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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: 5 stars
Summary: Just charming.
Review: Sedaris is a master of the short story / essay. Get everything he writes.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Good, not great
Review: Love David Sedaris, but this effort isn't as consistently funny as his previous pieces. At times he tends to go off on these self-indulgent tangents that I found pretty boring. Overall I still think he's genius.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Very very funny
Review: This book is a series of essays about speaking, some of which are laugh out loud funny, and others of which are just pleasant to read. The first few essays are about childhood and the author's speech therapy, and are quite funny and touching. The last few are about the author's attempt to learn French in France. If you have ever tried to learn a foreign language you know the ridiculous, embarassing mistakes you make. I read this book on a plane, and actually had to close the book during these essays because I was convulsing in laughter and the other passengers were starting to look at me funny.
I recommend this book, mainly for the last few essays which I found hysterical. The first few are also good, don't get me wrong!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: I love me some David Sedaris
Review: David Sedaris has such a way with words and wit, he makes all of his stories hysterical. I'd recommend any of his books to anyone.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A new height of humor
Review: "Me Talk Pretty One Day" is simply the funniest book I have ever read. This auto-biographical look into the ironic and vigorously funny anecdotes of Sedaris's life offer the reader a bizzare sense of hope, and an invitation to take life less seriously. These are stories that make you cry with laughter and beg to be read aloud to friends. I can't imagine that David Sedaris is for everyone, however. This is not a book that I would gift to my grandparents or in-laws, but for an adventurous fun person with a decent sense of humor, "Me Talk Pretty One Day" will certainly become a favorite.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Hilarious
Review: This book is a collection of humorous essays having to do with the author’s life and his observations, similar in format to those we’ve seen by Woody Allen, Steve Martin, George Carlin, or, if you go back far enough, Robert Benchley. They start when he was a boy in junior high school taking speech therapy lessons (“The word therapy suggested a profound failure on my part. Mental patients had therapy”), to his life as a fortysomething adult in France. In between he lives with his family in western New York and Raliegh, North Carolina, and as he grows up he works in various occupations in New York and Chicago. He also travels a lot. The essays are uneven to the extent that while some of them will cause you to bellow or guffaw uproariously, many will only cause you to chuckle gently or giggle uncontrollably. Yes, the book is that funny.

Of course, the author was lucky enough to grow up in the Addams family. I take that back. The Addams family looks like Make Room for Daddy in comparison with Mr. Sedaris’ family. There is his father, to begin with, who, among other things, can’t bear to throw away food. He keeps little bits of it tucked in the pockets of his clothes, his suitcase, behind his bed, you name it. Occasionally he’ll whip out a piece and start chewing. There is his sister, born and bred to be thin, who surprises her father one day with her “fat-suit.” She is also prone to saying things to her brother like, “Good luck on beating that rape charge!” while exiting a crowded subway with him on it. And then there is the pathologically profane brother, the self-proclaimed, “Rooster.” Mr. Sedaris has a lot of material to draw from, but then, it is doubtful that anyone else could quite put it his way.

The brother essay is particularly funny. 5’4”, with a high, girlish voice, eleven years younger than Mr. Sedaris, he is the one member of the family who took to the South, unlike the rest of these transplanted New Yorkers. But I suspect even the South would have reservations about the Rooster: “Certain m*********** think they can f*** with my s***,” he says. “But you can’t kill the Rooster. You might f*** him up sometimes, but, b****, nobody kills the m************ Rooster. You know what I’m saying?”

And then there is Mr. Sedaris trying to learn French, in France, with Poles and Italians and Koreans. The teacher asks them to try to explain Easter to the Morrocan student who has never heard of it. “A party for the little boy of God who call his self Jesus.” “He make the good things, and on the Easter we be sad because somebody makes him dead today.” “One too may eat of the chocolate,” says the Italian nanny. The teacher asks them who brings the chocolate. “The rabbit of Easter. He bring of the chocolate.” I could go on with this, but it is difficult to type when one’s fingers are shaking from laughing so hard.

There is so much more. I’ve barely even scratched the surface. This book is a real treat. Light, witty, clever, occasionally insightful and always very, very funny. It serves as a great, humorous break between reading the Tolstoys and the Dostoyevskys of the world, and best of all, you don’t have to sacrifice your intelligence to do so.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: oh my god he is so funny
Review: i haven't read anything by anyone funnier, and i wish i could find more books as funny as this one. i read it on the metro on the way to work and couldn't keep myself from laughing out loud. so half of d.c. thinks i'm crazy, but that's ok b/c it was worth it. it's such a great book. it will pick you back up in no time.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: a really funny read-and very empathetic
Review: David Sedaris's style is wonderful. It is surpassed only by his imagination for topics to write about. The chapter on learning French had me on the floor laughing. Nearly 30 years, ago when we emigrated to Israel, we attended daily classes in Hebrew and his stringing together of sentences reminded me so much of myself at that time. Highly recommended for anyone who likes quirky humour and a great writing style.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Thank you, David!
Review: A review in less than 1000 words... FANTASTIC!

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: not as consistently funny as Naked, but still entertaining
Review: This collection of humorous essays is a bit more uneven than David Sedaris's previous ones (Naked, Barrel Fever), and that's why it merits just 3 stars. Sedaris is at his best here when he recalls his experiences as an American living in Paris. Skip right to part "deux," if you want, and let the hilarity begin.


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