June 1, 2021
Everyone's favorite stoner recalls his childhood, youth, and first stirrings of Hollywood success. "My friends are thrilled when their kids don't shit all over their floors," writes Rogen. "As an adult, I get little to no praise for doing the same." It's a characteristic line; Rogen leans heavily on the seven words with which George Carlin made so much hay, with a dash of Borscht Belt shtick ("The hardest part about being Jewish is...the grandparents") and some occasional high-concept material. The author reveals that he inherited a touch of his father's Tourette's mixed in with his mother's gentleness, the blend of which resulted in a kind of easygoing ADHD best treated with lashings of marijuana. When he learned that a teenage friend had smoked pot with her brother, he asked how it felt. "It burns your throat like crazy," she replied, to which Rogen responded, "Awesome." Other drugs come and go in these pages--MDMA, for one, which can certainly make a pitch meeting difficult. And then there's this: "If you've ever been grocery shopping while an inhuman amount of hallucinogenic mushrooms are [sic] aggressively taking over your system, you know that shit ain't easy." Indeed. Rogen's not inclined to badmouth, though from time to time, his critical bone is tickled ("all the movies to come out of Project Greenlight fucking suck butt"). He also makes it clear, through encounters with the likes of Kanye West, Nicolas Cage, and George Lucas, that Los Angeles is the world headquarters of eccentricity bordering on madness. As a good Canadian, too, Rogen can't help but get in a few digs at the rest of the country, as when he considers the reluctance of the federal government to legalize pot, "because it's just too effective a way to persecute minorities and keep prisons full, which are things that they love to do in America." Fans of Rogen will enjoy his laid-back, whimsical memoir.
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October 8, 2021
This memoir of sorts by actor, comedian, writer, and producer Rogen is filled with both laugh-out-loud tales from his life and surprisingly insightful essays about societal ills. Rogen describes how he began performing stand-up in Canadian clubs and bars at 13 (his mother drove him to gigs), and happily he includes some of his earliest jokes, many of which revolved around his Jewish grandparents. After realizing that his strengths didn't lie in stand-up, Rogen turned to movies and television; here he details fascinating run-ins with everyone from Tom Cruise to Kanye West to Nicolas Cage. Rogen describes codirecting the controversial film The Interview, which centers on the fictional assassination of Kim Jong-un; in real life, the North Korean government threatened retaliation against Sony if it released the film. Rogen gets opinionated, too; he criticizes Twitter for doing little to combat the spread of antisemitic messages on the site and he makes clear his hatred for Donald Trump. He devotes much space to his daily weed habit, calling it "super fun" and the source of his insights; for some readers, these stories may wear thin. VERDICT Entertaining and funny, this work will delight fans of Rogen and his cohort.--Lisa Henry, Kirkwood P.L., MO
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