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Summary
Summary
Davy Rothbart is looking for love in all the wrong places. Constantly. He falls helplessly in love with pretty much every girl he meets--and rarely is the feeling reciprocated. Time after time, he hops in a car and tears across half of America with his heart on his sleeve. He's continually coming up with outrageous schemes, which he always manages to pull off. Well, almost always. But even when things don't work out, Rothbart finds meaning and humor in every moment. Whether it's humiliatinga scammer who takes money from aspiring writers or playing harmless (but side-splitting) goofs on his deaf mother, nothing and no one is off-limits.
But as much as Rothbart is a tragically lovable, irresistibly brokenhearted hero, it's his prose that's the star of the book. In the tradition of David Sedaris and Sloane Crosley but going places very much his own, his essays show how things that are seemingly so wrong can be so, so right.
Author Notes
Davy Rothbart is a frequent contributor to This American Life and a variety of magazines, the founder of Found Magazine and the editor of its various bestselling anthologies, and the author of The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas . He was born and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he still lives. My Heart Is an Idiot is his fourth book.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Searching for love, fulfillment, or just the next great adventure, Rothbart, a frequent This American Life contributor and the creator of Found magazine, has crisscrossed America numerous times and always finds, if nothing else, a good story. In his debut essay collection, a hit-and-miss compilation of failed love and harebrained schemes, he ping-pongs between the poignant and the crude, sometimes with little or no segue. The tone is set right away with "Bigger and Deafer," wherein Rothbart details the elaborate childhood pranks he would play on his deaf mother, including intentionally misinterpreting phone calls and yelling, "hey, bitch!" to her back at the top of his lungs. Often Rothbart continues his essays unnecessarily, like SNL skits that run a few beats too long. In both "99 Bottles of Pee on the Wall," about his Howard Hughes-like penchant for urinating in glass bottles while recuperating from an ankle injury coupled with a growing hatred for a series of sham literary contests, and "Shade," the story of his lifelong obsession with a character from the film Gas, Food, Lodging, there's a sense of narrative excess, despite Rothbart's gift for storytelling. The standout is "New York, New York," detailing Rothbart's bus trip from Chicago to Manhattan following 9/11. Striking a balance between gravitas and humor, he adds fresh perspective to a subject that can be overdone. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A collection of personal essays by a man with a knack for stumbling into alcohol- and lust-fueled predicaments. Rothbart (The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas, 2005) is the creator of the fanzine Found Magazine, which features the provocative and poignant notes people leave in coffee shops and on sidewalks. On the evidence of these pieces, his life is similarly haphazard. In "Shade," his pining for a woman who resembles a beloved movie character leads him to a long-distance relationship and a disastrous road trip. In "Tarantula," a one-night stand ends with him in a swimming pool with a dead body. And in "What Are You Wearing?" a random caller becomes a regular phone-sex partner. In small doses, Rothbart's say-yes-to-anything attitude and self-deprecating tone is entertaining and engaging. The best piece, "99 Bottles of Pee on the Wall," tracks his obsession with a scam artist who runs a series of fraudulent literary contests; the slow burn of his outrage--and growing crush on a female author who got taken--is smartly paced, and he's candid about his quixotic pursuit. But taken together, there's an overall pattern to his responses that gives these essays an off-putting, manipulative aspect. Rothbart's proclaimed modesty actually comes packaged in loads of hyperbole--every girl he falls for is the most beautiful girl in the room, every night was the most amazing night ever, every dumb drunken thing was the dumbest, most drunken thing he could have done. Such posturing makes the poignant tone of "New York, New York," about a bus trip he took right after 9/11, feel engineered for emotional effect. And it makes a more serious work of reportage about a man he claims was wrongly convicted for murder less convincing than it should be. Rothbart has admirable wit, but his sensitive-wiseacre persona gets repetitive.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
