Anything Can Happen
Notes on My Inadequate Life and Yours
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A look at the human comedy from a prize-winning writer who is “bright, funny and tells it like it is” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch).
In this insightful collection, an accomplished essayist and humorist offers a class in “Tyranny for Beginners;” warns about the snares of dinner parties; explains the mind-set of barbarians; suggests the perfect gift for Mother—a wildebeest—and tells what happens when his dog’s barking drives him to thoughts of murder.
Roger Rosenblatt forces us to laugh at the silliness of the world we have created, refocuses our minds on what really matters, and alerts us to the injustice and cruelty that lie just below the skin. A recipient of a Peabody Award, an Emmy, and two Polk Awards, and the author of Rules for Aging and Making Toast, he offers an entertaining and enlightening read filled with his “trademark droll wit” (Tulsa World).
“The best thing about reading an essay by Rosenblatt is that he makes you think.” —Town & Country
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Lyndon Johnson badgered Hubert Humphrey into killing a deer on a visit to Johnson's Texas ranch, then he sent the vice president the severed head of the animal to remind him of his power over him. That's really all there is to it." So begins "Tyranny for Beginners," one of the 60 or so short meditations on less dramatic forms of powerlessness political, economic and otherwise. The best pieces here are significantly more scathing, and more offhandedly probing, than anything Rosenblatt does for his "essays" on PBS's Newshour with Jim Lehrer. "Dogstoevsky" satirizes the morbidity of realistic Russian fiction, while "What Bothers Me" indirectly demonstrates how it does matter if banks fail in Yonkers. Both pieces are fuzzy in concept and execution, but their very formlessness gives them a kind of immediacy. A few longer pieces are interspersed among one- and two-page snippets. The tale of how Rosenblatt (Where We Stand) and his brother pretended to be the switchboard operators at the legendary Luchow's restaurant documents human gullibility. "My Stump Speech" and "Things One Would Like to See in the Movies" send up political clich s and cinematic ones respectively. Consumer society takes it on the chin in "How I Turned into the Westin" and "The Bathroom for You." The best is nearly the last, as well as the longest; after you read "Ashley Montana Goes Ashore in the Caicos," celebrity journalism in particular and pop culture in general will never quite sound the same. The cover shows it raining cats and dogs, not inappropriately.
