Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
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Book Reviews of Me Talk Pretty One Day
Book Review: Hits close to home
Summary: 5 Stars
Again, David rocks. I can go on and on about his witty observations and uniqueness and what-have-you, but I shan't. All I know is that the book makes me laugh and I really find many things that are meant to make me laugh to be unfunny. I accidentally left this book at a deli and the staff was sad when I came to retrieve it. It was living behind the bar and the employees were grabbing quick reads between shifts. It probably is now filled with innumerable germs and food borne bacteria but I love it and will not part with it and still reread it when I need a lift--which is quite often.
I like to retell Sedaris stories. My favorite from Me Talk Pretty is the one where David compares his boyhood experience watching a Herbie;the talking car movie in the States with that of his boyfriend Hugh who watched it in an African country. Hugh's father, a diplomate, was late picking him up from the theater so he had to wait outside while a dead man hung from a post, swinging in the breeze.
I never tire of hearing about my husband's crazy and fascinating foreign childhood.
Our Lives Have Gone To The Dogs
Book Review: Beyond funny
Summary: 5 Stars
I first heard David Sedaris on public radio and found his essays to be extremely funny and insightful. This book continues that tradition very well.Sedaris is an autobiographer, a social satirist and a wit. In some ways, however, he reminds me of the Jerry character on Seinfeld: He is funny on his own, but is funniest when he is the straight man for the genuinely eccentric people in his life. His family--from his beautiful sister who makes herself ugly to his foul-mouthed redneck brother to his sly, understated mother and his father, a screamingly funny IBM engineer with the strangest eating habits -- are the real stars here. Even his partner, who gets relatively little play in this book, is great fun.
Each essay has something to recommend it. While I thought the essays from France were more insightful and less humorous than the essays about his growing up, they all worked. And several were so funny I was unable to read them to my wife because I was laughing too hard to get the words out.
Read this book for the humor and you will happily reflect later on some keen social commentary.
(Note to earlier reviewer: Sedaris is much funnier than Bryson, and for much longer stretches.)
Book Review: Me Read Book and Write Review
Summary: 5 Stars
Sedaris, if you have not read him, is more than worth your while.
Very, very, very funny. Very real, very poignant. Somewhat this is the story of his life as kind of a gay Everyman- an alternately-oriented Charlie Brown if you will. The orientation issue is never overpowering, more woven in as it is added to the list of things that life has thrown at him that he must make the best of. The family is dysfunctional, but with a lot of character and even love, and keeps the stories from just being about a sad, rootless soul. The encounters with the machinery of southern public school, northern private commerce (as a pre-Will Farrel elf), and with France are exquisite. His life is one that we can identify with, maybe with a substitution here or there. His observational humor is clever, and his classic self-deprecating wit helps the reader to always want to root for him. There aren't, and I guess never have been, a lot of great humor writers out there (once you get past the Simpson's writers), but to me Sedaris can take his place with the best of them. I'm pretty conservative, but I know a good laugh when I see one, and a good book when I read one, and this is a very, very good book.
Book Review: Sedaris Does it Again...and Again...
Summary: 5 Stars
It is interesting to note that some readers do not find Sedaris' work interesting. Of course, we all have bad days, months, years, and we'll pick up a book that does not engage our minds with it's humorous intent. Not so for me with Sedaris' "Me Talk Pretty One Day". Essays on his family, to his days in New York until his current residency in Paris are such rip roaring fun - that he tore me away from the deep freeze of the winter blues into a rapturous high from which I have yet to come down. He makes you laugh and cry ... Nay - naysayers everywhere. This man has a mind that, as a writer wanna-be, made me envious of how he can take his life and describe it with words that create humor and texture so wonderful I felt like I've just had a fabulous meal at Nobu (NY Sushi restaurant). Damn Sedaris! I missed sitcoms, dinner, local meetings at the gym because each page kept me prisoner to his tales. I couldn't put this down. When I hit the last page - I was hungry for more. Needless to say - I now own all of Sedaris' work. Not everyone will love this as much as I. But, I can tell you, he does have a following - and I have joyously entered his clan. Get this book!Book Review: I laughed 'til I cried
Summary: 5 Stars
I have read books, the way some people devour bags of potato chips, all of my life. In my younger, more pretentious days, I thought a book had to be depressing to be smart: Sartre's No Exit, Camus' The Stranger, Kafka's Metamorphosis, stepping stones to the masochism of reading feminist tracts, spiraling ever downward to the study of law and theology. Then a friend lent me a copy of Me Talk Pretty One Day.,I've paid my dues in France and laughed like a madwoman at Mr. Sedaris' take on the language conundrum. I personally like myself and everyone else better when I'm in France for the reason he so brilliantly illustrates: I don't know enough French to understand when they're being nasty and I lack the vocabularly to wallow in my own customary cynicisms.
In the chapter "Remembering My CHildhood on the Continent of Africa", the bit about the field trip to the Ethiopian slaughterhouse had me punching my fists into the couch pillows in a futile effort to stop laughing. Ditto, for his rant about eco-capitalism. I marked a half-dozen pages in a twenty-minute read so I could call friends and give them a laugh. Hot damn!