A Profoundly Silly Book
929864
Ive always had the greatest admiration for the men who walked on the moon.  However as I read More than an Ark on Ararat I became convinced that at best Jim Irwin was hopelessly naive and at worst cognitively impaired.  Irwin lead a dangerously ill prepared, ill equipped and amateurish expedition to Mt. Ararat hoping to discover elephant tracks that lead backwards to a fully intact five hundred foot long wooden ship which had gone unnoticed for the last two thousand years.

Although Irwins marry band of idealistic and devout adventures had the bible as their guide it was anything but smooth sailing.  There were terrorist attacks and disputes over who would wash the dishes.  Expedition members, in an attempt to warm themselves, burned down one of their tents.  Its all too clear that the would be archeologists never earned their boy scout merit badges.  They were headed for disaster.  It comes as no surprise when Irwin suffers a near fatal fall down the mountain.  But even in this calamity Irwin sees the hand of God.  The near death experience offers him the opportunity to talk about Jesus from his hospital bed.

This book might have worked as a sort of comic Indiana Jones parody but unfortunately the quality of the writing never rises above the middle school level and the old testament quotes on each and every page are a bit too fire and brimstone for levity.  I suppose Irwins target audience might have been Sunday school students but even on that level Im not sure the book works.  A God who would flood the entire world drowning countless cute little puppies and kittens does not leave me with warm and fuzzy feelings.

The last few pages reveal the darker side of Irwins character.  Jim Irwin not only believed the the physical reality of the Ark, he also believed that hell was a very real place, a lake of fire where nonbelievers would suffer and burn in agony for all eternity without any hope of redemption.  This is the erotic dream of the drooling sadist.  No truly humane person could believe in everlasting punishment.
3387823
Every time someone tells me how much they love this book, it's typically one of my pretentious friends who thinks he is smarter than he actually is.

The book is dreadful, and in many ways.  The characters are unrealistic.  The plot is silly.  The way the title character goes about his "school shooting" is laughable.  SPOILER ALERT: Do you really think that, in today's day and age, a kid could go on a mass killing spree with a BOW AND ARROW?  The author obviously knows nothing about archery or the logistics of bows and arrows.

The narrator is an idiot who speaks as if she is teaching a university grammar course at all times.  Her husband is an ignoramus who doesn't see the sun before his eyes.  And the worst part is that the titular character is so stupidly unrealistic that the serious tone of the book is lost in the ridiculous Hannibal Lechter parody that he becomes.  Oh, kids are "Born" evil?  I didn't realize that this was a silly horror book.  The author has always stated that it was a serious character study.  Sure.  And snore.

But none of that matters.  It's not really a book so much as it's a big, long showpiece for the author to show all of the readers how great she is with verbiage.  She owns a thesaurus and wants you to know she used it.  Characters speak in ways that people simply do not speak.  The narrator is not a person so much as a fictional novel narrator, which is jarringly clear all throughout the book.  People simply don't speak this way.  And, if you meet people who say they do (or comment on this review by saying they do), they'll be those pretentious people who want to tell you how smart they know they are.  Well, just like Lionel Shriver is not nearly as clever as she thinks, people who love this book aren't nearly as smart as they believe they are, either.  So, when you see someone comment on this review about how intelligent they are, just know that they are not.

It's not a good book.  Slow, overlong, plodding, and just plain...well...stupid.

Shriver recently said she likes to write "unlikable" characters.  It's not that.  She just writes awful books.  With characters that don't really exist in the real world.  Go read "Lord of the Rings" and you'll find more realistic characters than you'll find in this book.  In fact, go read "The Cat in the Hat" and you'll still be more successful.

I only give it two stars because the idea is clever.  Without a doubt, I'll give her props for the story.
580113
It's cute, it's obviously meant to be silly and make you laugh, with a plethora of profanity and modern colloquialism.

But as an actual book on meditation or psychology, it falls way, way short.

In the end, I spent a few bucks for a conversation piece to sit on my desk at work.  I'm not mad about that.
2096156
Another Amazon reviewer and I love to review children's books and usually love the books we review. Not this time, not for "I'm So Embarrassed," by Robert Munsch.

