Great holiday gift idea: Born Standing Up, the new memoir by Steve Martin.
It’s somehow both brisk and sentimental, with penetrating notes on how he developed his act — starting with his childhood days bicycling to work at the Disneyland magic shop. As Martin describes his 18 stand-up years, “Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent in refining, and four were spent in wild success.”
It must be a good book: The New York Times has reviewed it three different times.