Whips and quips in comic’s essays
Tom Segura is constantly on the verge of going too far, straddling the line for the lulz. It’s effective, but it keeps the casual fan of his comedy at arm’s length.
That is, until he wrote a series of autobiographical essays titled “I’d Like to Play Alone, Please” and gave the bookish world a window into his heart.
An absolute troll from the start, Segura directly addresses readers and engages with his audience as if he’s up on stage performing a set. Open, funny and insightful like a Marc Maron interview if it was just one comedian talking to himself.
“I’d Like to Play Alone, Please” is a stereotypically masculine tour de force with farts, football and a third thing starting with “f ” that’s not fit to print, occasionally interrupted by completely disarming, heartfelt sentiments.
Amid reflections on his life and self-aware toxic masculinity is a spattering of famous people Segura has met, each one including a selfie before you can finish thinking, “Pics or it didn’t happen.”
Some chapters won’t be new for fans of Segura’s stand-up — he writes the tale of his accidental overdose nearly exactly the same way he tells it onstage. But Segura also offers a peek into his life, revealing how a kid spending wild summers in Peru and making bad science projects becomes a podcaster and touring comedian with four Netflix specials. His essays explore his childhood, times that he has bombed and which of his sons is his favorite and why in well-thoughtout prose that tells each story in a quirky, inherently Segura manner.
The book is funny, surprising and even sweet at times. Some of the most offensive sections result in the best punchlines, though it’s up to the reader
to determine if it’s worth it. Hardcore Segura fans will be right at home, while others caught unaware will be demanding refunds. Segura is polarizing that way. Don’t worry, though — mostly it’s just digs at his friend and fellow comedian Bert Kreischer. — Donna Edwards, Associated Press
In ‘Mini-Forest Revolution,’ author Hannah Lewis shows how a forestation method developed by Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki is helping groups around the world restore ravaged areas to dense forests that create green zones and help mitigate global warming by absorbing carbon.
Mention the word “forest,” and many people think national park in scope, but a forest planted in the Miyawaki method can thrive and make a positive environmental difference in a space the size of about half a dozen parking spaces. That’s because in a group, trees shade and cool the land below and allow it to retain more water, which helps the trees and allows beneficial insects and animals to thrive.
On a forest floor, temperatures can be as much as 20 degrees cooler
than the surrounding area. Replace an asphalt surface with a mini forest and the temperature differential can be 50 degrees or more.
Critical to the Miyawaki method is choosing the right trees for the location. And with rising temperatures, the trees planted need to be adaptable to temperatures that may be much warmer.
India, England, France and the Netherlands are leading the world in creating Miyawaki forests, many of them small enough to replace what were hardscrabble play areas at schools.
Planting trees is regularly offered as a solution to global warming because trees absorb carbon; in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide absorbs and holds heat. But the solution is not as simple as planting any available tree — some tree species are far better than others at absorbing carbon.
In a tidy 224 pages, Lewis simplifies the science of planting trees in a manner that produces the maximum benefit. And that’s an urgent issue in the U.S., where Lewis notes we have just one-fifth of the original forests that were here when Europeans first arrived.