My Well-Balanced Life on a Wooden Leg

by Al Capp and TurtleMe

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0936784938
• ISBN13: 9780936784939
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: Daniel & Daniel Publishers
• Length: 127 Pages
• Weight: 0.83 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

life as an amputee

Fun book to read for anyone. Capp talks about growing up as an amputee and his stories about girl watching will bring a chuckle. The book would make a good read for a young person that has had an amputation. It also has a copy of the comic strip he wrote for the military.

A must to the fan, but also intriguing on its own merits

Let me get straight to the point and clarify that the major reason why I write this review is to back up my fellow-reviewer's disagreement in the editorial review, which claims that it's "hard to regard [this] book as anything more than the publication of a literary curio that Dogpatch fans may be glad to read, but that others most likely will pass up." It is indeed true that, as a big fan of "Dogpatch" (or, to me more specific, the comic strip "Li'l Abner") I enjoyed MY WELL-BALANCED VIEW ON A WOODEN LEG especially much, as it gave some insight as to how the creator of the strip truly viewed the world and himself outside of the perspective of a celebrated cartoonist. However, thanks to Al Capp's incredible gift as a writer, observer and humorist, most of the stories included here are not only intriguing due to the autobiographical information that they provide; after all, one can assume that Capp exaggerated certain of the events in order to exploit their comic potential, but what remains is all the more rewarding than a straight-forward recollection of his life. Irrelevant of whether the reader is as obsessed with the Li'l Abner-strip as I am, stories like "Short Skirts" and "Memories of Miss Maundlebam" can in any case be treasured as some of the wittiest (but also often quite poignant and insightful) short stories put on paper by anyone. I laughed as hard at "Confessions of a Non-Alcoholic" as I have at Li'l Abner, when Capp makes it into a traumatic experience for his family that he is NOT addicted to booze; worst of all, or best of all, he is actually quite convincing: "My daughter burst into tears. She knew that, although for the sake of my children I try to keep up the appearance of being a drunk (like everybody else's father), I am secretly a hopeless non-alcoholic." The book contains ten essays covering various periods of Capp's life, as well as an insightful foreword by John Updike and an autobiographical cartoon sequence done by Capp for the war amputees after World War II. A couple of the essays were published in magazines during the 50's and 60's, but most of them were not seen by the public until this book was published in 1991. As suggested by the title, the main focus in several of these essays is on Capp's feelings regarding his loss of one leg at the age of nine. The humorous tone remains intact for the most part, to the point where a sad story like Capp losing his wooden leg outside the house of a new girlfriend caused him to run away home on one leg, in fear of her discovering his handicap, becomes disturbingly close to funny. However, Capp is not afraid of revealing that this tragedy was far from funny when he was young, even though he as an adult learnt to cope with it from a partly humorous perspective; in one of the essays, he points out that while having one leg forever remained very inconvenient, at sixteen the feelings of shame it caused him were unbearable. This is most evident in the two very first essays, which we