Another engaging story from Richard Russo, following my previous review of Empire Falls.

This one is filled with humor. It's truly an academic novel, revolving around a 49-year-old professor (mid-life crisis perhaps?) at a lower-tier university, maybe a branch campus, in a bypassed town in Pennsylvania. He belongs to the "sandwich generation" with a wife he loves, who is a school principal, and two daughters. One married daughter lives in town, and they worry about her financial situation and the possibility of her being in an abusive relationship.

His mother also resides in town, and there's talk that his father, who is separated from her, may be moving back in. The main character's father haunts the book like a ghost and doesn't make a personal appearance until the end of the novel. His father was a "celebrity academic," well-published, constantly on the move with visiting professorships, and always accompanied by an attractive female grad student.

First, about the town, Railton, which is described as being "divided by the tracks into two unattractive halves." Church Street has lost all six of its churches. Yet, the faculty stay because "We quickly learned how much more it cost to live in places where people actually wanted to live."

The main character happens to be the English department chair for a year, not because he is especially well-liked or a talented administrator, but simply because it's his turn and the faculty view him as the lowest common denominator they can agree on. He is both anti-union and anti-administration, making enemies on both sides. He treasures his wise-ass reputation (hence the book's title), surviving on cynicism and the disparagement of almost everything and everyone.

Anyone who has been in academia will appreciate the accuracy of what Russo criticizes. The faculty is one of inertia and lost opportunity; some didn't finish their doctorates or their books; a few could have gone elsewhere years ago but didn't; now they are trapped in this small world of mutual bickering and disgust. Here are some examples:

Russo calls it an "atmosphere of distrust, suspicion, and retribution." We all know the quote attributed to Henry Kissinger (although many said it before him) about academic politics being so vicious because the stakes are so trivial. I also think of Stoner in John Williams' novel where his chairman held a grudge against him for twenty years over a trivial matter.

Regarding the endless faculty meetings, he can't remember the last time anyone changed their mind as a result of all the reasoned discourse; in fact, it seems as if the discussions only further entrench everyone in their original position.

All hiring procedures are dominated by political correctness. One young male professor with a ponytail corrects everyone's generic "he" so frequently that they call him "Orshee" behind his back.

The main character loves it when someone says "We're all reasonable people." His response is: "Name ONE!"

The main character published one novel 20 years ago, which his former chairman always referred to as his "collected works."

The faculty union rep tells him: "I know you think we [the union] defend incompetence, promote mediocrity." To which he replies: "I wish you WOULD promote mediocrity…[it's] a reasonable goal for our institution."

When it comes to the latest rumor that financial exigency will lead to the administration cutting tenured faculty, he says: "[Not] unless the faculty are going to be invited to drink Jim Jones Kool-Aid after the donkey basketball game and then buried in a mass grave."

A significant portion of his vitriol is directed at his ever-absent, pompous father.

The problem with the title "Distinguished Visiting Professor" is that "...it's hard to remain distinguished among people who know you."

His father received two attractive offers that led him to take a job at Columbia U; one from the university for a full professorship, and one from a young woman graduate student.

Regarding his father's best-selling book of literary criticism, he remarks that "everyone buys it, displays it, discusses it, without finding the time to actually read it."

A grad student corrects papers in his father's large class, but he grades papers from his tiny seminar himself. "That is, he placed a letter grade on them and for all anyone knew may even have read them."

Other passages I liked include:

"…two people who love each other need not necessarily have the same dreams and aspirations, but they damn well ought to share the same nightmares."

His younger daughter, "the least thoughtful but the most outspoken of his three feminists" (wife and two daughters), says "Menstruation always was the real red badge of courage."

"Rachael [his department secretary] is one of the half-dozen women on campus with whom I have to work at not falling in love."

"His mind was simply voided, as if the thoughts in his head were composed of iron filings and he was standing too close to a magnet."

