Horse-Toothed Jackass

As a fan of Howard Stern, I checked out They Call Me Baba Booey from my local library.  It's Stern producer Gary Dell'Abate's life story.  You could fill a bookshelf with autobiographies from that show  Howard has written a couple books, Artie Lange has Too Fat To Fish and Robin Quivers did her life as well.  Since Howard has lots of fans, and runs a show where the staff regularly delve into their lives, I can see why publishers decided to go for their stories.

They Call Me Baba Booey isn't a bad book, but I think Dell'Abate overestimates our fascination with his life before Howard.  Yes, he had problems, and some decent stories, but what we'd like to hear most from him are behind-the-scenes anecdotes of the Stern show. While he drops in a bit here and there, the book is actually 80% over before Gary gets hired by Stern.  Dell'Abate's actually spent more years of his life working for Stern than not, so They Call Me Baba Booey comes off like the first half of a bigger book--the first half that we'd skim over to get to the good stuff.

He's a trivia expert on pop music, and I did enjoy some of his lists of music sprinkled through the book (though I wouldn't be surprised if his editors wanted to cut them).