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Summary
Summary
Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist Dave Barry is a pretty amiable guy. But lately, he's been getting a little worked up. What could make a mild-mannered man of words so hot under the collar? Well, a lot of things--like bad public art, Internet millionaires, SUVs, Regis Philbin . . . and even bigger problems, like • The slower-than-deceased-livestock left-lane drivers who apparently believe that the right lane is sacred and must never come in direct contact with tires • The parent-misery quotient of last-minute school science fair projects • Day trading and other careers that never require you to take off your bathrobe • The plague of the low-flow toilets, which is so bad that even in Miami, where you can buy drugs just by opening your front door and yelling "Hey! I want some crack," you can't even sell your first born to get a normal-flushing toilet Dave Barry is not taking any of this sitting down. He's going to stand up for the rights of all Americans against ridiculously named specialty "--chino" coffees and the IRS. Just as soon as he gets the darn toilet flushed. From the Trade Paperback edition.
Author Notes
Dave Barry was born in Armonk, New York on July 3, 1947. He received an English degree from Haverford College in 1969. His early attempts at small-town journalism for the Daily Local News in West Chester, Pennsylvania, were directed towards local matters, such as zoning and sewage. In 1975, he briefly attempted to teach business writing to business people. Since then, he has worked as a professional humorist.
For many years he wrote a newspaper column that appeared in more than 500 newspapers and for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He is the author of numerous fiction, nonfiction, and young adult books. His novels include Big Trouble, Tricky Business, Lunatics, and Insane City. His nonfiction works include Dave Barry's Complete Guide to Guys, Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States, I'll Mature When I'm Dead, You Can Date Boys When You're Forty: Dave Barry on Parenting and Other Topics He Knows Very Little About, and Live Right and Find Happiness (Although Beer Is Much Faster): Life Lessons and Other Ravings from Dave Barry. His young adult books include the Starcatchers series and the Never Land series.
Dave Barry's title, Best. State. Ever, made the New York Times bestseller list in 2016.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews 3
Publisher's Weekly Review
Miami Herald columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner Barry (Dave Barry Turns 50, etc.) contemplated titling this book"Tuesdays with Harry Potter"Dbut "the Legal Department had some problems with that." Barry is as funny as ever in these 73 columns, which targets everything from low-fat diets to low-flow toilets. Barry claims in his introduction that there is no better profession than humor columnist: "That is why so many people want my job. It looks so easy!... Every year, hundreds of thousands of people try their hand at this demanding profession. After a few months, almost all of them have given up and gone back to the ninth grade." There's no such regressive retrenchment for Barry, as he expresses his "deep concernDand yes, outrageDabout the forces of ignorance, injustice, oppression and profound moral decay that beset American society today." Thus, he covers such burning issues as airline "bistro service," dog shows, driving ("In addition to Road Rage, I frequently experience Parking Lot Rage"), Florida frogs, horse races, the IRS, online stock trading, Parent's Day at college ("I entered my son's apartment, which he shares with three roommates and approximately 200 used pizza boxes"), Paris, school science fairs and the specialty-coffee craze ("mutant beverages with names like `mocha-almond-honey-vinaigrette lattespressacino'"). Outstanding is a satire on academic film criticism, larded with absurd foreign phrases. MacNelly's caustic cartoons (he's another Pulitzer winner) are such perfect visual accompaniments to Barry's wry words that it's a surprise to find only 10 of them. A gifted and engaging humorist, Barry never ceases to entertain: no matter what subject, he can always find a side-splitting twist. 5-city author tour. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Barry here recycles his gripes, exaggerations, and pure fictions from his newspaper column from the past two years. Does recycling mean Barry has become a rabid tree-hugger? Perish that thought. As a patriotic American who recognizes that this nation was ordained for the convenience of consumers, Barry takes frothing umbrage at infringements on his, and every American's, right to a "Cherished American Way of Life" centered on junk-food eating and TV-watching. And don't get him started on toilets, concerning which a government proclamation that there be no more than 1.6 gallons of water used per flush set Barry off on several columns of satirizing this odious oppression of his freedom to flush away each call of nature with 3.5 gallons of water. Yes, this modern day, slightly-off kilter Son of Liberty finds Big Meaning in Small Things and thus taps the funny bone of a certain sensibility. Riffing off TV commercials with his brushes with famous people or his perplexities about women (his wife) and teenagers (his son), Barry flits among inspirations for his subjects, and that expectation of the unexpected is what has kept him popular for years. His fans will enjoy this reprise. --Gilbert Taylor
