Scan barcode
a2lulu's review
4.0
I enjoyed these memoir vignettes - great snapshots of his life and perspective. I enjoy his drawing style and found a lot of his stories charming, funny and compelling. Also helps that he’s a similar generation as me and lives in the Bay Area, so lots of shared cultural reference points…
lattelibrarian's review
3.0
Such a fun graphic memoir! Told through a variety of art styles and timelines, this makes for a fun slice-of-life with equal parts history lesson and humor. Definitely a great addition to our bookshelves here at the library!
rebus's review
0.5
Fred Noland is the prototypical modern Uncle Tom and also the typical modern 'liberal' who comes across more like a crypto-fascist (he is as entitled and white as Joel Christian Gill, Chuck D, and the execrable Garrison Keillor clone, Ross Gay). Your life isn't posh? Dude, you live in the fucking Bay area...
Noland is also the worst sort of hipster beatnik douche in appearance (but despises a HS friend for sounding off on cultural appropriation), and his greatest white pose is that of being a cyclist, which he has absolutely no talent for and sees as a sort of metaphor for the marathon that is life. This pinhead used to smoke and hasn't a clue as to why he was no good at cycling, using it instead as a form of spiritual pursuit (a fail as well, a fetish or affectation, much like with our old pal Matt Burks here in Madison, WI wearing his Italian cycling hat!). The art is astonishingly bad, the spelling often wrong, and the lettering is often so small that I needed a magnifying glass in addition to my readers.
Fred's dad was a mentally ill preacher who smoked and Fred himself is a moron who admits to being raised on television. He describes the modern line up of shows, Blackish, Insecure, Atlanta and Woke as improvements, but they too are awful, lack the nuance he claims they have, and depict the VERY small minority of blacks who are upper middle class (5.8% of blacks reach that, far fewer than the 20% overall). He's loved by the likes of the New Yorker because his work is as safe and as white as Cosby (the show and not the man).
So now Fred has the same sort of platform from which to preach as Chuck D, expressing anger that his monied and entitled privilege to travel has been curtailed by the lockdowns. He speaks boldly of firing friends (which is what assholes do because they don't know how to work things out), yet seems to have no real friends because he was a faux punk from the second wave who is totally inauthentic and didn't understand what the movement was REALLY about (he was a narcissist who would let crowd surfers get hurt rather than support stage diving). He even repeats the garbage propaganda that nurses are the best our society has to offer (who do you think steals half of the Oxy sold on the black market?). Anyone who believes Kamala has done good or has worked for Google has to be a tool.
He looks down upon everyone who hasn't raised themselves up from a bootstrap as he believes he's done (how very Reagan of you, Fred). He eats white, drinks beer, loves architecture as though he's Ayn Rand, hates day drunks, and is the sort of dimwit and self professed loner who walked around Austin merely guessing about places and somehow failed to see the 10s of thousands of bats that come out each evening just past sunset (I saw them in 2006). It makes his reflexive hatred of Trump seem more than a little moronic, since he's the sort of crypto-fascist who destroyed the Democratic Party and any real liberalism in this country. He's also enough of an idiot to have gotten the vax--because of Chuck D's confused messaging about it no doubt--and even worse, he's raising his kids Jewish, and their religion is what codified world fascism. Hell, he's so right wing that he was angry that a BLM protest blocked his access to a store, and he defends cops as necessary. He's also the sort of psychopath who has gone around cutting locks on bikes, the vigilante justice so common among right wingers.
I can also scarcely understand how someone who rode twice the miles I did became fat. The newsflash for Fred should be that EVERYONE IS blacker than you, dude, and it's a shame that his stutter didn't shut down his ignorant voice before he ever got started.
Noland is also the worst sort of hipster beatnik douche in appearance (but despises a HS friend for sounding off on cultural appropriation), and his greatest white pose is that of being a cyclist, which he has absolutely no talent for and sees as a sort of metaphor for the marathon that is life. This pinhead used to smoke and hasn't a clue as to why he was no good at cycling, using it instead as a form of spiritual pursuit (a fail as well, a fetish or affectation, much like with our old pal Matt Burks here in Madison, WI wearing his Italian cycling hat!). The art is astonishingly bad, the spelling often wrong, and the lettering is often so small that I needed a magnifying glass in addition to my readers.
Fred's dad was a mentally ill preacher who smoked and Fred himself is a moron who admits to being raised on television. He describes the modern line up of shows, Blackish, Insecure, Atlanta and Woke as improvements, but they too are awful, lack the nuance he claims they have, and depict the VERY small minority of blacks who are upper middle class (5.8% of blacks reach that, far fewer than the 20% overall). He's loved by the likes of the New Yorker because his work is as safe and as white as Cosby (the show and not the man).
So now Fred has the same sort of platform from which to preach as Chuck D, expressing anger that his monied and entitled privilege to travel has been curtailed by the lockdowns. He speaks boldly of firing friends (which is what assholes do because they don't know how to work things out), yet seems to have no real friends because he was a faux punk from the second wave who is totally inauthentic and didn't understand what the movement was REALLY about (he was a narcissist who would let crowd surfers get hurt rather than support stage diving). He even repeats the garbage propaganda that nurses are the best our society has to offer (who do you think steals half of the Oxy sold on the black market?). Anyone who believes Kamala has done good or has worked for Google has to be a tool.
He looks down upon everyone who hasn't raised themselves up from a bootstrap as he believes he's done (how very Reagan of you, Fred). He eats white, drinks beer, loves architecture as though he's Ayn Rand, hates day drunks, and is the sort of dimwit and self professed loner who walked around Austin merely guessing about places and somehow failed to see the 10s of thousands of bats that come out each evening just past sunset (I saw them in 2006). It makes his reflexive hatred of Trump seem more than a little moronic, since he's the sort of crypto-fascist who destroyed the Democratic Party and any real liberalism in this country. He's also enough of an idiot to have gotten the vax--because of Chuck D's confused messaging about it no doubt--and even worse, he's raising his kids Jewish, and their religion is what codified world fascism. Hell, he's so right wing that he was angry that a BLM protest blocked his access to a store, and he defends cops as necessary. He's also the sort of psychopath who has gone around cutting locks on bikes, the vigilante justice so common among right wingers.
I can also scarcely understand how someone who rode twice the miles I did became fat. The newsflash for Fred should be that EVERYONE IS blacker than you, dude, and it's a shame that his stutter didn't shut down his ignorant voice before he ever got started.
More...