If "I'm So Embarrassed" is some type of satire or wry humor, it goes over my head. The premise: A mother takes her son, 9 or so, to the mall for new shoes. He does NOT want to go because Mom embarrasses him EVERY time. She promises not to. Of course, first thing, without thinking, she spits on her hand and tries to tame his wild hair. Eeeekkk, he screams. You embarrassed me. I did? She is truly perplexed. Well, I won't do it again. But she does--two more gross times: In a lingering conversation with a kissy aunt and in showing his baby pictures to one of his teachers they meet. Double eeekkk!!

Then a friend from school appears and they decide to hang out since their moms embarrass them. The girl's mother brings over underpants and flaunts them in front of the boy. Which color do you want, she asks.

The two friends decide to embarrass their moms by saying they both snore and blame the thunderous sounds on the fathers. Then the mothers hide and demand to know how the children could embarrass them like that. They say, We had good teachers! The End.

The first grade teacher in my school loves this book and reads it to her students every year. I don't know why. The two mothers are incredibly insensitive, with edges of cruelty spiking their insensitivity. Then the turn-about is just as idiotic. Two children screaming out that their mothers snore. What kind of families are these, mall goers surely must wonder. Dysfunctional, for sure.

Did I miss something in this book? Two wrongs don't make a right? Is that it? What is the message? Is there a message? Should there be one? Come on, Mr. Munsch, what is the point of your book? Librarians truly want to know!
344632
The premise of this book was the seven deadly sins. I not only did not get a feeling of the deadly sins, I got the feeling Ms Evanovich decided to write a stupid book to see if it would sell. I don't doubt that it is selling because people love her lighthearted reading. I love her lighthearted style myself. I don't, however enjoy watching someone make fun of the art of writing in order to see just how stupid it could be. The setting is a bakery where people apparently eat cupcakes by the bucket. These are some of the characters and their famous lines:

  Shirley, stuck with speaking in tongues, is the stupidest, silliest, most boring character to ever find her way into a book. I will tell you something she said, but later. For the most part, what she said was not worth reading or your time trying to visualisz her.

  Gwen, who is not even struck with speaking in tongues says, "facaca". Is that a word? I spell checked it. No help. I have no idea what it means or what it was doing there.

  Diesel, the main hunk. Obviously unable to think up a name for him, she took one from a movie star. Diesel? Anyway, the main female character, who seemed to be struck with gluttony (but, only from time to time and for only certain things) is handling him erotically. His answer is, "you are scaring my boys." My boys? What a crock!

  The main female character, whose name I don't even remember, wonders what it would be like to stick her finger in an open jar of peanut butter while Diesel handcuffs her. Give me a break.

  I would have to place this under a newly named genre:  Ridiculous Pap. Or, as Shirley says, "icky, wiggle, wiggle."

  To give credit to Shirley, she said the only thing I liked in this whole book. On page 86, she speaks up and says, "Fruck". I agree, totally.
265557
Yes, the title is a lame joke and the repeated 12-step references are an insultingly stupid gag that isn't even clever the FIRST time he tries it.

Moreover, the information is often wrong. Example: when pointing out the problem of prefixes such as bi- and semi-, he gets the definition of semiannual backwards and actually teaches the reader that it means "every other year", which is wrong! And he overlooks the important fact that biennial and biannual are two different things.

There are punctuation errors in the book along with errors about punctuation.

I just had to stop reading before the book was finished. I was starting to skip a lot, especially all the attempts at humor, and I feared accidentally absorbing some of his errors.

