America (The Book: A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction)
By The Writers of The Daily Show and Jon Stewart
Reviewed by Adam D. Miller
A recent survey conducted by The University of Pennsylvania resulted in some rather interesting statistics. Attempting to find a correlation between late night talk shows and the political knowledge of young people, nearly 20,000 young adults were asked ten questions about the presidential candidates and their policies. On average, those who watched no late night talk shows answered fewer questions correctly than those who did, and Comedy Central’s The Daily Show proved to be the show that resulted in a significantly higher average of correct questions, higher than both The Late Show with David Letterman and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. These should prove to be alarming statistics to Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, who just last month, in his arrogance, called The Daily Show’s audience “stoned slackers.” In another recent study, Comedy Central discovered that on average, The Daily Show’s viewers were more likely to have completed four years of college education. In your face, O’Reilly.
Since Jon Stewart began hosting The Daily Show in 1999 (taking over from previous host Craig Kilborn), he and his writers have provided news stories that blur the lines between fact and fiction. When Bush became president in 2000, Stewart and his writers found their main target, but the Emmy-winning staff of The Daily Show is willing and ready to make fun of Bush's opponents and anything else they see fit for humiliation.
Along with correspondents Ed Helms, Steven Colbert, and Samantha Bee, Stewart and his team of writers have brought the political and topical humour of The Daily Show into a new book. America (The Book) not only looks like a 5th grade textbook – it’s set up like one too, with fun, educational facts and lots of pictures. But by no means, don't allow your fifth graders to use this as a method of research. Like The Daily Show, it proves that the brilliant-but-silly humour of Jon Stewart and his Daily Show cohorts works just as well in book form. From the opening Foreword by “Thomas Jefferson” to its lessons on the American political system and fact sheets about other countries, it manages to provide laughter while informing us of a few things we probably should’ve already known.
Regardless of your political leaning, America (The Book) will manage to make you laugh out loud about subjects that have been taken way too seriously lately. And if you buy it now, you get a free Bush vs. Kerry boxing match poster! The perfect companion to one of the most refreshing shows on television.
Comments? Click here to let us know what you think.
Darkly Dreaming Dexter: A Novel Doubleday
By Jeff Lindsay
Reviewed by Shel Desormeaux
A killer is on the loose in hazy, crazy Miami, and hookers, of course, are dropping like flies. Police are scrambling to nail the lunatic responsible for these tidy, bloodless murder scenes, and the absence of bodily fluids piques the interest of Dexter Morgan, a blood splatter analyst for the police department. Dexter, along with his sister Deborah, a Miami cop, is keen to find out just what sort of person would (and could) hack up whores and leave no traces of him or herself behind.
Dexter relies heavily on his charm, looks and darkly playful sense of humor to disarm people in his workplace and keep him on top of current cases, particularly this one. Disarming and charming people are very, very important, after all. He too has a tendency to chop people up and he’s got to steer people clear of his deeds.
Dexter only does away with bad people. Heck, it’s a social responsibility, really. In his line of work, he sees a lot of really bad folk come and go, and while he’s pretty indifferent to most people, the urge to do in other human beings is too strong to ignore, so he does his best and meets the world halfway.
Now, this hooker hacker? Very intriguing. Just another case to apathetic Dexter. Or else it would be, if the murder scenes didn’t look exactly like his own. The murderer is getting a little too cozy, and Dexter doesn’t know what’s threatened, his work or his life. Delicious.
I cheered for Hannibal Lecter (I’m not gonna lie), and so I cheered for Dexter. There’s a vigilante in all of us, and the big ugly part of me wants to see child murderers and pederasts diced up and fed to killer whales (Dexter doesn’t do that, that just came to me). Dexter is more likeable than a sociopath should be, but then again, doesn’t everyone know at least one warm fuzzy nutcase?
Jeff Lindsay creates a comfortable niche for his crazy person: a girlfriend for whom his polite and distant wooing is a godsend and a crew of coworkers who chalk up Dexter’s eccentricities to the effects of such a job, not to mention a family to which he is loyal in spite of himself (“… Deb is the only person in the world who gives a rusty possum fart whether I live or die. For some reason that I can’t fathom, she actually prefers me to be alive. I think that’s nice, and if I could have feelings at all I would have them for Deb.”).
