My experience with Lewis Black is primarily from his Back in Black segments on “The Daily Show” and a couple of his stand up albums. These performances are typified by yelling righteous indignation at the right and the hypocrisy of the system, and this (audio)book certainly featured some of that with the likes of Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Jimmy Swaggart getting the brunt of the bashing. What I did not expect was such a detailed description of his spiritual journey to a very nuanced faith. I would not have pegged him for someone who would spend so much time searching for and dissecting a belief structure that works for him. Instead I figured he was either an atheist or disinterested agnostic. He lost most of this new found respect for his complexity by spending a chapter describing how he came to believe the predictive abilities of a psychic, but I guess you’ll have that with drama majors.

An extra bonus was learning that Black and Mark Linn-Baker of Cousin Larry Appleton fame put on a show together while they were in the graduate drama program at Yale. They even performed the show for the audiobook. It turned out to be terribly unfunny, but to learn something of the history of Mark Linn-Baker was priceless.