My Heart Is an Idiot is an at-turns hilarious, surprising, and often touching collection of what Rothbart, creator of Found magazine, has learned by being, one imagines, open to go anywhere, do anything, and lend an ear to anyone. That his heart gets more than an honorable mention will come as no surprise after tearing through a couple of these appealing essays, as the author gamely, repeatedly picks up and skips town, bubbling over with loving hopefulness for an endless stream of enchanting females. Among the collection's other main characters are the U.S. itself and its tangle of roads and thoroughfares well worn by Rothbart and, in one of the most forehead-slapping contributions, the hack selling fake literary prizes to writing hopefuls to whom Rothbart anonymously sends bottle after bottle of his own urine. Admittedly a driftless thrill seeker when it comes to falling in love and settling down, Rothbart is simultaneously grounded in midwestern humility, and his style is irresistible in its conversational plainspokenness. A hero for the story, its tellers, and its lovers.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE 18th-century English theologian William Paley once wrote that the principle that will keep a man in everlasting ignorance is contempt prior to investigation. What a loser. Truth be told, I have lived a life plenty comfortable with my disdain toward hunters and hunting. And then along comes Steven Rinella and his revelatory memoir, "Meat Eater," to ruin everything. Unless you count the eternal pursuit of the unmetered parking space, I am not a hunter. I am, however, on a constant quest for good writing. "Meat Eater" begins with a promise - "This book has a hell of a lot going for it, simply because it's a hunting story" - and then delivers ceaselessly, like a Domino's guy with O.C.D. This is survival of the most literate. Graphic, sure, but less so than an episode of "CSI," and with more believable emoting. Early on, Rinella, the author of "American Buffalo: In Search of a Lost Icon" and the host of his own show on the Sportsman Channel, explains why he hunts: "I was hungry in the wilderness and here came a few tons' worth of caribou, 50 yards out and closing fast. In a moment like that, there is no time for emotional dawdling. It is a time for unerring judgment. It is a time for speed, both mental and physical. It is a time for action and precision and discipline. It is a time to do what millions of years' worth of evolution built us to do. And in the act of doing it, you experience the unconfused purity of being a human predator, stripped of everything that is nonessential. In that moment of impending violence and death, you are gifted a beautiful glimpse of life." I'm sure the reference to evolution wrecks it for Sarah Palin and her fellow field-dressers, but this - genuine passion, humbly conveyed - is when nonfiction slaughters fiction and hangs it over its mantle. The text is relentlessly vivid and clear, and not just when recounting a river otter eating a bluegill: "It hissed at me when it noticed me, the sound coming through a mouthful of fish as though the animal were playing a harmonica." The commitment, effort and ardor are unflinching. What Rinella does to prepare a muskrat trap when he's in fifth grade takes five more steps and is infinitely more loving than whatever I did as a fifth grader to break in my baseball glove. With every chapter, you get a history lesson, a hunting lesson, a nature lesson and a cooking lesson, and most of the chapters end with "tasting notes" on various game. Rinella's palate is discerning. He describes the gristle of a beaver tail as "a combination of beef jerky and Styrofoam." Readers will never ask themselves, "What is he talking about?" The only question they might have is, "Why isn't this guy the head of the N.R.A.?" As a 21st-century human being who hunts, Rinella can be as conflicted as a corner man in the 12 th round of a fight he knows he should have stopped in the ninth. He later kills the same river otter ("I made about 50 bucks so that some lady I'd never meet in a country that I'd probably never visit could have a nice coat"), but the sins against nature are rare, and in the hands of a less gifted writer, the less appetizing parts of this book would seem thoughtless, barbaric and irredeemable. But again and again, his descriptive powers trump gruesomeness. Here's how he depicts wandering into a mountain lion kill: "At the end of the drag marks was a dead buck with picked-clean bones that had been buried with leaves and dirt beneath a scrubby little oak. The hide was in pieces but still connected to the carcass here and there, like a person who passed out drunk in bed without getting completely free of his clothes." Some things I still do not understand, like the need to turn a dead bear's head toward the camera before