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Critics' Opinion:
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First Published:
Oct 2017, 416 pages
Paperback:
Sep 2018, 416 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Matt Grant
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A collection of seventeen wonderful short stories showing that two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks is as talented a writer as he is an actor.
A gentle Eastern European immigrant arrives in New York City after his family and his life have been torn apart by his country's civil war. A man who loves to bowl rolls a perfect game - and then another and then another and then many more in a row until he winds up ESPN's newest celebrity, and he must decide if the combination of perfection and celebrity has ruined the thing he loves. An eccentric billionaire and his faithful executive assistant venture into America looking for acquisitions and discover a down and out motel, romance, and a bit of real life. These are just some of the tales Tom Hanks tells in this first collection of his short stories. They are surprising, intelligent, heartwarming, and, for the millions and millions of Tom Hanks fans, an absolute must-have!
Three Exhausting Weeks
Day 1
Anna said there was only one place to find a meaningful gift for MDash – the Antique Warehouse, not so much a place for old treasures as a permanent swap meet in what used to be the Lux Theater. Before HBO, Netflix, and the one hundred and seven other entertainment outlets bankrupted the Lux, I sat for many hours in that once-splendid cinema palace and watched movies. Now it's stall after stall of what passes for antiques. Anna and I looked into every one of them.
MDash was about to become a naturalized US Citizen, which was as big a deal for us as it was for him. Steve Wong's grandparents were naturalized in the forties. My dad had escaped the low-grade thugs that were East European Communists in the 1970s and, way back when, Anna's ancestors rowed boats across the North Atlantic, seeking to pillage whatever was pillage-able in the New World. The Anna family legend is that they found Martha's Vineyard ...
Continue ...
After I finished them, most of Hank's stories flitted from my brain like a light balloon. In seventeen stories, Hanks — whose squeaky-clean image as "America's Dad" has itself become as American as apple pie — presents a world as neatly packaged and free from real-world troubles as the average Hollywood rom-com. This is the short story collection of a new and burgeoning writer, as uneven and unsure as all debuts can be. But it's also the voice of one of America's most beloved actors, a growing literary talent, and a man who is clearly not content to explore just one aspect of the human condition...continued
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(Reviewed by Matt Grant).
Ann Patchett
Reading Tom Hanks's Uncommon Type is like finding out that Alice Munro is also the greatest actress of our time. Anna Funder
Uncommon Type is funny, wise, gloriously inventive and humane. Tom Hanks sees inside people – a wary divorcee, a billionaire trading desire for disaster, a boy witnessing his father's infidelity, a motley crew shooting for the moon – with such acute empathy and good humour we'd follow him anywhere. Carl Hiaasen
Wait - Tom Hanks can write, too? Funny, moving, deftly surprising stories? That's just swell. Maybe there's no crying in baseball, pal, but it's perfectly acceptable in the book business. That's how we drown envy. Mindy Kaling
The central quality to Tom's writing is a kind of poignant playfulness. It's exactly what you hope from him, except you wish he were sitting in your home, reading it aloud to you, one story at a time. Stephen Fry
Mr. Hanks turns out to be as authentically genuine a Writer with as capital a W as ever touched a typewriter key. The stories in Uncommon Type range from the hilarious to the deeply touching...All with that extra quality of keenly observant and sympathetic intelligence that has always set Tom Hanks apart. I blink, bubble and boggle in amazed admiration. Steve Martin
It turns out that Tom Hanks is also a wise and hilarious writer with an endlessly surprising mind. Damn it.Tom Hanks' short story collection Uncommon Type, puts his love for typewriters on display. Hanks has a personal collection of over one hundred machines, made up of nearly every make and model ever put on the market. For those who grew up in the digital age, typewriters may seem all but extinct, a relic of a past era. But at one time, typewriters were as revolutionary and cutting edge as the latest laptop technology. The earliest progenitors of the typewriter believed they were creating a writing device only for the blind. They didn't foresee typewriters being needed by those who could see; after all, what were pens for?
Like most inventions, the creation of the typewriter wasn't a singular event; historians estimate that the typewriter ...
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