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Lamentations of the Father: Essays
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Lamentations of the Father: Essays
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Lamentations of the Father: Essays
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Lamentations of the Father: Essays

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

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When The Atlantic Monthly celebrated its 150th anniversary by publishing excerpts from the best writing ever to appear in the magazine, in the category of the humorous essay it chose only four pieces—one by Mark Twain, one by James Thurber, one by Kurt Vonnegut, and Ian Frazier's 1997 essay "Lamentations of the Father." The title piece of this new collection has had an ongoing life in anthologies, in radio performances, in audio recordings, on the Internet, and in photocopies held by hamburger magnets on the doors of people's refrigerators. The august company in which The Atlantic put Frazier gives an idea of where on the literary spectrum his humorous pieces lie. Frazier's work is funny and elegant and poetic and of the highest literary aspiration, all at the same time. More serious than a "gag" writer, funnier than most essayists of equal accomplishment, Frazier is of a classical originality. This collection, a companion to his previous humor collections Dating Your Mom (1985) and Coyote v. Acme (1996), contains thirty-three pieces gathered from the last thirteen years.

Past winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor; author of the nonfiction bestsellers Great Plains, Family, and On the Rez; contributor to The New Yorker, Outside, and other magazines, Frazier is the greatest writer of our (or indeed of any) age.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 25, 2010
ISBN9781429941020
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Lamentations of the Father: Essays
Author

Ian Frazier

Ian Frazier is the author of Travels in Siberia, Great Plains, On the Rez, Lamentations of the Father and Coyote V. Acme, among other works, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He graduated from Harvard University. A frequent contributor to The New Yorker, he lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

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  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    A couple of pieces in this collection had me laughing out loud. One was the title essay bemoaning typical child behavior (table manners, etc.) in biblical style. The other was a reflection on the problem of recall in middle age, when it's no longer easy to mentally delineate between, for example, H. G. Wells, George Orwell, Orson Welles, and Orson Bean. (And was it ever easy to keep Robert Conrad and William Conrad straight?)Unfortunately the other 34 pieces didn't so much as tickle my funny bone. Perhaps Frazier and I have so little in common that we don't even share a sense of humor, and others who share Frazier's outlook on life would see the humor that I missed. After all, this collection did win the Thurber Award for American Humor. The judges must have found more to laugh at than I did.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A collection of short, humorous essays, I found this when I was cruising the Humor section at the bookstore, a section I rarely venture into. The Atlantic Monthly published the title piece of this book as "among the best writing ever to appear in the 150 years of the magazine" claims the back of this slim book. And once I'd read it (again as I'd seen it on the internet before), I had to agree that it was truly a work of wonder. This and Cursing Mommy were the most hysterical bits in the collection, although I claim to bear no resemblance to the cursing mommy herself (despite the breadth of good Anglo-Saxon words in my childrens' vocabularies). There were a few essays that didn't cause me to crack a smile but overall, this was a fun, quick read, easy to dip into and a nice palate cleanser when reading weightier stuff.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Of Uneven QualityI think the title essay is hilarious, and I've given several copies of the hardbound version of that individual essay as gifts. The collection under review has a few other essays ("If Memory Doesn't Serve", "Kid Court", "What I Am") of the same general nature, not quite up to the level of "Lamentations of the Father" but still quite funny and insightful.If all of the essays were like that, I would have rated this book 4 stars. Most of them, however, are different, somewhat like a lengthy elaboration on a Jack Handy quote, somewhat like an above-average example of an article from The Onion. I thought these were so-so; something about them just didn't click for me. Your mileage may vary.And then there a few (like the "Cursing Mommy" ones) that seem to be based on the premise that offensive things are intrinsically funny. Certainly, Frazier isn't the only humorist who seems to feel that way, but I don't, and there's no way I could give this book as a gift to those in the (prudish, puritanical, call them whatever you want) circles I run in.