60 of 62 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best in, July 26, 2002
This review is from: The Fran Lebowitz Reader (Paperback)
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.
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22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
LANDLORDS, URBAN OLYMPICS, er, CB RADIOS, MOOD RINGS, etc, December 30, 2002
This review is from: The Fran Lebowitz Reader (Paperback)
Look, anyone who can proclaim that their idea of exercise is having to light their own cigarette has got my vote.
There are some brilliant pieces in here, but there is no question that they were of a time. The selections from Metropolitan Life work best for me; they are, as one would've said in '70s Manhattan, "a stitch". Still, I can't imagine even a modern new yorker not being able to identify greatly with some of these insights and witticisms. Kind of like the movie Arthur, it evokes a different time but you'll still be able to recognize all the people and feelings. And it's damn, damn funny.
As another reviewer begged, come back Fran, we need to read what you have to say about today's anti-smoking, anti-dancing, anti-livable, post-Giuliani town.
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47 of 56 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Funny but very dated, November 9, 2002
This review is from: The Fran Lebowitz Reader (Paperback)
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.
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