Joe BerkowitzRezensionen

Somehow, I ended up with an advanced review copy of this book, which won't be published until next month. I've wracked my brain in an attempt to figure out where I got it, and the best I can do is that I bought it from one of the booksellers who operate on the streets in Greenwich Village around New York University. One of the benefits (or curses, depending on one's view of these things) of living in a publishing capital is that one occasionally gets an early look at interesting books.

And an interesting book this is: because it is an uncorrected proof, it contains a number of spelling and grammatical errors which I'm sure a wary copyeditor has long since corrected; likewise, I'm confident a judicious fact checker caught the fact that Anthony Weiner, one of our more, uh, colorful politicians here in New York City, was never a United States Senator, but rather a Congressman. Before he disgraced himself, that is.

In any case, as its title suggests, this book reports on the world of pun competition, a lively subculture of whose existence I was entirely ignorant. I take exception to the use of the modifier "irreverent" in the title, as I think Mr. Berkowitz actually approaches this world with the reverence it is due, which is to say some, but maybe not too much. While this is a book, I suspect, written for a younger audience (there is a lot of exposition on the social relationships between the real-life characters, and some of it is a bit too chatty for my tastes), and I am an older person, I still found this book compelling in parts, and sufficiently interesting that I read all but the final twenty pages in one compulsive gulp. Incidentally, if you are young and interested in breaking into the world of comedy writing and performing, this book passively supplies an interesting look into the way that milieu operates

Using the conventions of sportswriting, Mr. Berkowitz manages to make the actual pun competitions he attends, and in which he participates, genuinely exciting. He moves his narrative at a brisk pace, making what would potentially induce torpor into a something that reads like, well, like the best descriptive writing about closely fought sporting events, which I suppose is what the pun competitions are.

I like the idea that books like this still have an audience, and therefore still get published. Despite observing several times that puns are generally regarded as the lowest form of comedy, Mr. Berkowitz shows, and doesn't tell--another of this book's strengths--the high but quirky intelligence engaged in participating in a pun competition. The contestants in this world are clearly both intelligent and interesting people, and they're well worth reading about.

The book chronicles the author's cheese journey, from ignorant amateur to cognizant connoisseur, as well as America's rise in the cheese world. Following the author's revelation at an establishment that he has been leading a most basic cheese life, he tours across the world expanding his cheese lexicon and gaining first-hand experience on artisanal cheese. He meets with producers and mongers, visits farms and contests, and attends parties and seminars.
It's a solid book on the cheese world, bringing the reader along for the tasting and adventuring with its attractive descriptions. The cover's nice, featuring a drawing of the empire state building stabbing a piece of cheese.

American Cheese: An Indulgent Odyssey Through the Artisan Cheese World by Joe Berkowitz is a very highly recommended book about cheese. How could a book about cheese not be worthy of five stars? "Cheese is literally heaven. It’s what happens after milk sheds this mortal coil and ascends to a higher plane of existence."

I've been excited to read American Cheese since I first heard about it and it is worthy of my every expectation. There is no doubt that Joe Berkowitz loves cheese so he is the perfect choice to share the world of American artisan cheese with the rest of us. What is even more entertaining is that he does so in an informative and humorous fashion.

After his first encounter with an artisan cheese tasting and experiencing Rogue River Blue at Murray's Cheese in New York, Berkowitz began to explore the artisan cheese culture. He visits tastings, cheese mongers, makers, affineurs, cheesemonger competitions, dairy scientists, cheese celebrations, and restaurants with cheese carts. There is a whole cheese culture that celebrates cheese. He volunteers at Murray’s Cheese shop, attends the Cheese Ball and meets Madame Fromage, follows the California cheese trail, he visits Cheeselandia, and talks to dairy scientists at Wisconsin’s Center for Dairy Research. It is a plethora of cheese happenings and cheese information!

If you love cheese, and anyone who is looking into a book called American Cheese: An Indulgent Odyssey Through the Artisan Cheese World likely does, as you read be sure to have a pen and paper handy so you can write down all the new cheeses to taste. I had to scramble looking for something to write on almost immediately so I'd like to give the rest of you a heads up. I am thrilled to learn that "According to Dr. Ahuja, those among us who can endure limitless dairy products have a genetic mutation that keeps our lactase intact into adulthood. In other words, cheese lovers are technically X-Men." Yes!

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of HarperCollins.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2020/10/american-cheese.html
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3585070361

I received an advance galley through NetGalley.

American Cheese is my kind of book. Author Joe Berkowitz had a near-religious experience with artisan cheese that awoke him to the diverse flavors and textures of the world's cheese, resulting in a country and world-spanning odyssey to understand the joys of modern cheese and the industry as a whole. It's enlightening. It's laugh-out-loud funny through. Perhaps most of all, I felt as if I had connected with a friend who gets it.

I love cheese. I chronicle every cheese that I try and constantly seek out new experiences. It has become one of my prime (and most expensive) hobbies. I've had many of the cheeses he viscerally describes in this book, and discovered many more to add to my wish list (and yes, there is an actual wish list). Even more, he gets to experience and describe incredible things I never will, like volunteering at Murray's Cheese in NYC, attending and eating his way through the Cheesemonger Invitational, hanging out with cheese influencers like Cheese Sex Death (one of my favorites online), traveling the California Cheese Trail (totally a goal of mine, though as a native Californian, I was appalled that the author didn't know California made cheese), and attending world-class cheese events in France and Italy. Through his words, I was vicariously there, and left desperately craving the cheeses he describes.

Throughout everything, he is easy to relate to, modest, and hilarious. Some choice quotes include:

"I wanted to run outside doing full Kermit-arms and scream for everybody to try this cheese right now, which probably wouldn't be the weirdest thing anyone overheard on Bleecker Street that day."

