New book: Me of Little Faith
by SouthernFriedInfidel | Published on July 18th, 2008, 7:42 am | Arts
A few years ago, I decided to start writing my own memoir of my experiences with religion. I thought that my story could be of interest to both the general public and the publishing industry. So far, the publishing industry has expressed zero interest in me... but it appears to have thought that Lewis Black's input of the same sort was worth a try. "Me of Little Faith" recently came out, and I was happy to receive it as a birthday gift last month.Because I had read his earlier book, "Nothing's Sacred," I approached this new volume with some trepidation. While Black is a terrific stand-up comic, I found his earlier book rather tedious and stopped reading it -- most likely only a few pages before "it got really good."
This current volume, I did manage to get all the way through. Though not without some difficulties. I find it surprising to read this fellow saying at one point that he has less religion than any other person in America... yet he also says he believes psychics, that his dead brother had a hand in making him successful -- apparently he has a whole raft of weird supernatural beliefs floating around in his head. I guess he's just not a fan of organized religion as such.
At the start of the book, there are some very funny riffs on his life as a Jewish kid. His comparison between his experiences at Hanukkah and the Christian neighbors' Christmas celebrations was hilarious. But when he settled down to discussing his adult life, the fun seemed to slowly melt away. Moving from one sort of mysticism to another, there was nothing to really interest me... Black seemed to merge seamlessly into the morass of all Hollywood sorts -- unable to believe his wondrous good fortune and not willing to ascribe it only to luck and a lot of hard work.
Toward the end, he did get in some good licks on the hugely funny world of televangelism. So it wasn't a total loss. I think that reading this, one can indeed come away with a decently accurate view of the man's ideas on religion and the supernatural. Whether you would find that view interesting at some level... that would be for the reader to decide, I suppose. Myself, I found it unremarkable, and just a little disappointing. I rather expected a little less mysticism out of this guy. Odd, really.
