Rating: 
Summary: Delightful.
Review: Sedaris' control of prose is dumbfounding. "Naked" is a collection of essays and stories based upon Sedaris' childhood and life, which are at times, not wholly believable. He embellishes just enough to turn the saddest stories of a dysfunctional family into a farcical and enjoyable romp of satire. Sedaris is upfront and honest with his readers, at times saying the things we wish we all had the courage to say. He celebrates both the good and the bad of everyone, making us realize that in some way, all of life is enjoyable; but sometimes you have to be callous to find the humor.
Rating: 
Summary: You'll buy it... but you won't keep it.
Review: The only thing I can say to express how much I love this book is: Buy two. Mine has been passed around to at least seven of my friends. It is so funny, clever and at times, tender that you'll want everyone you care about to experience it as well. Buy this book -- No, buy two.
Rating: 
Summary: Very disappointing - very little humor
Review: This book is a sad commentary on an extremely dysfunctional family whose members all need help. To attempt to find humor in such a family suggests that the author needs help most of all! I found this book to be very disturbing and not at all funny.
Rating:
Summary: Funny? Yes. "Side-splitting?" No.
Review: The publisher touts this book with quotes of "side-splitting" and "laughed so hard I dropped the book." This leads me to believe that the typical book reviewer suffers from some degenerative bone disorder. Or maybe I have stronger, split resistant sides and a better grip than most. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it. David is an honest and funny writer. But, unlike the apparent high altitude, chain smoker who reviewed "Naked," I didn't have to "stop reading to catch my breath." A fun book, and also check out "Barrel Fever" by Sedaris - another great read.
Rating:
Summary: Read it in a day-quite remarkable since I was at work!
Review: But man, I couldn't help it! Yes, it is horribly disturbing, but just when your breath catches and you wonder, "Where is he going with this?" he turns it, makes it humorous and ridiculous. Reminds me of the scene in Pulp Fiction where they hit a bump and John Travolta accidentally shoots the victim they kidnapped in the head . . . you hate to laugh but you find yourself doing it anyway. As hard as the essays were to digest at times, I appreciated him dealing with race and sexuality issues as he did; daring to say a lot of things that others never do, and making the reader deal with it. Sedaris is masterful at knowing exactly how far to stretch the line, before letting it bounce back the other direction. To those that wonder if all these stories are true, I believe they are. Anyone who REALLY pays attention to their lives, especially looking at it as a detached observer with an evil streak of humor . . . could find a novel of equal absurdity inside themselves. My life is as boring as they come and my parents were fairly normal, but they did know a seven foot hare krishna named "Big Ed". David-keep writing . . . few have your gifts.
Rating:
Summary: Though fashionable, self-pity isn't funny.
Review: Imagine a drawer crowded with all the emotional language, the symbols and feelings, values and aspirations, that ornament popular vehicles of representational reality, that bedeck and bespangle all manner of storytelling, of bestsellers, movies, TV, and even emotionally color, seep into, that which is supposedly impersonal or factual--news, sports, and textbooks--pervading our culture so thoroughly as to go unnoticed, as to be merely assumed part of the landscape, and, as such, inevitably assimilated, taken as our own, as us. There beneath stories of the "dysfunctional," the "victimization," alcohol abuse, drug rehab, pedophilia, rape and ethnic pride; there under all that gender equality, gay liberation, multicultural, rainbow coalition empowerment, self-invention, and special group interests, supporting the whole ragtag phantasmagoria that is used everyday to tug at our heart strings from TV, movie screens, and the page is just the simplest of ideas: ME ME ME ME ME mine mine mine mine. Underlying too much of what currently aspires to pathos is self-interest disguised as self-pity, the latter being little more than the rubber band of the ego relaxing momentarily. Sedaris dips everything he writes about in the bitter acid of self-pity, going so far as to pour cold contempt on his subjects; his failings are accepted, those of others mostly derided. The bounteous criticism of everyone else and the world is difficult to endure from a man who can boast no significant accomplishment, who has endured no special trial, seen no special sights, glimpsed no unique vision, nor has any new opinions or ideas to share with the reader. The heart of humor, that affection and love bestowed on the objects of derision or satire, including oneself, is so absent that the merest human kindness which occasionally surfaces here seems a miracle; nor is there anything like the lofty, disinterested intellectual meat or imagination of a Swift. Sedaris' catty negativity (he is a homosexual) is unrelieved, wearing, and abrasive. His heart is not large or generous enough to admit the fondness for the stumbling, bumbling fool found in Thurber or Ring Lardner, regardless of the claims made to the contrary by the plethora of reviews littering the book's cover and inside pages (one quote goes so far as to describe the book as a collection of "essays," when it is in fact composed of short stories; so much for critical credibility). There isn't even the accuracy in social detail of Jean Shepherd. The only parts that stand out are brief portraits of the writer's mother, a cynical, soft-hearted alcoholic, and Greek granny, an obstinate, opaque relic transplanted intact to these shores from the old country. Lacking irony and disinterest, the rest is mostly flat and two dimensional, without contour and shadowless, as if illuminated by a harsh, artificial, unforgiving light. Characters and situations are glibly and superficially sketched; language suffers from bland homogeneity (Sedaris has a unique ability to write sentences of the same length and cadence unfailingly adhering to nothing but colloquial English); very little is inferred, very little is given for afterthought, hardly anything lies beneath the surface. As a footnote, I could not help but notice that, inadvertently or not, Sedaris fulfills the stereotype of a homosexual's family background, which consists of a strong, dominant, dependent mother and a weak, recessive, indifferent father, i.e., imbalanced gender role models. Has anyone else noticed this or been bothered that such basic pathology ("dysfunction") is unremarked upon by the author?
Rating:
Summary: A funny and bizare look at growing-up.
Review: I loved this book!!! I have to admit I was drawn to the book by its cover. However, it was David Sedaris's writing that made it impossible to put it down. This histerical look into David Sedaris's funny, yet bizare childhood made me both laugh and want to call my parents and tell them I love them. The one thing that stood out through "Naked" was that, no matter how weird things got, his heart was always in the right place (well...for the most part). I can't wait to read Mr. Sedaris's other novels.
Rating:
Summary: "Naked " does not live up to expectations
Review: My book club read this book for our August '98 meeting. We had read the reviews in Amazon.com and were expecting a laugh a minute. However, we were all disappointed in the book. For most of us, the book elicited a chuckle or two, and generally not until the middle of the book. One Amazon.com reviewer commented on Sedaris' dysfuntional family, but it is Sedaris himself who is dysfunctional. One of our members has heard Sedaris on NPR, and she enjoyed the book more than the rest of us because she said it explained a lot of the background of his radio stories. The consensus was that Sedaris is a loser who is writing to elicit our sympathy for his poor pathetic excuse of a life.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting but not terribly funny...
Review: True, I did laugh out loud at some of the stories, but I didn't think it was "Sidesplitting" as the cover said. An OK read if you want to read the details of someone growing up in a dysfunctional family and wandering around during early adult hood (didn't we all!). Challenge to the author: Tell us about your MEANINGFUL relationships...
Rating: 
Summary: Repetitive
Review: The stories in this book become repetitive. The story(ies) is(are) funny but only for so long.
|
