The book is a collection of long form journalism stories most of which were originally written for the Weekly Standard. Despite what you might think though if that was your only knowledge the book is 1. Not really a political book in any partisan sense and 2. Quite edgy. The book starts with a portrait of Detroit, that is compelling but perhaps uneccesarilly hopeless and ends with a piece on New Orleans which was my favorite in between are a number of pieces on political eccentrics including Donald Trump, Al Sharpton, Jim Traficant, Marian Berry and fringe California gubernatorial and presedential candidates. Sprinkled in between are stories about topics ranging from a pseudo-academic porn convention, dodgeball, facebook, a cd collection of spirituals, and a dailykos bloggers convention in Vegas. Throughout Labash is funny and insightful. Occasionally he does veer towards being too cynical such as in the piece about the Kos convention, though it should be noted that his objections had more to do with the form of communication on Kos and not the content perse.
A WSJ article I read compared Labash to Tom Wolfe or Hunter Thompson. I can’t speak for the Thompson, comparison but the Wolfe comparison while not completely off base is a little misleading. Most of Labash’s works have a much more overtly comedic tone to them Wolfe’s writings, think of it as being like Joel Stein doing long form journalism.
Rating: 4 / 5
Great title, I have not bought the book because I have been a regular reader of the Weekly Standard and I remember most of the people mentioned in the preview being profiled in the magazine.If you are a regular reader I doubt you will find anything new. HOWEVER if aren’t then pick this book up and be ready to laugh your head off. Great writing, funny and insightful.
Rating: 5 / 5
I spend a fair amount of time hanging out with Dave “Mudcat” Saunders, and Labash nails that profile while finding humor in all the man’s complexities. He does a tour of politic’s characters. He’s found the right people, and Labash knows how to render them, taking them right down to the wood. It’s a great read.
Roland Lazenby
author of Jerry West, The Life And Legend Of A Basketball Icon
Rating: 5 / 5
This is a collection of twenty-three of Mr. Labash’s previously published magazine articles from “The Weekly Standard” and “Salon.” The reader has his or her choice about whether to sample humorous entrees of such items as “Detroit: The City Where the Sirens Never Sleep”, “Yippie Kay Oy Vey: Kinky Friedman Runs fro Governor”, “Arnold Uber Alles: The Wild, Final Days of the Schwarzenegger Campaign”, “Trump on the Stump”, “Rev Gotta Eat: Al Sharpton’s Hungry for a Place at the Table, ” or “Fly Fishing With Darth Vader.”
Naturally, after looking over the entire buffet, I went directly to the items that seemed to wet my appetite the most–the desserts. I chose two spicy dishes of tarts and cheesecake appropriately entitled “Among the Pornographers.”
“This odd assemblage has gathered for a four-day World Pornography Conference in the Universal Sheraton, amid the strip-mall sprawl of the San Fernando Valley, porn production capital of the world. The meeting is sponsored by the Center for Sex Research at California State University, Northridge–a sort of Left Coast Kinsey Institute.”
More than 500 “academics–sociologists, anthropologists, sexologists, film and gender studies teachers, and interdisciplinary seekers from across the country–are attending under the guise of studying `Eroticism and the First Amendment.’ But the real aim is simpler: to celebrate pornography.” The place is awash in exotic porn stars and samples of the world of porn. The various college types hope to vastly improve their own college or university’s collection of porn. The Northridge Center is hoping “to get more [Pornography] deposits from the industry–so we’ll have the biggest porn collection in the country.”
“Academics, it seems, are the only people who can de-eroticize sex more completely than pornographers.”
This reprint of the satirical magazine article was a laugh, or at least a chuckle riot. Having wet my appetite I returned to the buffet table and decided to taste a dish labeled “Down with Facebook!” This article points out that “‘Time’ magazine recently declared Facebook more popular than porn. But who are they kidding? Facebook is porn. With porn, you watch other people take off their clothes and abase themselves in public. On Facebook, where there’s technically an anti-nudity policy (thus defeating the whole purpose of the Internet), you get to figuratively do the same.” The author then proceeds to build a case against the social networks as a very dangerous form of suicide for too many of its “Facetards.” For the addicted, there is nothing that they won’t post on their Facebook page. It’s costing many of them jobs as more and more employers check the Facebook pages of prospective employees.
Beginning to sate my appetite, I decided to have a main dish of “The Wild, Final Days of the Schwarzenegger Campaign.” After stuffing myself on beefcake enhanced with steroids I then returned to the smorgasbord to enjoy the headliner dish from the front of the book’s cover–fresh 22-inch long Mountain trout caught in Wyoming by Darth Vader, the nickname for Vice President Dick Cheney.
Labash hoped to use his mutual love of fly fishing to discover how the legendary closed mouth and secretive Vice-President reached his political decisions. He got his day long, eight-hour interview while floating lazily along the river with Cheney, who catches twenty-two fish to his two, but all he discovered is that Cheney is not only an expert fly fisherman who gets really excited about the sport, but that he loves the natural beauty of the Snake River and the wilds of Wyoming, Idaho and other beautiful and inaccessible fishing havens around the planet. Surprisingly, Labash allows his readers to realize that Dick Cheney would be the very last person in the world who would wish to despoil the environment.
