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Title details for There's Nothing in This Book That I Meant to Say by Paula Poundstone - Available

There's Nothing in This Book That I Meant to Say

by Paula Poundstone
Paula Poundstone
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
Part memoir, part monologue, with a dash of startling honesty, There's Nothing in This Book That I Meant to Say features biographies of legendary historical figures from which Paula Poundstone can't help digressing to tell her own story. Mining gold from the lives of Abraham Lincoln, Helen Keller, Joan of Arc, and Beethoven, among others, the eccentric and utterly inimitable mind of Paula Poundstone dissects, observes, and comments on the successes and failures of her own life with surprising candor and spot-on comedic timing in this unique laugh-out-loud book. If you like Paula Poundstone's ironic and blindingly intelligent humor, you'll love this wryly observant, funny, and touching book.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    November 7, 2006

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781598874846
      • File size: 172732 KB
      • Duration: 05:59:51

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Stand-up comic, mother of three, and recovered alcoholic, Paula Poundstone tells all in a frank stream-of-consciousness memoir. Poundstone uses the lives of historical figures, including Joan of Arc ("called by God and driven to drink"), Charles Dickens ("a beloved novelist and incredible bookstore employee"), the Wright Brothers ("flying planes and busing tables"), and Sitting Bull ("a great warrior and a heck of a Ping-Pong player"), as jumping-off points for her own story. While this makes for a lively structure, with funny one-liners, sometimes Poundstone gets sluggish and bogged down in her material. Overall, this is worth the chuckles but is too long and in need of a laugh track. M.T.B. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      August 7, 2006
      Poundstone makes self-involvement entertaining in her memoir-cum-history, which takes biographical sketches of seven historical figures—from Joan of Arc to the Wright brothers—as an excuse for a hilarious and sometimes exhausting stream-of-consciousness confessional. She's interested in other people, she explains, it's just that their stories inevitably—and uncontrollably—trigger her own: "Martin Luther King could come to my house tonight and say, 'I have a dream...' and I'd cut him off and say, 'I had a dream once, too, only in mine....'" Most everything reminds Poundstone of her well-publicized drinking problem. Joan of Arc didn't drive her livestock to pasture while drunk, but if she did they'd "have something in common." Segue to Poundstone being court-ordered on television to attend Alcoholics Anonymous ("That pretty much blows the hell out of the second A"). An explanation of Helen Keller's deafness and blindness is the perfect opportunity for the non sequitur: "God, I loved to drink." But Poundstone deals frankly with the nightmarish results of her alcoholism: she temporarily loses custody of her children, does 180 days in rehab and "was seeing four therapists a week to satisfy the court. Even Sybil didn't see four therapists."

    • Publisher's Weekly

      January 29, 2007
      The intentionally disjointed structure of this audiobook—Poundstone presenting biographies of seven historical figures, including Joan of Arc, Helen Keller and Abraham Lincoln, with each fact launching her into a tangent about her own life—works particularly well on audio. Poundstone sounds like she's chatting naturally and keeps remembering other things she wants to say. She's frank, funny and immensely likable. Her autobiographical stories are often harrowing: she was convicted of driving while intoxicated with her three adopted children in the car, and lost custody of them for a year. Her pain at the memory is obvious, but she leavens the subject matter with plenty of black humor and irony: noting that she was court-ordered on television to attend Alcoholics Anonymous, she comments, "That pretty much blows the hell out of the second A." There are many quotable one-liners, amid Poundstone's self-deprecating humor. By turns funny and poignant, this is a book that shines on audio. Simultaneous release with the Harmony hardcover (Reviews, Aug. 17).

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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