All in all, it's great humor, a very good read, and an accurate snapshot of the academy. Russo was a faculty member at Southern Illinois and at Colby College, Maine. I'm giving it a 4, not a 5, because the humor, unlike in Empire Falls, sometimes degenerates into farce, almost slapstick. Still, it's highly recommended.

Photo of Richard Russo from wikipedia

Henry Devereaux Jr., the son of a renowned author, was once a famous author himself. Currently, he is the head of the English department at a small Pennsylvania college. He and the entire school are grappling with the issues of downsizing and budget constraints. It all seems rather mundane and unremarkable. However, things take a strange turn when Henry threatens to kill a duck every day until he gets his budget. This is when the surreal and comical adventure begins.

It's an excellent and hilarious read that keeps you engaged from start to finish. There are several quotes that really stand out. For instance, "It's later than it should be, and I'm farther gone than I should be, and the moment when I might have exerted my free will, held up my hands, and shouted 'No Mas!' to the cheering crowd is long past." This quote really captures a sense of regret and missed opportunities.

Another quote that I found interesting is, "It turns out that scrapple is like a lot of food that's conceptually challenging. That is, better than you might expect." It shows how our initial perceptions of things can often be wrong.

The statement "The fifties makes first basemen of us all" is also quite thought-provoking. Overall, I would rate this book an 8/10. I started reading it on 6/3/16 and finished on 6/19/16, which took me 17 days.

Richard Russo is truly one of my all-time favorite authors.

His books are invariably set in forlorn towns, revolving around dilapidated centers, those suffering blue-collar havens that are as podunk as can be, with sell-by-dates seemingly splashed all over them.

The people, towns, souls, and minds have long lost their initial charm and are slowly sliding into obscurity.

The atmosphere is always a touch depressing, and the stories unfold at a slow pace, with satirical social commentary serving as the mainstay of all conversations everywhere.

From the blurb, we learn that Richard Russo performs his characteristic high-wire act between hilarity and heartbreak.

The protagonist, William Henry Devereaux, Jr., is the reluctant chairman of the English department of a poorly funded college in the Pennsylvania rust belt.

His reluctance stems partly from his anarchist nature and partly from the fact that his department is more savagely divided than the Balkans.

In just one week, Devereaux will have his nose mangled by an angry colleague, suspect his wife is having an affair with his dean, wonder if a curvaceous adjunct is trying to seduce him with peach pits, and even threaten to execute a goose on local television.

All this while coming to terms with his philandering father, the failure to live up to his youthful promise, and the ominous failure of certain vital body functions.

In short, "Straight Man" is classic Russo - side-splitting and true-to-life, witty, compassionate, and impossible to put down.

I have never closed a book of his without feeling a sense of satisfaction.

There is a perfect blend of humor and sadness, and the story is a wonderful ode to mediocrity.

Russo knows how to apply malapropisms to the lives of his characters in his realistic fiction, making it all the more engaging.

In the city of Railton, Pennsylvania, forty-nine-year-old William Henry Devereaux, Jr. is a bit of a rogue.

He is considered an ingrate by Teddy Barnes, insane, unprincipled, and too idealistic by Dickie Pope, "Judas Peckerwood" by Billy Quigley, a "Beatnick" by Lou, a "Clever man" by his mother, and absentminded by the three feminists in his life - his wife Lily and his two daughters.

"A vague pain in the collective ass" - that's how the laissez-faire William Henry Devereaux, Jr. himself sums it up.

Yet, this doesn't stop the solipsistic professor from feeling like his dog, Occam - the fastest, the smartest, the bravest, especially in his dreams.

World-weary and always swimming upstream, he is difficult to move into action, except when faced with a urinary track problem.

His doctor diagnoses it as some sort of bladder hysteria.

He has all his bickering, gossiping colleagues in the English department irritated by his sardonic wit.

They scramble for positions, pursue their own agendas, backbite for recognition, fight petty battles, and slave away to their own superior ambitions, despite having little talent to support them.

They have been working together for twenty years and have basically overstayed their welcome in each other's lives.

This is a gentle character-based comedy about life in academe, filled with hilarious moments and sadness subtly interwoven in the characters' backstories.

