The Way I Heard It With Mike Rowe Review
Mike Rowe seems a character from another era. A time of schmaltz. A time of goofballery. A better fourth dimension? Okay, boomer, sure. Rowe's nonfiction collection and mini-memoir The Style I Heard It is pretty cornball—and brainy and non a piffling chip hopeful. This is not so like shooting fish in a barrel to pull off in publishing's quarter-century of putting out self-aggrandizing, unhinged, cringe-inducing celebrity screed. Rowe adroitly avoids this trap past making the main subject of his memoir someone other than himself. A lot of someones.
Rowe, who is best known for hosting the Discovery Aqueduct reality show Dirty Jobs, is also the writer and co-creator of the hit podcast The Style I Heard It. If you lot are of a certain historic period and didn't abound up an urban hick in some coastal ghetto of the heed, yous may remember radio broadcaster Paul Harvey. Harvey, whose vocalisation sounded something like a duet between a banjo and a chorus of ten-year-olds scraping their fingernails across a wet chalkboard, came on twice a day for about five or ten minutes on a broadcast format known at the fourth dimension equally "the radio." Harvey'due south kickoff show of the day was news with mildly patriotic political commentary. Ah, but the day's second installment. As Paul Harvey might say, that . . . that . . . that . . . that was "The Rest of the Story."
Even my paternal granddad, a homo who barely cracked a smile in all the years I knew him, a human being who busied himself from dawn till dusk with a perpetual to-do listing, as if the earth would vanish if he stopped working, did have a couple of daily breaks. When he did, Grandpa would pause to wolf down a baloney sandwich (ane piece on 2 pieces of Sunbeam breadstuff, no condiments), chug some of my grandmother'southward treacly tea, and heed to Harvey on WHMA out of Anniston, Alabama. He and I shared this enthusiasm, and we would sometimes listen together.
In like style, I was an early subscriber to Rowe's podcast, T he Due west ay I H eard I t. Information technology took listening to merely one episode for me to realize what Rowe was upwards to. He had channeled Harvey'southward The Remainder of the Story to create the form of his podcast—well, basically copied it wholesale—but institute a way to put a mod spin on it with a smidgen of irony and a bear upon of bawdiness.
Rowe'due south podcast is pure amusement, and information technology soon developed a large subscriber base. The success of the podcast led to Rowe'southward book, The Style I Heard It, based on the pod, with a bit of Rowe'southward memoir interspersed betwixt the chapters.
The Mystery of the Vanishing Woman
Each mini-essay in The Way I Heard Information technology presents a vignette of a historical figure, usually, but not ever, a hero of concern, the civilization, or government service. Rowe throws in a villain, an anthropomorphized nonhuman, or a hapless, famous failure every now and again for spice. The twist is that we don't detect out who the figure is until the terminal paragraph, sometimes the final sentence.
Rowe uses all sorts of devices to obfuscate the identity of his subjects, but mostly he employs the tried and true method of calling them by a childhood nickname, their existent name rather than a well-known pseudonym or stage name, or by referring to them in misleading emblematic terms, such as "the popular star," when talking about a sure classical music cracking of the early nineteenth century, or "the young officer," when referring to a certain American traitor we have commemorated with the statue of a bodiless boot draped over a cannon upward Saratoga way.
Part of the fun is in trying to guess who Rowe is talking about before he gets to the end and reveals all. More often than not, he's done a good job of hiding the identity, and provides us with a pleasant "aha" moment. Well, information technology's usually more underwhelming than that. Telephone call information technology a "Huh. How nearly that?" moment.
Rowe skips through time and presents history in bite-size chunks. He has no overriding narrative, no calendar other than a sure gustatory modality for subjects who brandish an aspect of showmanship, which Rowe, a consummate showman himself, identifies with.
He mercifully doesn't try to put things in a larger context. These are people you already know or take heard near, and Rowe trusts readers to supply the big picture. What Rowe excels at is imparting some tidbit of backstory that near people won't know, or if they did once know, will have mostly forgotten.
The best of the vignettes for my money is his affiliate titled, "The Mystery of the Vanishing Adult female." Hither Rowe explores a wonderfully macabre and mostly obscure affiliate in a famous woman'due south life. One day the wife of a well-known British barrister and former armed forces man vanished. It was thought she'd thrown herself into a pond to drown, just no trunk was discovered. The story took the British papers past storm. Her husband was suspected of foul play.