"Cheese is literally heaven. It's what happens after milk sheds this mortal coil and ascends to a higher plain of existence."

Seriously, if you love cheese, get this book.

If you're going to read about obsessive word play competitions, I'd recommend Word Freak on Scrabble competitions instead. That's an experience. This book is reasonably well written, but once you know what competitive punning is about, there's not much more to learn. I did enjoy the discussion of the TV shows @Midnight and Bob's Burgers, where the puns were/are actually funny. But what this mainly demonstrates, over and over, is that generating puns in high quantity in short time does not lead to anything all that interesting.½

Some people like puns. Some people hate puns. And some people absolutely LOVE them. AWAY WITH WORDS is about the third group.
Last fall, my daughter and daughter-in-law gave my husband a game called Punderdome. Two words are drawn from a deck and the players have a short time to think of puns utilizing those words. The winners are those who come up with the best ones. Our pun party was very lively and a lot of fun.
Punderdome is also the name for a Brooklyn-based pun competition, one of several such gatherings in the US. Jay Berkowitz is an active participant. AWAY WITH WORDS tells how the competitions are formed, how they operate, and how people prepare to compete in them. It’s a lot more intense than most people would expect.
The participants get to know each other because of their frequent interaction. Many of the punsters work as writers for tv shows, movies, or newspapers or comedians. Some newspapers thrive on utilizing puns in their headlines and stories. At the competitions, a category is announced and the contestants have ninety seconds to come up with as many puns as they can. They then present them to live audiences and are judged by the audience’s response.
The latter half of the book has many examples of winning (and some not so funny) entries.
Since there is so much overlap among the competition and the competitors, the book does become repetitious

Bill Watterson, in his Calvin and Hobbes strip, gave Calvin magazines on gum chewing to mock the niche magazine industry (An exchange...Hobbes: "I can't believe there's a magazine for gum chewers." Calvin: "Heck, there must be at least a dozen such magazines. ... Each appeals to a different faction. 'Chewing is high gloss, literate and sophisticated. 'Gum Action' goes for the gonzo chewers. 'Chewers Illustrated' aims at the vintage gum collectors, and so on. ... Each one encourages you to think you belong to an elite clique, so advertisers and appeal to your ego and get you to cultivate an image that sets you apart from the crowd. It's the divide and conquer trick." {excited face}. H: "I wonder what happened to the melting pot." C: "There's no money in it.") Obscure? I read Joshua Foer's book Moonwalking with Einstein, in part about extreme memory competitions. Talk about obscure...

And then there's this...about pun competitions.

I am an inveterate punster (yes, I could have said in vertebrate...), so when I saw this, I had to read it. It was painful. I love a well-crafted story leading up to a beautiful groaner of a pun. These competitions are about rapid fire punning to random categories. The champs groan them out and the audience response clap-o-meter determines who wins them. Berkowitz litters his narrative with examples.

Painful.

I'll stick to my Feghoots.

I really love this kind of microhistory (I think that might be the correct genre?). Basically I love learning about tiny niche hobby communities and the people who inhabit them. And this is the nichest of the niche -- who even knew pun competitions existed? I certainly didn't, despite having lived for several years apparently just a short distance from one of the main sites of such competitions in Brooklyn, NY. And there's another site in Milwaukee? I repeat, who knew?

When I get a chance, I will sit down and rewrite this review to contain a suitable number of puns. Unfortunately, I'm not very good at being punny on the fly.

At the end of the author's year-long exploration of puns and competitive punning, he felt somewhat let down and was ready for a break from wordplay. I kept asking myself why anyone would ever feel anything but let down after spending a year working at pun-making. It's supposed to be fun!½

Waterboarding the English language

Puns are bottomless. Comedian Steve Allen used to collect the so-called best and publish them in books, but he knew he could never have the definitive collection, because they just kept coming. At the Algonquin Round Table in the 1920s, the best and the brightest vied to outdo each other, for about ten years. Given a word, they had to employ it in a sentence. From this came such deathless utterances as: We wish you a meretricious and a happy new year. Now, there is a small non-chain of pun events all over the USA, where people pay to be tortured by contestants who fly in from around the world. It’s the new millennium.

Away With Words follows the punning of a cadre of New Yorkers on this non-circuit. They work out locally, and make the road trip to Austin where the oldest US event is their World Series of punning. The book reads like a television reality show. It progresses chronologically, episode after episode, has the same setbacks and euphoric moments, the same angst and second-guessing, and culminates in Oz. It is mostly background, mostly detail, mostly description, with several bouts of thick action interspersed. You get to know the contestants, possibly more than you wanted to, just like reality tv, and you get to read endless puns.

Two things about the puns. Because these are performance contests, they are intense personal efforts, not simply tossed off, unexpected witticisms in conversation. Sometimes they are too intense. Be prepared to read a pun and not get it. (A lot of it has to do with delivery and timing, and books are not the best medium for that.) Sometimes the contestants actually have to explain the pun to the judges or the audience, which is a real buzz-kill. The other thing is what Joe Berkowitz correctly calls pun fatigue. Twenty puns in a row on the same topic can be, can I say – punishing.

Berkowitz learns the ins and outs, eventually moving up a notch in the hierarchy of winners. He has entered a tiny universe unknown to most mortals, and like its television equivalents, this show is an education in how this microuniverse works, warts and all. The bottom line appears to be that standup comics or people who use mental dexterity in what they do and how they live make for naturally performing punsters. They are more observant, and quicker with associations. They have honed attitudes and timing that can lift a bad pun into a shriek of laughter. So it’s not necessarily something just anyone can take up and succeed with. Fortunately.

David Wineberg

4/5