Rating: 
Summary: Steve Martin is no friend of mine...
Review: Actually, this book, entitled "Pure Drivel" is in fact NOT pure drivel at all as the arther would have you believe. Nope. If you read it very very closely, maybe with a magnifying glass of some sort, you will find on page 47 some pure crap. Yes, it's true, and that makes this book "unpure" as far as drivel goes.
And the arther didn't know what he was talking about when it came to the facts about the period shortage. I lived through that particular time in history and I can assure you it wasn't all that bad. In fact, he tries to show his thrifyousness by using only one period in the whole story, but if you look closely at the backward period mentioned in the middle, it's simply a regular period turned backwards and NOT an actual backward period. So, he used two periods, not one and proves my point exactly.
The most enlightening aspect to this book is found in it's opening pages where you learn who the publisher is, the copyright year and the ISBN number. I have read this many times and have committed most of it to memory. What more can I say?
Steve did let a secret slip out. As we all know, the arther likes to cat juggle. In this book he mentions kittens on mars that never die. So, this leads the reader to understand that his cat juggling days are well over, now that we know that they are not just earthling cats. It's much easier to juggle cats that never die, as we all know.
Also, too, I just want to let Steve know that Karen is fine and we are living in a small chalet close to a casino somewhere in Minnesota. She has read your apologies over and over and one day found that she used it as a spaghetti sauce recipe by accident that actually turned out half decent.
Rating:
Summary: An absolutely gorgeous book
Review: Annotation: In this ingeniously funny book of humorous skits, Martin shows he is master of the written word. The book is hilariously funny and intelligent in his skewering of the topic at hand. The book features Martin at his finest. The book is incredibly witty as Martin shows off his superb writing ability. This is the funniest book I have ever read.
Author Bio: Born in Waco, Texas and raised in Southern California, Martin became a television writer in the late 1960s, winning an Emmy Award for his work on the hit series "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour". By the end of the decade he was performing his material in clubs and on television and went on to host several episodes of "Saturday Night Live". Martin continued to use his stand-up skills as host of the 73rd and 75th Annual Academy Awards, for which he was nominated for Outstanding Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program. Martin has stared in many movies which include The Jerk, The Man with Two Brains, and All of Me in which he was nominated for an academy award. His latest film was Cheaper by the Dozen.
Evaluation: This was one of the best books I have ever read. It was so funny I found myself being stared at by my parents. They must have thought "What Is he reading?". Anyway I was inspired by the book to try a hand at writing comedy. I hope I can use and master the English language the way Martin has. He is beyond description.
Rating:
Summary: An absolutely gorgeous book
Review: Annotation: In this ingeniously funny book of humorous skits, Martin shows he is master of the written word. The book is hilariously funny and intelligent in his skewering of the topic at hand. The book features Martin at his finest. The book is incredibly witty as Martin shows off his superb writing ability. This is the funniest book I have ever read.
Author Bio: Born in Waco, Texas and raised in Southern California, Martin became a television writer in the late 1960s, winning an Emmy Award for his work on the hit series "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour". By the end of the decade he was performing his material in clubs and on television and went on to host several episodes of "Saturday Night Live". Martin continued to use his stand-up skills as host of the 73rd and 75th Annual Academy Awards, for which he was nominated for Outstanding Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program. Martin has stared in many movies which include The Jerk, The Man with Two Brains, and All of Me in which he was nominated for an academy award. His latest film was Cheaper by the Dozen.
Evaluation: This was one of the best books I have ever read. It was so funny I found myself being stared at by my parents. They must have thought "What Is he reading?". Anyway I was inspired by the book to try a hand at writing comedy. I hope I can use and master the English language the way Martin has. He is beyond description.
Rating: 
Summary: Accurate Title
Review: Here's the quick and dirty on Steve Martin's Pure Drivel:
About 90% of the pieces are clever;
About 60% of the pieces are witty;
About 40% of the pieces are funny (funny enough to cause an audible chortle, guffaw or even a wry smile).
Steve Martin is a very crisp and smart writer. His mastery of the written word and imagination are on full display here and show why he often writes successful movie scripts.
