James Lileks

I love Lileks books as he is about the most sarcastic and witty author I know of. This book gathers parental advice from about 1915 on up to the early 60's and mercilessly makes fun of it. As Lileks himself says in the introduction, "This book is so unfair...for the most part they (the experts) got it right...But when they were wrong, they were brilliantly wrong. Incandescently wrong." Probably my favorite in the book is an old ad, maybe from the 40's, featuring an enraged father wielding a show more hairbrush as he chases a terrified little boy down the front porch. The ad copy has the boy saying," If he spanks me, I'm gonna run away from home!" The ad was for a children's laxative product! Maybe the parent was meant to show the picture to their own child and scare the crap out of them. show less

This book is gold.

As a refugee of the 70's myself, complete with lingering nervous ticks in the presence of goldenrod kitchen appliances, geometric wallpaper and shag rugs, I can't recommend this book highly enough. As the author says, it's important to learn from history so we don't repeat it.

The spreads are, for the most part, so god-awful you just have to laugh. If they're too painful to laugh at, the author's writing will numb the pain: he holds nothing back and just about all his show more commentary had me howling out loud.

Buy or borrow this book - even if you didn't live through the 70's, it's a cautionary tale about what happens when you try too hard to be cool and have more money than sense. If nothing else, you'll laugh.


[PopSugar 2015 Challenge: A Funny Book] show less

Funny, in a truly awful way. I remember some of these design elements in the house where I grew up, although I don't think my mother went overboard quite to this extent. (I do remember her painting the walls fo the staircase red, and adding a big white arrow pointing down. But that was the extent of it.) Author James Lileks has wry, witty manner of describing the Era of Excess.

All too familiar! In 1978 I moved into a house that had been decorated according to the aesthetic which Lilek hilariously demolishes in this book. It had metallic greeny-silver wallpaper - with flocking! -, huge orange-and-brown geometric wallpaper (different patterns for different rooms) and a tiny room wallpapered past the point of claustrophobia with a metallic-shocking-pink-fire-engine-red pattern. It took many hours to scrape it all off the walls. The scary thing is, after reading this show more book, it suddenly occurs to me that they may have done all that right before selling to make the house more attractive. The scarier thing is that earlier in the decade I probably admired some of this stuff, although in the case of seventies design it was difficult to distinguish aesthetic attraction from horrified fascination. Lilek's wicked comments literally are laugh-out-loud funny, so be warned before trying to read the book in public. show less