Russell Brand: My Booky Wook

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: It Books; 1 edition (May 18, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061857807

Russell Brand learned early on to make a joke of fear and failure. From a troubled childhood in industrial Essex, England, to his descent into addictions to alcohol, drugs, and sex in the seamy underbelly of London, Brand has seen his share of both and miraculously lived to tell the tale. In My Booky Wook he leads readers on a rollicking journey through his disastrous school career, his infamous antics on MTV, and his multifarious sexual adventures. But this irreverent memoir is a story not simply of struggle but also of redemption, a testament to the difficulty of discovering what you want from life and the remarkable power of a bloody-minded determination to get it. My Booky Wook is a giddy trip through the brilliant mind of one of Britain's most valuable exports. 

  People who do not watch Russell Brand's comedy and have only seen his ridiculous antics in movies often base their judgments of his personality and talents based on how he looks. The first thing I always tell these people - looks can be deceiving. Yes, he looks sort of like a cocky crack-head, but he is actually an extremely intelligent, wittily ironic individual. His comedy is not mindless swearing or simply making faces at the audience. He actually uses big words, and it amuses me to wonder how many people actually understand what he's saying.
  This book was very similar to his comedy: life stories that are situationally humorous. I was actually more than a little surprised at the amount of drugs, alcohol, and random sex acts. And he was beautifully frank about it all. Disturbingly so at times, to be honest. The other thing that surprised me was the ending. I thought we were going to at least reach the beginnings of his super-stardom, but he really only broached his initial fame in his hoyden days. Apparently his more well-known antics are to come in the second book.
On a writing scale, I'm going to give the book a B-. It was filled with a lot of British slang, which is perfectly fine, but there are times when a gloss of a certain word really should have been provided. He gave some, but not all. Also, his stories also bounced back and forth along the timelines. While I understand that telling a life story in order is an almost insurmountable challenge, unless you're writing as it happens, events happening around a certain time should largely kept together. Telling me a story about something that happened previous to the time period of which you are writing but telling me when we are talking about is just confusing. Finally, I felt that his problems were mostly his own fault. It wasn't like his life was excessively harder than the average persons, or like he didn't have at least one person who loved him in his life. In fact, he had many. His deterioration is inexplicable and therefore frustrating to me, but I'm not a terribly sympathetic individual. He obviously had some personality disorders and is now getting help. So good for him.
  Overall: B
  Not quite what I expected, but still funny at parts and often thought provoking.