Dave Barry's Bad Habits: A 100% Fact Free Book (Beeler Large Print Series) - Hardcover

Barry, Dave

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1574905244 ISBN 13: 9781574905243

Publisher: Thomas t Beeler, 2003

Synopsis

If you're not already acquainted--nay, infatuated--with the works of the man who the New York Times calls "the funniest man in America," you can get cracking right now with this all-time favorite collection of Dave Barry's humor columns. Dave Barry's Bad Habits won't rot your teeth, cause your insurance premiums to go up, or make your kids go cross-eyed if they sit too close to it. It will, however, make you laugh so hard your middle actually moves (the best exercise, and possibly the only kind you'll be interested in after forty). Here, preserved for all time, are Barry's profoundest musings on such topics as how to get kids to stop smoking (eliminate tenth grade), what to do if your car is making loud noises (turn up the radio), and a solution to the battle of the sexes (let the men do housework, say, for the next six thousand years to even things up). Together they serve to expose the little insanities of everyday life and assure us that we're not completely alone in a world gone mad.

About this title

Review

"To most people, news means information about events that affect a lot of people. On local TV news shows, news means anything that you can take a picture of, especially if a local TV News Personality can stand in front of it."

Dave Barry is the modern master of silliness; there's a party in his pen. While he's more recently branched out into books and magazine articles, the form where he shines brightest is the newspaper column. Dave Barry's Bad Habits is a cracking-good collection of his syndicated column taken from the early 1980s. And Barry at his best can stand among the greatest humorists America has produced.

First of all, let me assure you that we are not in a depression. The key economic indicator of a depression is that you suddenly start seeing a lot of primitive black-and-white newsreel films of people wearing old-fashioned hats and overcoats and forming lines in the streets of major cities to obtain bread. So far, all the lines of people have been videotaped in color, which is the sign of a stable economy. Also, the people have not been lining up for bread. They have been lining up for cheese, which the government has several million tons of."

When you're looking for a good belly laugh, sometimes only Dave Barry will do. Dave Barry's Bad Habits skates from topic to topic, always light, always rambunctious. For the dedicated fan, it's an essential volume; for the rest, it's yet more evidence that Barry is the Zen master of written mirth. --Michael Gerber

About the Author

Ridley Pearson is the award-winning coauthor, along with Dave Barry, of Peter and the Starcatchers, Peter and the Shadow Thieves, Peter and the Secret of Rundoon, Peter and Sword of Mercy, Escape from the Carnivale, Cave of the Dark Wind, Blood Tide, and Science Fair. He has also written more than twenty best-selling crime novels, inlcuding Killer View and Killer Weekend, and the young adult fantasies Kingdom Keepers-Disney After Dark, Kingdom Keepers II-Disney at Dawn, and Kingdom Keepers III-Disney in Shadow. He was the first American to be awarded the Raymond Chandler/Fulbright Fellowship in Detective Fiction at Oxford University.

The New York Times has pronounced Dave Barry “the funniest man in America.” But of course that could have been on a slow news day when there wasn’t much else fit to print. True, his bestselling collections of columns are legendary, but it is his wholly original books that reveal him as an American icon. Dave Barry Slept Here was his version of American history. Dave Barry Does Japan was a contribution to international peace and understanding from which Japan has not yet fully recovered. Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys is among the best-read volumes in rehab centers and prisons. Raised in a suburb of New York, educated in a suburb of Philadelphia, he lives now in a suburb of Miami. He is not, as he often puts it so poetically, making this up.

About this edition

• Publisher: Thomas t Beeler
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1574905244
• ISBN 13: 9781574905243
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 299