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Me Talk Pretty One Day Abridged

Me Talk Pretty One Day Abridged

List Price: $24.98
Your Price: $16.99
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Very depressing book
Review: There was nothing to laugh about in this book. The author made it clear he had a terrible life, that he hated everything and everyone, and that he has felt unloved throughout his life. I found the book to be depressing, irritating and frustrating.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Most depressing book I've ever read
Review: I feel so bad for the author because there is not one thing in his life that is worth living for. He hates everything and everyone, and he makes that crystal clear with every word he set to paper. His descriptions are bad...some border on cruel and evil. His "humor" is directed towards 5 year olds or the brain-damaged. I don't know how this book ever got published.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Six Degrees of David
Review: I was on a plane to NYC reading "Naked" for my next book group meeting, when I heard someone a few rows down from me burst out laughing. As I exited the plane, I took a peek at what he was reading and it was "Me Talk Pretty One Day." A few weeks later, on a road trip, I listened to "Me Talk Pretty One Day," and at one point, I had to pull the car over to the side of the road, because I was laughing... so... hard! Reading (or listening to) his books may put you in some embarrassing situations, but it will be worth it.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: VERY funny, but more than just that
Review: Last Christmas I was given, at my request, the David Sedaris boxed set. Eleven months later, I still listen to at least four stories a week. I adore him! He's wondrously, riotously funny, but he's more than that.

Part of what makes him so attractive to me is that I too am from a Northern family that moved South when I was a kid, and like Sedaris I moved to France because of a relationship and without knowing more than a few words of the language. But Sedaris is so engaging a narrator that his readers can identify with even his more bizarre experiences/tendencies (e.g., cleaning the apartment of a sadomasochist, his inglorious career as a performance artist, his wish to buy a two-headed calf's skull for "the price of a single-seater"). His vision of the world is ultimately quite tender--this comes out especially in his stories about his mother--and he never laughs at anyone more than he laughs at himself.

"Me Talk Pretty One Day" is a great introduction to his work, and I especially recommend the spoken version--his reading of his stories adds quite a lot to them. If the France thing particularly interests you, begin with "See You Again Yesterday" (live), "Jesus Shaves" (EXCELLENT closing line!), or "Picka Pocketoni" (every time I hear it I can't help but wonder if Martin from California realizes how his boneheadedness has been immortalized).

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Wit? I don't think so
Review: I read this book based on numerous suggestions by friends. Bear in mind that I believe these people are very intelligent and I almost universally find humor in the same things they do. Given all that, I don't know why they liked this book so much. Perhaps I had an experience with overinflated expectations. David Sedaris is often called a "witty" writer. In my dictionary, wit is defined as "the ability to perceive and express in an ingeniously humorous manner the relationship between seemingly incongruous or disparate things." If this is what happens in Me Talk Pretty One Day, I completely missed it.

To me Sedaris was smug and his self-deprecation seemed completely insincere. Even when talking about how he is bad with scientific things, you get the feeling that he thinks it is better to be scientifically ignorant. My experience with reading Sedaris's tales was one of excrutiating tedium. He is very popular and liked by many of my friends so there must be something here that appeals to people. It simply doesn't appeal to me.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Bottleneck
Review: I honestly thought this was the funniest book that I have ever read.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: I made a fool of myself
Review: Okay, so I am on a fairly-long airplane ride, reading the 2nd half of this book. I was laughing out-loud, to the point that when we landed, two women in the next two rows turned around and said, "I'm sorry, but I just HAVE to know what you were reading...." The funny thing was, I didn't even realize I was laughing.

This book, and others by David Sedaris, are wonderful and hilarious and SO readable, all at once. I strongly recommend anything that Sedaris has written, particularly this one, to anyone who needs to have one of those "few and far between" side-splitting laughs.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Will Success Spoil David Sedaris?
Review: David Sedaris's first books, BARREL FEVER and NAKED, brought him from cult status to national celebrity status because of his singularly hilarious vision of the world. But much of his humor in those books depended on his scruffy, outsider economic status (he made his money before he became famous cleaniong other people's houses in Manhattan) and his extremely bizarre and loveable large family from North Carolina. It was easy to love Sedaris's self-deprecating hero because he was such an underdog; you couldn't help wanting him to win.

But since he's become a success his subject matter has changed while his tone has not. It's very hard to feel sorry and luagh at Sedaris's circumstances when his problems include assimilating properly into French culture (his boyfriend owns a farmhouse in Normandy) or choosing among overfancy dishes at expensive Manhattan restaurants. The best bits in this collection--the first story about his lisp correction therapy, his account of his father's peculiar eating habots, and his classic "Big Boy"--retain Sedaris' sense of himself as underdog, and thus are hilarious; the rest of the collection is quite disappointing for those who loved Sedaris's first two books.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Not impressed
Review: I did not laugh. The guy is not interesting. The writing is amateurish dime store bookish. The humor is high school level.
I really liked the title. Thats all.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: sedaris has a gift of sharing his life with humor
Review: Me talk pretty one day is one of those books everyone should have on their shelf. Sedaris tells the stories of a family of individuals who find ways to love each other despite their glaring differences. This is one of those rare books that makes you laugh each time you lose yourself among the pages. With each story told you find yourself reliving similar moments of your past and laughing. Me talk pretty is a book that you can open any time you feel down, read a few pages or plow through the whole book again, transforming the negative emotions into a happiness that seeps from your pours and coats your skin. This is a book you fall in love with from the first page and when you get to the end you find yourself turning back the pages and enjoying some of the stories again and again.
The struggles of life that rub you like sandpaper, become less painful when you are wrapped in the tals of David Sadaris. If you are looking for free flowing humor Me Talk Pretty One Day is a book you should not only have your collection but keep close.


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