" by Xenobe Purvis

 Xenobe Purvis can write spooky, but then there are all sorts of haunts, aren’t there? Her debut novel The Hounding, set during the 18th-century in Little Nettlebed astride the Thames River—but far away, in distance and in thought, from London—concerns the Mansfield sisters, orphaned, insular, feminine threats, particularly to the small-minded males of the village. The book gives its plot culmination away in its first line (in what reads like a dark version of Johnny Carson’s old Carnac routine): “The girls, the infernal heat, a fresh-dead body.” But the book never surrenders its air of mystery—do the Mansfields have the power to transform into dogs? Then again, its theme is sussing out the line between what’s human and humane. (Note we are piss poor at the latter.)

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on October 31, 2025.

A Review of "Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson" by Claire Hoffman

 

Why and how masses of people fall under the thrall of a magnetic person are the kinds of questions that sadly keep poking their, in the most recent case, oddly orange-tinged heads up far too often in history. That makes Clarie Hoffman’s steady, insightful biography Sister, Sinner, an examination of the fantastic and tragic life of evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, all the more timely. An early 20th century powerhouse, McPherson arguably created the first megachurch (what became the Foursquare Church, which still has over 6500 congregations globally today) and was wise enough to be the first woman to preach on the radio, too. Her style of Pentecostal ceremonies featured staged spectacle, from camels to faux police motorcycles, big choirs, some speaking in tongues.

But the most important voice was always Aimee’s. Her goal was to make one’s relationship with the lord more personal—her original magazine from her church was the Song of Solomon inspired The Bridal Call. As Hoffman puts it, “Aimee’s words were a sort of heavenly come-hither, a promise of intimacy with the divine, a lifting up away from all the darkness that was gathering in the world.” But, often drawing her sermons from her life—and what a life it was—“She emphasized her fallibility, always,” Hoffman further explains, “She was prideful and prone to make foolish mistakes, but all of this made her more adorable and magnetic.”

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on September 5, 2025.

A Review of Marcy Dermanksy's "Hot Air"

 

In Marcy Dermansky’s engrossing novel of (mis)manners Hot Air, third person limited isn’t just a narrative technique, it’s a view of the world where solipsism holds all the cards. Her characters are self-involved, feckless, cruel, and what’s worse, two of them, couple Jonathan and Julia, are ridiculously rich. As their assistant Vivian considers it, “It was amazing how easy it was to solve problems when you did not have to worry about how much it cost.”

Of course, things can cost us more than money. A handful of pages into the tale, Jonathan and Julia, contentiously celebrating their anniversary on a hot air balloon ride, crash into Johnny’s pool, just as he and Joannie have had their first kiss on their first date. (Yes, four names that begin with J, which leads to some confusion, but also underlines how sadly similar everyone is deep down.) Joannie, the poorest of this foursome, is a divorced mom, eager to move up in the world for her and her daughter, Lucy. Although Joannie has written a semi-successful novel she has never been able to follow up on, and therefore perhaps is the closest to a stand-in for the author—who names each chapter after the character’s viewpoint we are privy to in those pages—Dermansky lets loose this zinger, “As a rule, Joanie didn’t like rich people, but she thought that could change if she were to become one.”

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on June 10, 2025.

A Review of "What Art Does" by Brian Eno and Bette A.

 

At a mere 4.5 by 6.5 inches, only 122 pages long, with a cover that’s bright white and soothing flamingo pink, Brian Eno and Bette A.’s What Art Does beckons with an easy-going, “See? Manageable.” That’s even with its subtitle “An Unfinished Theory” dragging along like tin cans attached to a car, startling everyone. That said, a quick peek inside is even more welcoming. Bette A.’s deceptively naive, you could almost draw them yourself, just beyond line drawings are full of childlike whimsy. The typography is also playful, changing size, color, font, and even fading away. Given the ultra-creative natures of its authors—Eno is a British polymath musician, producer, artist, activist, A. a Dutch artist, novelist, and art school teacher—of course this book about art is art itself.

