Home :: Books :: Audiocassettes  

Arts & Photography
Audio CDs
Audiocassettes

Biographies & Memoirs
Business & Investing
Children's Books
Christianity
Comics & Graphic Novels
Computers & Internet
Cooking, Food & Wine
Entertainment
Gay & Lesbian
Health, Mind & Body
History
Home & Garden
Horror
Literature & Fiction
Mystery & Thrillers
Nonfiction
Outdoors & Nature
Parenting & Families
Professional & Technical
Reference
Religion & Spirituality
Romance
Science
Science Fiction & Fantasy
Sports
Teens
Travel
Women's Fiction
Naked Abridged

Naked Abridged

List Price: $17.00
Your Price: $11.56
Product Info Reviews

<< 1 .. 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 .. 32 >>

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: funny, but the humor is a bit twisted
Review: This is actually actually funny book, but I have to say I was disappointed. I read Me Talk Pretty Some Day before this one. Me Talk is one the funniest books I have read in years. Unfortunately, Naked doesn't come even close. Get the other book if you want a Sedaris book.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A book you will give to your friends
Review: If you are not chuckling & laughing so hard that tears are falling down your face, you can't be reading this book. Each chapter is a separate, funny short story. "Naked" is funnier than the next book, "Me talk pretty one day", perhaps because the stories take place in the U.S. (the other revolves around his experiences in France). You will never forget his story of the nudist camp, the Christmas elf, or his mother talking with his grade school teacher about his odd every day behavior. A very charming & offbeat book. You'll want to pass it on.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Superb - a contemporary classic
Review: He's no Garrison Keillor, but my mother back in Fargo, ND heard him on NPR reading his now infamous "Santaland Diaries" and immediately purchased this book for both herself and me noting for my benefit "and he's gay". Well, at least I'm accepted, right? Anyway, my mother was right - both the fact that he's gay and the fact that this is absolutely one of the finest collections of short stories ever assembled. He has a clever observational style and darkly caustic sense of the humorous and the absurd. You may be taken aback at first, but as you read one short after another you begin to understand the forces that shaped him into the man who wrote these occasionally disturbing but frequently laugh out loud auto-biographical novellas. Trust me, you WILL laugh out loud more than a few times - be careful reading this in public!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Real life is stranger than fiction.
Review: Hey reader in New York! You're the one coming off as a self-important blowhard! "Naked" is first rate comedy, or perhaps tragi-comedy, and there is nothing you can say to sway my opinion. This is Sedaris' book, not yours, and the events that he describes in this book are from his perspective. He just tells it as he saw it, and he sees things in a very particular way. I see him as a person who can't live any other way than the way he does. So he got famous! Big deal, the poor guy worked as an Elf at the age of thirty or so. Would you do that?

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A Ride On The Wild Side Kind've Read...
Review: Naked is a hilarious collection of autobiographed essays by talented author David Sedaris-- an outrageously funny ride recalling some of his more memorable moments in life. One belly-roll after another. A ride you will not want to miss!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: You'll get shushed right out of the library with this one
Review: David Sedaris' memior, Naked, is easily one of the funniest books currently in print. I had purchased it about a year ago and it sat on my shelf until last week. Walking to lunch, I ran into a coworker who was laughing hysterically while noshing on a sandwhich and chips at our office deli. It turns out that she was reading Naked. I must say her laughter was infectious as she read me a passage and it was decided - Naked would be my next read.

The book is a collection of essays chronicling Sedaris' upbringing with 5 other siblings and his wild and sometimes crazy parents. Sedaris covers his adolesence and early adulthood with wit, sarcasm and a few poignant moments. But mostly, it's a rip-roaring good read. Pick it up and grab a box of kleenex - you'll be laughing that hard.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Wonderful and hard to put down
Review: If you've ever heard David Sedaris on "This American Life" you know his thought provoking and funny style. The book is no exception. It's part hitch-hiking story, part growing up drama and part employment memoir. The sum of the stories add up to touching and emotional portraits of growing up in America. In short, many of us have had the same experiences.

The final chapter on visiting a "Nudist Camp" is truly brilliant. I couldn't stop thinking about it for weeks. If you grew up in America or would like to know what it's like to have done so read this book.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A Twisted View Of Life-A Laugh A Minute!
Review: Only David Sedaris can take a mundane activity and turn it inside out so intensely and simply that you can't stop laughing. This collection includes his morbid Greek grandmother who turns the family life upside down until they force her into not one, but two nursing homes where she traumatizes all around her. As a youngster, Sedaris finds an old pornographic novel with horrible typos that speaks of relentless incest. Passing it down to his sisters, they all develop a fear of their "sexual prowling" parents. Senior Sedaris tricks the kids into going golfing only to have sister Lisa have her first period at the fourteenth hole in front of all the Golfing big shots. Does the author stop hitch-hiking after several attempts on his life? No. This he finds exciting, made all the better when he can produce marijuana to calm any fag-hating drivers. The stories are alarmingly fresh and Sedaris' viewpoint is so violently skewed, you wonder how he lives his life at all. This is a hilarious outlook on life.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: America's greatest living humorist?
Review: Now that Woody Allen has more or less quit writing comedy for print, I wonder if David Sedaris isn't the finest writer of pure comedy that we have today. He is certainly the most widely read. I read most of this on the El commuting into downtown Chicago, and I was amazed while reading it how many other people were reading it as well, as well as Sedaris's other books.

On one level, Sedaris employs an exceedingly simple formula: he take events and people in his own life, and in makes us laugh at the people he has known, but even more at himself. I can imagine that Sedaris did indeed suffer from an obsessive-compulsive disorder, but I very much doubt that it was as extreme as it portrays it to be in "A Plague of Tics." But that imaginative exaggeration is what makes him an artist instead of a mere autobiographer. He also succeeds because he writes with enormous wit. I like the fact that he is hard to anticipate. Where a story starts off is not where it will end up. You imagine you know what a particular story is about, only to find it galloping off in another direction.

I went on from this one to read (well, listen--my friend lent me a CD copy of it) ME TALK PRETTY ONE DAY. I actually prefer the stories in NAKED, which are set in Sedaris's childhood and youth, to the more recent book, which mainly features stories from his adulthood and residence in France. But I can strongly recommend both.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Too funny!
Review: Story after story of Sedaris' life that just made me laugh out loud. I couldn't put the book down. I could not stop reading or laughing.


<< 1 .. 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 .. 32 >>

© 2004, ReviewFocus or its affiliates