Customer Reviews

Answer Me!: The First Three

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Ohhh yeah!! I love the Goads, and I love this book! Evil, vile, full of ranting vitriole, what more could a gal want to warm the cockles of her cold, hard lil' heart? Wow, this book rocks. I'd laid hands on several copies over the years, but had never found one of my own until just recently, and even tho' I knew its innards by heart, I still hadda' get a copy of my own to love...

Really, this ranting, raving supertract is a work of art. Bile, blood, anger, and well aimed barbs about society, the system, and basically, everybody that isn't a Goad, are all strongly backed up by charmingly psychotic artwork. One can tell that each missive was lovingly honed into a rusty, bent and dulled edge before being gently dipped into battery acid and poison tree frog juice, and then blow-darted onto its gingerly selected, filth-covered page. And the best part of all? They did this ALL FOR YOU! The Goads gift to mankind is hypnotically ugly, and vastly, horribly entertaining. Getchyer' own copy today!!!

This book is not those who are offended easily. But if you have a dark sense of humor and are fascinated by all that is evil or corrupt, then this book may be right up your ally. My favorite part is the in depth A thru Z profiles on Serial Killers.
To know if this book is right for you you may want to look into some of Jim Goads writings and see what you think. I personally think hes a genius but I'm sure not all would not agree...

An incisive book of hate liberally spiced with unarguable insight and viciously accurate, in-your-face detail. There are some gems in this work by two passionate and driven writers.

This was received in good order and in good shape. It is a disturbing compilation, but necessary to any modern deviant collection.

This is a mixture of great articles and complete self indulgence. It's not as well written as "Redneck Manifesto" but it has plenty of good, sharp moments. Well worth a look.

Sherlock Holmes and the Flying Zombie Death Monkeys

These are important early works of an important American prose stylist with an authentic refreshing voice overlooked by mainstream publishing. Jim Goad burst onto the scene of American letters with this compilation of his earliest examples: a combination of H.L. Mencken, Eric Hoffer, and the obscure Joe Schenkman (whose work in the late 70's National Lampoon is similar).

Jim Goad has an allure for certain types of women who like dangerous rough trade combined with the low cunning of undiscovered genius. The hero is always the rebel that plays by his own rules, yet the edge of a rusty beer can that is attractively picturesque is also loaded with tetanus, as too often Goad's amorante discover. In Goad's self-narrative, this allure is also his curse and makes him a controversial figure. This is not an unknown dimension of personal history for some of the world's greatest writers.

This humour is dark and cynical, but only to those who don't find Thomas Harris's "Hannibal" laugh out load funny, or Chaucher's "The Milller's Tale," or haven't read Rabelais or de Sade. Otherwise, Goad's work is challenging and reads like someone still finding his voice and synthesizing his perspective and weltenshaung.

If you think Mondo films, serial killer trading cards, Hunter S. Thompson novels, and the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow are the spiffiest things since sliced bread, you'll probably like this book. But if you're looking for something with a little more depth, look elsewhere.

In a self-interview near the end of the book, Jim Goad asks: "What if the idea of equality is entirely fictional? What if the communists were just as bad as the Nazis...or worse? What if Christianity is really no worse than any other religion, and so we should all feel free to defame Judaism and Islam, too? Why weren't the so-called 'oppressed' peoples of the planet able to develop adequate organizational skills and self-defense technologies to fend off the evil imperialists? What if, despite the fact that we tell ourselves we're making progress, the world around us is actually getting worse...and for reasons which seem too unpleasant to consider?" Well, those are all good questions. So why doesn't he try to answer them, instead of wasting valuable page space with Charles Manson doodles and a history of Western masturbatory practices? That's what I mean by a lack of depth. There's too much time spent on fluff and not enough on serious issues.