Library Journal Review
Barry fans will enjoy this latest collection of columns from one of America's funniest journalists. The title originates from his rant about low-flow toilets in his notorious "Toilet Police" article. According to the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist (Big Trouble), it wasn't his first choice for a title, which would have been (and I am not making this up) Tuesdays with Harry Potter. Apparently, the publisher's legal department had some problems with that. The title represents Barry's rage not only about toilets but about airline "bistro service" meals, television ads for pharmaceuticals, and the general moral decay confronting America today. Fans will not be disappointed with Barry's forays into proper word usage when he dons his "Mr. Language Person" hat. And they will certainly rally around him on issues concerning the IRS, college dormitories, and Internet millionaires. But the toilet on the cover is really why this book should be in every library's humor collection. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/00.]DJoe Accardi, Northeastern Illinois Univ., Chicago (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Politically Correct So there I was, sitting under the hot lights, when suddenly Vicki Lawrence leaped to her feet and started yelling at me about the death penalty. This happened in Los Angeles, on the TV show Politically Incorrect. People yell a lot on that show. One time I was on there with Micky Dolenz; he yelled at me, too. Back when I used to watch The Monkees on TV, I never dreamed that one day, one of them would be yelling at me personally regarding current events. This is a great nation. Guests are encouraged to express strong views on Politically Incorrect, because it makes for better entertainment. The host, Bill Maher, could name any topic at all--say, monetary reform in the 17th-century Netherlands--and we guests would immediately be at each other's throats over it, even if we were not totally certain what "Netherlands" are. I was on Politically Incorrect because I was on a book tour. You go on whatever show they tell you to go on, in hopes that the host will at some point hold your book up to the camera, causing consumers all over America to rush to bookstores to purchase it. You will basically do anything to get your book on TV. For example, a few days earlier, I let a total stranger commit a major act of gel on my hair. This was on The Today Show, in New York. I was sitting in the makeup room, drinking coffee, trying to wake up, and the makeup person, after studying my head, called the hair person over, pointed at my hair, and said: "See? This is exactly what I was talking about." Then they both laughed, and the hair person, before I knew what was happening, applied 37 pounds of Industrial Concrete Strength gel in my hair, and thus I appeared on national television looking like Eddie Munster. This would have been fine if the reaction of the world at large had been to rush out and purchase my book, but the actual reaction, to judge from the people I know who saw the show, was to ask: "What happened to your hair?" But getting back to Vicki Lawrence: She was yelling at me about the death penalty, and I was yelling back at her, while simultaneously--and I am NOT proud of this--holding my hand over the mouth of another guest, Sol Wachtler, a former chief judge of the New York State Court of Appeals who got into trouble over a woman and went to jail and, needless to say, wrote a book. I was silencing him so that I could better express my very strongly held views on the death penalty, although now I honestly cannot remember what those specific views were. I do remember that before the show, when I was in the waiting room with Vicki Lawrence, somebody brought up her hit song, "The Night the Lights Went Out in Geor- gia," which has an extremely complicated plot. I have never met anybody who understood what that song is about, so I figured this was my big chance to find out. "What is that song about?" I asked Vicki Lawrence. "I have absolutely no idea," she said. Here's a coincidence: Vicki Lawrence was once a regular on The Carol Burnett Show, and earlier that same day, I met: Carol Burnett! Yes! A comedy goddess! A star who, in my mind, is bigger than all the ex-Monkees combined. She and I were waiting to appear on the early-morning news show on Los Angeles TV station KTLA. I still don't know why Carol Burnett was there; I don't think she has a book out. I do know that we were both preceded on the show by a lengthy live