Author: Brian J. Noggle

This is my second Dave Barry tome this year (I read Dave Barry Turns 40 in March). Somehow, Dave Barry or someone convinced Random House to send Dave Barry and his family to Japan for three weeks to get a book about it. Really. It must have been something to be a humorist in that golden age. My employer here at the blog won’t even pay for my trips to the coffeepot.

The book comes at the height of Dave Barry’s popularity and the height of Japan’s economic power. A couple year later, Japan hits the economic skids and falls from the front rank of American citizens’ bugbears. To put it clearly: Instead of American sitcoms dealing with the zany antics of a fish-out-of-water American in a Japanese auto company (Gung Ho, and yes, I know it was a movie first, but it was later a sitcom), we get American sitcoms dealing with the zany antics of a fish-out-of-water American in an Indian call center (Outsourced, which was also based on a movie). No word on if someone is going to send Dave Barry to India for three weeks.

My point in the preceding, aside from having the sudden urge to compare Gung Ho to Outsourced, is that the book is a period artifact since it fits into the period genre of trying to understand the Japanese who were economic geniuses. It has Dave Barry’s amusing spin on it and has a travelogue thing going on, but it’s mostly Dave Barry being Dave Barry.

An amusing read.

I bought this book not because I’m a big fan of self-help motivational books, but because I knew how the main conceits story ended, right about the book was publshed. Larry Walters attached some helium-filled weather balloons to a lawn chair because he wanted to fly. Armed with a pellet gun to shoot the balloons to control his altitude, some sand bags for ballast, and a six pack. He shot up to 18,000 feet and into the flight paths for LAX. After he finally came down and got tangled in some power wires, he told a reporter he did it because “You can’t just sit there.” A great conceit for a self-help motivational book.

In 1993, Larry Walters killed himself. A little less rousing premise.

So I opened the book to chuckle at the woe-begotten central conceit, and indeed some of the other examples in the book are dated and the end result of the stories ends up not being optimal for the participants. Aren’t I a sophisticated cosmpolitan pooh-pooher?

Jess Gibson was a businessman before his calling to serve the Lord, and it shows. The book is definitely a business kind of motivational book with some scriptures overlaid. I can’t say that it’s roused me out of this chair to do something–I’m busy writing book reports that upwards of a dozen people will read–but if you’re the kind of person influenced by this, maybe it will help you. Actually, I wonder about people who read a lot of these kinds of books. People who read self-help motivational books tend to read a lot of them, don’t they? Do they build up a tolerance, or do they just need a steady diet of motivation? Hey, if it works for them, I won’t knock it.

On a side note, although the author looks a little, uh, seasoned in the jacket photo, he’s still around. I just saw him on PBS promoting funding for public television. Good for him.

When (if) you think of Clarence Day, you think of Life With Father. And with good reason. Not only was that middle-1930s reminiscience of growing up in the 1880s Manhattan a good bit of nostalgia that really caught on, including a Broadway play of the material, but it’s really about the only good thing Day wrote.

This volume includes: Life with Father, which collects a number of memoir essays that Day published throughout the Manhattan publishing world of the 1920s and 1930s; Life with Mother, a collection that tried to recapture the success of the earlier work, but was published by his widow and contains scraps and fragments and does not work because Mother was not the character that Father was; This Simian World, his first published book that muses upon civilization as a collection of apes, complete with wondering what civilization would be like if ruled by catmen or elephantmen; and a collection of drawings with short bits of doggerel below them.

I read Life with Father in 1999 or 2000, right after I got married. I was not yet 30, so I identified a lot with the narrator of the pieces, Day and his double-effect narrator self-appointed omniscience. Although I would not have applied those adjectives and adverbs then. He was the young guy, and Father was the old man stuck in his ways. Upon re-read, I identify more with Father, bellowing for his dinner or his way after working all day at the stock brokerage. The character of Father is seen through the eyes of a child, retold by that child as an adult. As such, Father is a bit of a cipher and a bit of a caricature. But he’s providing a damn good life for his wife, a lightweight deb of the postbellum world, and his four boys. Underneath the buffoonery of his wanting his own way and throwing what look like temper tantrums to get them, he’s a good man and the son knows he cannot emulate the father.

Aside from the father/son relationship, this book is great for the view of New York City in the 1880s. Gas lights. The installation of telephone replacing the bell you ring for a message boy. The horses and carts riding underneath the El to the farmland north of Central Park. Fascinating. I started reading this soon after I read The Virginian; in that book, the Virginian tells a tall tale that involves the New York restaurant Delmonicos sometime in the recent past. In Life with Father, Father takes the son to Delmonicos, probably right about the time the story from the western was set. Interesting confluence of my reading.

Life with Father, frankly, is the best of Clarence Day. The other things really aren’t worth much.

Interesting side note: This is a 1948 edition of the collection (I can’t imagine there were many more); the previous owner used a photocopy or reproduction of an industry article from 1948. The bookmark was in the early part of Life with Father, so the previous owner did not make it far into the book at all.