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How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays (A Harvest Book)

How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays (A Harvest Book)

List Price: $15.00
Your Price: $10.20
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Superb Humor
Review: "How to Travel With a Salmon" delightfully skewers our hyperefficient, bureaucratic and wordy world. I laughed hard with every essay. Having once served as the chair of an academic department, I can vouch that the essay on "inventories" absolutely captures the degrading quality of the bureaucratic details that can consume days of professorial concern. However, nothing can top the Milanese process of renewing lost drivers licenses, although many U.S. municipalities try.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Or..."How to Use Suspension Points"...
Review: ...or the logical illogic behind everyday life. ..Umberto Eco is one of my favorite writers/thinkers and I was well pleased when he allowed some of his followers like me off the hook with a down to earth, easy to follow book. Sharp witted and clearly with tongue placed firmly in cheek, Eco skewers human habits and modern day customs with a faux/not faux rationalism...sometimes with the same stance you'd imagine he'd lecture a graduate course in the theories of semiotics.

But, fear not, dear reader, Dr. Eco is just having a little fun. An essay entitled "How to Be a Television Host", turns out to be a parody on how the powers-that-be who produce entertainment/shows/movies must think the audiences are really dumb. Even though he kinda went overboard with applause and the fictional Bonga nation (somewhere "between Terra Incognita and the Isle of the Blest"), it is truth. He even parodies himself and academicians like himself in the piece 'Three Owls in a Chest Drawer' (in which two more of my favorites--Erica Jong and Camille Paglia--get a nod) which ends with a wry punchline "This, and only this, is what Poetry demands of us."

Eco says one should never fear exaggeration in writing parody. Well...truly, he is fearless in these essays.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A loud book!
Review: A loud book - at least while you're reading it! Even this normally quiet reader could not help laughing out loud at every one of Eco's essays. While all of his books are excellent, this is one of the funniest books that I've ever had the pleasure to read.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: What is like to travel with Umberto Eco
Review: I knew Umberto Eco from his previous books like Foucault's Pendulum and The Name of the Rose. Both of them are very documented and serious writings and I have to admit I was a bit reserved at the idea of Umberto Eco writing humorous essays.

But it was enough for me to read only the first story (How to Travel with a Salmon) and I decided I had to read the whole book.
This is the book that will give you a nice feeling, sometimes will make you even laugh out loud, as it is written with a lot of wit and sense of humour.
It is suitable for someone who wants a light reading and intelligent at the same time.

I was pleasantly surprised to meet the playful side of Mr. Eco which resulted in light satires at the address of some social institutions, bureaucracy and habits that people have. It is a delightful reading that I bet, you don't want to miss.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: How to review an funny Umberto Eco book.
Review: In this collection of humourous essays, Umberto Eco exemplifies my most favourite literary character: the lovable curmudgeon. Only he happens to be a curmudgeon blessed with world class wit, an encyclopedic knowledge of history and art and literature, and the reputation as the world's leading expert on semiotics. I enjoy his writing best when he's not wielding all of those swords at once. During those pieces the humour gets tangled up in the academia, causing migraine headaches for his less nimble-minded audience (an example of this is the long piece 'Stars and Stripes', which in the interest of full disclosure I'll admit to not understanding).

The better pieces are quick, to the point, and almost existential. They are also very accessible. 'On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1' takes that wickedly mischievous proposition to its logical conclusion, and skewers the pomposity of academics who feel equipped to offer a truthful representation of the world. Eco himself knowingly gets caught in that crossfire, much to his own delight. My favourite piece is entitled 'How Not to Use the Cellular Phone'. In it, he rationally categorizes cell phone users (ranging from those so important they need to be on-call 24 hours a day, to those living lives so lame they must constantly be in contact with people who might be doing something interesting). Upon completion, I felt justified in my desire to never own one of those horrendous little gadgets.

Once again, a funny little book that makes you look at the world your living in just a bit differently. What more can you ask?

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Eco does stand-up comedy in a book...
Review: In this collection of short essays published in a span of over 30 years in various magazines, Eco takes all kinds of themes in a mood for parody and satire.
Dealt with here are various modern day commodities (phones, gadgets etc.) as well as ...trains, buses, libraries, waiters, and in general themes that bear no connection with them ..
Reading this book through is not much different than being engaged in conversation with a very witty person who's got an opinion on everybody and everything and has a very special way to deliver it on top of it.
Some of the subjets of these essays may seem a bit out of time (times have indeed changed since some of these were written) but the humor is the prevailant factor here, a caustic humor characteristic of Eco anyway.
If you've gotten to know this brilliant author and mind through his classics such as "Foucault's pendulum" and "The name of the rose" you might find yourself surprised with what's on offer on this book. It's a style you might've not expected, but this does in no way mean you'll be dissapointed. On the extreme contrary!
Great book, reads through like a breeze, and so packed with hilarious lines/conclusion/observations that you'll surely return to it many times.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Eco does stand-up comedy in a book...
Review: In this collection of short essays published in a span of over 30 years in various magazines, Eco takes all kinds of themes in a mood for parody and satire.
Dealt with here are various modern day commodities (phones, gadgets etc.) as well as ...trains, buses, libraries, waiters, and in general themes that bear no connection with them ..
Reading this book through is not much different than being engaged in conversation with a very witty person who's got an opinion on everybody and everything and has a very special way to deliver it on top of it.
Some of the subjets of these essays may seem a bit out of time (times have indeed changed since some of these were written) but the humor is the prevailant factor here, a caustic humor characteristic of Eco anyway.
If you've gotten to know this brilliant author and mind through his classics such as "Foucault's pendulum" and "The name of the rose" you might find yourself surprised with what's on offer on this book. It's a style you might've not expected, but this does in no way mean you'll be dissapointed. On the extreme contrary!
Great book, reads through like a breeze, and so packed with hilarious lines/conclusion/observations that you'll surely return to it many times.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Eco's right on point on Salmon, and, well, everything else!
Review: In this hysterical collection of essays, Umberto tackles everything from the Italian driver-licensing bureau to the cosmic army of the future--one that doesn't seem to be able to do anything really useful save dispatching astrograms to each other. Eco is delightful, mocking at times, right on point throughout. Whether you want to know the truth about talk-show hosts, how to deal with soccar fans, taxi-drivers and, well, salmon, how to buy useless gadgets, or simply want to hear the secret rules concerning library organization (no bathrooms), how to compile toilet-paper inventories, you'll love this book. The book is enjoyable throughout with its often bizarrely funny juxtapostition of the mundane and the learned.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Entertaining and intelligent
Review: The Italian author Umberto Eco has written several humorous articles in his career. This book is acollection of the classics. All articles are at least mildly entertaining, containing some all-too-true comments of the modern society, and a few even managed to put a smile on my face. It is a quick and fun read with pointed social criticicm and irony-filled sarcasm. A nice little gift idea.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: The witty traveler
Review: This collection of essays combines travel with intellectual barbs. The book journeys from the surreal, such as the logistics of manipulating life-sized maps of a territory, to the all-too-real and malodorous such as the title story of the hotel with the broken computer, overly attentive housekeeping, and thus a slowly decaying fish. And the book will please word-fetishists, as the sentences are cleverly assembled.


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