Starred review from June 26, 2017
One of veteran comedian Poundstone’s highest-profile recurring gigs involves panelist duties on National Public Radio’s Wait Wait... Don’t Tell Me! game show, and the accomplished funnywoman draws quite effectively on her natural ease in front of a microphone, bringing the droll quality of her stand-up comedy to the audio medium. The narrative centers on her quest to find the elusive experience of bliss through various experiments, ranging from the altruism of donating plasma and volunteering in a nursing home to the hedonism of renting a sports car or watching movies at home with her three kids for 24 hours in a row. Poundstone’s turn imitating the teenage angst of her technology-addicted son leaves a particularly memorable impression. An Algonquin hardcover.
May 1, 2017
In the follow-up to There's Nothing in This Book that I Meant To Say (2007), comedian Poundstone chronicles her amusing and surprisingly personal search for the key to happiness.In the introduction, the author notes that she has done things in the moment that made her happy, but she had never given much thought to pursuing it consistently. If anyone had found a secret to success, it would be cruel of them to keep it secret. So Poundstone resolved to find it and began an "unscientific" study to figure out if the secret could be found in various tasks or pursuits. Some of the experiments included an exercise regimen, dancing, spending more time with her dog and many cats, and hugging everyone she meets. She also spent an entire day watching movies with her kids, an enterprise that almost broke down over movie choices. After renting a Lamborghini, she discovered that while it thrilled her to drive a powerful machine, she felt like a jerk every time she passed a homeless person. That experiment was supposed to last for a week, but as Poundstone notes, she was deep in debt and could only afford to rent the car for a day. The concept of a comedian doing a series of stunts to find happiness seems like a pure romp, and there are plenty of great laughs, but that's not the whole story. One of the reasons the author is searching for happiness is to cope with real struggles. She is raising three kids while trying to keep a tour schedule to pay her debts; her cats are involved in a territorial pissing fight; a good friend is dying of cancer. Eventually she realized the true nature of her search: "Happiness needs to be like a soaking rain, an aquifer, a tucked-away capacity to store enough so that when your friend Martha gets sick, you don't fade away forever." A deeply revealing memoir in which the pathos doesn't kill the humor--delivers more than it promises.
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May 1, 2017
Over the course of several years, Poundstone (There's Nothing in This Book That I Meant to Say, 2006) conducted scientific experiments concerning what makes people happy, and she relays them here. She tries to get organized once (make that twice) and for all. She spends a day hugging as many people as she can. She rents that surefire midlife-happiness-bringing vehicle, a Lamborghini, for a day. She tries to reconnect with her many pets, whom she fears she's neglected. A crack writer of uncommonly hilarious observations, she organizes her experiments into clever categories (hypotheses, field notes, constants, conclusions, etc.) and measures happiness gained and lost on her invented scale of heps, balous, and fractions thereof. In between it all, the stuff of life fills in. One gets the impression that Poundstone is either parenting one or all three of her kids, scraping together her formidable, continuously strenuous career, hopping a plane, or sifting a litterbox at all times. As readers may expect, this isn't really science-y. But it is smart, sweet, and laugh-out-loud funny balm for exceedingly stressful times.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)