This Book Will Save Your Life

Product Information

With dark humor and sharp dialogue, Homes plumbs the depths of everyday American anxieties through stories about unexpected situations.”— Time This is the dicey part," the stunt director says over the walkie-talkie. "We have to land him gently. The second the horse has all four legs on the ground he's going to want to bolt. You have to get the cable off so he doesn't drag us. You have to get the cable." As startling and riveting as her fiction . . . a lacerating memoir in which the formerly powerless child triumphs with the help of a mighty pen.”– San Francisco Chronicle

Okay, do you ever get that feeling? That sense of… oh, I can’t find the right words, I can only describe it as a warm fuzzy. It’s this sense of childish hope, that people ARE good---and not good like someone letting you cut in line at the grocery store because you have 2 items to their 20 or someone following the correct etiquette of ‘merging into traffic’, but have you experienced true goodness? I have. I know I have. I’ve remembered coming home and being so excited to retell the story of something that renewed my faith in mankind. I remember grinning, not just smiling or smirking but full on ear-to-ear, pearly whites, make your face hurt, grinning.It is also important to me to write books that are funny—darkly funny. I find daily life to be surrealistic. The split between what we’re able to accomplish in mechanical terms combined with human behavior and a kind of flawed social structure—e.g., an automated voice versus a “live” person, and so on—all tells me a lot about who we (Americans) are as people and who we are becoming. And despite being perpetually hopeful about what we are each capable of, I remain often stunned by what I see.

Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. An absolute masterpiece . . . Homes writes ecstatically, and like no one else.”– The Philadelphia Inquirer He gives away new cars, pays for his maid's hip replacement, sends the weary housewife to a spa. "This is the person he wants to be," Homes writes. "He wants to be able to do this for others, strangers, it doesn't matter who, and he wants to be able to do it for himself." His Good Samaritan impulse also inspires a series of impromptu rescue operations: A horse is trapped in a sinkhole, a hostage is trapped in a trunk, a woman is trapped in a bad marriage. These episodes are mildly amusing (for 15 minutes, he's a national celebrity, a punch line on Letterman), but because Richard is so imperturbable and his success so firmly guaranteed, the scenes never develop any real suspense.

By the end, Richard is very different from the anal retentive who worried that if he admitted himself to hospital he would miss his personal training appointment. And he is all the better for it. The experience saves his life. Whether it will save yours is debatable, but it shifts your perspective on life and in the most darkly entertaining way. Richard goes outside, stands with his feet on the edge of the hole—it is definitely deeper than it was two hours ago. The horse looks up. burada yazarın dalga geçtiği şey amerikalıların kendileri dışında her şeyde çözüm aramaları. beslenme takıklıkları bizde yeni moda olanlara çok benziyor. sözde sessizlik kampına egolardan arınmaya gidiyorlar minder yerlerini bile paylaşamıyorlar, öteki olmak hakkında hiçbir fikirleri yok, yoksulları anlamıyorlar. Rich in humanity and humor . . . Homes combines an unfussy candor with a deliciously droll, quirky wit. . . . Her energy and urgency become infectious.”– USA Today