Finally, take a look at this. The one reviewer here who "LOVED this book!!!!" and who claims to "teach a Business Writing course" says she or he "ended up using (and duely[sic] referencing) several pieces from his 12-step program." I didn't finish the book. Is "duely" a new word the author suggested instead of good old-fashioned duly?
2783026
Quick summary: 3 year old (Colton) has undiagnosed ruptured appendix and (according to the boy only, not the doctors, nurses or staff) dies for thee minutes unbeknownest to anyone but him.  He has a "heaven experience" which isn't revealed except for brief comments from the child for several YEARS.  How gullable does Todd Belcho think people are?  He wrote this book to make money and preach his version of God.  There's no other way to account for it.  The book is just plain silly.  And, yes, I guess I am in the minority doubting the creditability of a 3 year old telling snippets of what happened while he visited heaven.  Absurd.  The only logical sequel to this book is Colton's diagnosis with a mental disorder.
1313530
Apparently, somehow, this book is not satire. You might think it is based on the fact that the pages are violently pink and aggressively floral, or that it's punctuated with twee "Dear Diary!" entries chroncling how this dwarf needs a makeover, and that elf likes her shoes, or that the book helpfully includes three different definitions of the word "mini" (it means a miniature! Who could have guessed?) in the first thirty pages, but no, it's not satire. It's just a disgustingly sexist, insulting piece of condescension for women whose tiny brains can't understand anything that's not related to shoes and designer bags and boys, or isn't presented in a kooky font. It gives a basic overview of the information contained in the Player's Handbook, but the Player's Handbook is clearly designed for men, and women wouldn't be able to follow it, so naturally Shelly Mazzanoble wrote this hot pink garbage to assure women that D&D isn't just for hopeless basement dwelling neckbeards, and spends chapter after chapter trying to convince me, a self-obsessed, frivolous, shopoholic, chronic dieter, who is reading this book on the treadmill (but not too much because I don't want unsightly muscles bulging out of my skinny jeans) that this is indeed the case. She assures me that I won't have to consume "full sugar soda" and wreck my diet (I can always bring along a baggie of Kashi cereal!), and that someone can help me with the difficult math (she literally says that she hasn't done that much math since her all day shopping trip at the mall). Every sentence is more infuriating than the last, from the Clueless-esque quips about "fashion challenged" dwarfs to the nauseating jokes about bad perms and shoes. I think the editor must have removed the "teehee!" that I'm 100% sure Shelly Mazzanoble adds after every sentence she writes, speaks, and thinks. I haven't confirmed this, but I'm assuming that the author isn't really a human woman, but three small internet trolls in a trenchcoat. Investigations are continuing.

Essentially the book fundamentally understands why women aren't flocking to D&D. The author thinks it's because the game is simply not attractive to women because it's not pink enough, nobody talks about shoes, and it's too hard for women to understand. She's wrong. The reason women aren't flocking to D&D is because when this book was pitched to the Wizards of the Coast, someone somewhere thought it was a good idea.
3240456
What can you say about a book called 101 burger jokes? Well, it's one of those books that is so bad it's good, although I'm sure this wasn't the author's intention. Basically the best thing about this book is the very premise. One has to wonder why the author decided to focus entirely on such a specific and bizarre premise. Apparently he is the author of a number of similar books on sharks, dinosaurs, horses and I shudder to think what else. But I'm sure that this is his most puzzling topic.
And the jokes are terrible. Worse even than the jokes you get in the cheapest of Christmas crackers. Most of them rely entirely on abstract puns (e.g. "What do they call a meeting among the most brilliant people in Burger Land? - A MEATing of the minds!") that have very little to do with hamburgers themselves and more to do with just the sounds of any words vaguely related to hamburgers.
The other thing I wonder about is the target audience - the low calibre of the puns and the near disturbing level of anthropomorphization of burgers suggests children, but the obscure late 70s pop culture references and the sheer specificity of the subject matter confounds the matter beyond cognition.
In short, it's a great conversation piece, but go elsewhere if you want genuine burger-related humour.
2578871
This was a silly book.  Some of the plot was not at all possible, for example you cannot kill diabetics with one piece of cake.  But somehow I read the whole thing, mostly I think from the desire to see how the book ended. I should have just skipped to the end.
2524773
I read this when I was 19. I thought it was OK. But boy was I lost in my life. Since that time (1977) I have learned how to be happy. And it is based on accepting the world and reality and dealing with it in terms which allow shaping it to my satisfaction, or not bothering with things over which I have no control. This book advocates stupidity, couched in seemingly endless discussions which quote Greek philosophers to justify his dumber than hell approach to life. He fails to recognize the true dynamics of science (testing and adapting to reality), while expounding on the value of imagination to the point of valuing ideas simply because they are original. His whole foundation (the concept of "Quality") is asinine. Quality is simply a high degree of value and usefulness exhibited in the characteristics of entities, be they theories, objects, inventions, or behavior. This man is misled to the point of utter impracticality, all the while believing that he is on to something so profound it can change the world. The only things his ideas change are bad experiences of the world to worse experiences of the world. If you read about his reaction to his book over the years, he is somewhat puzzled that it has never been accepted as a text for philosophy courses. The reason is simple: It's dumber than hell. You want profound? Read Walden? Thoreau often has his head in the clouds, but he at least accepts the world as a place in which to live, unlike Pirsig, who sees it as an entity to renounce, and that's on his good days. On the worse days, the world is something to abhor, and it's no wonder that he himself struggles with that, as his fundamental idea, that he is right, and that the whole world is based on fallacy, denies all that has been created by honest evaluation of phenomena. Absolutely an abomination of the intellect. Shear crap! I stand behind this review one hundred ten percent. The one aspect that is quite wonderful is the reconciliation with his son. That is hands down the best part of the book. But it takes 475 pages to get there, and could have been achieved in the first paragraph if the kids dad didn't have his head up his ass.
3523441
This book makes NO sense whatsoever. I get that the author was trying to be funny and I've got a good sense of humor, but this book is downright DUMB. Also doesn't do anything to teach colors.
4013870
It's hard for me not to act like a bit of a patronizing jerk towards some of the people here who were convinced by this book and "found God". It's just sill-no, scratch that. It's utterly stupid to me. Nothing about this book is in anyway convincing. Ed and Lorraine were nothing more than very charismatic con artists. They talk and talk and talk about all this "evidence" yet not thing one is ever shown. The book has a few pictures of literally nothing passed off as demonic phenomena.

