Rating: 
Summary: Very funny and nostalgic ...
Review: ... if you happened to live in Manhattan mid 70s - mid 80s. If you did you've probably read all of these pieces but it's a treat to read them again. If you didn't some of this may not tickle you as much but Lebowitz is as sharp an observer and terse a wit as anyone.
Rating:
Summary: I'm Right...You're Wrong
Review: A somewhat amusing look at society, New York, and the audibly tan by a woman who knows all. She really does. Wonderful answers to questions you did no know existed. Swell and dandy I'd have to say
Rating: 
Summary: Frantastic!
Review: Absolutely uproarious! By the second page, I was on the floor nearly asphixiating from laughter. Lebowitz has an innate flair for striking the funny bone with a combination of a purposefully erudite tone and an unapolgetically self-oriented perspective. Not for the dull-witted.
Rating:
Summary: great book
Review: don
Rating: 
Summary: keep on milkin' it, fran
Review: For twenty years now, Lebowitz has been keeping her name in the limelight on the basis of these quaint humor piees. From this molehill of work, she has built a mountain of a career. Too bad there never was much 'there' there. Where's this Bonfire-of-the-Vanities-like epic she says she's been slaving over? Sorry, but she ain't no Ralph Ellison. Oh, and am I the only one who's noticed she could pass as Geoffrey Rush's twin?
Rating: 
Summary: Funny but very dated
Review: Fran Lebowitz is a real one-of-a-kind humorist: basically, she's a Manhattan-centric, curmudgeonly, Jewish lesbian who writes in Wildean aphorisms. She's delightful, and if you've ever seen her on TV it's almost impossible not to hear her sentences in her bemused tones. This collection represents almost all of her writing she's ever published: two bestselling studies from the Seventies, "Metropolitan Life" and "Social Studies." They're funny but extremely dated: Lebowitz's observations on "discotheques" and CD radios seem extremely quaint today. Famously, Lebowitz has suffered from writer's block since publishing these (very short) two collections. True to form, this edition advertises "A New Preface by the Author" which is only one paragraph long. I can't give this much higher of a rating because these pieces are so dated: it's time for Lebowitz to write something new and of our time.
Rating:
Summary: A successor to Dorothy Parker?
Review: Fran Lebowitz is sometimes referred to as the successor to Dorothy Parker. A few similarities are apparent. Both are sharp-witted, female New Yorkers famous for their often stinging one-liners. Yet, if Parker could be considered a painter of the urban American landscape in the 1920s through 1950s, Lebowitz should be considered a sketch artist from the 1970s. I don't think she has Parker's depth or sense of structure. Her essays are playful but often amount to mere list making or an assemblage of loosely connected observations that could just as well belong on a greeting card or cocktail napkin. And she often relies way too heavily on puns. Several pieces in this collection fall flat for me. Yet others - such as her advice to heiresses, "At Home with Pope Ron," and "The Last Laugh" - were quite clever. I think she's worth reading as perhaps one of the leading humorists of her generation. Comparisons with the more versatile and compelling Parker are a bit of a stretch, though.
Rating:
Summary: The best in
Review: Fran Lebowitz's "The Fran Lebowitz Reader" is a must for anyone interested in the best in "urban cool" writing. Lebowitz is unusual in being an American humorist of the barbed--not warm and fuzzy, like Erma Bombeck--variety. She lays on the sarcasm and the weary, I've-seen-it-all attitude a little thick at times, but hey, this woman was born in the wrong era and you can't blame her for that. Picture Dorothy Parker come back to life with a fleshier face and uncooperative hair and you have a decent picture of Lebowitz.I can't resist quoting. Some of these are classics that you may be surprised to learn came from Lebowitz: "My favorite way to wake up is to have a certain French movie star whisper to me softly at two-thirty in the afternoon that if I want to get to Sweden in time to pick up my Nobel Prize for Literature, I had better ring for breakfast. This occurs rather less often than one might wish." * * * "There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness or death." * * * "All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in fact, barely presentable." * * * "[In grade school,] I believed passionately that Communists were a race of horned men who divided their time equally between the burning of Nancy Drew books and the devising of a plan of nuclear attack that would land the largest and most lethal bomb squarely upon the third-grade class of Thomas Jefferson School in Morristown, New Jersey." * * * "Polite conversation is rarely either." * * * "The only appropriate reply to the queston, 'Can I be frank?' is 'Yes, if I can be Barbara.' " * * * "Looking genuinely attentive is like sawing a girl in half and then putting her back together. It is seldom achieved without the use of mirrors." * * * Well, I could go on and on, clearly, but I'll stop quoting if only just to say that this is the kind of sophisticated humor book you can devour in one gulp--or pace yourself and enjoy it slowly and luxuriously, like nibbling away at a particularly fine bittersweet chocolate mousse. Despite the occasional reference which dates these pieces to their 1970s origin (such as instructions for disco behavior), most of the essays hold up amazingly well because they do the time-honored humorist trick of commenting on basic human foibles. This is a delightful, subversive book.
Rating:
Summary: Should be standard reading...
Review: I first read something of Fran's in high school, and was hooked ever since. The material in this book is amazing, it's so funny and well written. I have to agree with the reader from New York who said that only hicks wouldn't appreciate it. Fran is one of the authors I would be pleased to be in her company, and listen to her talk, about anything!
Rating:
Summary: Should be standard reading...
Review: I first read something of Fran's in high school, and was hooked ever since. The material in this book is amazing, it's so funny and well written. I have to agree with the reader from New York who said that only hicks wouldn't appreciate it. Fran is one of the authors I would be pleased to be in her company, and listen to her talk, about anything!
| 