On one fly fishing trip a “young man who worked for the Idaho Fish and Game” jumped out of the bushes and checked to see if everyone had their fishing license. Even though he was reading Dick Cheney’s license while he looked him directly in the face, he failed to recognize the Vice-President. Labash didn’t mention whether the clueless ranger eventually put two and two together and made the connection when he checked the licenses of the flotilla of trailer boats following Cheney that were packed with wetsuit clad Navy Seals and a small army of heavily armed secret service agents. Who knows he probably wanted to see their hunting and fishing licenses?
Finally, stuffed with broiled Snake River cutthroat trout, I decided to stop eating even though some of the desserts at the end of buffet still looked particularly inviting. All the glassy eyed professors were still ogling the porn star tarts and wanting to pose for photos with their arms around them.
The buyers of this humorous collection of yummy, fluffy soul food book won’t be disappointed. Even “Rev Gotta Eat!” Matt Labash is like another Dave Barry or P.J. O’Rourke and the latter added a testimonial to the book that is printed on the cover. “Matt Labash’s Book Rocks. He is Hunter S. Thompson on Acid.” Hum I thought; I didn’t see any acid on either the buffet table or at the bar. I must have been distracted with my own ogling of the beautiful porn tartists and all the intoxicating, luscious and surgically enhanced cheesecake.
Rating: 5 / 5
Matt Labash is an extremely out of the ordinary writer and observer. His book contains 23 of his pieces ranging from the terribly devastating chapter on Detroit that is more than pitiful in its’ descriptions of the conditions there, that you can’t help laughing in the awfulness of its accuracy. He visits New Orleans and the dreadful effects of Katrina. He follows a luddite’s path down the facebook road and down the Snake River with Dick Cheney… the Darth Vader of fly fishing.
We learn the physical damage? that dodge ball has done our nation’s children, of course with the added `horrors ` of duck duck goose and musical chairs, actually citing studies form the Department of Health.
Lovers of Canada and Gordon Lightfoot- Labash has you in his sights as well.
He writes an startlingly sympathetic portrait of Marion Barry and one of the seriously most affecting accounts of 9/11 with the story of Edlene LaFrance whose husband died in the collapse of the Twin Towers.
There is the humorous, the interesting and some sorrow; but always interesting reading in this book.
Rating: 4 / 5
The book is a collection of long form journalism stories most of which were originally written for the Weekly Standard. Despite what you might think though if that was your only knowledge the book is 1. Not really a political book in any partisan sense and 2. Quite edgy. The book starts with a portrait of Detroit, that is compelling but perhaps uneccesarilly hopeless and ends with a piece on New Orleans which was my favorite in between are a number of pieces on political eccentrics including Donald Trump, Al Sharpton, Jim Traficant, Marian Berry and fringe California gubernatorial and presedential candidates. Sprinkled in between are stories about topics ranging from a pseudo-academic porn convention, dodgeball, facebook, a cd collection of spirituals, and a dailykos bloggers convention in Vegas. Throughout Labash is funny and insightful. Occasionally he does veer towards being too cynical such as in the piece about the Kos convention, though it should be noted that his objections had more to do with the form of communication on Kos and not the content perse.
A WSJ article I read compared Labash to Tom Wolfe or Hunter Thompson. I can’t speak for the Thompson, comparison but the Wolfe comparison while not completely off base is a little misleading. Most of Labash’s works have a much more overtly comedic tone to them Wolfe’s writings, think of it as being like Joel Stein doing long form journalism.
Rating: 4 / 5
Great title, I have not bought the book because I have been a regular reader of the Weekly Standard and I remember most of the people mentioned in the preview being profiled in the magazine.If you are a regular reader I doubt you will find anything new. HOWEVER if aren’t then pick this book up and be ready to laugh your head off. Great writing, funny and insightful.
Rating: 5 / 5
I spend a fair amount of time hanging out with Dave “Mudcat” Saunders, and Labash nails that profile while finding humor in all the man’s complexities. He does a tour of politic’s characters. He’s found the right people, and Labash knows how to render them, taking them right down to the wood. It’s a great read.
Roland Lazenby
author of Jerry West, The Life And Legend Of A Basketball Icon
Rating: 5 / 5
This is a collection of twenty-three of Mr. Labash’s previously published magazine articles from “The Weekly Standard” and “Salon.” The reader has his or her choice about whether to sample humorous entrees of such items as “Detroit: The City Where the Sirens Never Sleep”, “Yippie Kay Oy Vey: Kinky Friedman Runs fro Governor”, “Arnold Uber Alles: The Wild, Final Days of the Schwarzenegger Campaign”, “Trump on the Stump”, “Rev Gotta Eat: Al Sharpton’s Hungry for a Place at the Table, ” or “Fly Fishing With Darth Vader.”
