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The Hipster Handbook

The Hipster Handbook

List Price: $9.95
Your Price: $8.96
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Don't read this book in the dark!
Review: Duh!...who can read in the dark? No, it's not scary but it IS frightfully funny! You will recognize someone you know from every one of Lanham's 10 Hispter profiles. Especially notable and recognizable is a "WASH" Hipster--Waitstaff or Service Hipsters. If you've ever eaten at a greasy spoon, you have been served by one of these Hipsters. You know...you were afraid not to treat them like THEY were the customer or person to be served because you were afraid they would put a hair in your food?! Read the book! Get a belly full of laughter.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: worth a look
Review: funny funny funny, and insightful. this is not War and Peace, but definitely a great coffee table book. very hip and unexpectedly smart.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Funny
Review: Good stuff. I laughed a lot. I admit I skipped a lot, so I can't give it five stars (and I had a library book, if I'd owned it I would have dipped into other sections later), but found it well-written and funny. Yes, I was a little nonplussed at times to see my "original" behavior wasn't so original and was being satirized. That's what prompted the one star reviews below, methinks. But what most "noncomformists" do is end up conforming with nonconformists...so, really, you're just a conformist (try saying you love Ronald Reagan at the Gyspy Den, dude...be a REAL nonconformist). But my own pretentions are worth laughing at (dudes, I was wearing a Yeah Yeah Yeahs T-shirt when I read it!). Funny stuff. Maybe not David Sedaris funny (oops, the Hipster Handbook said Sedaris is a hipster fave! Damn these pigeon holes!) but funny nonetheless.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: funny book, yo
Review: I know this book is a joke, but it is filled with helpful info. Good record tips. Good film selections. It's a great culture guide. Oh yeah, it is funny as hell too. I heard the word "deck" on the Sopranos. Maybe the glossary started as a joke (though the author claims it is real) but words like "deck," "fin," and "frado" are entering the lexicon. Hipster Handbook is a good, fun read. Very funny

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: funny book, yo
Review: I know this book is a joke, but it is filled with helpful info. Good record tips. Good film selections. It's a great culture guide. Oh yeah, it is funny as hell too. I heard the word "deck" on the Sopranos. Maybe the glossary started as a joke (though the author claims it is real) but words like "deck," "fin," and "frado" are entering the lexicon. Hipster Handbook is a good, fun read. Very funny

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Bad joke or lousy writing?
Review: I read this book twice, and I wasn't sure if this was supposed to be taken as satire or not. Regardless, this book is as fun as watching Madonna's "Swept Away" and written at that same level. Regardless, if you read this book to gain insight into how to be hip in New York City, then you should probably be reading the Village Voice instead.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: deck insights
Review: i, as a jobless williamsburg native attending art school in brooklyn, can attest that this book has a shameful amount of truth to it. nevertheless i found it thoroughly amusing, especially in bringing me to laugh at myself so much (whether or not this is deck is questionable, although i might add that i'm sure not to do that in public, where i consistently maintain a complacent outlook).

the author provides us with a rigorous national geographic examination of the common household hipster: everything from different breeds of hipster (the loner, the polit, the WASH) to a day in the life of a hipster to a glossary of hipster terminology. there's even a section on the historical figures of hipsterdom. and then, there is the ultimate test of truth: are YOU deck as ef?

when my friend from australia stayed in williamsburg, she was given a copy of this to read on the subway so she could make her way around town...a memory she's sure not to forget.

the only way a person can't appreciate this book is by taking it seriously, be they a hipster or not. it's no masterpiece, but it deserves a spot on the coffee table at the very least.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: People Please
Review: If you don't see the satire and humor in this book, then you are an idiot. If you don't understand that this book is making FUN of hipsters, then please just quit now, you have no hope, you are lost and always will be.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: think you're hip? probably not!
Review: It's funny how as we all draw closer together via the internet and other media, there are still many who get their jollies by seperating us into smaller and smaller sub-cultures. Stangely enough, a lot of the people who seem to want to do this write pop culture books (and pick out programming for radio stations, but I digress).

"The Hipster Handbook" is not as subversive as the previous paragraph suggests, of course, but it is a little divisive. Defining the "hipster" as a number of linked but distinct social groups that smoke European cigarettes and never wear pleated pants is simple enough, but turning it into a do-and-don't book to achieve a kind of faux superiority, as writer Robert Lanham seems to have done, is in the book's parlance, very "fin."

It's a little hokey to aim a book towards a culture of people who wouldn't be caught dead (in public anyway) reading a book like this. What's more, most non-hipsters will find this book cliqueish and a little silly. Even if they have hipster tendencies, borderline UTFs, clubbers, and Neo-Crunches will likely not take the step to become more "deck," or cooler (for the rest of us) because in the book's definition anyone who enjoys TGI Fridays or hasn't considered making out with a person of the same gender is not a candidate for hipsters-dom.

With all that said, this book has some excellent illustrations by Jeff Bechtel, and discusses some really cool people, books, films and albums that you may never have heard of. It's worth the low purchase price to get these rather astute reccomendations. The hipster-type descriptions are laugh out loud funny as well. Keep in mind, however, this is no "Official Preppy Handbook," even though it does its best to take that book's premise and update it with a new subculture. This is perfect for light reading, but only for that. Try these generalizations on real hipsters and they'll likely call you a "hypo" and you'll end up calling Lanham et al, well, very fin.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: such ..., i would put negative stars if i could
Review: ive never read anything more ridiculous in my life! sure, he gets some of the obvious stereotypes down, but good lord, everything else is just not true! i ahve been in the scene long enough to have a good idea about what goes on, and this book just makes me and my "hipster" friends just laugh uncontrollably. if i saw anyone actually listen to this book, i would point him or her out right away to shame them, because really, you can't follow a book for this scene. the only way is to get yourself out there, and be in it because you love it, you feel it, not fake it


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