The Bassoon King
Art, Idiocy, and Other Sordid Tales from the Band Room
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3.8 • 8 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
From the three-time Emmy nominated actor, climate activist, and author of Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution—Rainn Wilson’s memoir is about growing up geeky and finally finding his place in comedy, faith, and life.
For nine seasons Rainn Wilson played Dwight Schrute, everyone's favorite work nemesis and beet farmer. Viewers of The Office fell in love with the character and grew to love the actor who played him even more. Rainn founded a website and media company, SoulPancake, that eventually became a bestselling book of the same name. He also started a hilarious Twitter feed (sample tweet: “I'm not on Facebook” is the new “I don't even own a TV”) that now has more than four million followers.
Now, he's ready to tell his own story and explain how he came up with his incredibly unique sense of humor and perspective on life. He explains how he grew up “bone-numbingly nerdy before there was even a modicum of cool attached to the word.” The Bassoon King chronicles his journey from nerd to drama geek (“the highest rung on the vast, pimply ladder of high school losers”), his years of mild debauchery and struggles as a young actor in New York, his many adventures and insights about The Office, and finally, Wilson's achievement of success and satisfaction, both in his career and spiritually, reconnecting with the artistic and creative values of the Bahá’í faith he grew up in.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The title of this book notwithstanding, Wilson is better known for his role in TV's The Office and as the mastermind of the Soul Pancake website and media company than for being a former fledgling bassoonist. This memoir takes readers through his life and acting career, including his early, formative years in Nicaragua with his then recently divorced and remarried father. Wilson was born in 1966, and when he was five, the family moved to Olympia, Wash., and later to a suburb of Seattle, where he grew up playing Dungeons and Dragons as well as the bassoon, and participating in the Model U.N. (his "precursor" to acting). Through his digressions on favorite albums, unremarkable jobs, and his various acting teachers, Wilson's story is engaging. He eventually attends acting school at NYU during the 1980s. His description of gritty, raucous Manhattan at that time is spot-on, with memories of drug and alcohol escapades, muggings and robberies, bombing on Broadway (in a play, that is), and finally marrying the love of his life, becoming a father, and rediscovering his Baha'i faith (the latter explained in an informative addendum). Readers will relish his experiences as Dwight Schrute (who contributes the book's foreword) in The Office snagging the part, the show's debut, the actors and writers, and behind-the-scenes reminiscences.
Customer Reviews
Great.. then not great.
Excellent first 2 thirds. A great story well read.
Abysmal final third disappearing down the well of self-promotion and religious preaching.