Comedian Lewis Black's Nothing's Sacred owes more to that genre of pseudo-books where comedians transfer their stand-up acts to print a la Jerry Seinfeld's Sein Language and Dennis Miller's Rants than it does to, well, literature.

Although the author spends a great deal of prose on his childhood, adolescence, and college years, this autobiographical structure is basically abandoned after Black's early stand-up career, and it never really had the spirit of full disclosure anyway.

Black claims that what unites the meandering rants that comprise Nothing's Sacred is his "contempt for authority figures."

But that struggle is never articulated coherently enough for us to understand what Black's trying to say.

It's hard to reconcile the comedian's funny, non-sequitur musings about candy corn and his collegiate trip to Europe, for instance, with this professed intention of his.

Towards the end of the book, we get the same Starbucks bit that he did on The Daily Show, but I was pleased to see Black dress it up this time by riffing on it in an extended rant, refreshingly literary in nature: "I feel the need to scream," he writes, "and even if my scream is not answered, I find my sanity in the echo."

It was moments like this that made me aware Black could have gone farther and done more stylistically with his angry-man observational prose.

He's a talented comedian and some of that definitely seeps into this entertaining book, but ultimately he doesn't imbue Nothing's Sacred with anything that makes it necessary to read rather than watch his act.

-- Reviewed by Nicholas Norcia