Mike Shea on the month’s new releases
Bill Hicks
Love All the People: Letters, Lyrics, Routines
Soft Skull Press
(Read an excerpt)
Buy this at BookPeople.com
In 1994 caustic stand-up comic BILL HICKS was knocking on stardom’s door when he died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 32. Ten years later, those who missed the Houston-bred Hicks on his first go-round get fresh exposure to his scathing and profane social commentary with the simultaneous release of LOVE ALL THE PEOPLE (Soft Skull Press), a compilation of miscellaneous writings and routines, and BILL HICKS LIVE (Rykodisc), a DVD with three complete live shows and a bonus documentary. Hicks has been touted as a cult genius who paved the way for the likes of Dennis Miller, Bill Maher, and Jon Stewart. Detractors counter that he also spawned dreadful angry comics like Andrew “Dice” Clay. The most insightful selections in Love All the People are not the transcribed shows but New Yorker critic John Lahr’s foreword and the interviews and letters that reveal Hicks to be a painfully sincere idealist distraught because America chooses to bomb, not feed, the world. “Love” and “compassion” are irony-free terms for Hicks; there is no sarcasm in the title. But the real measure of Hicks’ singular talent is found viewing Bill Hicks Live, which shows the comedian to be whip-smart, Klaxon-loud, and X-rated—oh, and plenty hilarious. For all his rebel posturing, he’s a pro’s pro, with the timing of a demonic televangelist—all swagger and dramatic pause. But the laughs are just jabs Hicks throws to set you up before he knocks you out with the Big Truth About Thinking for Yourself and Not Being a Mindless Drone for the Man. Bill Hicks never was a laughmeister shucking and jiving for a sitcom role, which is why he matters now as much as he did then.
Scott Zesch
The Captured (A True Story of Abduction by Indians on the Texas Frontier)
St. Martin's Press
(Read an excerpt)
Buy this at BookPeople.com
It was relatively easy for SCOTT ZESCH to find his great-great-great uncle Adolph Korn’s gravestone in their family’s hometown of Mason. It was considerably more difficult to uncover the facts of his ancestor’s abduction as a child by an Apache raiding party in 1870 and understand why, by most accounts, Korn would not shake his acquired Indian ways even after he’d been returned to his birth family. Zesch’s research forms the basis of THE CAPTURED (A TRUE STORY OF ABDUCTION BY INDIANS ON THE TEXAS FRONTIER) (St. Martin’s), in which he reconstructs the stories of nine children and teens taken in raids. The collection is a fascinating reassessment of the not-uncommon phenomenon of white Indians in nineteenth-century Texas. Be forewarned that the brutal truths of frontier life recounted here are not for the faint of heart.
