Word: lowdownness
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...Lowdown: Montandon locates the origins of his project in the urge to quash the creeping feeling that, despite the successes of his career, he's yet to do anything exceptional. "I wanted my Moby Dick," he writes. Readers can get behind that feeling, and as a witty and likable writer, he makes a good companion for this quixotic journey. But it's a far cry from chasing white whales, even if both stories explore the pursuit of elusive goals. "How did a fairly useless device hold such power over their imaginations?" Montandon wonders of his subjects. For his purposes...
...Lowdown: If you saw 8 Mile, you're familiar with much of Eminem's story already, and unfortunately the narrative is crisper on the silver screen. Though sprinkled with anecdotal gems, this tangled history veers closer to "annotated picture book" than autobiography and crumples under the weight of too many half-baked attempts at introspection. The book's structure, it seems, was dictated not by laziness but by personal philosophy: he's not much of a reader. ("If there are no pictures in a book, forget it.") But he doesn't seem much for writing, either. Die-hard fans will...
...Lowdown: There are some who think that memoirs should be exciting, thrilling, full of tragedy or high comedy. John Grogan does not write those kind of memoirs. There are some who think that memoirs should look at the lives of screwed-up folk on their way down (who eventually pick themselves back up) as a way of peeking into a world not our own. John Grogan rejects that proposition outright. His two books operate under the premise that anyone's life is worthy of a memoir, no matter how boring or similar it is to everyone else's. Growing...
...Lowdown:It's a hefty task, trying to tell the history of man through a single animal. Beef attempts this, much in the vein of the many "(Name of Product): How (synonym for name of product) Changed the World"-type books that have flooded the market in the past decade. And it does a lot of admirably hefty lifting, offering fascinating interludes about Spanish bullfighting and Masai tribesmen in some places and a really delicious rib recipe or a listing of different cheeses in others. But the authors' florid writing-"Herders constitute neither the world's oldest profession, nor indeed...
...Lowdown: For anyone who's followed the news closely over the last eight years, or looked into the history of our 43rd president, there are no real revelations to be found in W. But what may surprise both Bush experts and newcomers alike is the breadth of sources used in constructing this piece of historical fiction. Taken on its own, the "W. Film Guide" is a useful hub of Bush anecdotes, psychoanalysis and chronology, charting the rise and fall of this unlikely world leader...