Russell Brand’s ‘How to Become a Christian’: A superficial, self-serving memoir of conversion

When Russell Brand published his 2007 memoir, “My Booky Wook,” I bought it with no particular expectations. The lanky provocateur from Essex was already famous for his drug-addled, debauched adventures as a stand-up comic and onetime MTV host — a job he lost after showing up the day after 9/11 dressed as Osama bin Laden. I suspected this latest venture might be no more than a shoddy attempt to cash in on this notoriety.

I was wrong. “My Booky Wook” was engaging, witty, and painfully self-aware. Brand could write.

The unbuttoned shirts and Jim Morrison-like leather pants mask a keen intelligence and shrewd rhetorical instincts.

Born identity

And Brand can still write, in the strict sense. The sentences in his new book, “How to Become a Christian in Seven