Customer Reviews

Fly Fishing with Darth Vader: And Other Adventures with Evangelical Wrestlers, Political Hitmen, and Jewish Cowboys

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

 

 

The book is a collection of long form journalism stories most of which were originally written for the Weekly Standard. Despite what you might think though if that was your only knowledge the book is 1. Not really a political book in any partisan sense and 2. Quite edgy. The book starts with a portrait of Detroit, that is compelling but perhaps uneccesarilly hopeless and ends with a piece on New Orleans which was my favorite in between are a number of pieces on political eccentrics including Donald Trump, Al Sharpton, Jim Traficant, Marian Berry and fringe California gubernatorial and presedential candidates. Sprinkled in between are stories about topics ranging from a pseudo-academic porn convention, dodgeball, facebook, a cd collection of spirituals, and a dailykos bloggers convention in Vegas. Throughout Labash is funny and insightful. Occasionally he does veer towards being too cynical such as in the piece about the Kos convention, though it should be noted that his objections had more to do with the form of communication on Kos and not the content perse.

A WSJ article I read compared Labash to Tom Wolfe or Hunter Thompson. I can't speak for the Thompson, comparison but the Wolfe comparison while not completely off base is a little misleading. Most of Labash's works have a much more overtly comedic tone to them Wolfe's writings, think of it as being like Joel Stein doing long form journalism.

Humor, scandal, and/or empathy writers usually wear thin before the third chapter - their talent isn't that good, or the material is a badly dated collection of material most no longer have any interest n. Not so with Matt Labash - he's good to the last page, even though the material is a wee bit old.

Labash begins with "Detroit - The City where Sirens Never Sleep," and tells of schools that haven't ordered new textbooks in 19 years and the lowest high school graduation rate of any large district (24.9%), a city with half the population of 1950 and an estimated 60,000 vacant houses that once gave its key to the city to Saddam Hussein. Where 47% of adults are functionally illiterate, the local football team was 0-14, and the populace has been honored as America's 'fattest city,' and its 'sexual disease capital.' The sirens never stop - driven by arson in abandoned homes, factories; its abandoned train station may be next. At the same time, Labash also visits with a homeless person living under a bridge, and possessing more common sense than most of those driving overhead.

The title, "Fly Fishing with Darth Vader" obviously refers to V.P. Cheney. Expecting a nasty hit piece, I instead found a delightful story of another side of Mr. Cheney - an ordinary guy with a strong interest in fly-fishing and those who do it. It's all 'catch and release' - even the trout come out good, and I can't wait to see more the great Wyoming scenery described by Labash as he fly-fishes with the V.P.

Other treats include the life of an evangelical wrestler, and executives and managers acting like kids in an effort to keep employees happy so they, in turn, keep customers happy. It's "The Office" all day long, an antidote to dour-faced efficiency experts and sophomoric business guru cliches - all backed up by 'research' and stories told by funsultants.

In between, Labash also writes with empathy of his visits with a 9/11 widow.

Labash is truly a multi-faceted writer, a man with a wide range of talents.

I spend a fair amount of time hanging out with Dave "Mudcat" Saunders, and Labash nails that profile while finding humor in all the man's complexities. He does a tour of politic's characters. He's found the right people, and Labash knows how to render them, taking them right down to the wood. It's a great read.

Roland Lazenby
author of Jerry West, The Life And Legend Of A Basketball Icon

Matt Labash is an extremely out of the ordinary writer and observer. His book contains 23 of his pieces ranging from the terribly devastating chapter on Detroit that is more than pitiful in its' descriptions of the conditions there, that you can't help laughing in the awfulness of its accuracy. He visits New Orleans and the dreadful effects of Katrina. He follows a luddite's path down the facebook road and down the Snake River with Dick Cheney... the Darth Vader of fly fishing.
We learn the physical damage? that dodge ball has done our nation's children, of course with the added `horrors ` of duck duck goose and musical chairs, actually citing studies form the Department of Health.
Lovers of Canada and Gordon Lightfoot- Labash has you in his sights as well.
He writes an startlingly sympathetic portrait of Marion Barry and one of the seriously most affecting accounts of 9/11 with the story of Edlene LaFrance whose husband died in the collapse of the Twin Towers.
There is the humorous, the interesting and some sorrow; but always interesting reading in this book.