your buddy snaps a photo. Some things I will never understand, like choosing to spend months anywhere with your family, let alone in the woods. Rinella ends his book with what might be an audacious claim: "To abhor hunting is to hate the place from which you came, which is akin to hating yourself in some distant, abstract way." This is a tough sell, if he were selling. But he's just sharing, and for the reader brave enough to set aside his contempt prior to investigation, "Meat Eater" offers an overabundance to savor. JUSTLY or unjustly, "My Heart Is an Idiot," Davy Rothbart 's first book of essays, labors under three different comparisons: 1) his pieces against one another, which is the cross-reference to bear of any collection; 2) this book against the organic riotousness of his creation, Found magazine, an accumulation of notes, letters and photos that have been discarded by others; and 3) "My Heart" against "Meat Eater," both of which happen to be reviewed in the same space by the same guy. "My Heart Is an Idiot" is primarily an inventory, however frank, of women Rothbart fell in love with from across a bar, picked up, discarded and then picked up again, recounted in longing, rueful prose. A boyfriend of a girlfriend's mom "was wearing a nice suit but his face was sunburnt and dirty, giving him the vibe of a homeless guy at a job interview." A dead elk Rothbart and another motorist have to move off the highway is as "heavy as a coffin filled with ice." When the prose works, it sings. When it doesn't, it passes out face first on a friend's couch. It seems far-fetched that Rothbart, a frequent contributor to "This American Life," would consistently stumble upon characters so memorable and fully formed, let alone remember entire conversations. But such is the modern personal essay from the House of Ira Glass. It should be called something else, other than nonfiction. "Re-enactmention," perhaps. Wherein a predominantly true story is made more complicated in the service of art. There's gratuitous naughtiness, the liberal dollop of pop-culture references and needless versions of a phrase like "wet eyes" when "tear-filled" would do. But you can overlook all of that in a good story, and there are more than a few. "Human Snowball," in which Rothbart surprises a bartender in Buffalo for Valentine's Day, should have been the template for the other tales of his self-repairing heart. "How I Got These Boots," his encounter with a hitchhiker on the way to the Grand Canyon, is a three-page demonstration of less is more. In his most impressive piece, "The Strongest Man in the World," the pursuit is justice. And the relationship with the opposite sex is refreshingly platonic, because this time, it's with the mother of a friend who's in prison for a murder he probably didn't commit. A lot happens to Rothbart and around him, because he continually seeks out people, places and things. He is adventurous in a sedentary world. At times, he telegraphs the all too serendipitous reunions with those he meets on his travels, and you can see them coming from paragraphs away. But when he's en route - by car, by truck, by bus - he's at his most appealing. "New York, New York," about a two-day trip on Greyhound from Chicago to Manhattan immediately after 9/11, is the best example, if for no other reason than he is moving away from the girl, not toward her. And there is no bar. Mercifully, it has been raised. 'In that moment of impending violence and death, you are gifted a beautiful glimpse of life.' Bill Scheft is a writer for "Late Show With David Letterman." His most recent novel, "Everything Hurts," is being made into a film.
Library Journal Review
Rothbart claims he falls in love easily, whether with a pretty woman at the airport or one who randomly calls his hotel room, and that is why his "heart is an idiot." Rothbart (contributor, NPR's This American Life; Found: The Best Lost, Tossed, and Forgotten Items from Around the World) is addicted to new experiences, and these 16 original essays (described on the copyright page as forming a "memoir" of "stories.grounded in truth") document his chance encounters. In "Human Snowball," Rothbart recounts a trip to Buffalo to meet a girlfriend and the diverse group of companions he gathers along the way, including Chinese restaurant owners and a 110-year-old man. In other pieces he details encounters with people on a bus ride to New York City after the 9/11 attacks, a family he meets when he runs out of gas in the desert, and his friendship with Byron Case, a man jailed for murder. VERDICT Rothbart has a good heart.ÅThe descriptions of his sexual encounters are graphic, butÅthese essays show a man full of life who does not hesitate to say hello to a stranger.-Joyce Sparrow, Kenneth City, FL (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.