The book is one of the neatest I’ve read in a while. I’ve got a soft spot for bitter bastards and Dexter is one of the most polite and self-aware of those to come along in a while. And he’s cute. And he knocks off bad people. And Lindsay’s going to put him in another book. You can’t lose.
Comments? Click here to let us know what you think.
Eats, Shoots & Leaves Gotham Books
By Lynne Truss
Reviewed by Adam D. Miller
Eats, Shoots, and Leaves is the funniest book about punctuation that I’ve ever read.
Okay, you’ve got me: It’s the only book about punctuation that I’ve ever read. Although I must say; as an English major, I have had my fair share of lessons on the subject of punctuation, and none were nearly as entertaining as Lynne Truss’ book. One has to wonder: if the journalist Truss were a professor what kind of entertaining curriculum might she provide? Well, if this book is any indication, it would certainly be something fresh and wildly entertaining.
In her prologue to Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, author Lynne Truss warns the reader than her book is not for everyone. After all, this is a woman who has made a point of going around London and placing cardboard apostrophes onto signs that were lacking them. After displaying a sentence with an excessive number of apostrophes, she writes, “If this satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes causes no little gasp of horror or quickening of the pulse, you should probably put down this book at once.” For me, it was the intellectual humour and wit in these opening paragraphs that kept me reading. I too, have laughed when seeing a sign that advertises “Fresh Vegetable’s.”
The comedy provided by Truss is intelligent without being too overly pretentious. It almost reminds me of Eddie Izzard in his more sophisticated moments. Particular the bit in Dressed To Kill where he criticizes the English language’s pronunciation of certain words. I never thought a book about a clinical topic like punctuation would be so difficult to put down and have me laughing so loud.
Apparently I wasn’t the only one. Eats, Shoots, and Leaves has been critically acclaimed and heavily promoted in Truss’s England and here in North America. Frank McCourt (Angela’s Ashes) declares in his Foreword to the book, “O, to be an English teacher in the age of Truss.” A sentiment that is all too fitting for a book that proves that education and entertainment really do fit together. In an age where punctuation is dwindling (thanks in part to the growing prevalence of e-mail, which Truss addresses in the book), it is a refreshing read for grammar sticklers and anyone who wants to be educated in a delightfully entertaining way.
Comments? Click here to let us know what you think.
In The Shadow of No Towers Pantheon Books/Random House
By Art Spiegelman (Author/Illustrator)
Reviewed by Russell Bartholomee
I tend to be a bit wary of works of art that were wrought in reaction to the events of September 11, 2001. It’s not that I think the tragedy should be off-limits to artistic response; it’s that so often the responses seem opportunistic, manipulating the audience to cash in on the immense loss of life instead of honoring it. There are exceptions, but for every album like Springsteen’s The Rising, there are a dozen albums like Daryl Worley’s Have You Forgotten? that wrap substandard songs in the flag for a quick buck.
So when I saw Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers at the bookstore on September 11th of this year, I was skeptical. I might have passed up the book altogether, except that I had previously read and adored both volumes of Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus, which powerfully chronicles his parents’ experiences as survivors of the Holocaust. Knowing how honest and compelling that account was, I was more than willing to give Spiegelman’s new book the benefit of the doubt. I’m glad I did.
Comprised primarily of ten original tabloid-sized comics, it is astounding and provocative, thoughtful and bold. Unlike Maus, which was a retelling of his father’s story, In the Shadow of No Towers is an intensely personal account of the artist’s own experiences, fears, and impressions on September 11th and in the aftermath of the attacks. The book also contains two essays and eight classic comics from the turn of the 20th century that deal with some of the same concepts as Spiegelman’s originals. The design of the book is beautiful, though it is much shorter than it appears to be, as each of its 38 pages is printed on thick paperboard.
