The Daily Show (The Book): An Oral History as Told by Jon Stewart, the Correspondents, Staff and Guests Hardcover – November 22, 2016 by Chris Smith (Author), Jon Stewart (Foreword), Grand Central Publishing

'The Daily Show' tells the surprising story of TV journalism made irresistible

The improbable story of how a group of comedians turned the world of political journalism on its ear is told from the inside.







At one point in Chris Smith’s capacious oral history of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart – recalling the short-lived agreement among late-night TV’s top hosts to go dark during a 2007-8 writers’ strike – jokingly calls Jay Leno, David Letterman, Jimmy Kimmel, Conan O’Brien, and himself “the five families,” as in the Mafia clans of "The Godfather." It was tongue-in-cheek, but also a rare and interesting slip. As a rule, few things make Stewart squirm like conceding that he’s got any sort of power.

So far as I can tell, he’s the one who instigated the move, then convinced the others to join in. That shouldn’t only remind us that Stewart works overtime to be one of the good guys; it also underlines his clout. Except to Comedy Central’s audience of “slackers and stoners,” as Bill O’Reilly huffily miscalled them, "The Daily Show" had barely been on anybody’s radar when Stewart took over from original host Craig Kilborn in 1998. Less than a decade later, broadcast TV’s late-night big enchiladas – all with much larger audiences than his – treated him as not only their peer but a moral compass.

Don’t blame me if I got entranced with picturing Stewart as Michael Corleone: the nebbishy college kid who somehow ended up as capo di tutti capi. True, this means imagining a Michael Corleone who is a) Jewish, b) impish, and c) on the side of the angels, three improbable new wrinkles. But Stewart’s ascent from a gadfly comic on a cheesy cable network to Generation X’s version of Walter Cronkite was fairly improbable too. No one would have bet on him to end up as the first late-night TV star since Johnny Carson to invent an original cultural role – one that, like Carson’s, is now the template his multiple successors try to emulate.

Unsurprisingly, he comes off awfully well in Smith’s cast-of-dozens chronicle. He has a few bad moments, true — including his eventual return to the air during that same strike, which some of his writers apparently never forgave him for. But he’s often the one who beats up on himself the most in these pages. With a few disgruntled exceptions, practically everybody who ever worked for "The Daily Show" –and Smith seems to have talked to almost all of them – lauds his decency, creative smarts, and constant drive to bring out the best they had on tap. One word that comes up an awful lot is mensch.

It’s easy to forget that Stewart’s takeover of Kilborn’s slot was on the bumpy side. Thinking they had a pretty good thing going without his creative input, the team he’d inherited balked at Stewart’s determination to reboot the show’s priorities from random spoofery to satire with a distinctive point of view – his. “What I needed most,” he says, “were accomplices.”

He found them soon enough, especially in the hires of writer-producers Ben Karlin and David Javerbaum. But the most prominent turned out to be Kilborn-era holdover Stephen Colbert, who took to the new regime like a duck to water. Considering that Stewart was an untested quantity who’d never been the boss of much of anything up to then, his sure-footed resolve seems remarkable, especially since Comedy Central execs were a long way from convinced their newbie was on the right track. The stakes just weren’t high enough back then for them to hit the panic button.

Thanks partly to then-correspondent Steve Carell’s antic pursuit of candidate John McCain in New Hampshire, the 2000 election (a.k.a. “Indecision 2000”) was the making of the new "Daily Show" –the moment when people outside Comedy Central’s target audience began to sit up and take notice, from New York’s sherpas of chic to D.C.’s own movers and shakers. Then 9/11 was almost its unmaking, or so it seemed at the time. “I don’t even know if we have a show anymore,” one staffer recalls "DS" co-creator Madeleine Smithberg saying.

Stewart didn’t go back on the air for over a week. When he did, his tearful monologue about his old view of the WTC towers being replaced by a view of the Statue of Liberty struck many people, me included, as, well ... sweet, but not what we wanted from Jon Stewart.

Wrong again. From then on, his comic persona – aggrieved, disbelieving, roguishly sassy – was merely one facet of how Stewart manifested in public. That was what made him the most engagingly human of guides to the Bush era’s iniquities along with one of the shrewdest, but only the puckishness of "The Daily Show" kept Stewart's moral seriousness in balance. When he tried to convert his dandy cockpit into a bully pulpit and did so without the protection of the show’s mordantly ironic context, he floundered.

That was the case when he went on "Crossfire" in 2004 to upbraid Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala for “hurting America” with their reductionist sparring. Widely admired at the time, this "Mr. Stewart Goes to Washington" moment hasn’t aged all that well; an America that could be damaged by" Crossfire"deserves to die of the common cold. On the other hand, "Crossfire" did get canceled just months later, and every little bit helps.

Six years later, a more ambitious attempt by Stewart to put his influence to concrete use – the “Rally to Restore Sanity And/Or Fear” that he and Colbert staged on the Mall before the 2010 midterms, simultaneously burlesquing Glenn Beck’s Tea Party rallies and hoping to peddle a rational alternative to the politics of hysteria – was an unmistakable misfire. Uncharacteristically for him, its goals just didn’t seem well thought out, leaving an unwelcome impression of vainglory. “I feel like it stood against everything we thought – we never thought we were anything but a TV show,” says executive producer Rory Albanese, who begged Stewart in vain to reconsider.

All the same, it’s hard to imagine either Dubya’s or Obama’s presidencies without Stewart and the invaluable palliative of The Daily Show. Sure, in a sense, he and it were preaching to the converted. But putting it that reductively misses the point. For one thing, there are limits to what satire can do, and helping people cope with lunacy is one job that’s inside satire’s wheelhouse. For another, like most good pop culture – not just the political kind – "DS"didn’t cater to an established community so much as it created one.

Attitudes that might have stayed amorphous and private otherwise got crystallized once Stewart defined how to express them, and knowing you were part of an audience of kindred spirits was exhilarating.

Colbert’s 2005 departure for "The Colbert Report," along with Ed Helms’s and Rob Corddry’s exits the following year, led to another bumpy transition. But that may have been a blessing in disguise – by providing a bigger platform for Samantha Bee’s talents, just to start with. Then a formula that might have gone stale otherwise got refreshed by new hires, from Larry Wilmore tolatter-day "Daily Show" MVP, John Oliver. Predictably, Oliver – who was on track to be Stewart’s successor until Comedy Central let him slip away to HBO – is the most entertaining contributor to Smith’s collage: “I’m English,” he moans of his emotional farewell to "DS." “I’m dead inside. I don’t have any echoes of feelings. What I have might be from ancestors centuries ago.”

The ultimate measure of the beneficial impact of "The Daily Show," of course, is how many of its onetime correspondents went on to front shows of their own – each with its own distinctive character but nonetheless all originating in a shared sensibility that was barely aware of itself as such before Stewart came along. "DS"was so obviously the signature TV series of its generation that this book’s rare carping voices are almost a relief, in that keeping-things-honest way. If damn near everyone else sounds a bit in awe of what their unlikely Godfather wrought, no wonder.

"The Lost City of the Monkey God" by Douglas Preston (Grand Central Publishing, 336 pages, )

Douglas Preston is best known for the Agent Pendergast novels he has written with Lincoln Child for decades, but he has also penned nonfiction books on a variety of topics, including one — “The Monster of Florence” — that delved into true crime and forced him to flee Italy. (You'll have to read the book to find out why.)

He and Child are among the best thriller writers working today. Their individual novels aren't as good as the ones they write together, but they're both at the top of their craft.
Preston's latest solo effort is a best-selling nonfiction book with the pulp title of “The Lost City of the Monkey God.” The name calls to mind H. Rider Haggard, Indiana Jones, the 1980s TV show “Tales of the Gold Monkey” and real life adventurers such as Percival Fawcett, whose tragic search for El Dorado, the City of Gold, was spelled out in David Grann's popular “The Lost City of Z” a few years back. (Grann entered the same Amazonian jungles as Fawcett, trying to find traces of the explorer or locate the city himself.)
The “Monkey God” title is fraught with expectations, especially since the author is best known for writing thrillers. The book only partially fulfills its promise.

So here's the nutshell version: For 500 years, tales have circulated about Ciudad Blanca, the White City, a fabulous civilization said to have vanished around the time of the conquistadors. Fiction writers, in particular, like to say that such cultures “disappear without warning,” despite the fact that they were susceptible to drought, disease and war — things that could easily decimate a population in the space of a few years. These cultures, Preston notes, aren't the equivalent of the Marie Celeste, the “ghost ship” found in perfect condition but with no one aboard. Instead, they show evidence of rapid but not immediate depletion that has more in common with “The War of the Worlds” than any great mystery.

Folks from the Old World who tramped through the jungle looking for treasure brought with them a host of diseases, including the measles and smallpox, that New World populations had never encountered and to which they had never developed antibodies. Disease swept through the tribes and cities, sometimes outpacing the actual arrival of the Spanish in each new province. Combine that with drought conditions, and civilizations shriveled up. Some diseases were estimated to be 90 percent fatal.

The White City, then, was only one of a variety of cultures that collapsed in the midst of disease … if, in fact, it was ever one actual city to begin with. The White City also was known as the City of the Monkey God, and although several people claimed over time to have found it, they lacked scientific evidence and “ground truth,” an archaeological method of proving out a claim by visiting and mapping the site. Legends abounded about a cursed city in Honduras, but even the most convincing evidence was tainted by a lack of provenance. One fellow brought a collection of artifacts with him from what he said was the White City, but he killed himself soon after, without telling anyone precisely where he'd been.
The big break in the White City case came not from on-the-ground explorers but from scientists using lidar, a surveying system that operates similarly to radar, except instead of bouncing sound off objects, lidar bounces laser beams off the ground. The airborne laser system is capable even of penetrating dense jungle foliage, and what it revealed were several sites in eastern Honduras that appeared to be old villages or cities.

In 2012, Preston joined an archaeological expedition to one of the sites. He writes of various hardships he endured, many of which were truly horrible. The area had not recently been visited by humans, and the animals betrayed no fear of them. The expedition members, however, feared spiders and bugs and monkeys … but especially the long, powerful fer-de-lance vipers, whose venom is deadly. At one point, Preston describes lying down in his tent only to feel the earth moving beneath him; countless bugs squirmed beneath the tent, adding to the misery of bites from flying insects.

The team soon came upon something extraordinary: a field of statues and other icons, all of them broken and positioned carefully in something like a grid. Most of the buildings were buried beneath dirt and growth, but it seemed the group had truly found a lost city. Or more than one. Was it the White City? Well …

Legends grow from kernels of truth. Sometimes those legends diverge wildly from reality; other times they hold close to the facts. You should read the book yourself to see what Preston thinks and to determine what you believe.

The final fourth of the book reads like something out of Michael Crichton's fiction. It's even scarier because it's real.

After leaving Honduras, the party split up, and people tried to settle back into their normal lives. Within a few days, though, some of them fell ill. They'd all returned covered with insect bites, but some of the bites wouldn't heal. In fact, they got worse over weeks and months, turning into bigger, uglier wounds. At first, doctors prescribed antibiotic creams, but when those didn't work, Preston and the others tried to find their own explanation. Eventually the doctors agreed: They all had a disease known as leishmaniasis.

You've probably never heard of that illness before, since it tends to affect poor people living in the tropics. The potentially fatal disease probably dates back to the dinosaurs, though, or to the breakup of the supercontinent of Pangaea. The most common form, Preston writes, is cutaneous leishmaniasis, which, as the name suggests, affects the skin. Indeed, recent cases have been reported in Texas — and Oklahoma. Preston's research indicates the disease, transmitted by insects, will spread rapidly in North America in the coming years.
Preston and friends seem to have contracted a different, and much worse, strain of the parasitic disease, one that could eat away their faces and bones, disfiguring them with ulcers.

Therein lies the moral I took from this book: Some places aren't meant for human habitation. Adventure fantasies rarely include mud, muck, torrential rains, predators, poisonous snakes, parasites and life-changing diseases. Real adventures in the jungle do.