This is a collection of twenty-three of Mr. Labash's previously published magazine articles from "The Weekly Standard" and "Salon." The reader has his or her choice about whether to sample humorous entrees of such items as "Detroit: The City Where the Sirens Never Sleep", "Yippie Kay Oy Vey: Kinky Friedman Runs fro Governor", "Arnold Uber Alles: The Wild, Final Days of the Schwarzenegger Campaign", "Trump on the Stump", "Rev Gotta Eat: Al Sharpton's Hungry for a Place at the Table, " or "Fly Fishing With Darth Vader."
Naturally, after looking over the entire buffet, I went directly to the items that seemed to wet my appetite the most--the desserts. I chose two spicy dishes of tarts and cheesecake appropriately entitled "Among the Pornographers."
"This odd assemblage has gathered for a four-day World Pornography Conference in the Universal Sheraton, amid the strip-mall sprawl of the San Fernando Valley, porn production capital of the world. The meeting is sponsored by the Center for Sex Research at California State University, Northridge--a sort of Left Coast Kinsey Institute."
More than 500 "academics--sociologists, anthropologists, sexologists, film and gender studies teachers, and interdisciplinary seekers from across the country--are attending under the guise of studying `Eroticism and the First Amendment.' But the real aim is simpler: to celebrate pornography." The place is awash in exotic porn stars and samples of the world of porn. The various college types hope to vastly improve their own college or university's collection of porn. The Northridge Center is hoping "to get more [Pornography] deposits from the industry--so we'll have the biggest porn collection in the country."
"Academics, it seems, are the only people who can de-eroticize sex more completely than pornographers."
This reprint of the satirical magazine article was a laugh, or at least a chuckle riot. Having wet my appetite I returned to the buffet table and decided to taste a dish labeled "Down with Facebook!" This article points out that "'Time' magazine recently declared Facebook more popular than porn. But who are they kidding? Facebook is porn. With porn, you watch other people take off their clothes and abase themselves in public. On Facebook, where there's technically an anti-nudity policy (thus defeating the whole purpose of the Internet), you get to figuratively do the same." The author then proceeds to build a case against the social networks as a very dangerous form of suicide for too many of its "Facetards." For the addicted, there is nothing that they won't post on their Facebook page. It's costing many of them jobs as more and more employers check the Facebook pages of prospective employees.
Beginning to sate my appetite, I decided to have a main dish of "The Wild, Final Days of the Schwarzenegger Campaign." After stuffing myself on beefcake enhanced with steroids I then returned to the smorgasbord to enjoy the headliner dish from the front of the book's cover--fresh 22-inch long Mountain trout caught in Wyoming by Darth Vader, the nickname for Vice President Dick Cheney.
Labash hoped to use his mutual love of fly fishing to discover how the legendary closed mouth and secretive Vice-President reached his political decisions. He got his day long, eight-hour interview while floating lazily along the river with Cheney, who catches twenty-two fish to his two, but all he discovered is that Cheney is not only an expert fly fisherman who gets really excited about the sport, but that he loves the natural beauty of the Snake River and the wilds of Wyoming, Idaho and other beautiful and inaccessible fishing havens around the planet. Surprisingly, Labash allows his readers to realize that Dick Cheney would be the very last person in the world who would wish to despoil the environment.
On one fly fishing trip a "young man who worked for the Idaho Fish and Game" jumped out of the bushes and checked to see if everyone had their fishing license. Even though he was reading Dick Cheney's license while he looked him directly in the face, he failed to recognize the Vice-President. Labash didn't mention whether the clueless ranger eventually put two and two together and made the connection when he checked the licenses of the flotilla of trailer boats following Cheney that were packed with wetsuit clad Navy Seals and a small army of heavily armed secret service agents. Who knows he probably wanted to see their hunting and fishing licenses?
Finally, stuffed with broiled Snake River cutthroat trout, I decided to stop eating even though some of the desserts at the end of buffet still looked particularly inviting. All the glassy eyed professors were still ogling the porn star tarts and wanting to pose for photos with their arms around them.
The buyers of this humorous collection of yummy, fluffy soul food book won't be disappointed. Even "Rev Gotta Eat!" Matt Labash is like another Dave Barry or P.J. O'Rourke and the latter added a testimonial to the book that is printed on the cover. "Matt Labash's Book Rocks. He is Hunter S. Thompson on Acid." Hum I thought; I didn't see any acid on either the buffet table or at the bar. I must have been distracted with my own ogling of the beautiful porn tartists and all the intoxicating, luscious and surgically enhanced cheesecake.