More a ranting diary than a linear history, each of the ten comics gives graphic display to the author’s wounded psyche. Each theme explored (frantically searching for his daughter, watching the towers crumble, being afraid of everything) is made manifest by dazzling artwork in gorgeous color. All of the images are exquisitely rendered, each page with its own distinct style and layout. The most potent image is one that recurs throughout the book—the radiant outline (what Spiegelman calls “the glowing bones”) of one of the towers, moments before it collapsed. The book is at its best when the artist lets his stunning images do the talking for him.
Unfortunately, there are some serious shortcomings to the book as well. It is self-involved to distracting levels. Completely absent is any sense of the human tragedy on that day. We get the image of the tower, but hardly a mention of the loss of life. There's panic, fear, and confusion - all on the part of Spiegelman and his immediate family. As a friend of mine commented, on each page Spiegelman seems to say, “it didn’t affect YOU like it did ME!” I live in Texas, so no doubt this is true in my case. Trouble is, you get the feeling Spielgelman would say this to other New Yorkers as well.
And there is a paranoid streak a mile wide (to which the artist freely confesses in the book's splendidly designed pages). Spiegelman is clearly unhappy with the way the attacks have been propagandized for political purposes and says so, but sometimes his hyperbole gets the best of him. One panel shows Art asleep at his drafting table, with a government agent on one side and a scimitar-wielding terrorist (!) on the other. The caption reads "Equally terrorized by Al-Qaeda and my own government." Um, no. His vocal criticism of the culture of fear encouraged by one too many orange alerts and the jingoistic ubiquity of the flag rings more true, as does his desire for level heads to prevail. Still, Spiegelman makes no claims that he’s trying to speak for anyone but himself. He's revealing his own feelings, and this he does with refreshing candor.
I wish the book were longer; even though the classic comics are nice to see, they make up nearly half the book’s total content. Not as epic or ultimately important a work as Maus, this book nevertheless makes me wish Art Spiegelman had done more biographical graphic novels. Even when he makes me uncomfortable, he makes me think. And there's far too little of that around.
Comments? Click here to let us know what you think.
Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About Villard/Random House
By Mil Millington
Reviewed by Kid Spill
In the same wryly observational vein as Nick Hornby’s How To Be Good, the very Britishly-named Mil Millington writes about a man who isn’t fallen, exactly, but falling. The protagonist Pel’s eventual tumble over the edge ostensibly occurs beyond the end of the novel. Pel’s troubles, which provide not only the plot events of the book but also the texture of his daily life, are primarily due to his girlfriend, Ursula (a German who despises British women, British food, and apparently, her British boyfriend), and also their two children, Pel’s boss “TSR” (whose disappearance is the crux of the unlikely but oddly endearing story) and Pel’s mind-numbing IT job.
Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About is a book made up entirely of Pel’s follies. It a comedy not of errors but of a certain “sucks to be you, buddy” sentiment. As Millington writes, “The story in whose misleadingly calm shallows you’re standing in right now is not a tragedy. How do I know? Because a tragedy is the tale of a person who holds the seeds of his own destruction within him. This is entirely contrary to my situation - everyone else holds the seeds of my destruction within them; I just wanted to keep my head down and hope my lottery numbers came up, thanks very much. This story is therefore not a tragedy, for technical reasons.”
Millington, a Guardian columnist, culled the material for Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About from his website of the same name, and presumably from his relationship with his own German girlfriend. Regardless of the source material, the book is remarkably fresh, with both the wit and approach coming off as startlingly original.
Millington’s humour is perfectly tuned and plotted. It is, in fact, so much the definition of clever that it could very well provoke lesser writers to shuffle to the corners of their cold bedrooms and lie down on their floors, ashamed. Millington’s rapid wit encapsulates that particular brand of British self-deprecation, marked by brutally honest revelations backed up with reassuring and quiet notes of affection.
Although too much of a good thing is an even better thing, too much of an even better thing can get a mite tiring. At three hundred plus giant pages, Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About makes you feel badly for wanting such a great comic tome to be over already. But ultimately, its length and narrative irrelevance is no matter, as Millington digs deep into the minutiae of long-term relationships and beautifully and hilariously pulls out the too-common moments of disagreement and tension that, when faced by the light of day, appears perfectly absurd.
Comments? Click here to let us know what you think.
Or, click below:
Visitors from the US:
Visitors from Canada:
