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kareila_booksThis is not a book written by John Cleese. This is a series of transcriptions of interviews and lectures that he gave at Cornell University starting in 1999, when he was named a visiting professor-at-large.
To be fair, he is a very smart man and he does have some interesting things to say. I just would have liked to read a proper narrative of his instead of a series of disjointed transcriptions.
About a third of the book is taken up with one section that is just Cleese sitting with the screenwriter William Goldman and letting him ramble on endlessly about how hollow and desperate Hollywood is. Of that, I was only interested in the two pages Goldman spent talking about his experience writing The Princess Bride, because I was one of those people who was fooled by his abridgment tactic and went to the library looking for more books by S. Morgenstern.
Apart from that, Cleese's main interests seem to be philosophy and religion, but he doesn't present any original thoughts on those subjects, only recollections of works by other thinkers.
To be fair, he is a very smart man and he does have some interesting things to say. I just would have liked to read a proper narrative of his instead of a series of disjointed transcriptions.
About a third of the book is taken up with one section that is just Cleese sitting with the screenwriter William Goldman and letting him ramble on endlessly about how hollow and desperate Hollywood is. Of that, I was only interested in the two pages Goldman spent talking about his experience writing The Princess Bride, because I was one of those people who was fooled by his abridgment tactic and went to the library looking for more books by S. Morgenstern.
Apart from that, Cleese's main interests seem to be philosophy and religion, but he doesn't present any original thoughts on those subjects, only recollections of works by other thinkers.
