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Failure Is an Option: An Attempted Memoir
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)

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Published:
Penguin Publishing Group 2018
Status:
Available from OverDrive
Description
“Writing this funny requires immense talent.”
AV Club
H. Jon Benjamin—the lead voice behind Archer and Bob's Burgers—helps us all feel a little better about our own failures by sharing his own in a hilarious memoir-ish chronicle of failure.

Most people would consider H. Jon Benjamin a comedy show business success. But he'd like to remind everyone that as great as success can be, failure is also an option. And maybe the best option. In this book, he tells stories from his own life, from his early days ("wherein I'm unable to deliver a sizzling fajita") to his romantic life ("how I failed to quantify a threesome") to family ("wherein a trip to P.F. Chang's fractures a family") to career ("how I failed at launching a kid's show").
As Jon himself says, breaking down one's natural ability to succeed is not an easy task, but also not an insurmountable one. Society as we know it is, sadly, failure averse. But more acceptance of failure, as Jon sees it, will go a long way to making this world a different place . . . a kinder, gentler place, where gardens are overgrown and most people stay home with their pets. A vision of failure, but also a vision of freedom.
With stories, examples of artistic and literary failure, and a powerful can't-do attitude, Failure Is an Option is the book the world doesn't need right now but will get regardless.
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Format:
Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read
Street Date:
05/01/2018
Language:
English
ISBN:
9781524742171
ASIN:
B074LTY5JD
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Citations
APA Citation (style guide)

H. Jon Benjamin. (2018). Failure Is an Option: An Attempted Memoir. Penguin Publishing Group.

Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

H. Jon Benjamin. 2018. Failure Is an Option: An Attempted Memoir. Penguin Publishing Group.

Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

H. Jon Benjamin, Failure Is an Option: An Attempted Memoir. Penguin Publishing Group, 2018.

MLA Citation (style guide)

H. Jon Benjamin. Failure Is an Option: An Attempted Memoir. Penguin Publishing Group, 2018.

Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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Grouped Work ID:
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Needs Update?:
No
Date Added:
Jun 12, 2018 18:11:09
Date Updated:
Dec 06, 2020 02:46:29
Last Metadata Check:
Mar 25, 2024 00:26:00
Last Metadata Change:
Nov 19, 2023 11:02:00
Last Availability Check:
Mar 25, 2024 00:26:01
Last Availability Change:
Mar 25, 2024 00:26:01
Last Grouped Work Modification Time:
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OverDrive Product Record

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title
Failure Is an Option
fullDescription
“Writing this funny requires immense talent.”
AV Club
H. Jon Benjamin—the lead voice behind Archer and Bob's Burgers—helps us all feel a little better about our own failures by sharing his own in a hilarious memoir-ish chronicle of failure.

Most people would consider H. Jon Benjamin a comedy show business success. But he'd like to remind everyone that as great as success can be, failure is also an option. And maybe the best option. In this book, he tells stories from his own life, from his early days ("wherein I'm unable to deliver a sizzling fajita") to his romantic life ("how I failed to quantify a threesome") to family ("wherein a trip to P.F. Chang's fractures a family") to career ("how I failed at launching a kid's show").
As Jon himself says, breaking down one's natural ability to succeed is not an easy task, but also not an insurmountable one. Society as we know it is, sadly, failure averse. But more acceptance of failure, as Jon sees it, will go a long way to making this world a different place . . . a kinder, gentler place, where gardens are overgrown and most people stay home with their pets. A vision of failure, but also a vision of freedom.
With stories, examples of artistic and literary failure, and a powerful can't-do attitude, Failure Is an Option is the book the world doesn't need right now but will get regardless.
reviews
      • premium: True
      • source: Publisher's Weekly
      • content:

        March 26, 2018
        In this rambling collection of random anecdotes, comedian Benjamin (the voice of characters in the Archer and Bob’s Burgers TV series) tells of his life failures. Stringing together short chapters better suited for standup routines, Benjamin provides fodder for the cliché that learning from failure provides a way forward in life. He can be a hilarious storyteller who fires off witty one-liners (looking back on playing catch with his neighbors, he concludes that “the curveball is the oral sex of baseball. It’s delicate and precarious”), but even those grow tiresome after a while. In a chapter titled “The Early Failure Years,” he attributes his occasional dizziness and his incredible laziness to his mother’s being given nitrous oxide during his birth; later, he lists his various business failures, including an idea for a restaurant called “Leftovers,”which would cut down on food waste and provide cheap meals by serving leftovers. In one of his funnier observations (from a chapter subtitled “How I Failed Hosting a Bar Mitzvah”), Benjamin points to the adolescent character of the present U.S. president: “Teens are a grisly combination of suppressed rage, sexual confusion, vanity, and unrelenting incompetence... just imagine Donald Trump but more agile.” On stage, these anecdotes might work well, but on the page they are cloying and tedious.

      • premium: True
      • source: Kirkus
      • content:

        April 1, 2018
        Voice actor and stand-up comedian Benjamin structures a free-wheeling memoir of his rather uneventful life around the many failures he has experienced.The author, who voices the title characters of Archer and Bob's Burgers, grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he watched a lot of TV and recorded interviews with himself. He bounces lightly through his childhood in chapters such as "The Sleepover (and How I Failed to Have One)" (cold tent) and "The Teen Years (How I Failed Hosting a Bar Mitzvah Party)" (the DJ played AM oldies). Then he moves on to stories about failing to move to France, get a graduate degree in Holocaust studies, sell a TV pilot, and ride a motorcycle. Every time Benjamin starts to get into potentially heavy emotional territory, he leaps out and moves onward with a joke. The most effective chapters of the book are those that give a sense of the author's trials and tribulations as he recognizes his shortcomings and goes on with a shrug. These chapters are interspersed with brief intermissions, most of which are padding. Benjamin also initiates long--and increasingly annoying--interchanges of letters with scholars, asking them to explain how failure expressed itself in history, to which they respond with polite confusion. He inserts a sophomoric collection of line drawings of failed sexual positions and a more successful set of failed pickup lines: "Do you work out, or are you just naturally tense?"; "Has anyone ever told you you look like my mother?" Benjamin's descriptions of self-humiliation can get uncomfortable for readers, as in the case of a protracted chapter involving diarrhea, a rental car, and a hotel.More a collection of gags than a thoughtful examination of a life, the book is best experienced in bits and pieces in order to avoid the impression of being trapped in an elevator for hours with a stand-up comic.

        COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

popularity
610
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“Writing this funny requires immense talent.”
AV Club
H. Jon Benjamin—the lead voice behind Archer and Bob's Burgers—helps us all feel a little better about our own failures by sharing his own in a hilarious memoir-ish chronicle of failure.

Most people would consider H. Jon Benjamin a comedy show business success. But he'd like to remind everyone that as great as success can be, failure is also an option. And maybe the best option. In this book, he tells stories from his own life, from his early days ("wherein I'm unable to deliver a sizzling fajita") to his romantic life ("how I failed to quantify a threesome") to family ("wherein a trip to P.F. Chang's fractures a family") to career ("how I failed at launching a kid's show").
As Jon himself says, breaking down one's natural ability to succeed is not an easy task, but also not an insurmountable one. Society as we know it is, sadly, failure...
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