The Baby Train and Other Lusty Urban Legends [Paperback]

Jan Harold Brunvand (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 17, 1994

America's premier folk detective is back on the case, sniffing out those zany but dubious stories that "really happened" to a friend of your sister's boyfriend's accountant's mechanic.

Jan Harold Brunvand—''Mr. Urban Legend" [Smithsonian]—tracks the most fabulous tales making today's cocktail-party circuit and shows why those stories that sound too good to be true probably are too good to be true.

The eponymous episode—"The Baby Train"—sheds light on certain predawn activities that have linked unusually high birth rates to the whim of train schedule makers. Other stories offer a revealing peek behind the story of "The Exploding Bra," expose the embarrassing source of "The Hairdresser's Error," resurrect a "Failed Suicide" Buster Keaton would have died for, and show why adults are better off not bringing their comic book fantasies out of the closet. From "Superhero Hijinx" to "The Shocking Videotape" to "The Accidental Cannibal," The Baby Train uncovers the mysteries behind some of the bawdiest, goriest, funniest, most pyrotechnic urban legends yet.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Brunvand, an English professor at the University of Utah and author of four previous collections of modern folklore, including The Vanishing Hitchhiker , here offers another engaging compilation. He groups these resonant anecdotes, found in slightly modified versions around the world, into such sections as Sex and Scandal, and On-the-Job. In the former, the title piece tells of a train whose early morning whistle wakens couples in bed and leads to pregnancies. From the section titled Fun and Games, "Built in a Day" refers to taxi drivers' descriptions, tendered most often to tiresome American tourists, of such local monuments as the cathedral in Milan's Piazza di Duomo. Expanded from Brunvand's syndicated newspaper column, these accounts, for the most part, are attributed to the notorious FOAF--a "friend of a friend." Illustrations not seen by PW .
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Folklorist Brunvand has compiled another collection of stories originally published in his nationally syndicated column, "Urban Legends." The author gives a lively analysis of these contemporary folk tales, also including accounts and variations received from his readers. Although the narratives are reported as true, they were most often told by an unnamed "friend of a friend" and involved outrageous antics or unbelievable coincidences. The study reveals recurrent motifs and concludes with "A Type-Index of Urban Legends" classifying the tales from all five of Brunvand's books. Not as informative as The Vanishing Hitchhiker ( LJ 10/15/81), but equally entertaining.
- Eloise R. Hitchcock, Tennessee Technological Univ. Lib., Cookeville
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (October 17, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393312089
• ISBN-13: 978-0393312089
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,961,038 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very fun collection of legends, February 12, 2001

By 

Benjamin Denes (Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Baby Train and Other Lusty Urban Legends (Paperback)

I've always been one of those people who love to hear a good, ironic story - my alltime favourite being the babysitter who gets the crank calls - and was pleased to find this enjoyable series of books. This was my first one, and I really enjoyed it.

The review Amazon posted is true in a sense, but there are so many stories out there that I doubt that Jan will ever "rewrite the same book" over and over. Awesome book!

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb!, July 2, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Baby Train and Other Lusty Urban Legends (Paperback)

Professor Brunvand provides an informative and entertaining account of urban legends (or urban myths). Professor Brunvand is so revered that he was recently referred to in an episode of "Millenium" which dealt with urban myths.

I recommend that readers read his other books about urban legends.

3.0 out of 5 stars Great Great Grandson of Original Urban Legends Book, June 27, 2011

By 

John M. Ford "johnDC" (near DC, MD USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Baby Train and Other Lusty Urban Legends (Paperback)

Jan Harold Brunvand wrote this book as the fifth installment in his urban legend series that begins with The Vanishing Hitchhiker. It tells us a little bit about the common forms of these stories and the mental processes that shape them. Then it does its primary job of telling interesting, mostly untrue stories that happened to "a friend of a friend."

The book's title story is about an unusually high birth rate in a small western town. It was supposedly caused by a train which regularly blew its whistle going through the town each morning at 4 AM, waking many of the residents. Since it was too early to get up and too late to go back to sleep... the town had a higher than usual birth rate. In some versions of the story, the railroad changes the train schedule to ease the population explosion. In others, some families are immune because of deafness, shift work, or other factors.

Other interesting stories are organized into categories of horror, crime, work, fun and games, foreign relations, animal legends, and academic legends. The absence of a chapter of urban legends with sexual themes sets this book apart from previous volumes. Perhaps that well has run dry.

A few favorites:

- A family assumes the tin of unlabeled brown powder mailed to them by relatives is coffee. Too late they learn it was their cremated grandmother.
- A flight attendant is unobtrusively wearing an inflatable bra under her uniform. Suddenly, the airplane cabin depressurizes...
- A thrifty pet owner splints his budgie's leg with wooden matches to save a trip to the vet. The bird scratches the newspapers in its cage with the as-yet unlit match.
- Before computers, university students were assigned to classes by clerks. One year they juggled the freshman English class assignments to fill one section with students whose last name was an animal name (Bird, Fox, Deere, etc.).


The stories are entertaining and the author's observations are illuminating. For a more serious discussion of folklore, see the most recent version of Brunvand's text, The Study of American Folklore: An Introduction.