If you are actually swayed by this book to believe, than I think you were already a believer to begin with and just looking for justification.

While not in anyway convincing in the slightest (there is some seriously silly things that happen in this book. Cartoonishly so), the book is very enjoyable and fast paced-if not cheesy and redundant. The writing is poor and reads like a 60s comic book with an ! at the end of damn near every sentence. Anyone who is entertained by horror and the occult will find plenty of good scares here. It's a harmless campfire tales kind of book. Pick it up if you're looking for some free-wheeling fun scary fiction.
2093214
This is a stupid book.  I got about half way through and stopped reading.  Blech.  Stilted language and not one character to root for.  The main character (Jane McGuire) is petulant, rude and for all her "worldliness" is very childish.  She seems to be constantly stamping her beautiful little foot and uttering "Damn you!!!"  She insists on doing as she pleases and all the responsible adults around her roll over, declare that she knows best, and allow her to do it.  And she is such an irresistible "woman" that 34 year old Mark Trevor salivates over her (this part is just weird) as do almost all of the other male characters.  And she is portrayed to be so much older than 20 year old Jock and 23 or so Mario.  Puh-lease.  Oh, yeah.  Ya gotta love how the ridiculous plot includes ancient treasure, international terrorism, and numerous references to 9/11 and Homeland Security.  Ooohh.  This is my first IJ book and surely my last.  I got to page 250 before bailing on it.  What was the publisher thinking?
4075297
Do take seriously what it says on the back cover of the book: "This is a very silly book filled with very bad things".  They really mean it.  The book is actually funny - to an adult - but not very appropriate for children.  A cartoon showing a boy whose tooth is being pulled out by a dentist, ending with the dentist ripping off the boy's head accidentally? Good luck taking your child to the dentist next time!  Oh, and then there are all the poo jokes... Funny, but really inappropriate.  I'm sure kids make up jokes like that all the time in the schoolyard on their own - but should they also find them in a book?
2296590
This "alien field guide" is a silly guide aimed at kids in the 8-11 range. Each "alien" bares a remarkable similarity to something commonplace here on earth (like clouds). It's clearly meant to be silly fun, but the frankly the humor just falls flat. Imagine the least funny person you know trying to tell jokes - that's kind of what it feels like. Additionally, the vast majority of the jokes (disco? blurry alien photos?) will go way over the head of kids in the target age range. It's not bad, but it's also not that good.
4001216
What a silly book.  So bad it's not even fun to laugh at. An absurd plot populated by cardboard cutout characters. It gets 2 stars instead of 1 because Hall does seem capable of stringing a subject, predicate and verb together to make a sentence.  Still, the latest Wonder Woman movie is more believable than this.