I can understand using sex and violence as bait to get people interested in the magazine, but once they've been taken in, there isn't much substance here. All too often it's just shocking for the sake of being shocking, offensive for the sake of being offensive. After a while, having someone take a dump on your kitchen table ceases to be revolutionary and merely becomes unpleasant.

It's hard to figure out just who the target audience for this magazine was. The Goads claimed to hold hipster counterculture types in contempt, yet who but those types could this magazine have appealed to? I don't know how fresh this material was in the early 90's when it first came out, but looking back on it in 2008, these magazines read like a catalog of every countercultural cliche imaginable.

While the editors went after women and feminism with a vengeance, and touched on some racial issues, there were some politically-correct boundaries Jim Goad and his late Jewish wife Debbie did not cross. For example, the Goads were perfectly willing to repeat the popular mantras that Hitler was planning to take over the world and that the Axis powers were solely responsible for WWII, even though such claims were called into question decades ago by such reputable historians as A.J.P. Taylor (Pat Buchanan also has a new book on these topics coming out shortly; the publishers of Newsweek magazine apparently feel so threatened by Buchanan's forthcoming book that they ran a front-page story a week or two ago decrying such "revisionist history"). Surely a pair of editors as well-read as the Goads would have been aware of such alternative historical viewpoints regarding WWII.

It's also interesting to observe that while Jim didn't hesitate to use the "n-word" or to call the Chinese "ch*nks," nowhere did he refer to Jews as "k*kes." In one passage, he refers to "Jews and ch*nks," rather than to "k*kes and ch*nks." Why the inconsistency? I guess Jim must have had some awareness that it's not the n*ggers or the ch*nks that control the publishing industry, and that using the k-word could spell trouble for his career as an author. If you wanted to be charitable, you could say he was refraining from using this word out of deference to his wife, but his wife was also a female and that didn't prevent the magazine from being replete with nasty screeds about women (the worst of them being written by Debbie herself).

One gets the impression that this magazine was being pulled in two opposite directions. Jim Goad, the son of an Irish-Catholic plumber (he doesn't mention his mother's ethnicity), seems to feel genuine empathy for the heterosexual white male underdog, whereas Debbie Goad can scarcely hide her hatred of Middle America (check out, for example, the intro to the piece by Boyd Rice and the bio of porn star Colleen Applegate). You can't be for one of these things and against the other, it's an all-or-nothing deal. There's also far too much Freudian nonsense in here about guns being surrogate penises, etc.

Still, for $15 plus shipping, this is a thick, nicely bound and printed book that's hard to beat as toilet reading material. You might also want to get it just to have a copy of possibly the only book to have come out in the last 20 or 30 years that is completely free of typos and grammar/spelling mistakes.

One last thing: Answer Me! No. 3 contains a ridiculous article by Adam Parfrey, the homosexual-Jewish owner of the trendy countercultural Feral House publishing company, alleging that Steven Spielberg is a pedophile. He bases his assertions on loose word/image associations, far-fetched interpretations of movie scenes in which he finds (or rather, projects) sexual meanings, and dubious statements made by a NAMBLA representative (who went so far as to insinuate that Spielberg may be a member of NAMBLA). I'm not sure what the Feral House crowd has against Spielberg, but its disdain is conspicuous, what with Parfrey's Apocalypse Culture 2 anthology bearing an anti-Spielbergian rant by actor Crispin Glover.

I'm no fan of Spielberg, and for all I know he could be a pedophile, but if you're going to make such accusations in public, you had better provide stronger evidence than what was in this article. If anything, the article makes a stronger case for the author himself having pedophilic tendencies.

Jim Goad is one of the only people left thats man enough to not worry if he hurts a few feelings. I fully admire a man who is not swayed by the pointless self hating guilt that is the monster called PC thought (or lack there of). This book is very well writen and has many good points for those not worried what other brainwashed sheep think of them.

So if your not chained by fear and touchy feely pc imprisonment this is a book for you

...is a self serving, woman beating, hate monger.
God love him for it! Buy this book!!!