Rating: 
Summary: Funny at times....
Review: .....stale at others. Korine is a great writer of movies. He knows what he wants to see and he captures it (Gummo, Julien donkey-boy). When it comes to this book, he is hit & miss. The tasteless jokes are great and so are fictionalized stories of celebrity lives, but I'd say only half of these tales work in print. Korine needs a camera to get the images in his head across to his audience. For now, this is a funny toilet read. Give us another movie, Harmony.
Rating: 
Summary: Immature
Review: A Crack Up at the Race Riots is the work of an immaturewriter. I am a big fan of Korine's film work but he fails to succeedin effectively recreating his film style on paper. The book is uninteresting because it aims to upset the reader but is neither original or intelligent enough to do so. It is scatological in a very uninteresting and highschool manner ... The non-linear framework is not innovative as he didn't create the concept and definitely not effective as there is no focus whatsoever, just immature scriblings that any malcontent 16 year old could create. A disappointment from a very talented film maker.
Rating: 
Summary: confusing/beautiful
Review: Ahh! Another ride on the Harm roller coaster! I bought this book the second it came out. The half written texts and hand written madness is truly great. The section where he describes the pictures of urban atrocities is my favorite....so realistic. The ties with Gummo are obvious and would recommend this book to anyone who likes Gummo and Gummo to anyone who likes this book.
Rating: 
Summary: irony, absurdity, tragedy, comedy, harmony
Review: As has already been pointed out, there's nothing coherent about this book except its own incoherence, its anti-form form. As with most decadent and absurdist literature, the whole is subordinate to the parts, and these parts include nonsensical fragments of conversations, random ideas, bad jokes, suicide notes, and a picture of MC Hammer at age 12. Taken together, they illuminate the bizzare and dark sensibilities of a truly talented and passionate young artist with a sensitive finger on the pulse of this American nation. But don't take them together. Or at least, don't try to fit them together into some meaningful message. There isn't one. Or perhaps rather, in the most absract sense, the message is there is no message. So if you're looking for and are used to a well crafted story and plot that all hangs together nicely, then don't shell out the 15 bones for this (note)book. But, since you're reading this review, you probably already have some familiarity with Harmony's other work (films and whatnot) and will probably like this too. On a slight side note, I noticed that some reviewers felt that Harmony's aesthetic intentions don't translate well into book form. I'm not sure I know completely what all his intentions are, but I think these reviewers make a good point. Korine seems to me to be primarily a visualist (as evidenced by that stupefying tapestry of beauty Gummo), and this book, I think, fails to capture the haunting and poetic imagery Korine is going for, and which he renders so well in the cinematic form. So maybe if I had one word to describe this book, it would be cinematic. But literature doesn't work so well when it tries to be cinematic, that's why it's literature. (And I would go as far as to say vice-versa.) But of course that's something to be discussed and debated, and not here. So in the end, I give it 4 stars, because I enjoy Korine and his imagination.
Rating:
Summary: eminem was in a wendy's commerical when he was 12
Review: crack up at the race riots is part scrapbook, part videologue all in one. pieces of scripts, part conversations, fake rumors and ideas all writen by harmony korine (writer of Kids and writer director of Gummo and Julian Donkey Boy). Sometimes you don't know whether to laugh or wonder if you're the butt of a joke (who pays for half writen lines anyway? me.) but it all ends up nicely. as a peek into the head of a genius.
Rating:
Summary: Stick to the camera, pal
Review: First off, A Crackup at the Race Riots is not so much a novel as a conceptual joke about novels. OK, fair enough, I mean, this is Harmony Korine we're talking about. He made Gummo, we know he's a brilliant film-maker. Trouble is, as somebody says below, many of the jokes are stolen. There are some particularly egregious steals from Donald Barthelme, who went typographically mad with considerably more style. The main reason I'm willing to thrust my avant-garde sensibilities aside and refuse to give him the benefit of the doubt is that, on closing the book, my dominant emotion was acute envy that I hadn't thought of trying to pull off something as easy as this myself. A Crackup has some nice ideas and pretty good jokes, but something is reminding me ominously of what happened in punk rock; just because the Sex Pistols were a good band, doesn't mean that anyone can do it. I wonder if Korine isn't becoming the Cockney Rejects to his own Pistols, as it were; deliberately trying to glorify being shambolic. That attitude was invented and promoted (in punk rock, anyway) not by bands but by entrepreneurs seeking to make a buck and by left-wing journalists projecting their half-assed ideas onto innocent musicians, and if Korine is trying to emulate in his own work, he risks disappearing up a conceptual fundament. Don't go there, Harmony! Remember Alan Clarke! Kathy Acker did this stuff so much better, anyway.
Rating:
Summary: Crack Up Redux
Review: Great book with the repetitive urgency of an obsessive compulsive disordered patient tied to a bed just out of arms reach of the light switch. Am I the only one who has noticed that this book is just a remake of Fitzgerald's "The Crack Up"?
Jessica Tandy really should have been married to John Stamos, and the next review I write will contain the following:
1)My name 2) My feelings for the author 3) my daily exercise regime which includes sit-ups.
This book is def worth the read and as a prerequisite, I suggest picking up Korine's inspiration for this novel: see above.
Rating:
Summary: Harmony Korine can do no wrong.
Review: I still think his work is all based on a joke-- Gummo, obviously, has to be, and the response to Kids was absolutely hilarious. Crackup is sort of the same in that I think he's just seeing how we react. Korine is a keen observer of culture (isn't that what Kids was, after all?), and I liken him to Kurt Vonnegut in a lot of ways. So, read the book and enjoy and wonder, like I do, what Harmony thinks of our reaction to his work-- Maybe he's just testing us, eh?
Rating:
Summary: great book. buy it
Review: Someone called this a postmodernist novel. I don't think so. It's not a novel. It's an old form, the laundry list appropriated for literary purposes. Narrative glue that normally binds the ideas in a novel is entirely missing. It's like Korine went about recording little snippets of thought and conversations on scraps of paper, then pulled them all together and arranged them by topic like suicide notes, overheard conversations, movie ideas etc. It's like a found object collage. Chapter titles are the only hint at what Korine is thinking. But ultimately, we're on our own when it comes to tying all the scraps together. It's kind of looking at small tiles on a bathroom floor. Sooner or later you'll start seeing patterns. But Korine's selection of scraps is not random. Korine collects among the lower classes. He gives the podium to people who don't normally have a voice in our culture, people who may or may not have jobs, people with no concern for political correctness. And I think that this is where Korine deserves 5 stars. He makes us look at people we don't normally want to look at. He doesn't glamorize them, he doesn't apologize for them. He simply holds up the mirror and makes us look at them. He reminds us that not everyone gets to realize the American dream. As for postmodernism or new literary forms, I think Korine got something going. Ideas in most modern literature are way too sparse. You have to wade through way too much narrative and plot to get at the few good ideas, insights, images. Korine simply throws out the ideas, images, lets you wander about and create your own picture. Bless the lad, buy his book.
Rating: 
Summary: Chaffed lobes
Review: This book proves, once and for all that Harmony Korine is a goon.
He smells of pee and lives in a bin.
THE END
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