PositiveNew York Times[A] fascinating and rigorous, no-punches-pulled investigation into the provenance and parturition of his and Stephen Sondheim’s first collaboration ... This is not a collection of gossip. It is actually a story of artistic steadfastness, revealing as much about the ultimate work as the experience the participants endured while making it.
John Waters
PositiveThe New York Times...this book—more than any of the author’s others I have read—shows a vulnerability and an honesty and an almost frantic desire to impart to us, before he can no longer, his manic mantras, his obsessive treatises and his biting and blisteringly honest bons mots that are actually really enlightening life lessons ... Mr. Know-It-All is not, by any means, Waters’s finest work, but it is perhaps his most revealing, his most authentic ...unlike authors who in their later works allow a sober knell of perception to ring through their prose, Waters instead manages to impart his wily wisdom like some giddy, gurgling, bratty child waiting to be caught and brought back home to clean up his soiled bedroom and do his homework ... John Waters—the brand as well as the man—has aged well. He and his work are seasoned; they are the gifts that keep on giving, to him as well as us.
David Sedaris
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewI have come to the conclusion that David Sedaris is not just some geeky Samuel Pepys, as I had assumed all these years. True, he may shed a revelatory light on the more extreme facets of our societal spectrum through his bizarre and pithy prism. Yes, his worldview—a fascinating hybrid of the curious, cranky and kooky—does indeed hold a mirror up to nature and show us as others see us. But make no mistake: He is not the Fool, he is Lear ... This book allows us to observe not just the nimble-mouthed elf of his previous work, but a man in his seventh decade expunging his darker secrets and contemplating mortality. Calypso chronicles his latest attempts to come to terms with the slings and arrows of truly outrageous fortune that life has flung at him ... For Lear the storm is the central metaphor ... For Sedaris a snapping turtle with a partly missing foot and a tumor on its head becomes an unlikely leitmotif ... The brilliance of David Sedaris’s writing is that his very essence, his aura, seeps through the pages of his books like an intoxicating cloud, mesmerizing us so that his logic becomes ours ... The geeks really do inherit the earth.
