Customer Reviews

Poets Ranked by Beard Weight: The Commemorative Edition

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Dear Gilbert Alter-Gilbert,

I would like to express my sincere gratitude for your painstaking research into the life and ideas of Upton Uxbridge Underwood--a man so remarkable, so mysterious, and so mellifluously named. Few things are nobler than rescuing some literary oddity from the abyss of history: it is a great and chivalrous deed deserving of the highest praise--and you have rescued not just one but many such oddities, assembling them with exceeding care into a single convenient volume which must delight and astound the literary historian. This latter, as he leafs through the pages of Poets Ranked by Beard Weight, becomes the equivalent of a Columbus, discovering a continent whose existence he never suspected, venturing into a world previously unknown.

As for me: I am just relieved to at last have a psychological explanation of Underwood's troubling beard-obsession, this thanks to your discovery of Cecil Asquith Feverfew's illuminating biography, a work so long lost it was rumored to be nonexistent and came to be sneeringly referred to, in certain scholarly circles, as "the phantom reference."

What Underwood either refused to consider or failed to recognize is that the bearded face is actually in some manner more obscene than the whiskerless one; and for this reason the beard is not the satisfactory veil-substitute his rashness celebrated. Indeed, the serious and distressing problem of facial nudity is one which the beard does not solve but, on the contrary, compounds. Underwood was granted a revelation of the solution, (the veil), but blind to the significance of what he had seen, he neglected it in favor of a wild fancy which, nurtured in the hothouse of his unbalanced head, soon acquired the dimensions of a pathological disorder. The problem of facial nudity can only be solved through the rigid enforcement of a law requiring, sub poena mortis, that all women go veiled and all men vizored--but it necessitated more pragmatism than Underwood possessed to arrive at this conclusion.

The lifework of Underwood, like that of so many men of genius, was no more than a mad dash in the wrong direction, the tragic pursuit of a chimera mistaken for truth.

Yours Sincerely,

C.S.

This is a really fun read and very different from anything I have ever seen. I laughed so hard my beard fell off!

The beard is a serious matter, whether literal or figurative, and should not be treated with dismissive levity, nor is it in this retrieved corpus of pogonosophic investigations, but rather is held up for scholarly examination and appraisal, as befits previously unremarked phenomena in the bardosphere that have long been staring mankind in the face. Whether rightly or wrongly, I declare without fear of contradiction that in no other volume will you find such a realistic description and delightfully dagguerotype depiction of the Singing Beard of Zanzibar or the Bearded Flying Govindas, or the yogi who ascends by his beard, or the unfortunate group who together form the Gordian beard. Nor, I assert, even though I just trimmed my own manhood in front of a mirror, will you find elsewhere such a precise scientific classification and weighing of beards that combines so convincingly the undeniable hirsuteness of great men and their equally undeniable creativity. Whether or not one is ultimately convinced that such an esoteric and quasi-spiritual connection is valid, the high level of discourse and uncommon profusion of neologisms make this a book to hold to one's hairy chest, to share with chimpanzees and to leave secretly on the coffee table for others. Highly recommended for refined literati, spoiled heirs, meta-historians, mystifiers, obscurantists, crackpots, derelicts, street people, silly sillies and gleaming-eyed pundits in the twilight of normal society.

Mr. Alter's book offers the otherwise bored reader a wry, humorous, romp through the literary world of beards. Fascinating. Get ready to laugh all by yourself!

Erudite, clever, and a whole lot of fun! Laughed so hard, my heart went pitter-pat! This a book I would recommend to my friends.

"By the time readers finish with this eccentric morsel of literary mischief, they will have learned the definitive secret of artistic creativity long by orthodox "science" and the gnosis underlying the profoundest universal philosophic systems although,in the process, they may find they have beards furring their ears, coating their tongues and sprouting between their toes! Once exposed to U.Underwood's forgotten masterpiece, you'll never look at writers, whiskers, or their wearers the same way again! I loved this book!

This book is high humor with a surrealist flair! This uncategorizable, almanac-style compendium of beard wisdom and beard weirdness is not to be missed.
Hilarious theories of beard science and goofy beard cosmology are somehow plausibly articulated. The imaginative illustrations are superb. The text is never high-handed but it leaves the reader with the sense of being adroitly posed between the apocryphal and the actual. Whether it's seen as parody, science or pseudoscience, this one-of-a-kind exegesis is filled with gentle amusements.

A side-splitting romp through rarefied realms of "pogonology" and "barbometrics", the whole package is phantasmagoria of beard mania and a glorious salute to all things whiskered.

The book is a gas! An endlessly entertaining gem.

I was quite a bit into the book before realizing this entire treatise is a spoof. It is delightful and unique. A great, fun read for the thinking reader and a perfect gift for that bearded friend or relative. Unlike anything else out there!

Like me, you are no doubt weary of hearing how Walt Whitman's "Hibernator" beard stacks up against Henry David Thoreau's "Wandering Jim." Despair no longer! Underwood's Pogonometric Index of 0 ("Very very weak") to 60 ("Very very heavy") attributes numerical values to "poetic gravity" and relative "beard weights."

Admittedly, readers with soul patches lurking limply beneath their nether lips may find these magnificent specimens dispiriting. But the rest of us can rejoice!

Thank you fro writting an entertaining book on a subject many men are interested in. Very well written and thought out.