Rating: 
Summary: Short, Sweet, but Mainly Funny
Review: Ian Frazier's Coyote v. Acme will not please everyone as the humour is not always accessible but when it clicks, it clicks with a sweet, funny vengence. I did not understand all the humour but could surprisingly even enjoy the whimsy of the essays that were swimming just a little above my head. And each small essay is short enough to either get or not get and then move on to the next one. In a short space of time there should something of great humour for the reader and, often, many things. Because of the rather esoteric style of the humour, the book even stands up to repeated readings, something that is very rare in a book of humour.
Rating:
Summary: Short, Sweet, but Mainly Funny
Review: Ian Frazier's Coyote v. Acme will not please everyone as the humour is not always accessible but when it clicks, it clicks with a sweet, funny vengence. I did not understand all the humour but could surprisingly even enjoy the whimsy of the essays that were swimming just a little above my head. And each small essay is short enough to either get or not get and then move on to the next one. In a short space of time there should something of great humour for the reader and, often, many things. Because of the rather esoteric style of the humour, the book even stands up to repeated readings, something that is very rare in a book of humour.
Rating:
Summary: A bent outlook with a clever turn of phrase
Review: Ian Frazier's new volume casts a bent eye to some of our institutions with a clever turn of phrase and tongue firmly imbedded in cheek. If this comes out sounding like a cross between Dennis Miller and Buddy Hackett, then so be it. These pastiches are actually more closely related to Robert Owen Butler's "Tabloid Dreams", but also have a sense of John Lennon's "In His Own Write" or "A Spaniard in the Works". From the opening tale about the dissolution of a family (and civilization as we know it) due to the cancellation of a weekly sit-com "Somewhere, invisible pens compute the swirling arithmetic of loss."; through a German invasion of a wedding party "...that smell of ether, camel dung, and boiled cabbage that the German Army carried wherever it went."; and the attorney for the plaintiff, Wile E. Coyote, describing his client's numerous bodily injuies including, but not limited to "flattening of the cranium, displacement of the tongue, reduction of length of legs and upper body, and compression of vertebrea from base of tail to head."; this is a seriously funny and well written look at modern Americana and its attendant symptoms.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent satire by Frazier
Review: Ian Frazier's work no longer appears in "The New Yorker," which is a great pity to those of us who enjoyed his work there. His later pieces for that magazine are collected here in "Coyote vs. Acme," which is worth purchasing for the title work alone. And although the essays here are somewhat more uneven than those in his earlier collection, "Dating Your Mom" (which I also recommend), "Coyote vs. Acme" is still an excellent sample of Frazier's work.
Rating: 
Summary: excellent writing, laugh-out-loud with few exceptions
Review: If you are having increasing difficulty finding a book, movie or TV show which actually makes you laugh out loud, buy "Coyote vs. Acme." Even the most jaded of readers (me) cannot help but howl at the truly inspired and funny stuff Mr. Frazier includes, page after blessed page.
Rating:
Summary: excellent writing, laugh-out-loud with few exceptions
Review: If you are having increasing difficulty finding a book, movie or TV show which actually makes you laugh out loud, buy "Coyote vs. Acme." Even the most jaded of readers (me) cannot help but howl at the truly inspired and funny stuff Mr. Frazier includes, page after blessed page.
Rating:
Summary: Monty Python meets Warner Brothers
Review: If you grew up appreciating Roadrunner cartoons, the title "essay" is one of the funniest pieces ever written; absolutely perfect word pictures of Coyote's mishaps, while defly skewering our litigious society. Although the book is uneven, don't miss "In the Plain Air" - all is not beauty among the Impressionist painters - and "Boswell's Life of Don Johnson" - Frazier's ear for parody is marvelous
Rating: 
Summary: Lame
Review: It is an insult to the history of satire in this great land of ours to call this contrived waste of badly needed carbon dioxide sucking trees "great American satire." You know comedy is bad when you start to imagine the writer sitting in a plastic wicker lawn chair saying to himself in between slurps of some foofoo drink, under the drone of the neigbor's lawn mower, "yeah ... heh, heh, heh, that's funny I ought to write that down." If you want some satire from a disenfranchised white male, go check out T.C. Boyle's Budding Prospects and lets have the author of this dud out there planting the trees his book wasted.
John Boyt, Uskudar American Academy, Istanbu
Rating:
Summary: A Brilliant, Truly Funny Book
Review: It is disappointing, but not surprising, to see that there are a number of readers who give this book only a star or two. Of course, some people think Charles Dickens is "dull", while others don't "get" James Thurber. Fortunately, many more do, and Frazier is definitely in a league with Thurber and other great humorists. He is simply one of the best writers alive, and easily the funniest. If you appreciate true wit and absurd, hilarious writing at all you should buy this book. Those you who don't like it probably have a sense of humor that reaches the level of most TV commercials, if that. One can only feel sorry for you - you're missing a great writer!
Rating:
Summary: A Brilliant, Truly Funny Book
Review: It is disappointing, but not surprising, to see that there are a number of readers who give this book only a star or two. Of course, some people think Charles Dickens is "dull", while others don't "get" James Thurber. Fortunately, many more do, and Frazier is definitely in a league with Thurber and other great humorists. He is simply one of the best writers alive, and easily the funniest. If you appreciate true wit and absurd, hilarious writing at all you should buy this book. Those you who don't like it probably have a sense of humor that reaches the level of most TV commercials, if that. One can only feel sorry for you - you're missing a great writer!
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