In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash by Jean Shepherd
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Book Reviews of In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash
Book Review: In God We Trust, all others pay cash
Summary: 5 Stars
An excellant book that reviews a typical midwestern childhood from the humorous viewpoint of an adult. A must read for every man over 55 but entirely unnecessary for women of all/any age.Book Review: Great book
Summary: 5 Stars
I was a bit surprised at the format, but my expectations upon receiving this book were not very high, but after reading it, it has more than exceeded my expatations.Book Review: good deal
Summary: 5 Stars
Was shipped very quickly, item was it excellent shape (brand new). All in all it was a good deal and I will buy from them againBook Review: Five Gold Hearts for my adolescent hero.
Summary: 4 Stars
`In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash' is written by one of my teenage idols, Jean Shepherd. I will never forget the Saturday evening in 1959 when I was tootling up and down the radio dial on my cherished `transistor' radio powered by four D cells, looking identical to the leather clad model owned by all the guys in our local Boy Scout patrol, of which I was assistant patrol leader. This was when my Boy Scout Junior High School activities were being replaced by my High School activities involving DeMolay, the Key Club, and High School Dramatics. But getting back to the radio.
I ran past 710 on the AM dial and heard this really odd recitation of near nonsense verse, and immediately thought it was a commercial, the typical artistic content of commercials being about two rungs higher than the average radio programming. I went up to the end of the AM dial and on my way back down, the high brow doggerel was still emanating from 710, which happened to be that very primordial talk radio ICON, WOR, out of NEW YORK CITY!!! And, the high faluttin doggerel was Jean Shepherd doing his yearly reading of Lewis Carroll's `The Hunting of the Snark'.
This was actually a simultaneous discovery, as I was quite familiar with the Alice stories, but I had never, up to this point, run across `The Hunting of the Snark'. I stayed with the reading until the end to hear Shep sign off with his classic theme, the `Kentucky Running Horse'.
I have been a fan of Jean Shepherd ever since, up to his death about 10 years ago. I consider myself quite fortunate to have met him in person twice. The first time was just before the publication of this book in 1966. My uncle took me to New York to see Shepherd perform at his Saturday evening broadcasts on WOR, live from the Limelight in Greenwich Village. Unfortunately, we didn't realize we needed reservations for seating at the performance, so we put in our names and garnered the very last standby seats, which put us at the entrance, about as far away from the stage as you could get in the small restaurant. At the news break in the middle of the show, after Shep revived himself with some potables, he asked the audience which of his various stories we might like him to recount when we went back on the air. Two or three audience members gave some suggestions and at last, from the very back of the room, he picked on me, whereupon I requested the story of the baseball game in Florida, a story I heard at least twice over the last six years.
Lo and behold, after some groundwork laid down after the station break, I realized that Shep was going into the story I requested. After the show, my uncle and I went up to the stage and Shepherd spoke to my Uncle, ignoring me, the short nebbish-like teen standing beside him. Introduced as someone who worships the ground on which he walks, he happily signed my scorecard from the New York DJ baseball game we saw earlier that day at Yankee Stadium, wherein Shep managed to hid a double and make out with the beauty playing umpire at second base.
This book came out shortly thereafter and I grabbed it up as soon as it hit the bookshelves. In a word, I was disappointed. The long and the short of it is that Shep's humor simply did not translate well from the spoken to the written word. I didn't even read the whole book until many years later, when Shepherd's screenplay for `A Christmas Story' hit the big screen, and this book was given as the source for the screen story. Not surprisingly, Shep's lines in the hands of talented actors and director worked like a charm. They still seemed to sit deflated on the page, with less life than when they came out of that ancient radio or came from that low stage at the Limelight.
My second encounter with Shep was about 28 years later at a speaking appearance at a local community college. Shep had since written three other books and was famous for several PBS dramatizations as well as his magnum opus, `A Christmas Story'.
This was a very different Jean Shepherd. He was talking about his craft rather than practicing it. His most revealing statement at the time that is highly relevant to understanding this book is the fact that what he did was not nostalgia, it was satire. That is, he is much more a precursor to Howard Stern than he is to Garrison Keillor, although if the truth be known, I strongly suspect that Keillor would agree that he is doing satire too.
As proof of Shep's statement, he revealed that his mother was an important Chicago lawyer and his father was an aloof, but very successful cartoonist. I also seem to recall that his childhood friends, Schwartz and Flick were pure inventions, but my memory could be failing on that point. Shep was actually very successful in school, leading to a rating in the Army as a communications specialist.
In fact, it was my experience with this book that made me cringe when culinary funnyman Alton Brown came out with his first book. Fortunately, in spite of some other missteps, Brown successfully ported his humor from the screen to the printed word.
If you ever develop nostalgia for Jean Shepherd, I suggest you first look up recordings of his show as a supplement to getting his books. By the way, relatively little of `A Christmas Story' actually comes from material in this volume.
Book Review: A great book for those who want to relive childhood
Summary: 4 Stars
Like many other reviewers, my first taste of Jean Sheperd came from seeing the film "A Christmas Story", and anyone who has seen that film will find many of these stories instantly recognizable. Although my childhood was a lot more recent than the situations in this book describe, this book nonetheless brought me back to those far more innocent days of youth. This book is very funny, and Sheperd's ability to describe scenes and situations is excellent. In fact, the set-up of these stories is often far more entertaining than the pay-off, which generally is something blowing up or some riot occuring. The greatest part of this book for me was the general description of the Christmas season, the 4th of July fireworks, the annual Thanksgiving Day Parade, the corny movie promotions, etc. It sounds cliche, but he really does put you right there and make you feel like you are actually experiencing all of these things.The only flaw in the book were the interludes. This book is made up primarily of a bunch of different stories which are not really interconnected with each other. To make this work as a "novel" Sheperd sets up scenes in the "present" tense that involve the main character (Ralph) reminiscing about old times with his childhood pal, Flick. All of these scenes have a very forced quality about them, and the dialogue sounds unnatural since it exists merely to segue from one story to the next. I probably would have given the book 5 stars if it was just a book of stories without the awkward interludes.