(Not that You Asked)
(Not that You Asked): Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions Steve Almond,
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1400066190
DDC: 813.6
Edition: Hardcover; 2007-09-11
Summary:
How does Steve Almond get himself into so much trouble? Could it be
his incessant moralizing? His generally poor posture? The fact that
he was raised by a pack of wolves? Frankly, we haven’t got a clue.
What we do know is that Almond has a knack for converting his dustups
into essays that are both funny and furious. In (Not that You Asked),
he squares off against Sean Hannity on national TV, nearly gets
arrested for stealing “Sta-Hard” gel from his local pharmacy, and
winds up in Boston, where he quickly enrages the entire population of
the Red Sox Nation. Almond is, as they say in Yiddish, a tummler.
Almond on personal grooming: “Why, exactly, did I feel it would be
‘sexy’ and ‘hot’ to have my girlfriend wax my chest? I can offer no
good answer to this question today. I could offer no good answer at
the time.” On sports: “To be a fan is to live in a condition of
willed helplessness. We are (for the most part) men who sit around
and watch other men run and leap and sweat and grapple each other. It
is a deeply homoerotic pattern of conduct, often interracial in
nature, and essentially humiliating.”On popular culture: “I have
never actually owned a TV, a fact I mention whenever possible, in the
hopes that it will make me seem noble and possibly lead to oral sex.”
On his literary hero, Kurt Vonnegut: “His books perform the greatest
feat of alchemy known to man: the conversion of grief into laughter
by means of courageous imagination.”On religion: “Every year, when
Chanukah season rolled around, my brothers and I would make the
suburban pilgrimage to the home of our grandparents, where we would
ring in the holiday with a big, juicy Chanukah ham.”The essays in
(Not that You Asked) will make you laugh out loud, or, maybe just as
likely, hurl the book across the room. Either way, you’ll find Steve
Almond savagely entertaining. Not that you asked.
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