Rating: 
Summary: Surprsingly good
Review: In the interest of full disclosure, I will state that I opened this book expecting to be disappointed. I have read SatireWire for some time, and it's great, but I thought the premise of this book -- this faux history of the new economy -- was asking for trouble. I was only slightly right. A few of the stories didn't work for me. They would have been very funny if I read them closer to when some of the events happened, but time and distance tempers the joke for me. However, with the vast majority of the several hundred stories here, the author has managed to transcend time and place. This is just very, very funny writing, and some of these "business" stories, such as about employee slapping, the Fed "policy rave," or selling off your most loyal employees, will be funny 50 years from now.That said, I'd still like to see what the author could do with a more timeless subject.
Rating: 
Summary: Intelligent AND absurd
Review: It's rare to find a book you'll keep on your permanent bookshelf, especially a humor book. (It doesn't quite impress your parents like a copy of, say, Teddy Roosevelt's biography or the Compleat Works of Shakespeare) But this is one book I'm keeping around, and if anyone doubts my intelligence because I have a book on my shelf where the cover has a picture of a businessman with a shrunken head, I can just tell them to open any page, and they'll see why I kept it. This is that rare -- there's that word again -- form of humor that's both intelligent AND absurd. Well, not always. It would be hard to argue that "Yahoo Beats Analysts' Estimates, Dogs" is intelligent, it's just absurd. But the other stories do accomplish both, like: "Bold New Economy Deserves Bold New Recession," or "IBM Denies Its Aryan6000 Machines Aided Nazis," and my personal favorite: "Americans Annoyed by 'All This International (bad word)' on Internet," that will keep you rolling. Very very funny stuff, story after story after story.
Rating:
Summary: Bullseye
Review: It's the writing, stupid. There are who knows how many (other than too many) humour sites on the Internet, and while the majority are just not funny, even many of those that are funny are so poorly written that it's all a great tragicomical waste and makes me lonely and mawkish and occasionally belligerent toward fish. Marlatt, however, is not only terribly funny (with a few exceptions, but very few), but he can write. And that's what makes the book work so well. You're not distracted by inanities. Instead, you can enjoy the entire trip, from the book reviews "The 7 Habits of High, Effective People," to the e.e. commerce poetry, to the wonderfully silly stuff, like "Mad Cows Use Cell Phones." I wish it were longer, but in the overall, it really is brilliant.
Rating: 
Summary: Funnily enough, not really that funny at all
Review: Let me start by saying I am a great fan of satirewire.com, which is where the material from this book first appeared. The website is very quick to produce hysterically funny material, focussing on the events of the day and skewering the rogues who need to be skewered. And that is part of the problem with this book -- much of the material is pretty old and refers back to events that no one really remembers that well and therefore do not resonate. The jokes have no immediacy. I read much of the book and thought "This I'm sure was funny then, but it sure falls flat now". The buzzwords and fads of the boom-times in the 1990s are just vague memories now and have very much lost their bite. So while I'll continue to log on to the website, I'm going to give away this book.
Rating:
Summary: A Beautiful Thing
Review: Maybe it's ironic or prophetic on the author's part, but you'd have to say we're living in an "Economy of Errors" right now. That kind of puts a lot of pressure on this new book, but almost everything worth skewering about business is, in fact, skewered in Economy of Errors. And the best thing is, it's done with dry wit, absurdity, sarcasm, but without personal vindictiveness. True enough, some stories take [it] out of some individuals, like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or stock analysts or the President -- but at the same time they sum up and take apart entire genres and belief systems. I loved "Bold New Economy Deserves Bold New Recession," the story about Alcoa betting the company on "eluminum," the first "web-only" metal, and the one that begins: "Today, more than ever before, women are in top executive positions, which means today, more than ever before, top male executives get to yell... GIRL FIGHT!" To put together a book that's smart, laugh-out-loud funny, and timely is a beautiful, beautiful thing.
Rating:
Summary: Hilarious and sharp witted
Review: My father always used to tell me, "You're too young to be this sarcastic." Well, nobody is old enough to be as sarcastic as Mr. Marlatt. He does an excellent job of poking fun at the business headlines and at corporate life without the doom and gloom that so many others resort to.
Rating:
Summary: Can Americans be funny?
Review: My father always used to tell me, "You're too young to be this sarcastic." Well, nobody is old enough to be as sarcastic as Mr. Marlatt. He does an excellent job of poking fun at the business headlines and at corporate life without the doom and gloom that so many others resort to.
Rating:
Summary: Hilarious and sharp witted
Review: My father always used to tell me, "You're too young to be this sarcastic." Well, nobody is old enough to be as sarcastic as Mr. Marlatt. He does an excellent job of poking fun at the business headlines and at corporate life without the doom and gloom that so many others resort to.
Rating: 
Summary: If they can write like it, why can't it look like it?
Review: The majority of customers' reviews favor 'Economy of Errors' and rightly so, it has some very funny writing in it. So why does it look so dreadful? It seems to me that the really successful media orientated funny stuff is a crafted combination of words and visuals. The Onion's 'Our Dumb Century' book was brilliant because the words were put in the context and style of front pages from the past, the Modern Humorist's 'Rough Draft: Pop culture the way it almost was' would be nowhere near as funny if they did not pay meticulous attention to the everyday items they copied and then changed slightly. Everyone remembers the National Lampoon, their wicked parodies worked because they looked just like the real magazines, comic strips, advertisements etc. The same goes for SatireWire, they need to work at creating the media look of the New Economy. A start has been made, the nine front covers of BusinessMonth Weekly in this book have a slight professional look but the rest of the book, with its sloppy layouts, typography and badly cropped photos spoilt it for me. I think readers should expect better.
Rating:
Summary: Buy, don't steal, this book
Review: The majority of customers' reviews favor `Economy of Errors' and rightly so, it has some very funny writing in it. So why does it look so dreadful? It seems to me that the really successful media orientated funny stuff is a crafted combination of words and visuals. The Onion's `Our Dumb Century' book was brilliant because the words were put in the context and style of front pages from the past, the Modern Humorist's `Rough Draft: Pop culture the way it almost was' would be nowhere near as funny if they did not pay meticulous attention to the everyday items they copied and then changed slightly. Everyone remembers the National Lampoon, their wicked parodies worked because they looked just like the real magazines, comic strips, advertisements etc. The same goes for SatireWire, they need to work at creating the media look of the New Economy. A start has been made, the nine front covers of BusinessMonth Weekly in this book have a slight professional look but the rest of the book, with its sloppy layouts, typography and badly cropped photos spoilt it for me. I think readers should expect better.
|
