Customer Reviews

How to Survive a Garden Gnome Attack: Defend Yourself When the Lawn Warriors Strike (And They Will)

5 star:		(41)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(13)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I first saw garden gnomes in the early 70's while stationed in Germany. Even the most staid and restrained German garden seemed to have at least one and usually scores of them. Personally I've never had any problems with gnomes. I was taught to deal with different cultures with kindness, curiosity and willingness to learn about and from them. So, it comes as a shock to know that someone - Chuck Sambuchino fears and says there will definitely be an attack.

My motto has always been better safe than sorry, always be prepared, never run out of toilet paper during a blizzard, etc. If you want to be ready then this would be a good book. There is some good advice anyway: secure your chimney caps, keep floors clear, do not set landmines on your lawn.

One word of advice that is not mentioned in this manual, my German landlady told me gnomes that carry red mushrooms with white spots were good luck. I do notice none of Sambuchino's gnomes have these good luck mushrooms, so maybe that is what the trouble is. Who knows, but this would make a nice giggle for anyone owning a garden gnome and you never know when survival manuals might come in handy??

I got an advanced reading copy of this book through the Amazon Vine program. It was just too funny to pass up. I mean I have read Zombie survival guides, werewolf survival guides; but a guide to survive those vicious garden gnomes!? How cool is that.

This book goes through a step by step process on how to defend yourself from garden gnomes. It starts with how to assess if you are at risk and how to determine if garden gnomes have infested your property. Then it goes on to inform the reader on how to protect their house against garden gnome invasion and how to defend yourself should those little ceramic bundles of terror breech your house. There are even a couple short "real-life" stories of gnome attack survivors.

This book was amusing. I laughed a couple times out-loud and snorted a few more times. This would be a good joke gift or something to buy just for the plain strangeness of having it. It is not much more than a joke book though. Luckily it is short and doesn't take itself too seriously, so it has that going for it.

Some parts of the book are truly funny; especially when the book goes through weapon recommendations (flame thrower - not recommended). There are wonderful pictures of gnomes wielding dangerous objects or gnomes sneaking into houses that are cute and humorous...and just a tad creepy. Other parts of the book are kind of repetitive and made my eyes roll.

To be honest I was expecting a bit more from this book. A bit more creativity and a bit more humor. Don't get me wrong there are some funny parts in here, but most of the recommendations are pretty simple and common sense type things. The funniest part was really the concept of this book and some of the pictures in it.

Overall it's pretty funny and might make a good coffee table book. It is incredibly short, but that works in this book's favor...I think any more would have been too much. If you are expecting a light and slightly amusing read you won't be disappointed, just don't expect anything too crazily clever or in depth.

Unless you are buying this for a garden gnome enthusiast, I would have to say that this is a leave it sort of book. I had hoped for something funny, or some dry wit... but when reading this cover to cover - it comes across very bland, like a college creative writing assignment that was churned out over too much coffee and just enough bong hits that the author thought it was funny. In the end the funniest part was the pictures. I didn't laugh at all, though I could see where it was Supposed to be funny... it just wasn't. Perhaps it's part of the "You can't spoof a spoof" problem that happens. It just comes out not funny. I'm sorry, I wanted to like this, but I can't think of anyone that I would honestly recommend this to.

I don't want to go into a lot of detail because I don't want to come across as author bashing, but let me simply say, the idea was good, the pictures were good, but the execution of the idea falls flat.

I like this book because it isn't nearly as boring as the zombie survival guides I've seen. The zombie books try to look like survivalist manuals and they end up looking too serious and being too long to read. This is a short quick book, and it doesn't try for seriousness at all which makes it a lot more fun to read.

Plus, the gnome jokes are a welcome change from the zombie jokes.

Gotta be honest - I grabbed this to be a gag gift for someone, but thought I would read it before "gifting it" and was shockingly disappointed. I expected a more clever book than this one. The author seems to have run across an idea and had a budget to make it a book and maybe he needed some help with making it more funny rather than appearing like his original material wasn't going to make a large enough book, so just keep adding to it until he gets the page count up. I would recommend maybe for a gag gift, but not much else. At least the price is relatively low when buying from Amazon!

I purchased this book as an accompanyment to a gnome as Christmas gift. A truly funny book if you have an offbeat sense of humor. The author does an amazing job of creating this.

This is a very light-hearted and amusing tongue-in-cheek take on the "survival scenario" genre. It is self-effacing and it takes itself even less seriously than many other similar books. The humor in it is quirky, yet all the putative examples of garden gnome attack and your strategy of defending yourself seem plausible in a twisted, zany kind of way. The book is very nicely illustrated with large-size pictures of actual garden gnomes. It is a bit too large to be a pocket book, but not as large as most hardcover books. It makes a cute coffee-table book, waiting area book, or an amusing and inexpensive gift.

The poor gnomes, they get no respect in Dungeons & Dragons, literature or from the Nostalgia Critic. And now we learn why, yes they are preparing to attack. They have invaded gardens world wide, distributed on multiple websites and now control travel companies. Began the lawn wars have!

Overall, this is a good but silly book and a great coffee table book or a good gift to those "Gnomeowners" who don't know better.

Earlier this year I read Max Brooks' The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead. I love zombies and a well written humor book can go a long way so I enjoyed it quite a bit. Unfortunately it also set a standard for other "survival guides".

I had high hopes for How to Survive a Garden Gnome Attack. I grew up visiting my great-grandparents' home where all of their neighbors had rock gardens filled with gnomes in various states of activity and thumbing through the pages of an early edition of Gnomes 30th Anniversary Edition at my nana's house. Any The Sims player knows how much fun it is to kick a lawn gnome. Personally, I'm rather fond of the tacky lawn accessories. So a humorous book poking fun at them seemed like it might be really tongue-in-cheek entertaining.

Sadly, for me, it just fell short. While there was a lot of science and pseudo-science laid out in completely plausible ways in The Zombie Survival Guide none of the scenarios really felt at all "okay that could be real". Yes, I have seen a lawn ornament out of the corner of my eye and thought "did that thing just move a little closer", but I haven't found a missing pair of scissors that I didn't KNOW was somewhere being used by one child to hack the hair off the other. Don't get me wrong, I wanted to like this book. I really did. I just found so much of it felt downright contrived... maybe like this was intended to be a parody of other humor survival guides? It's just trying way too hard which even my husband, whom I read much of it aloud to, said it sounded like it was trying to be a Max Brooks work.

While I, personally, didn't like it this book definitely deserves praise for its originality. I think it might make a great gift for a gardening enthusiast with a good sense of humor or a die-hard The Sims player/fan who would get the joke. Enjoy!

A fabulously creative book, filled with full-color photographs of gnomes caught in acts of mischief. I've heard it said, that you are never truly best friends until you have discussed how you will both survive a gnome attack together. This is a *superb* gift idea for the humorous people in your life!