Book Reviews
Mr. Sedaris comes across, much as he did in Naked, as a self-dramatizing narcissist, by turns egomaniac and self-deprecating, needy and judgmental. He cannot abide people who smoke Merit cigarettes, wear cowboy boots or ''consider the human scalp an appropriate palette for self-expression.'' .... Mr. Sedaris's bitchiness can easily wear thin..., and in the slighter pieces—like one about his brief stint as a writing teacher—his efforts to send up himself and his supporting cast are neither comical nor convincing, merely petulant. Indeed, the stronger chapters in this book tend to be the ones that mix satire with sentiment, brazenness with rumination. Those pieces reveal a writer who is capable not only of being funny, but touching, even tender, too.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Time
[Sedaris's] need to hang onto his neuroses permeates his fourth collection of comic pieces...an assortment of frequently very funny, too-often bland and ultimately frustrating essays. This is not to say that Sedaris is not a very funny writer. Many lines and several of the premises are brilliant, worthy of our best comic essayists—Calvin Trillin, Woody Allen, Christopher Buckley, Dave Barry. At his best, he makes you laugh out loud, which indeed may be worth the price of admission.
Jonathan Reynolds - New York Times Book Review
His brilliance resides in a capacity to surprise, associate, and disassociate, and the result is something like watching lightning strike in slow motion.
Boston Book Review
Deftly navigates some unsettling subject matter.... Ultimately, it's his notes of rapture that leave the strongest impressions.
Seattle Times
If wit were measured in people, Sedaris would be China...his talent is that huge.... Sedaris' wit should be regulated. Experiences this enjoyable are usually illegal.
Denver Rocky Mountain News
Sedaris is Garrison Keillor's evil twin: like the Minnesota humorist, Sedaris focuses on the icy patches that mark life's sidewalk, though the ice in his work is much more slippery and the falls much more spectacularly funny than in Keillor's.... "Reliable sources" have told Sedaris that he has "tended to exhaust people," and true to form, he will exhaust readers of this new book, too—with helpless laughter.
Publishers Weekly
Sedaris, noted essayist and NPR radio commentator, is a master at turning his life experiences into witty vignettes that both entertain and comment on the human condition.... A little sadder at times and overall a little less uproariously funny than in previous works, Sedaris remains the champion of the underdog. —Gloria Maxwell, Penn Valley Community Coll., Kansas City, MO
Library Journal
The undisputed champion of the self-conscious and the self-deprecating returns with yet more autobiographical gems from his apparently inexhaustible cache. Sedaris...approaches comic preeminence as he details his futile attempts, as an adult, to learn the French language.... [F]rom an impossibly sardonic rogue, quickly rising to Twainian stature.
Kirkus Reviews