Staying Crazy To Keep From Going Insane - Softcover

Cris Cohen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0983769001 ISBN 13: 9780983769002

Publisher: Tyrannosaurus Max Press, LLC, 2011

Synopsis

For six years, California native and author Cris Cohen entertained readers in and around Southern California with his wry and often hilarious takes on any number of everyday subjects. His humor columns ran in several newspapers. Staying Crazy To Keep From Going Insane is a compilation of his funniest columns from those days and the best new ones from his blog he has been writing since he and his family moved to Cary, NC, in 2008 - where he finally lives in a neighborhood in which no one has written a screenplay. 

Topics in the book range from weight loss (after his gut moved from "out of shape" to "second trimester") and the weather ("I've eaten Jell-O molds that were less dense than the air out here"), to rustic restaurants ("which usually means you shouldn't go there unarmed") and his wife's pregnancy ("While ultrasounds might be precise, there is a lot that they miss, like the ability to make your child look human.").

The book's sarcastic title, "Staying Crazy to Keep From Going Insane," bespeaks its wide-ranging topics. It's also a phrase that the author, who claims he took up writing because he couldn't afford mental health care, has used many times over the years when someone asks him, "How's it going?" 
The book features a quirky cover illustration (a goldfish wearing a shark fin hat) by Raleigh, NC, artist Darla Yancho and an interior illustration that resulted from a contest he ran on the book's website stayingcrazy.com. 

Endorsed by Pulitzer Prize-winning humor author Dave Barry, New Yorker cartoonist Drew Dernavich, and PEN/Faulkner winning novelist T.C. Boyle, Staying Crazy To Keep From Going Insane is laugh-out-loud funny. But its purpose is earnest: Proceeds will go to the Miracle League of the Triangle, the local franchise of a baseball league for kids with special needs. One of those kids is author Cris Cohen's son, Max. 

About this title

About the Author

Cris was born in Buffalo, NY, which even people from Siberia describe as "freakin' cold". At the age of one, Cris and his parents moved to a suburb of Los Angeles, a city filled with actors and actresses, most of them taking your order at IHOP. Several years later, Cris attended and surprisingly graduated from the University of Southern California. He then fulfilled his parents' dreams by throwing away his education and working as a DJ in rock radio in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. In 1994 the station where he was working was sold without notice to a Spanish language station (true). Since his fluency in Spanish was limited to the line "Do you speak English?", Cris chose to move on and take up serious work. He started writing his humor column for a collection of California newspapers. Cris eventually married one of his editors, simultaneously demonstrating his dedication to journalism and his wife's lack of taste. Not wanting to spend his days just staring at a desktop computer, he then moved on to the tech world and Silicon Valley, where he spent his days staring at a laptop computer. Although they had made good friends in the San Francisco Bay Area, Michele and Cris wanted to live in a place where the houses cost less than the average nuclear submarine. So in 2008 they moved to North Carolina, where the state flower is an arrangement of pulled pork and hushpuppies.

Review

"A fine book for a fine cause" - Dave Barry - Pulitzer Prize-winning humor columnist

"Very funny stuff -- and your very strong voice shines through." - TC Boyle - PEN / Faulkner and PEN / Malamud Prize-winning author

"If Cris made a lasagna, it would probably be a funny lasagna. If Cris made a chair, it would be a funny chair. Thankfully, he has decided to make a book instead, which I enjoyed reading along with a glass of the most hilarious Merlot. Keep it coming, Cris!" - Drew Dernavich - Cartoonist for The New Yorker magazine 

Edition details

• Publisher: Tyrannosaurus Max Press, LLC
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0983769001
• ISBN 13: 9780983769002
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 178
• Editor: Michele Cohen
• Illustrator: Daryl Stephenson, Michelle Zerzanek, Marilyn Berg Cooper