Belgravia by Julian Fellows,Grand Central Publishing

Belgravia by Julian Fellows,Grand Central Publishing 

'Belgravia' transports readers into the classic conflicts of Victorian aristocracy

Julian Fellowes's first serial novel – 'Belgravia' – isn’t a book with great emotional depth, but what the story lacks in nuance it makes up for in a crackling plot.

In television series "Downton Abbey," the stock-in-trade of Julian Fellowes, the show's creator, was well-bred snobbery. In Belgravia, a serial novel now in hardback and the newest offering by Fellowes, "Downton" fans will find much of the same. The book is rife with schemers, social climbers, and snobs to rival even the Dowager Countess of Grantham.

Yes, "Downton" fans, if you mourned the end of Fellowes’s late-Edwardian TV melodrama, you’ll find the territory of “Belgravia” fairly familiar, in spite of its early Victorian setting. Class conflict is alive and well in the pages of this potboiler, as are meddling servants, well-kept secrets, and every reader’s favorite: star-crossed lovers.

“Belgravia” opens in 1815, at a glittering ball on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo. But before readers can get too comfortable, the next installment jumps ahead 26 years, landing in the exclusive Belgravia district of London, where the historically rich and the nouveau rich cautiously rub elbows. It’s here that the real drama of the story unfolds, as the upwardly-mobile Trenchard family faces the repercussions of a long-held secret that could cause their lives to unravel.

If the Trenchards have everything to lose, the other key players in this story, Lord and Lady Brockenhurst, have everything to gain. No spoilers here – “Belgravia” is crafted to keep you guessing from chapter to chapter – but let’s just say that like "Downton," “Belgravia” deals with the concerns of the rich: heirs, money, propriety, and society.




The novel also explores the upstairs/downstairs effect, although at least in this installment of what is sure to be another Julian Fellowes empire, the servants function more as plot devices than well-developed characters. Still, if you’re longing for a slippery servant of the O’Brien or Thomas variety, “Belgravia” won’t disappoint. And Fellowes provides enough of a sketch of the central downstairs characters so that readers may anticipate their reappearance in a sequel.

What readers might not be so keen to revisit is the somewhat relentless historical detail of this story, which seems to be interwoven with the plot more out of obligation than with an eye to thoughtful storytelling. Part of this is the medium, of course. With "Downton," the viewer was fully immersed in the visual details of the narrative. In “Belgravia,” the touches that help the 1840s come to life are painstakingly – and painfully – spelled out. That I could handle (though I did miss the costuming – my primary reason for tuning into "Downton" each week); the problem was that the heavy-handedness extended to characters’ emotions, which should be felt rather than explained.

No matter. While this isn’t a book with great emotional depth, what the story lacks in nuance it makes up for in a crackling plot, with Fellowes’s characteristic well-choreographed storylines and enough cliffhangers at chapters’ end to keep the story moving along. In fact, “Belgravia” was released not just in hardback, but also serially, for those who wanted to download individual installments, following in the great tradition of Charles Dickens, who set a high bar for nimble plotting.

Fellowes is no Dickens – meaning, his stories offer more in the way of fluff than they do in social commentary. Like "Downton," however, “Belgravia” does dabble in feminism; it’s the women who are the engines in this story, the women who get things done. Perhaps the greatest pleasure of the narrative is watching the chess game play out between Mrs. (Anne) Trenchard and Lady Brockenhurst, as they jockey for the upper hand while their mutual secret unravels. The younger Mrs. (Susan) Trenchard’s actions are more unsavory, but also prove surprisingly, if not somewhat cynically, strategic. The Dowager Countess of Grantham might not approve, though perhaps she’d give a nod to the young woman’s daring.

Or perhaps not. The Dowager is, of course, a snob – as are Fellowes fans after six uneven, but nevertheless delightful, seasons of "Downton." “Belgravia” is certainly the lesser of the two offerings – entertaining enough, but, like its nouveau rich characters, ultimately trying a little too hard.