Naturally, after looking over the entire buffet, I went directly to the items that seemed to wet my appetite the most–the desserts. I chose two spicy dishes of tarts and cheesecake appropriately entitled “Among the Pornographers.”
“This odd assemblage has gathered for a four-day World Pornography Conference in the Universal Sheraton, amid the strip-mall sprawl of the San Fernando Valley, porn production capital of the world. The meeting is sponsored by the Center for Sex Research at California State University, Northridge–a sort of Left Coast Kinsey Institute.”
More than 500 “academics–sociologists, anthropologists, sexologists, film and gender studies teachers, and interdisciplinary seekers from across the country–are attending under the guise of studying `Eroticism and the First Amendment.’ But the real aim is simpler: to celebrate pornography.” The place is awash in exotic porn stars and samples of the world of porn. The various college types hope to vastly improve their own college or university’s collection of porn. The Northridge Center is hoping “to get more [Pornography] deposits from the industry–so we’ll have the biggest porn collection in the country.”
“Academics, it seems, are the only people who can de-eroticize sex more completely than pornographers.”
This reprint of the satirical magazine article was a laugh, or at least a chuckle riot. Having wet my appetite I returned to the buffet table and decided to taste a dish labeled “Down with Facebook!” This article points out that “‘Time’ magazine recently declared Facebook more popular than porn. But who are they kidding? Facebook is porn. With porn, you watch other people take off their clothes and abase themselves in public. On Facebook, where there’s technically an anti-nudity policy (thus defeating the whole purpose of the Internet), you get to figuratively do the same.” The author then proceeds to build a case against the social networks as a very dangerous form of suicide for too many of its “Facetards.” For the addicted, there is nothing that they won’t post on their Facebook page. It’s costing many of them jobs as more and more employers check the Facebook pages of prospective employees.
Beginning to sate my appetite, I decided to have a main dish of “The Wild, Final Days of the Schwarzenegger Campaign.” After stuffing myself on beefcake enhanced with steroids I then returned to the smorgasbord to enjoy the headliner dish from the front of the book’s cover–fresh 22-inch long Mountain trout caught in Wyoming by Darth Vader, the nickname for Vice President Dick Cheney.
Labash hoped to use his mutual love of fly fishing to discover how the legendary closed mouth and secretive Vice-President reached his political decisions. He got his day long, eight-hour interview while floating lazily along the river with Cheney, who catches twenty-two fish to his two, but all he discovered is that Cheney is not only an expert fly fisherman who gets really excited about the sport, but that he loves the natural beauty of the Snake River and the wilds of Wyoming, Idaho and other beautiful and inaccessible fishing havens around the planet. Surprisingly, Labash allows his readers to realize that Dick Cheney would be the very last person in the world who would wish to despoil the environment.
On one fly fishing trip a “young man who worked for the Idaho Fish and Game” jumped out of the bushes and checked to see if everyone had their fishing license. Even though he was reading Dick Cheney’s license while he looked him directly in the face, he failed to recognize the Vice-President. Labash didn’t mention whether the clueless ranger eventually put two and two together and made the connection when he checked the licenses of the flotilla of trailer boats following Cheney that were packed with wetsuit clad Navy Seals and a small army of heavily armed secret service agents. Who knows he probably wanted to see their hunting and fishing licenses?
Finally, stuffed with broiled Snake River cutthroat trout, I decided to stop eating even though some of the desserts at the end of buffet still looked particularly inviting. All the glassy eyed professors were still ogling the porn star tarts and wanting to pose for photos with their arms around them.
The buyers of this humorous collection of yummy, fluffy soul food book won’t be disappointed. Even “Rev Gotta Eat!” Matt Labash is like another Dave Barry or P.J. O’Rourke and the latter added a testimonial to the book that is printed on the cover. “Matt Labash’s Book Rocks. He is Hunter S. Thompson on Acid.” Hum I thought; I didn’t see any acid on either the buffet table or at the bar. I must have been distracted with my own ogling of the beautiful porn tartists and all the intoxicating, luscious and surgically enhanced cheesecake.
Rating: 5 / 5
Matt Labash is an extremely out of the ordinary writer and observer. His book contains 23 of his pieces ranging from the terribly devastating chapter on Detroit that is more than pitiful in its’ descriptions of the conditions there, that you can’t help laughing in the awfulness of its accuracy. He visits New Orleans and the dreadful effects of Katrina. He follows a luddite’s path down the facebook road and down the Snake River with Dick Cheney… the Darth Vader of fly fishing.
We learn the physical damage? that dodge ball has done our nation’s children, of course with the added `horrors ` of duck duck goose and musical chairs, actually citing studies form the Department of Health.
Lovers of Canada and Gordon Lightfoot- Labash has you in his sights as well.
He writes an startlingly sympathetic portrait of Marion Barry and one of the seriously most affecting accounts of 9/11 with the story of Edlene LaFrance whose husband died in the collapse of the Twin Towers.
There is the humorous, the interesting and some sorrow; but always interesting reading in this book.
Rating: 4 / 5