Essays Books - Page 5

The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook

Joshua Piven

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Total reviews: 202 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

How to Wrestle Free from an Alligator: 4. If its jaws are closed on something you want to remove (for example, a limb), tap or punch it on the snout.

Though it's being marketed as a humorous title--after all, it's unlikely you'll be called upon to land a plane, jump from a motorcycle to a moving car, or win a swordfight--the information contained in The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook is all quite sound. Authors Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht consulted numerous experts in their fields (they're cited at the end of the book) to discover how to survive various and sundry awful events. Parachute doesn't open? Your best bet for survival is to hook your arms through the straps of a fellow jumper's chute--and even then you're likely to dislocate both shoulders and break both legs. Car sinking in water? Open the window immediately to equalize pressure, then open the car door and swim to the surface. Buried in an avalanche? Spit on the snow--it will tell you which direction is really up. Then dig as fast as you can.

Each survival skill is explained in simple steps with helpful illustrations. Most stress the need to be prepared--both mentally and physically. For example, to escape from quicksand, you will need to lay a pole on the surface of the quicksand, flop on your back atop the pole, and pull your legs out one by one. No pole? No luck. "When walking in quicksand country, carry a stout pole--it will help you get out should you need to."

Hopefully you'll never need to know how to build a fire without matches, perform a tracheotomy, or treat a bullet wound. But in the words of survival evasion resistance escape instructor "Mountain" Mel Deweese, "You never know." --Sunny Delaney

NPR Driveway Moments All About Animals: Radio Stories That Won't Let You Go (Npr Driveway Moments)

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Stories from the National Public Radio archives celebrate our relationship with our furry, feathered, and sometimes scaly friends.

What’s a "driveway moment"? It's when you're so captivated by a story you're hearing on NPR that you stay in your car to hear it to the end—even if you're sitting in your driveway with the motor running. For years, listeners have written to NPR to describe such moments. Now animal lovers especially will want to make sure their tanks are full.

Meet a dog who's addicted to toads, a chatty parrot who tells the truth, the Stupid Pet Tricks coordinator for the Late Show with David Letterman, and a professional dog walker whose day features 14 canines and a lot of fresh air. Learn about a dog's life in Vietnam (where dog meat is a delicacy) and the heartrending search for lost pets following Hurricane Katrina. Visit a retirement community for thoroughbred racehorses and the Wait Wait petting zoo, where cows moo with British accents and mice dislike cheese. Bid farewell to a cat named Miss Pudding and welcome three orphaned hummingbirds home.

Heard on All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Talk of the Nation, and Wait Wait…Don't Tell Me!, hosted by Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep, these stories will make you laugh out loud and shed a tear or two.

Car Talk Field Guide to the North American Wacko

Tom Magliozzi

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A radio road trip across America featuring the wackiest calls from the nuttiest specimens ever to phone the show.

A high point of every Car Talk show is the call-in segment, when listeners phone in for advice and regale hosts Click and Clack with tales of their own automotive misadventures.

Like Dave from Bemidji, Minnesota, who drives his Chevy Cavalier home from Alaska when it already has 350,000 miles on the odometer. And Dinesh, who strolls across Death Valley. Rather than worry about buzzards, he's concerned about how his car will hold up in the heat. Christy wants to know if she fried her dad's Citation. Adrienne frets that a load of rocks might crush her Saab. Single guy John wonders if he should tidy up his car for a first date or reveal its trashy self. And when Ann's husband travels from Georgia to Florida to get his vasectomy reversed, Ann drives like a banshee to bring him back home. Ever since, their Caravan makes strange grinding noises.

It seems that lunatics aren't confined to Car Talk Plaza. They're everywhere, and they're dialing the phone. Four hilarious radio shows celebrate the land of the free, home of the wacko.

Naked Pictures of Famous People

Jon Stewart

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 95 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Sometimes it seems like every standup comedian worth his or her salt just has to do the book thing, and you might feel that yet another warmed-over stage routine is the last thing you need taking up valuable bookshelf space. Jon Stewart's book will come as an extremely pleasant surprise. He eschews the standard standup patter and instead gives us 18 short comic essays in a variety of styles that recall the prose work of Woody Allen, only with a few more references to genitals. Stewart proves himself a remarkably nimble humorist with a sharp eye for parody, whether he's writing "A Very Hanson Christmas" or "Adolf Hitler: The Larry King Interview."

HITLER: ...Larry, look, I was a bad guy. No question. I hate that Hitler. The yelling, the finger pointing, I don't know ... I was a very angry guy.

KING: And this ... new Hitler?

HITLER: I get up at seven, have half a melon, do the jumble in the morning paper and then let the day take me where it will.... Me!! The inventor of the Blitzkrieg... When you stop having to control everything it's very freeing.