Pure Drivel is a thin collection of short essays Martin wrote for The New Yorker (whose readership I've always thought feels it must support the clever even if it is not concurrently the witty). The topics are as wide ranging as you could imagine: a report on the shortage of an important article of punctuation; a Lucy and Desi script, Lolita (yes, that Lolita) at age fifty (this is a gem), a future report on the devastation caused by the Y3K bug, and assorted other topics not joined by any relation other than birth from the wellspring of Martin's mind.
I read this in three sittings, which I think was a mistake. Sometimes for me, humor collections fall off if taken in too large a bite. I usually laugh out loud at Dave Barry's weekly columns but found his essay collections repetitive. Same for Letterman Top Ten Lists. I would advise the reader to place this book at a convenient location in the bathroom when the five or ten minute literary piece is required for maximum enjoyment.
Rating:
Summary: Take it or leave it
Review: I've always considered Steve Martin a genius. His stand-up comedy, while full of slapstick, is also quite intellectual at times. Subtlety and irony are themes which often abound in his comedic work, and they come to the forefront in "Pure Drivel," a series of essays which can be read cover to cover in ninety minutes.There are moments of laugh-out-loud enjoyment, such as "Side Effects." Other essays, which deal with MENSA, Martin's own birdbath, prescription narcotics and a variety of wide-ranging topics, range from mildly amusing to humorous. While none of it is dull--thanks in large part to the brevity of the essays--there's nothing here which is terribly memorable. The many fans of Steve Martin will enjoy this book, as I did, but I'm not sure he'll win new converts with it. Much more highly recommended is the novella, "Shopgirl," a legitimate attempt at fiction writing. Martin succeeded in spades, which only supports my claim that he can do just about everything in the entertainment industry.
Rating:
Summary: Proof positive
Review: If, for some (wild and) crazy reason you need more proof of the unadulterated comedic genious that IS Steve Martin, here it is. The essays contained herein are so funny that if you don't laugh out loud call the undertaker because you are dead!
He hit some rough patches with movies but there is not a rough stretch in this book. If you want to think and laugh, buy it.
Rating: 
Summary: Very, Very Strange....
Review: Not in a bizzarre way, more like an *interesting* way. This book is completely non-linear, and nothing makes sense if you try too hard to understand it. Usually, you don't laugh because it's funny, you laugh because no other reaction seems appropriate. It might be genius or insanity, i'm not sure. His writing reminds me a lot of Spike Milligan (R.I.P. -- Now THERE was a comic genius), and you will absolutely HATE it if you're the kind of person who likes everything to be straightforward. This book is for the kind of people who like things that are completely unlike most of the other books you'll see in the comedy section of a bookstore.
Rating: 
Summary: Appropriately Named - I'll Give Ya That
Review: Oh how I love just about everything Steve Martin does. From The Jerk to Cheaper by the Dozen and just about everything in between, the man is a living legend.
This audio book his a letdown. Oh, I know, it's sophisticated humor; witty beyond understanding for the low IQ masses...yeah, whatever.
It's boring, slow, and just plain, NOT FUNNY. I can't believe all of the great reviews. I must assume that all of these people are either related to the comic-genius or hope that one day, when they run into him at the airport, they can brag about how they love all of his work - even the sad-excuse-for-a-book Pure Drivel. Well I'm not joining the suck-ups on this one. I'm glad I only checked this one out from the library. I would be extremely upset if I had wasted my hard-earned money on this Pure Drivel. At least he got the name right.
Rating:
Summary: Mostly forgettable but still fun
Review: Several of these short works - such as "Scrodinger's Cat" - did nothing for me and I wondered whether Martin's name, rather than literary merit, got them originally published in The New Yorker and other magazines. Yet I'd recommend "The 100 Greatest Books That I've Read," "Closure," "Lolita at 50" and "A Word from the Words," among others. There are enough laughs here for readers who appreciate Martin's creative antics to want to experience this book.
Rating:
Summary: Thoroughly bizarre
Review: Steve Martin is a funny guy. Almost always. Even when he's in a bad movie (and he's made his share), the man himself is usually funny. This book is a fantastic little piece in which he pretty much emptied his mind of all the screwy, random thoughts that had been rattling around and turned them into strange essays about... well... anything. Politics, a day in the garden... my personal favorite was a great piece about a sudden shortage of a certain punctuation mark. The synapses in this man's brain make quantum leaps to connect the oddest things and turn them into something utterly histerical. Drivel? Perhaps. But it's among the best drivel I've ever read.
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