Customer Reviews

CPR for Dummies

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

 

 

I don't think there'll be a more bizarre book released in 2008, that's for sure. CPR for Dummies combines a screenplay, a day-long gritty Lower East Side (that's NYC for people who don't know) sex narrative, a corrupt priest and his group of idiosyncratic followers, and the end of the world into something delightfully weird.

Briefly, on the last day on earth (think "Armageddon"), a sexually voracious woman and her boyfriend get trapped in a church with a priest and his small congregation, who divulge their stories as the world outside them gets crazier and the meteor gets closer. Climax of the book is a three-way orgasm in a confessional.

And that climax is previewed by Mickey himself. At the beginning of the book he tells you, in italics and parentheses, that it's going to happen. This is CPR for Dummies' central conceit -- no-nonsense meta comments from the author. (He even puts them in the back-of-the-book copy.)

They're the best thing about the book. They come at the end of every chapter (and the chapters are short an readable) -- for example, I'm almost done writing this paragraph.

(it wasn't very good, was it? You're probably bored already and clicking off to another site.)


Mickey Z's meta strategy becomes addictive; after a while you're waiting for his out-of-the-box comments, which often reveal which of the book's many entertaining anecdotes actually happened to him. When I (tried to) read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, I got caught up in the preface. The first sentence: "It is not necessary to read the preface." Well, I thought, that's annoying -- it's probably not necessary to read the whole book. And I put it town.

Mickey Z's meta strategies are MUCH more palatable. When you finish this book, you feel like you know him, and you also feel like you've been through a long, strange trip to obliteration.

a.k.a. Ash Lomen


I liked this book... I'm just sure if everyone else will. Giving it a five star rating is something I'm almost hesitant to do... but after all... I am judging the book on how much I enjoyed reading it... and that was one whole hell of a lot.

CPR for Dummies isn't really a novel... it's not really even fiction... it's a story wrapped in a psychic storm of fact, fiction, opinions, and intercourse. It's a stream-of-consciousness designed for you to choke on. And swallow.

It's also (whatever it is) very funny...

Mickey Z's viewpoint is not always a popular one (or one I always agree with) but what can I say... I like a guy who asks questions. Consider the possibility that you may be (on occasion) wrong... and you might learn something.

Maybe even how to win a fight...

CPR for Dummies is a brilliant, inventive, and thoroughly enjoyable novel. It's filled with wild, engaging characters and an interesting mix of sex and politics--part Henry Miller and part Howard Zinn. While it has a storyline that moves compellingly forward, it also uses a postmodern collage structure that carves out plenty of free space for author playfulness, surprising anecdotes about history and science, and urgent political commentary. I read it in two sittings and found it to be both a real page-turner and an educational treat. And watch out for the ending.

With a copy of CPR for dummies opened to any random page, You will be the most popular person on the subway! Juicy as TimeOut's Jamie Bufalino, with a plot and engaging dialogue!

"Mickey Z. has written a novel about the end of the world that reads like a Stanley Kubrick movie of a Kurt Vonnegut novel cut into little pieces and spliced back together."
- Levi Asher, Literary Kicks

"Mickey Z. has thought a lot about politics and a lot about sex. He's thought about politics while having sex, and about sex while having politics. As a result, Mr. Z. has written an orgasmic Left revolt-book! I am surprised that I liked the novel, actually. I didn't know that I enjoyed anything written after 1931."
-- Sparrow, poet and presidential candidate

"Mickey Z.'s CPR for Dummies is a ribald collage of styles, points of view, and blasphemies. Written loosely in the style of a play, the novel includes the author as a character, a sex-crazed priest and a confession-booth orgy to rival the best of Rabelais. Both satiric and insightful, the book manages to invoke both Armageddon and optimism. With politics sure to rile even the most self-righteous liberal, Mickey pulls off a tour de force -- a textbook within a play within a parody within an urban memoir. It is a book that is as tongue in cheek as Vonnegut and Bukowski -- funny, sexy, surprising and entirely iconoclastic."
-- Christine Hamm, author of "The Transparent Dinner"

I pretty much groaned when I started reading this. Okay another book by a guy that finds it easier to write experimentally because you don't have to flesh out characters or make sure the plot makes sense. Oh and he's inserting himself into the text. Yawn. Another post-post-modern book filled with sex and the author. Yawn.

But I stuck with it and I'm glad I did. There actually is a plot here. True the characters are not fleshed out, and yes, the author is annoying with his uninteresting assertions about how interesting his life is. But about halfway through I realized there's a good chance that what the author is saying about himself is not really about himself. He's making it up. Perhaps the author is still an unknown quantity. Yay, the mystery preserved. He may or may not have been doing that, but the fact that I believed it was all made up made the story much more interesting. Like the guy's not bragging after all, he's just being creative.

But what if he was just writing about himself? Couldn't he have just put together a memoir? Okay, so David Sedaris has that all sewn up, sure let's try to figure something else out.

These are the reactions that I had to the book. I'm not exactly sure what the author was trying to do, but his political rants are worth reading. And he has a great way of digging into past historic events and giving them meaning in the context of world events of today. I like that.

The style is strange but so is the world and maybe we should be looking at it like this book presents it: mish mashed, off the wall, meaningful in its meaninglessness.

Have fun.

This is a hard book to rate because the story is a 1 but the style is a 5. Let's call it a 3.

Mickey Z wrote the book in a really fun way; interactive with varying styles. The parts I liked the best were the personality tests.

Alas, the story itself is just boring, as are the characters.

Mr. Z just needs the right story and he can do something amazing.

I would have given this a 2.5 star rating had Amazon allowed...

Janie, a girl who works for a magazine called Naughty and is a bit obsessed with sex, finds herself in a predicament when she walks into a church to get directions on her way to an audition and instead, finds a small group of religious fanatics who think she's the second coming of Christ. Led by Father Gil, a less-than-holy priest, this eccentric bunch will not allow her to leave, continue to call her J.C., and ask her all sorts of outrageous questions. Janie's answer...to lead them into the arms of sin. Oh, and let's not forget to mention that the world is about to end while all this is going on.

The positives: I like the characters, while ridiculous and somewhat far-fetched. Not much character development, but the story is so short (the span of a few hours, that it doesn't lend itself to that). The plot, while meager, was interesting and comical. I also enjoyed some of the political rhetoric in the book, especially toward to the end.

The negatives: Had the author solely focused on the story at hand and left out all the snippets of history, politics, unrelated side stories, unnecessary tests, etc...this book would have been the size of a pamphlet. I got REALLY sick and tired of the constant cutting away from the story. The author's personal interjections in parentheses, while whimsical at the beginning, got severely old and annoying after about page 10. It felt like the author was trying way too hard to be witty, but really it just came off as bad writing. There was far too much unrelated information that didn't seem to matter one way or the other to anything that happened in the story. I won't say that some of the side notes didn't relate indirectly, but at least 75% should have been removed.

Overall, I felt that this was ok at best. I wouldn't tell some one not to read it, but I wouldn't recommend it either. The potential is there, but the author missed the opportunity on this one.

Dear Mickey Z:

Advice and counsel from a self-promoting swamp creature from the '70s based on his experiences as a "personal trainer" for former celebrities is of absolutely no use to anyone -- especially when you and your loony Manson girl friend Mooney are laying around in your beanbag chairs, chugging carrot juice and babbling online about the benefits of mass death by earthquake and tsunami. Please stop writing and thinking, effective immediately. For your own good and ours. Thanks.