Coyote V. Acme by Ian Frazier Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Coyote V. Acme
Book Review: Bitingly funny and deeply disturbing.
Summary: 4 Stars
Frazier writes like a college professor bitten by a rabid dog (and that's a good thing). Some of the pieces -- "Brandy by Firelight" and "Where the Bodies are Buried" particularly -- take a seemingly small conceit or idea and stretch it until it screams for mercy, laughing all the way; meanwhile, others like "Stalin's Chuckle" have a Woody Allen-esque feel of history revised to be funnier. Highly recommendedBook Review: Bizarre and absurd.
Summary: 4 Stars
You have to love the absurd to like this book. Frazier likes to juxtapose unrelated concepts, like a garden party with a blitzkreig. There is one gem of an idea in each essay, and you'll laugh out loud when you get it. On the downside, there is *only* one joke in each essay, and at times the end doesn't come soon enough.Book Review: Could Have Been Better
Summary: 3 Stars
I picked us this book after reading Lamentations of the Father: Essays by the same author. That book floored me with its almost 100% hysterical essays. This one was a disappointment. There was a little too much high-brow New Yorker humor that seems to be only for the inside, elite crowd, like the New Yorker cartoons which mostly leave me befuddled. The last three pieces and the piece which is the title of the book were really funny. The rest just didn't cut it. If you can get your hands on those other pieces it's probably better than inversting in the whole book.Book Review: Excellent satire by Frazier
Summary: 4 Stars
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.Book Review: I don't get it
Summary: 1 Stars
The title says it all. The only reason I didn't give this book a 1 rating is the mild amusement value of the overall ideas behind each of the essays. I found all of them bland and drawn out, almost entirely based on American pop culture, tediously overstated. Blech.