Stewart is not afraid to flirt with bad taste, in fact, some of the pieces in this collection do for "flirting with bad taste" what Bill Clinton did for "not having sexual relations." But it's wonderful to see an edgy comedian taking on the traditionally cozy genre of the humorous essay, creating work that combines the wit of Robert Benchley with the energy and attitude of the best modern standup. Naked Pictures of Famous People proves that Jon Stewart is as comfortable, and accomplished, in front of a word processor as he is in front of an audience. --Simon Leake

Letters from a Nut

Ted L. Nancy, Jerry Seinfeld

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 129 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Good Fun 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I first read parts of this book years ago. I finally bought my own copy, and I'm glad I did. "Letters from a Nut" will not cause you to become sick from laughing so hard, but it will put a smile on your face.

The concept of writing ridiculous letters to businesses and corporations to see what kind of response will be given is an entertaining idea. There are some letters that will not make the reader chuckle, but over half of the letters were worth a slight chuckle. Some even made me laugh outloud and ask someone else to take a look at the intitial letter and the response letter.

This is also a good book to go back and re-read once in a while.

Give it a try.

I think you will be pleasantly surprised by "Letters From a Nut".

See ya next review.

Editorial Review:

What if you wrote to the Baseball Hall of Fame offering to donate a full set of Mickey Mantle's toenail clippings? Why, they'd be glad to have 'em--even if you are "a Level 4 bed-wetter." Cooperstown is only one of many institutions terrorized in Letters from a Nut, a collection of crazed correspondence by Ted L. Nancy. The name is a pseudonym, perhaps for Jerry Seinfeld, who wrote the introduction. Seinfeld never comes clean, but the yocks sure sound like his material. And the letters have his prints all over them--who else would write the L.A. Lakers posing as a rabid fan who wears pants with a see-through back end, "for medical reasons"? Whoever wrote it, the book's a real lark. Where else can you meet "Pip, the Mighty Squeak," a man who gambles in a giant shrimp costume, or a corn that looks like Shelley Fabares? Only inside the fevered brain of Ted L. Nancy--whether he's Jerry Seinfeld or not.

What I'd Say to the Martians: And Other Veiled Threats

Jack Handey

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

What I'd Say To The Martians 4 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Reading Jack Handey is a lot like picking up something that smells really weird and awful and then offering it to someone else and saying,"here,smell this". You just can't keep that kind of thing to yourself.
Some of the passages are a bit too long (kind of like Deep Thoughts meets Faulkner),but that's a small nit to pick with this otherwise excellent companion to Handey's previous works.
You're probably going to finish a segment,think something to yourself like,"this is really sick",and then make a copy and take it to work the next day so you can stick it under someone's nose and say,"here,read this".

I cried. 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

That's how funny this book is -- it made me laugh so hard that I cried. Not everyone will have the reaction that I did, but man, even if you laugh half as hard as I did, you'll have a good time. I've read a good third of these essays in the New Yorker as they came out, but it's lovely to read them in one sitting and have common threads pop up (funny cowboy dance, his so-called friend Don, etc.).

Editorial Review:

Jack Handey is one of America's favorite humorists, from his New Yorker pieces to his Deep Thoughts books and Saturday Night Live sketches. Now, in What I'd Say to the Martians, Handey regales readers with his incredible wit and wacky musings.

Why Don't Cats Like to Swim?: An Imponderables Book (Imponderables Books)

David Feldman

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Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Save your money 1 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I have always been a big fan of the "imponderables" genre, but I had never read any by author David Feldman, an apparently prolific author in the that specific field. I thought the best place to start would be with his first Imponderalbes book, "Why Don't Cats Like to Swim?," which had apparently been originally published with the title, "Imponderables." I further assumed that an author's first venture into this genre would be the most interesting in that there was a high probability of an array of interesting subjects that eventually led to his writing the book. Well, I was wrong!

I finished this book in record time because I discovered that I couldn't care less about many of the alleged imponderables that were discussed. Really, who really cares about some of the following:

Why does root beer taste flatter than coke?
Which fruits are in Juicy Fruit chewing gum?
If trailer parks didn't exist, would tornadoes exist?
Why don't we ever see money from pay phones collected?
What is the purpose of the little slits in sugar cube wrappers?
What is a minor credit card?
Why are so many milk packages difficult to open and close?

If those and similar questions intrique you, you will probably enjoy this book.

About the only section that I found truly interesting was the section describing how stage hypnotists do their thing.

Perhaps his subsequent works got better in that the author solicites potential questions from his readership to be dealt with in later books. I'll never find out.

Editorial Review:

Why does an "X" stand for a kiss?
Which fruits are in Juicy Fruit® gum?
Why do people cry at happy endings?
Why do you never see baby pigeons?

