Friends Like These: My Worldwide Quest to Find My Best Childhood Friends, Knock on Their Doors, and Ask Them to Come Out and Play [Hardcover]

Danny Wallace (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 2, 2009

Danny Wallace has friends. He has a wife and goes to brunch, and his new house has a couch with throw pillows. But as he nears 30, he can't help wondering about his best childhood friends, whose names he finds in a long-forgotten address book. Where are they now-and where, really, is he?

Acting on an impulse we've all had at least once, he travels from London to Berlin, Tokyo, Australia, and California, risking rejection and ridicule to show up on his old pals' doorsteps. Memories of his 1980s childhood-from Michael Jackson to Ghostbusters-overwhelm him as he meets former buddies who have blossomed into rappers and ninjas, time-traveling pioneers, mediocre restaurant managers, and even Fijian royalty.

Danny's attempt to re-befriend them all gives remarkable new resonance to the age-old mantra, "friends forever!"

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In his latest, British humorist and TV personality Wallace (Yes Man) takes readers along on his quarter-life crisis quest to reconnect with childhood friends. Just months from his 30th birthday, Wallace found that "the evidence of impending adulthood" was all around him: he and his wife were eating healthy food, patronizing trendy bars rather than the neighborhood pub, and renovating their London home. When his parents send him a box of childhood mementos, Wallace gets the idea to locate as many childhood friends as he can before his next birthday. Traveling across the United Kingdom, out to Japan and elsewhere (even entertaining a trip to Fiji for one former school buddy), Wallace rediscovers shared memories, creates new tales and fulfills old dreams (including seeing a live Michael Jackson concert). By juxtaposing verbal snapshots of his childhood with his adult life and those of his friends, Wallace presents an entertaining (if somewhat shallow) look at the lives of a reluctantly maturing generation; fans of Gen-X and Gen-Y culture writers like Chuck Klosterman should find their overseas counterparts eminently relatable.
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About the Author

Danny Wallace is the author of The Yes Man, now a film starring Jim Carrey. He has hosted various television shows and starred in BBC documentaries. Currently, he has a weekly radio show on XFM in London, and three of his books have been bestsellers in the UK.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 416 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1 edition (September 2, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316042773
• ISBN-13: 978-0316042772
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.5 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (47 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,255,590 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book will make you laugh out loud..., June 30, 2009

By 

Judy Smith "judylynnsbooks" (jamestown, ky United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Friends Like These: My Worldwide Quest to Find My Best Childhood Friends, Knock on Their Doors, and Ask Them to Come Out and Play (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

This book is hilarious! The author pokes fun of his job...he's a quiz show host. He pokes a lot of fun at himself all throughout the book. When he's nearly 30, he has a midlife crisis. He has only been married for about a year and his very patient wife gives him permission to scout out his old friends from his childhood. For her permission though he must earn some man points by doing things around the house, like fixing faucets, staining furniture, etc. The author is so naive that he doesn't realize he has now been hooked into working to earn these man points the rest of his married life!

His 2 best friends at the moment are out of London, one on a world tour as a musician and the other has moved to a town too far for them to pub around together all summer. His wife has taken a job on a reality show that takes all her time. Hence he is alone a lot and thinking of the old days when he had at least 12 friends in his address book that he would like to look up now. Some he finds fairly easily, some are harder and far away but he persists (since it is more fun that staying home alone and thinking about growing up and not being able to sit on the display cushions).

Every sentence seems to make you laugh out loud. He has a great sense of humor and you just want the book to go on forever. The reason I even started reading it was because I had a childhood friend look me up recently. We hadn't seen each other in 30 years. We had a lot of fun and decided we would definitely attend our next school reunion because we were still looking pretty good compared to some of our old classmates. First we were still alive, 2nd we still had our hair (albeit dyed hair), 3rd we still have our teeth, and 4th we married younger men (versus most of our classmates marrying men they went to school with and whom now look pretty old compared to our men). So, of course, I was wondering if the author's experiences were good or bad.

Read the book...you'll love it!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book had me laughing out loud!, July 25, 2009

By 

PT Cruiser "PT Cruiser" (CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Friends Like These: My Worldwide Quest to Find My Best Childhood Friends, Knock on Their Doors, and Ask Them to Come Out and Play (Hardcover)

(What's this?)

Daniel Wallace writes an entertaining tale about how he discovered his old grade school address book in a box of old memories that his mum sends him and goes to work looking up all of his old friends. It's a simple enough story about tracking all 12 of them down and reconnecting but Daniel's writing style had me laughing to myself as I read through some of his sometimes outrageous adventures as he goes around the world finding every last one of them. (Well almost everyone.) It's all in the details and his writing style was very humorous and appealing.

I thought that I was the only one who could lollygag away a whole afternoon doing things other than the tasks I had set out to do in the morning, but Wallace seems to have refined it to a fine art. His excuses and rationalizations were even better than mine. Needless to say, I found this very enjoyable to read, realizing there are others out there who procrastinate as well as I do.

If you like down-to-earth good humor, I think you'll enjoy this book. It's a story I think most of us can relate to. I'm going to go look up his other books based on having read this one.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Friends Like These, November 1, 2009

By 

grumpydan (Andover, NJ United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Friends Like These: My Worldwide Quest to Find My Best Childhood Friends, Knock on Their Doors, and Ask Them to Come Out and Play (Hardcover)

I wasn't sure what I would expect when I picked up Danny Wallace's "Friends Like These" but I was pleasantly surprised. I also wasn't sure if I could relate since Danny was about to turn 30 when he had this desire to find long lost childhood friends. I'm a 40-something and that gap is larger. Turning 30 and getting a box delivered from his mom with stuff from his childhood (how cool is that?) and finding an old address book starts him on his quest to locate and update that book. He travels to various countries, calls all over the place and has a wife that he should be quite thankful for. Many of us have wondered what happened to that kid you used to play with in kindergarten or the guy you hung out with in high school, but Danny made it his goal to find out. Wallace's writing is humorous and sentimental and made this a fine book to read.