But then what is art? That’s where the aphoristic writing steps in, each sentence a barbed argument posed as indubitable statement. You find yourself bobbing your head in agreement page after page. Take this run of claims, “We all make art all the time, but we don’t really call it that;” art is “the name for a kind of engagement we have with something;” and, “the art engagement begins where functional engagement ends.”

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on May 2, 2025.

A Review of Sameer Pandya's "Our Beautiful Boys"

It’s no coincidence that the two main subjects of Sameer Pandya’s second novel Our Beautiful Boys are family and violence. Set in a vaguely Santa Barbara-ish fictional Chilesworth, CA (Pandya is an associate professor of Asian American Studies at UCSB), the book focuses on three high school football players and a vicious attack of a fourth student at a post-game party in a spot called the Cave House. This sly and captivating book fronts as a whodunit—crucial plot elements keep dropping until the very final pages—but even more so it’s a whoarewe, if I may create a sub-genre, as all its well-limned characters must confront the chaos of their inner selves. And then try to find where their true selves allow them to be in the shifting and complex milieus of family, work, teams, friendships.

Pandya masterfully builds three distinct family units—the Shastris, Gita and Gautum, and their golf-playing son Vikram, suddenly turning his attention to football; the Cruzes, high-powered academic Veronica, her running back son Diego, and her brother, Alex; the generationally privileged Berringers, Shirley, Michael, and their star quarterback son Michael Jr., who goes by MJ. Issues of race and class are clearly obvious from the first pigheaded teenboy taunt, but they go lots deeper than mere name-calling. Indeed, issues of race will grow quite twisted as Veronica’s backstory unspools, and we get to discover why she might be so hesitant to visit her parents. In this way Pandya gets to examine what the limits of self-invention are.

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on March 27, 2025.

A Review of "Nobody's Empire" by Stuart Murdoch

 

It would be easy to spend a ton of time teasing out where writer/musician Stuart Murdoch ends from where the main character of his debut novel Nobody’s Empire, Stephen Rutherford, begins.

Fans of B&S (that is, those who know enough to abbreviate Belle and Sebastian) will recognize that Murdoch’s novel borrows its title from a tune on 2015’s Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance that artfully captures Murdoch’s struggles with ME, or Myalgic encephalomyelitis (the medically mysterious chronic fatigue syndrome). Yep, his novel’s protagonist and two best friends, Richard and Carrie, also suffer from ME. Both Stuart and Stephen actively engage with questions of faith, albeit with an amorphous notion of god. Stuart went, and Stephen goes, on transformative trips to California. And both were saved by rock and roll. Heck, ignoring the shift from Scotland to Ireland, perhaps there’s even a nod to Joyce and his alter ego Stephen; think of Murdoch’s book as Portrait of the Artist as a Young ME.

But spending a ton of time teasing out such connections would also be a waste.

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on April 9, 2025.

A Review of "99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life" by Adam Chandler

A few weeks into the oligarchical hell of “Trump II: This Time We Leave the Country Stripped on Blocks,” Adam Chandler’s 99% Perspiration: A New Working History of the American Way of Life can seem downright roseate in its desire to consider what work means and how we might re-invent it. One way to think of Chandler’s engaging, thought-provoking book is to compare it to a Last Week with John Oliver: your narrator/host will make some funny jokes at his own expense, will bring the receipts for all the facts and figures carefully chosen to enlighten and not overwhelm, and will follow a pattern of how did we get here/where can we go from this unappealing here. “Writing this makes me feel a bit like the most stoned kid on an ultimate Frisbee team, but America isn’t what we’re told it is,” he confesses in his intro. “I’m not saying anything that you don’t already know.”

Chandler’s false modesty aside—he tells us plenty we don’t know, or perhaps haven’t quite considered via his long-view perspective—no doubt many of us feel snookered by what he bills the “American abracadabra,” that hard work always brings big rewards. As he says, we are meant to believe “anyone who fails to make it here in the Land of Opportunity must not be trying hard enough.” But as he also points out, citing a 2022 study, “35 percent of families in the United States with full-time workers don’t earn enough to cover basic needs such as food, housing, and childcare.” (And that’s all before the current crony capitalists further strip-out Medicaid, Medicare, SNAP, and then painfully tax everyone’s necessary goods with tariffs.)

