How a Comedian Wins Sympathy
Roy Wood Jr., The Man of Many Fathers: Life Lessons Disguised as a Memoir (New York: Crown, May 20, 2025). Hardcover: $32: 288pp. ISBN: 978-0-593-80007-2.
**
“From comedian, Emmy-nominated writer and producer, and former Daily Show correspondent Roy Wood Jr… memoir revealing that sometimes the best advice comes from the most surprising teachers. When Roy Wood Jr. held his baby boy for the first time, he was relieved that his son was happy and healthy, but he felt a strange mix of joy and apprehension. Roy’s own father, a voice of the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama, had passed away when Roy was sixteen.” Inside this book, Roy writes that his father had a “window-rattling voice” that was “so perfect, many news directors did not know he was Black.” Apparently, this smooth operator charmed “panties of the women he dated” and radio-operators to convince him to get a job despite his blackness. There are no citations for the claim that in places where he worked in the “1940s and 1950s” he was “the first Black employee.” He began covering all riots from the “civil rights movement”, especially those in 1965-8. Then, he launched with others WVON, or the “National Black Network”: “the first coast-to-coast radio network fully owned by African Americans.” This is very different from what the blurb is claiming. Roy’s father was a very wealthy businessman, from whom Roy inherited privilege in money, and in having a foot-in-the-door in entertainment/media. His father was not an impoverished civil-rights crusader, as the blurb suggests. This guy surely would have give Roy a good number of useful lessons. Though it’s just this blurb that’s misstating things. The interior of the book is presenting the facts.
“There were gaps in the lessons passed down from father to son and, holding his own child, Roy wondered: Have I managed to fill in those blanks, to learn the lessons I will one day need to teach my boy? So Roy looked back to figure out who had taught him lessons throughout his life and which he could pass down to his son. Some of his father figures were clear, like a colorful man from Philadelphia navigating life after prison, who taught Roy the value of having a vision for his life, or his fellow comedians, who showed him what it took to make it as a working stand-up performer.” For example, in “A Letter to My Son”, Roy writes that he commiserated with comedian Brandon T. Jackson at the Chicago Midway Airport’s convenience store in 2006-7, complaining that his “comedy club booker… accounted for 40 percent of my road bookings”. There are no clear lessons from this puffery, as Roy mostly puffs that the comedy Jackson is thinking of acting in involves “Ben Stiller”. Then, Roy makes Jackson sympathize with him over his early loss of his father. Roy says this conversation was memorable because this was the first time he reflected about his “relationship” with his father. It was irrelevant before, and then Roy learned that he can milk it for sympathy… This is not a good lesson, or it is a non-lesson.
“Others were less obvious, from the teenage friends who convinced him to race ‘leaf boats’ carrying lit matches in the middle of a drought to a drug-addicted restaurant colleague who played hoops while Roy scoured dirty dishes to big names in Hollywood, like Trevor Noah and more…” “Addict” does not appear with any specific name who Roy accuses of this inside this book. Though he does confess to being addicted to “junk food”. Thus, again, this blurb is a mis-advertisement of what this book is about. “…Lessons, such as how to channel anger through a more successful outlet (hint: never ever try to outfox a single mom), how not to get caught snitching (hint: never snitch), and how to become a good man—and a good dad (hint: listen to your fathers).”
This seems to be a rather empty book that somebody might have written who had no personal knowledge of who Roy is. It is not funny, or exciting. I do not recommend reading it.
A Puffery of the Space-Race Among Profit-Driven Billionaires
Christian Davenport, Rocket Dreams: Musk, Bezos, and the Inside Story of the New, Trillion-Dollar Space Race (New York: Crown, September 16, 2025). Hardcover: $32: 384pp. ISBN: 978-0-593-59411-7.
**
“Musk versus Bezos. China versus the United States. The government versus the private sector. Welcome to the rivalries and alliances defining the New Space Age. At stake? Billions of dollars, national prestige, and a place in the history books. Moon landings and space walks once captivated the public’s attention… A fleet of powerful new rockets is poised to take humans into the cosmos more than ever before.” This is an incredible over-puffery of this industry. The big rockets that are supposed to go further keep blowing up on-exit, and nobody has landed a human on the Moon (if not ever) than not across the past 50 years. “A lunar land rush has sparked a geopolitical competition among nations.” China is the main moon-landing operation at this time, not anybody in the US. “And the world’s two richest men have engaged in escalating brinkmanship, as NASA and the U.S. government embraces Silicon Valley innovation to jump-start the nation’s ambitions.” Is anybody in the US “ambitious” to go into space at the snail-pace we are inching there and back? The ambition is mostly with the billionaires who profit from failing to get anywhere while “trying”. “Space has entered a golden age, and this is just the beginning.” If this is the “golden age”; it might be the ending of space-travel attempts because repeatedly failing is not going to help the public have reasons to support a failing-mission. “Washington Post writer Christian Davenport chronicles the mad scramble to shape humanity’s off-planet future. He takes readers behind the scenes at NASA and the Pentagon as China’s aggressive moon mining plans raise alarms…” What? The only thing to worry about regarding China’s plans is that they are going to succeed in proving the US faked its “moon-landing”, such as by finding and bringing back rocks that prove US’s moon-rocks are fakes, or meteors that might have been chipped off the moon and brought to Earth, or the like. Inside the book, there is a mention that China’s plan to mine for “helium-3” is what’s troubling. This is an energy-source that apparently can be “worth $1,400 per gram”. The US seems to be lobbying to stop this attempt to actually profit from space-travel by evoking the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 that claimed “no nation could claim sovereignty over the moon.” Though noting that the Moon’s “resources” are available for exploitation. The remaining worry then is that being able to mine helium-3 would alter the “balance of power on Earth”. Readers are instructed to be afraid that China does not separate “civil and military space efforts”. Why would mining for an energy-source be militarily dangerous? Apparently, Trump voiced this concern, while claiming “NASA alone could not match China”, and so the administration had to sponsor billionaire space-racers. It seems they are inventing a motive to give billions to billionaires who openly sponsored Trump’s reelection. If China manages to take its space-program further this would finally make real progress in this field that has stagnated while the US has been writing fictions about its superiority in technology because of this ancient “achievement”.
“…Onto the sprawling Cape Canaveral factory where Blue Origin is working toward Amazon-style lunar deliveries, and onto SpaceX launch pads as Musk’s engineers log 100-hour weeks—leaving veteran astronauts marveling that they’re now operating ‘flying iPhones.’” This is a cryptic set of phrases. Why are iPhones flying? Searching for these torturous 100-hour workweeks, I found numerous exaggerations that Musk’s company is “running at ‘100 percent’”. I also found a reference to Musk’s claim that he “worked insane hours, didn’t sleep much, and often spent nights at the office.” This is used to explain why “SpaceX was notorious for churning through employees…” Musk has not quiet, so it seems likely that it’s his employees who are working these hours, while he might not be doing much besides what’s visible in the press. There certainly needed to be some documented proof beyond Musk’s own claims to support this statement, and yet the paragraph ends here.
“…What will happen as human ambition outpaces governmental regulation? Which country will win the race back to the moon? Was Donald Trump’s much-derided creation of the Space Force a surprising act of foresight, and will the U.S. finally make a real push to the moon and eventually toward Mars?”
I do not recommend this book. It’s a puffery of the US side of this space-race, when humanity really should be cheering for all other players.
--Pennsylvania Literary Journal: https://anaphoraliterary.com/journals/plj/plj-excerpts/book-reviews-summer-2025/