Great title, I have not bought the book because I have been a regular reader of the Weekly Standard and I remember most of the people mentioned in the preview being profiled in the magazine.If you are a regular reader I doubt you will find anything new. HOWEVER if aren't then pick this book up and be ready to laugh your head off. Great writing, funny and insightful.

Matt Labash is a writer for The Weekly Standard and this book is a compilation of his articles.

Labash has a clever, biting humor. He detests Facebook and the fakeness of friendships formed or reignited; he is appalled when he wife joins.

All the stories are humorous, but the downside is that because they are articles for a time-sensitive magazine, they are out dated. For instance the article for which the book is named, Fly Fishing with Darth Vader, is about a fly fishing trip Labash took with the Vice President, Dick Cheney. It's a bit too old to be of intense interest anymore.

It's a book to jump around in and choose the articles that will appeal to you.

The book consists of a collection of stories (nonfiction) written by Mr. Labash over the past several years. I had never read his column in the Weekly Standard and simply came across the book in the library. I'm very glad I did - the stories are very well written, clever, witty and in many cases enlightening. The stories were all written over the last dozen years and that is my one complaint about the book - some of the stories are least 10 years old. However, the author has such a flair for writing that I was drawn into the stories anyway. The stories cover a variety of well-known, and some not so well-known, individuals and events. I found all the stories interesting and there are quite a few that really stand out - his coverage of the Schwartzenegger and Trump campaigns as well as his profiles of Kinky Friedman, Marion Barry and Reverand Al.

Fly Fishing with Darth Vader is a collection of different pieces written by Matt Labash. It's probably his first book and in my humble opinion not the best satire/comical compilation of essays I have come across. The different people covered by the book includes Dick Cheney (Darth Vader), Donald Trump, Al Sharpton, A bunch of senators, people who go to porn convention and such. I didn't purchase the book, but was a gift to me by a friend. In all honesty, I don't think the writing is as funny as the comments on the front and the back suggest it is. You may laugh like ones or twice during a chapter, but that is the best. However, its a good way to know the details about the life of people like Dick Cheney, Donald Trump and such. They have their own little intricacies and it gives a good detail into that. Kudos to Matt Labash for traveling with the Vice-president and not getting shot. To summarize, it gives good details about the lives of a bunch of people, but not very funny.

Well, I bought this book just because somebody recommended it. I actually, thought it was a book of fly fishing stories. Well, there was one, with Dick Cheney (Darth Vader) which was interesting. Personally, I like Cheney. He put America first and never pretended to be a friend to anyone, unless they really were. He was America's Winston Churchill, without the thoughtfully crafted speeches.

I guess Matt Labash is trying to make a living as a political satirist, much like Hunter S. Thompson, or P.J. O'Roark, both of who are masters of the game. Sadly though, I think Matt gets off on bashing the very blue collar people he seems to claim to represent. Much like the "documentary" film maker Michael Moore, who really just beats up the very working class people he claims to be fighting for, he uses them in the end for the butt of his jokes. Moore's films are really just black humor, and like Moore, I think this writer likes poking fun at the very disease he is trying to treat.

Normally, this would be funny. But it isn't anymore. Making fun of Detroit isn't funny anymore when most major American cities are resembling that imploded wreck of humanity on a rusty zit. At this point, we all need to look in the mirror and take a good hard look at what we have become: a jaded, morose, imbibing, drug-seeking, deteriorating society marinating in the filth of our own excess.