Bill Geist

Bill Geist’s breezy coming-of-age memoir Lake of the Ozarks: My Surreal Summers in a Vanishing America focuses on his teenage years in the 1960s working at his bombastic uncle’s Arrowhead Lodge. Populated with colorful characters and peppered with humorous stories, anecdotes and observations, this book, like most of Geist’s work, is always amusing and often laugh-out-loud funny.

The Ozarks is, and has been, the vacation destination of most of the people I lived with for most of my life. It was the honeymoon destination, Senior Class sneak destination, and summer getaway for millions of people from the vast middle part of the country starting in the 1950’s and it is still going strong. It started out homespun kitschy and is now as sophisticated of a place to go as is Nashville. In fact, if you want to see or hear country music acts - this is the place most people show more from my home go. Nashville is too big city. Branson, Missouri is authentic country. When I saw the reviews for this new book, I had to read it.

The book turned out to be a nice nostalgic trip down memory lane for the author, and I thought it would be for me. It wasn’t. I wish he had written more about the area and why Bagnell Dam was built in the first place turning a back water area, the Ozarks, into one of the most visited tourist spots in the U.S. THe book started out that way when the author writes about the early tourist entrepreneurs of the area and what they did to try to get people to drive to an out-of-the-way area in the vast middle of the country served by poor roads, but it soon becomes another teen-boy-obsessed-with-sex book making this an average read for me.

This book has one of the best designed dust jackets I have seen in years. If the text isn’t stellar the dust jacket is, and the home photographs included add to the book.

The writing is lighthearted and at times funny, but somehow it lacks the homespun folkseyness I wanted. In short this isn’t a great work of nonfiction but it isn’t a waste of time either. show less

Bill Geist has been doing pieces for CBS Sunday Morning for years. He usually profiles interesting (quirky) people and places, and his sense of humor makes me smile. His son Willie Geist is currently one of the co-hosts on the third hour of the Today Show, and is featured on MSNBC's Morning Joe. He clearly inherited his father's sense of humor.

Just in time for Father's Day, they have written a book that I dare say most of us can relate to: Good Talk Dad: The Birds and The Bees...And Other show more Conversations We Forgot To Have, which pokes fun at the fact that Bill never gave Willie 'the sex talk'. Come to think of it, they never had deep conversations about other important things either. Sound familiar?

Early on, Willie describes embarrassingly being baptized as a 19 year-old in a church service, along with several babies sleeping peacefully in their mother's arms. He asks:
"Couldn't they have done this in a private ceremony before the service, as they do with the technical awards at the Oscars? In a ceremony earlier today, nineteen-year-old Willie Geist was given the sacrament of baptism."
If that made you giggle, you'll love this book as much as I did. Bill and Willie alternate telling stories from their lives, some of which differed depending on whom was telling it.

Bill and his wife Jody decided to send Willie to summer camp. But not to the camp that all Willie's friends were going to; Willie went to Camp Carson, "where convicted nonviolent offenders were sent to serve out their sentences", unbeknownst to Bill and Jody. That wasn't in the brochure. The campers had to decide whether they were safer backing the Latin Kings or the Spanish Gangster Disciples, who, at night, slashed each other car tires as a "prank".

When Bill received a $10,000 check to write a book, he bought a brand new red Jeep to celebrate. Willie loved his dad's "instinct to take that ten-thousand-dollar book check and spend every nickel of it as fast as you could, like a rapper who just got his first record deal".

Some of the funniest stories involve that Jeep. Jody taught Willie to drive on that Jeep, and then when it was all beat up and on its last legs, Jody drove down to Nashville to accompany Willie to college, but they had to make many stops along the way, coaxing that Jeep and stopping to repair it and feed it antifreeze several times before making it to Vanderbilt.

Bill and Willie shared a love of the New York Yankees and inappropriate humor. When Willie's basketball team held a year end banquet and discovered that the special guest was not a famous New Jersey Nets player but the team mascot, the boys pounded the poor mascot with rolls from the table. Some dads disciplined their sons, yanking them out of there. Bill laughed hysterically, thinking it was pretty darn funny.

There are serious moments in here, such as when Bill finally tells his children (after ten years) that he has Parkinson's disease. They found out when they received emails from people after reading about it on Bill's Facebook page. They suspected something was wrong, but never realized the truth.

I loved the stories about aunts and uncles and grandparents; it reminded me of my own family. And when Willie becomes a dad, his stories about his children, Lucie and George, are utterly charming.

This is a perfect book to read this Father's Day, or to give as a gift. It is funny, heartwarming (but mostly funny) and Bill and Willie are terrific writers; their voices come shining through as if they sitting next to you on the couch, recounting their stories aloud. It's like S@$t My Dad Says, but without all the cursing. show less

Here we have the 1990s distilled into a book: pro bass fishermen, American Gladiators, Phil Donahue, and more. It's more or less about unusual entrepreneurs, and it's fascinating to read this from the point of view twenty years later. A lot of this is still going strong, and what isn't has been replaced by something else. Geist's humor is interesting, because sometimes it sounds like he's making fun of his subjects, but most of the time he seems generally enthusiastic. If you'd like to do a show more bit of time travel to the fads of a couple decades ago, this is the book for you. I had fun. show less