Customer Reviews

7 Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin

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If you are interested in George Carlin, first read all his books, watch his DVDs and CDs and you will have it all...he said so himself, everything is there. If you want further information his own autobiography is the place to start. I enjoyed his autobiography but felt it left out much and this book to its credit does fill in a bit of the information I was hoping to find out which pertained to the business of his career , his switch in style and look etc..which I felt George glossed over too quickly in his own memoir.

The first nearly 100 pages of this book however were pretty grueling going and if you've read George's own book could be skipped...go to where he is a working stand up after his partnership with Jack Burns and the rest of the book has many interesting points to make and the author is good at pointing out how Carlins career relates to other events in media and our culture.

Bottom line, if you have all the DVDs, CDs and books and want more...then by all means invest...but ONLY after you have exhausted the complete Carlin authored material.

Mr. Sullivan's biography of George Carlin is a commendable overview of the great comedian's life but falls short of delving too deep into his troubles with drugs or his relationship with his beloved wife, Brenda. If you're expecting loads of laughs, you're in for a disappointment. The author, however, does well in covering the comedian's New York City childhood, his brief stints in radio as well as his quick rise and struggles once he headed to California. He also does a fine job explaining how The-7-Dirty-Words bit eventually wound up in front of the Supreme Court and how the nine old men voted. Such autobiographies as Steve Martin's "Born Standing Up" and Carlin's own "Last Words" are more gritty and graphic in describing the life of a stand-up comic than Mr. Sullivan's biography. Maybe, some day, another author will make a more in-depth effort on this highly influential comedian. But for now, if you are an admirer of Mr. Carlin's body of work, you'll probably enjoy the author's epitaph.

I just finished the audiobook version of this work and learned a great deal about one of my favorite comedians. 'Last Words' is a great book, but '7 Dirty Words' added so much more to my understanding of Carlin's life and career. James Sullivan did a great job with this project and Carlin fans are indebted to him for it.

Way too much boring names and dates, just start reading chapter 5 and on. Those are the moments that you want to capture and learn about Carlin, not all the jumble mumble to make the book a little thicker so it look decent on the shelf.

James Sullivan has made a wise strategic decision in his approach to *7 Dirty Words*: he doesn't attempt to replicate George Carlin's stand-up comedy in his own writing, that job being amiably fulfilled in Carlin's own books. What he does do is offer an insightful account of how Carlin's comedy evolved from his childhood (with evocative descriptions of, say, his time at Catholic summer camp) to his early apprenticeship work on radio and TV, all the way through his landmark albums and HBO specials. Sullivan has seemingly spoken to every one of Carlin's agents and managers, and he has a finely tuned sense of the business of comedy and how it changed over Carlin's lifetime. And while Sullivan spends less time than might be expected delving into Carlin's psychology -- he's not the sort of biographer to put his subject on the couch -- *7 Dirty Words* is immensely valuable. It gives a nitty-gritty account of how Carlin, with wit and courage both, blasted open the doors of what was permissible to say onstage and on the air.

i ordered this on dec,7th and was promised it by dec 24th so i could give it as a gift. Well i didn't receive it till jan, 3 201. ill let who ever reads this to decide whether to deal with this company or not.