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on February 21, 2025.

A Review of Neko Case's "The Harder I Fight the More I Love You"

 

Given she’s enchanted by fairy tales, it’s only fitting that Neko Case’s memoir The Harder I Fight the More I Love You leaves its readers following breadcrumbs tossed in a dark forest. Sure, many of the typical milestones of the rock ’n’ roll book get visited—childhood record purchases (Best of Blondie, “We’ve Got the Beat” 45), the agony and ecstasy of the road (on bad sound systems: “Your voice sounds like it’s being piped through a thrift store whale’s carcass into a pirate’s wet diaper. Ahoy, bitch!”), the tease and sleaze of a failed major label signing. But don’t come to the book expecting an album blow-by-blow or much dirt or gossip. This is really a book about art—how and why we make it and need it. That involves digging, a care to ever reconsider the past, a drive to outrun whatever hunts and haunts us, from the Green River Killer to familial trauma. And a hope to be fiercely feminist—at one point she rightfully laments, “How do women have any space left inside us with all the shit we swallow?”

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on February 5, 2025.

A Review of "A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman" by Robert Hilburn

 

A tunesmith with a con, not a song, in his heart, Randy Newman is a quintessential American composer. And like America, what a bill of goods Newman sells us: racist rednecks and drop-the-bomb political science, feel my pain anthems and a testy Old Testament God.

He gets away with singing from the viewpoint of these twisted characters for a slew of reasons. Despite a fiercely appreciative fan base, he’s never been able to sell himself; flying outside the radar of Top 40 has freed him from attacks from the irony-impaired, except for his one hit, an infamy that was, uh, short-lived. (His best known song, “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” beloved heart of the Toy Story films, never got released as a single, fyi.)

But those who are in the know get to know people they might never have otherwise. His lyrics, despite the humor that mostly means we laugh ’cause we don’t know what else to do while squirming, give voice to those we’d rather not hear from, like the sweet promises of the slave trader in “Sail Away,” the N-word dropping titular Southerner in “Rednecks.” But the true dignity these characters get are from the tunes. From a family of film composers, and multiply nominated for Oscars himself, Newman invests a cinematic quality to his melodies, providing each song with a kind of back-story.

A Few Words in Defense of Our Country, Robert Hilburn’s new bio of Newman, means to make the case for Newman as one of the great artists of our time. Throughout the book he interpolates encomiums from esteemed figures, and he kicks that off with none other than Dylan himself (he’s a Nobel Prize winner, you know). Hilburn is not here to bury Newman but to praise him, setting up with his prologues a two-pronged attack—Newman as prescient, penetrating American Jeremiah, sagely realizing the root of our national original sin is racism, and Newman as brilliantly funny.

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

A Review of "Rental House" by Weike Wang

 

You’re a mere five pages into Weike Wang’s masterful novel Rental House when she does this to you, as her married couple main characters, one a first-gen Chinese immigrant, the other a striving son of Appalachia, contest a name for their sheepdog puppy, possible considering Mantou (steamed bun):

Nate brought up the propensity of yuppie couples to name their expensive dogs after basic starch items…. There was no fruit or vegetable Keru enjoyed enough to dedicate to their dog. She would also not be giving their dog a human name like Stacy. The other possibility was Huajuan, or a fancy-shaped, swirled steam bun. Nate said the word a few times, believing that he was saying the word right, but Keru said that he was saying the word wrong, and though Nate couldn’t hear where he’d gone wrong, and she couldn’t explain it either, he agreed that Mantou was fine.

Care to read the rest then do at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on January 9, 2025.

