Bob’s Fenster’s TWISTED: TALES FROM THE WACKY SIDE OF LIFE falls short of its back cover promise to have you “shaking your head and laughing out loud.” There isn’t anything in it that is particularly humorous or wacky … or even slightly interesting.
I usually enjoy these types of books – the kind I can pick up in the humor aisle of my local bookstore and sit down and thumb through from one of those comfy chairs. But TWISTED is a really sad collection of trivia, world records stats, dumb criminal stories, historical quotes and craaazy word origins. I understand that with a compilation like this, all the entries can’t be gems, but seriously, there were only one or two nuggets that managed to pique me.
The author relied heavily on quotes that were not only really bad, but from people I’ve never heard of (and therefore, don’t care what they had to say): French acrobat Charles Blondin, chess master Wilhelm Steinitz and playwright George S. Kaufman, to name a few.
I don’t usually resort to excerpts in my reviews, but I fear you won’t believe how bad this thing is unless you get a sampling:
• “In 1979 Austrian police locked a man in a jail cell, and then forgot they’d put him in there. Eighteen days later, they remembered. The man, unable to shout loud enough to rouse help, survived without food or water for that long, but barely.”
• “Tom Wiggins from Georgia could copy anything on the piano after hearing it only once and without needing to practice. In the nineteenth century, he toured Europe showing off his amazing talent.”
• “Do you suffer from headaches or insomnia? Do you keep a diary? Psychology researchers claim there’s a correlation. On the bright side, people who can’t sleep at night have more time to write in their journals.”
• “Do men and women really want different things? Sure. For example, they want each other. What could be more different than that?”
• “’All life is six to five against,’ the writer Damon Runyon pointed out seventy years ago. The odds haven’t improved since then. But we do invent strange ways to lose.”
I always try to point out the positives in my reviews, so here goes: This book is 290 pages. If you put it in your bathroom, you’ll have no problem finding 145 double-ply uses for it. –Ken Davis
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