Pop-culture guru David Feldman demystifies these topics and so much more in Why Don't Cats Like to Swim? -- the unchallenged source of answers to civilization's most perplexing questions. Part of the Imponderables® series, Feldman's book arms readers with information about everyday life -- from science, history, and politics to sports, television, and radio -- that encyclopedias, dictionaries, and almanacs just don't have. Where else will you learn what makes women open their mouths when applying mascara?

Made in America

Bill Bryson

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Total reviews: 56 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Readers from Toad Suck, Arkansas, to Idiotsville, Oregon--and everywhere in between--will love Made in America, Bill Bryson's Informal History of the English Language in the United States. It is, in a word, fascinating. After reading this tour de force, it's clear that a nation's language speaks volumes about its true character: you are what you speak. Bryson traces America's history through the language of the time, then goes on to discuss words culled from everyday activities: immigration, eating, shopping, advertising, going to the movies, and others.

Made in America will supply you with interesting facts and cocktail chatter for a year or more. Did you know, for example, that Teddy Roosevelt's "speak softly and carry a big stick" credo has its roots in a West African proverb? Or that actor Walter Matthau's given name is Walter Mattaschanskayasky? Or that the supposedly frigid Puritans--who called themselves "Saints," by the way--had something called a pre-contract, which was a license for premarital sex? Made in America is an excellent discussion of American English, but what makes the book such a treasure is that it offers much, much more.

Forever, Erma: Best-Loved Writing From America's Favorite Humorist

Erma Bombeck

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A BEAUTIFUL TRIBUTE TO A POWERFUL LADY 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

When it comes to humour, there is no one who could pack a more powerful punch than Erma Bombeck. In this collection of essays, Erma tackles children, motherhood, fatherhood, neighbours, family gatherings and then finds the humour in life's most ordinary events. Five days before her passing, Erma wrote her final message and still, she faced life with amazing courage and wit.

As the years pass by, we still miss Erma deeply. She became a part of our own family and mothers could read her words of wisdom and come to the conclusion, "It puts my mind as ease to know that I am not the only one who fells this way about...."

Erma was a lady ahead of her time and a primary lesson we learn from her is "don't fret the small stuff; look at each day as a new experience and enjoy it to the fullest. Soon, our children will leave the nest; we will grow older and develop wrinkles but become more tolerant and accepting of ourselves. Even in her last days, she managed to find the beauty and humour in life...what better legacy could she leave us? The book, like Erma, is deserving of a thousand twinkling stars. No wonder the Heavens shine so brightly.

Editorial Review:

Erma Bombeck occupied a seat of honor in the homes of millions of Americans. Hers was inevitably the column you read aloud at the breakfast table, the piece you tore out on the bus to send to your mother, or the clipping you stuck on the fridge as a chuckling reminder of our modern lives' sublime ridiculousness. Bombeck had an eye for our common experience and a knack for throwing it into touching relief; we laughed because we saw ourselves in her work. She died last April, and this collection--the profits of which benefit her favorite charities--pulls together some of her best loved columns. The columns span Bombeck's career and the book includes tributes delivered at her memorial service.

Daddy Needs a Drink: An Irreverent Look at Parenting from a Dad Who Truly Loves His Kids--Even When They're Driving Him Nuts

Robert Wilder

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 34 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

A Santa Fe dad shares heartwarming, comic, often ludicrous tales of raising a family in this laugh-out-loud book perfect for anyone who enjoys the edgy humor of David Sedaris or the whimsical commentary of Dave Barry. Waxing both profound and profane on issues close to a father’s heart—from exploding diapers to toddler tantrums, from the horrors of dressing up as Frosty the Snowman to the moments that make a father proud—Robert Wilder brilliantly captures the joys and absurdities of being a parent today.

With an artist wife and two kids—a daughter, Poppy, and a son, London—Robert Wilder considers himself as open-minded as the next man. Yet even he finds himself parentally challenged when his toddler son, London, careens around the house in the buff or asks the kind of outrageous, embarrassing questions only a kid can ask. A high school teacher who sometimes refers to himself jokingly as Mister Mom (when his wife, Lala, is busy in her studio), Wilder shares warmly funny stories on everything from sleep deprivation to why school-sponsored charities can turn otherwise sane adults into blithering and begging idiots.

Whether trying to conjure up the perfect baby name (“Poppy” came to his wife’s mother in a dream) or hiring a Baby Whisperer to get some much-needed sleep, Wilder offers priceless life lessons on discipline, potty training, even phallic fiddling (courtesy of young London). He describes the perils of learning to live monodextrously (doing everything with one hand while carrying your child around with the other) and the joys of watching his daughter morph into a graceful, wise, unique little person right before his eyes.

By turns tender, irreverent, and hysterically funny, Daddy Needs a Drink is a hilarious and poignant tribute to his family by a man who truly loves being a father.


From the Hardcover edition.