A Review of "What Nails It" by Greil Marcus

 

Trying to write a book review about essays in which one of our preeminent social critics, Greil Marcus, explores why he writes criticism…well, I’ve already mirrored myself into infinity or oblivion. But perhaps that’s a worthy task. For Marcus’s short in pages (87) if long in contemplation What Nails It—part of the Why I Write series from Yale University Press, based on the annual Windham-Campbell Lectures—makes an immediate claim for the ineffable dropping into a writer’s noggin. He writes, “I live for those moments when something appears on the page as it of its own volition—as if I had nothing to do with what is now looking me in the face.”

Of course, what stares Marcus in the face during his writing process leads to classics like his debut (not counting—or discounting—his journalism in Rolling Stone, Creem, etc.), Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music and second book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century. Both drew musical murder boards that looped lines connecting unlikely persons and traditions, upending any sense of high and low culture; for just one example, 16th century insurrectionist and self-proclaimed King of New Jerusalem John of Leiden meet Sex Pistol punk Johhny (Lydon) Rotten.

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on October 14, 2025.

A Review of "Didion & Babitz" by Lili Anolik

Perched in a cultural place between Ryan Murphy’s Bette and Joan and Craig Seligman’s Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me, Lili Anolik’s Didion & Babitz pairs up exemplars of their age to examine how their age let them (and pretty much most women) down. Just as Seligman made the case for an Apollonian Susan Sontag and a Dionysian Pauline Kael, Anolik does the same for the heady, distant Joan Didion and the easily past Dionysus all the way to Bacchus Eve Babitz. This book is not a high-blown literary assessment or simply a twined biography, but cultural criticism told in an engaging, gossipy tone in which Anolik often directly addresses the reader, sets us up for her methods, previews her structure, even offers two versions of one crucial event and then shrugs and says, “You decide.” Didion & Babitz reads as if you and Anolik were cozied up in a red leather booth at Musso & Frank Grill, dishing dirt over bone-dry martinis.

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on January 2, 2025.

A Review of "Dorothy Parker in Hollywood" by Gail Crowther

 

Late in her life Dorothy Parker claimed during an interview that if she wrote a memoir—which she was loathe to do (and never did)—she would title it Mongrel. That’s the kind of telling, troubling nugget that writer, researcher, academic Gail Crowther unearths in her fascinating Dorothy Parker in Hollywood. Crowther set herself a tricky task, as Parker is both someone people tend to feel they know—heck, her poems might get recited from memory more than anyone’s, especially by those fond of martinis or mordant wit—but also don’t know at all. It’s easy to think of her as a relic of the Roaring 20s and the brilliance of the Algonquin and not even realized she didn’t pass away until 1967. It’s hard to imagine her listening to the Velvet Underground and hanging with Warhol.

Parker also lacks a dedicated archive, and very little exists of her drafts or letters or journals. A paucity of such materials just made Crowther digger harder and deeper, both finding many helpful sources from her friends and contemporary writing about her, but also using Parker’s work itself as a means to measure the woman. And a complicated one she was, for as Crowther puts it, “It is difficult to know whether it is better or worse that however rude Parker was to other people she was equally hard on herself.”

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on November 27, 2024.

A Review of "Plastic" by Scott Guild

 

The best speculative fiction gives us the distance to see our own world more clearly. Take Scott Guild’s debut novel Plastic. Most of its characters are just that, figurines, although others are waffles, or robots, or hairy shipping boxes with whirring propellers as means of locomotion. But their post-nuclear-war world is a nightmare of rampant consumerism, life lived virtually, and the ever-present anxiety over random terror attacks from groups trying to wake up the drugged-to-complacency citizenry to its own environmental destruction, in the book called the Heat Leap. It doesn’t take much for our humanity to be stirred by these unusual characters’ plights.

Did I mention when the characters converse, they do so in a quick cut new language? At one point history is described by a person explaining why not to study it: “War war war. Kill kill kill.” And here’s how a match from phone app Hot Date attempts to comfort our heroine Erin early in the book: “It okay feel bad, he says. No need embarrass. I get—I get total. Life just…creaky, no? So tough sometime.”

Care to read the rest then do at the California Review of Books.

Review also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on December 28, 2025.