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 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 "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 "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 "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 "Lou Reed: The King of New York" by Will Hermes

 

Will Hermes admits he’s on a fool’s errand with the opening quote of the preface to his 529 page biography of Lou Reed. The mercurial genius most famous as the leader of the Velvet Underground once told journalist Jonathan Cott, “There’s no reason to get into autobiographical things with me, because I’m a writer and a musician.” But Hermes, a diligent researcher (he makes clear he’s even read the archive of Reed’s sometimes terrifying “fan” mail), perceptive critic, canny social historian, and flat out elegant writer, is more than up to the task for what he himself calls “myth parsing.” As he puts it, “One gets the sense that memories might be clouded by subsequent myth, every double scotch or methamphetamine injection magnified into more smoking-gun evidence of the ‘Lou Reed’ character he blurred into by the mid-’70s.” 

 Then again, Reed went through a lot. Born in 1942 on suburban Long Island to a respectable middle class Jewish family—Hermes does wonderful work connecting Reed to that heritage—Lewis Allan Reed knew he was queer at age 12 almost two decades before Stonewall. Drawn to music and literature, New York City beckoned as it did to every artsy person in the northeast in the late 20th century. Alas Reed’s first and only year at NYU ended with him back at home and getting electroshock therapy (Hermes puts this seemingly barbaric practice into scary historic context: “In lieu of commitment to a mental hospital, an option that may have also been on the table, outpatient ECT probably seemed the lesser evil.”) Eventually Reed attends Syracuse, only to get his first case of hepatitis—and liver failure would be what led to his death in 2013—the first time he shoots heroin. It’s as if he was creating a life that could only be rock ‘n’ roll mythic.

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

This review was also posted at the Santa Barbara Independent on February 1, 2024.