news report in which the reporter wound up stripping down to her bathing suit and--I am not making this up--taking a shower with a live iguana. I don't know whether the iguana has a book out, but I would not bet against it. The next day I was on a show called Home & Family, which is broadcast from a house on the Universal Studios lot, just a short distance from the house where Tony Perkins stabbed Janet Leigh to death in Psycho. I found myself sitting on a long sofa with--these are just some of the people who were on that sofa--two co-hosts; Olympic decathlon champion Bruce Jenner; an Italian cookbook author; two large spherical home-improvement contractors wearing matching bright-yellow overalls that would be visible from Mars; two women who wrote a book about something like how to feed a family of 117 people for 23 cents a day; and a complete set of quintuplets. We did not, to my recollection, discuss the death penalty, but we did change locations a lot; every now and then, for no apparent reason, we'd all jump up and move, herd-like, into another room, where we'd watch somebody show us how to do some Home and Family thing such as baste a turkey. For all I know, that show is still going on. After a while, without being formally excused, I just sort of drifted outside and left, moving briskly past the Psycho house. Yes, the book tour was a lot of effort, but it definitely increased the overall public awareness of my name. I know this because my last appearance was on The Late Late Show with Tom Snyder, and at one point, when we came back from a commercial, Tom Snyder, who was not joking, introduced me to the audience as "Chuck Berry." I was not offended; I'm a big fan of Chuck. But if he has a book out, I want a piece of the royalties. Excerpted from Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down! by Dave Barry All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
Introduction | p. xi |
A Few Words About the Title | p. xvii |
Politically Correct | p. 1 |
Let's Get Physical | p. 5 |
My Final Answer Is ... Go Back to Your Spaceship, Regis | p. 8 |
Rubber-Band Man | p. 11 |
From Now On, Let Women Kill Their Own Spiders | p. 14 |
Here's Mud in Your Eye | p. 17 |
Eye of the Beholder | p. 20 |
Fore! | p. 23 |
Fore! II | p. 27 |
Another Road Hog with Too Much Oink | p. 30 |
Bon Appetit | p. 33 |
Road Warrior | p. 36 |
Weird Science | p. 39 |
The Tool Man | p. 42 |
The Toilet Police | p. 46 |
Smuggler's Blues | p. 49 |
Head to Head | p. 53 |
Gone to the Dogs | p. 56 |
The Nose Knows | p. 59 |
Missing in Action | p. 62 |
Why Abe Was a Geek | p. 65 |
Rock of Ages | p. 68 |
Mr. Language Person on Nitches, Yores, and Defective Sea Lions | p. 72 |
Caught Between a Czech and a Slovakia | p. 75 |
Parlez-Vous Francais? | p. 78 |
An Aesthetically Challenged American in Paris (Part II) | p. 81 |
A Blatant Case of Slanted Journalism | p. 84 |
Prison Is Deductible | p. 87 |
How to Handle the IRS | p. 91 |
Coffee, Tea, or Dried Wood Chips? | p. 94 |
Betting on the Ponies | p. 97 |
My Son's College Apartment Has a Pleasant Pepperoni Motif | p. 100 |
The Gulf Between Father and Son Is Called "Quantum Physics" | p. 103 |
"Day Trading for Dummies," Including Nap Times, Bankruptcy Laws | p. 106 |
Stay Tuned to FearPlex, for More Panic All Day, Every Day | p. 110 |
The Wait for the Tub Is Forever Since the Frogs Moved In | p. 113 |
A Titanic Splash (Again) | p. 116 |
Blair Witch Mystery Solved: The Seal Did It | p. 120 |
A Rolling Stone | p. 123 |
Decaf Poopacino | p. 126 |
Good for What Ails You | p. 129 |
A Critic, a Crocodile, and a Kubrick--Voila! | p. 132 |
Grammar: De Letter of De Law | p. 135 |
The Unfriendly Skies | p. 139 |
The Sky Is Falling | p. 142 |
Pine Sap Transfusions Could Save Your Christmas Tree's Life | p. 146 |
Don't Eat the Muskrats or the Poinsettia au Gratin | p. 149 |
Everything I Know About Dieting I Learned on Leeza | p. 152 |
The Banzai Chef | p. 156 |
Turkey Day | p. 159 |
Independence Day | p. 162 |
High-Fivin', Bosom-Ogling Soccer Lizard Must Die! | p. 165 |
Build Yourself a Killer Bod with Killer Bees | p. 168 |
High-Tech Twinkie Wars Will Be No Picnic | p. 171 |
Be an Internet Millionaire, and We May Like You | p. 174 |
This Real Man Can Drive Any Truck Named Tonka | p. 177 |
Wrestling's First Rule: Cover Your "Masculine Region" | p. 180 |
You Don't Wanna Know What's Under His Hood | p. 183 |
The Boob Tube | p. 186 |
And Don't Forget ... Tassels for All the Generals | p. 189 |
A Watchdog Never Drops His Guard--Except for Dessert | p. 193 |
Nuke the Stalker Sparrow That Fowled Fabio | p. 196 |
Batman to the Rescue | p. 199 |
The Fountain of Youth | p. 202 |
He Would Flee Bosoms, But His Car Is Booted | p. 205 |
The Birth of Wail | p. 208 |
Survival of Mankind Rides on the Successful Pickup Line | p. 211 |
Baby Hormones Have Taken Over My Wife, and All I Can Say Is "Waaah!" | p. 214 |
Today's Baby Showers Require an Ark to Haul Home the Loot | p. 217 |
Labor Dispute | p. 220 |
Voyage of the Stuffed | p. 223 |
My Workday: Nap, Toenail Inspection, Nap, Underwear Check, Nap | p. 226 |