Arthur Conan Doyle even hired a medium to see if he could contact her in the afterlife and go the scoop on her murder. But it turned out that she was very much alive and staying at a hotel in Northward Yorkshire. The thing was, she had no thought who she was. She'd checked in under the name of her husband'south mistress, Nancy Neele, and said she was visiting from Due south Africa.
This Miss Neele had no ID, no memory of how she had gotten to the hotel, and no idea of why she had identified herself as Miss Neele. Merely even though this Miss Neele didn't know who she was, the detectives assuredly did. She was the woman on the front page of every paper in United kingdom. She was the elusive subject field of what had been the largest manhunt in English history.
"For twenty-four hours," the adult female said, "I wandered in a dream, and and then found myself in Harrowgate every bit a well-contented and perfectly happy adult female who believed she had but come from South Africa."
Who was she? Hint: she's later became famous—but not for existence the object of an investigation, as she was hither. This is probably my favorite of Rowe's misdirection, considering I had no idea of this bit of the subject field's background, and that story, in itself, is a complete little tale that doesn't even need the revelation of the bailiwick'south name to maintain interest.
Rowe's mini-biographies are a flake uneven, but none are complete duds. Rowe deploys a variety of deceptions to hide the subject's identity, but his go-to is the allegorical fakeout. When we think he's speaking literal truth, it turns out he'southward tacitly comparing the person, the person's job, or the person's life, to another situation entirely, but one that conforms to it by extended analogy. His take on Ed, the famous actor, is one of these.
Before the election, the brothers had bickered over the economy, immigration, taxes, race relations, and, of course, the edge. Like many in the entertainment concern, Ed'southward little brother saw the election'due south outcome equally a fait accompli. He not only believed that the Democrat would win—he believed information technology would happen in a landslide. All his friends said then. All the pundits said and then. Besides, the Republican culling was a buffoon. A dangerous, unpredictable buffoon.
Rowe is, of course, not talking almost current politics. And it is refreshing when, at the end of the affiliate, Rowe refuses to speak, or, in this example, to write downward, Ed'southward atrocious brother'south name, trusting that nosotros know it is not worth repeating.
Amusing and Polished
Rowe cut his comedic teeth non on his show D irty J obs, which came later in his career, but at the QVC dwelling shopping aqueduct, where he got his big break as a night host. There, he was fired twice, and somewhen left on his own accordance, mostly because he could never seem to deliver his pitches straight. In that location are some hilarious YouTube videos of Rowe hawking cherubic porcelain figures on a seesaw, the "Katsak," a bag lined with crinkly plastic meant to provide pleasure for your pet, and a somewhat creepy collectible doll all available for the low, low price of $29.95 (plus shipping and handling).
Yet while Rowe'due south lack of seriousness doomed him at QVC, it creates a buffer for the heartfelt, but often sappy, sentiment of The Fashion I Heard Information technology. Rowe is an old-fashioned celebrity who counts information technology every bit a bespeak of pride that he ever remains in character in public. He paints paeans to his parents and his Baltimore upbringing. He tells a ghost story about a haunted San Francisco area mansion where he lived rent-free during his stint at QVC.
Rowe's list of horrible reality shows that he has either hosted or narrated is impressive—and a reminder of the gloriously stupid days of bad cablevision. Even so he makes it clear that he learned his chops on these shows, and was steadily becoming better and better at what he did as a result. Like well-nigh actors who make a living at their arts and crafts, Rowe developed early on the ability to put up with show biz nonsense and rejection while keeping his eye on the long game.
In a similar manner, a great deal of the fun of The Way I Heard It is the juxtaposition of the horrible pun or the moment of absurdity with the appeal to sentiment and eye-brow erudition. Reading Mike Rowe is a fleck like encountering a master salesman at a gunkhole testify in your local borough middle.
The volume is a pitch for a certain amused, easy style of looking at life, and a tale told past a smart, polished communicator who has figured out how to tug at your heartstrings and whack your funny bone without trying to stick a knife in your dorsum in the procedure. The twists are gentle, informative, diverting—and designed to exit no permanent scars.
At least that's the way I read information technology.
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Source: https://thefederalist.com/2020/01/17/mike-rowes-latest-book-will-delight-your-nostalgic-funnybone/
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