But there is also "Animal rights thugs guarding the pond, sexual harassment lunches, the detoxing of Modern Languages. Something’s happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear."

Richard Russo should be read with an open mind.

The protagonist, Henry Devereaux, reminds me so much of Sully in his other books, and I absolutely love that kind curmudgeon!

Expect the unexpected and make the time to read his works. It's truly worth it.

3.5 stars.

This book had certain parts that I found truly interesting. There were some scenes that were extremely funny, making me burst out laughing. There were also moments that were filled with compassion, touching my heart. However, there were a few sections where I simply tuned out.

Russo's humor is of a wry and masculine nature. He often makes jokes at the expense of others. Students, females, academic colleagues, and even academia as a whole are targeted by his sharp wit. But at the same time, he also has a self-deprecating side.

I truly adore Russo as an author. However, I will probably always compare all of his works to "Empire Falls". That book set a very high standard, and it's a tough act to follow in my opinion.

Overall, this book had its highs and lows, but it still managed to keep my attention for the most part.

Twenty or thirty years ago, I was an avid reader of everything Russo penned. I simply couldn't get enough of his works.

Recently, I have been revisiting some of his novels, and to my surprise, I find myself having some reservations about the characters' world views. Of course, we can learn a great deal from characters with diverse perspectives, and I don't intend to pose the misguided "likability" question. However, I did feel that there was perhaps a bit too much of an assumption that the reader would identify with certain types of smug behavior and attitudes.

Most likely, I'm holding him to an unfair standard. There is no doubt that Russo is a master of the written word. He crafts beautiful sentences and vividly imagines communities in a deeply convincing manner, both the physical environment and the prevailing attitudes within them. His writing has the power to make you laugh out loud. "Nobody's Fool" was a book that I particularly adored. I also recall being truly impressed by his short story collection, "The Whore's Child," and I may revisit that one soon.

I picked up this particular novel because my family started watching "Lucky Hank," which is based on it. And I noticed that so many aspects didn't quite match my memory. This is partly because we now live in a very different world than when "Straight Man" was first published, but there were other changes as well. Due to the spoiler factor, I won't say anything more.

William Henry “Hank” Devereaux is the temporary chair of the humanities department at a not-so-great community college in Railton, PA, which is facing budget issues. Hank is quite a character, a bit of a scamp really, who struggles to take things seriously. As a result, this book is often uproariously funny, taking the reader on a wild romp through the senseless political infighting within academia, all while Hank is grappling with a midlife crisis.

He questions himself, wondering if he should fully embrace his current situation among his friends and colleagues or respectfully leave and seek out where he truly belongs. Others seem to come to terms with who they are and what they've become, but Hank can't seem to do the same. He feels like a contortionist, cramped up in the rafters, all to maintain the costly illusion that he's not like his father. He ponders if this pretense is worth the effort, and yet, he offers his father's own words in response: "You bet your ass."

This sums up the essence of Hank, and since this character is dear to my heart, I thoroughly enjoyed his story, even though it sometimes wandered and got a bit sidetracked by the details of academic infighting.

This book should be placed on the shelf beside the equally hilarious or perhaps even funnier, shorter, and more tightly written Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher. Both books are the perfect remedy when you're in need of a good laugh.

The Richard Russo books I’ve read have all been set in decaying New York mill towns. However, Straight Man takes a different turn as it is set in a decaying Pennsylvania railroad town.

In fact, it stands out from his other works quite significantly as it belongs to a different genre - it's a campus comedy, a genre typically associated with writers like David Lodge. Russo, as expected, does an excellent job with it.

William Henry Devereaux is a creative writing professor at a small state college. His colleagues are mostly mediocre, and so are his students. Devereaux is the temporary chair of the English Department while they search for a permanent head, and the university administration is hinting at layoffs. He finds himself caught between the administrators and the faculty, loved by neither side and assumed by each to be favoring the other.

Given his basic lack of leadership ability and temperament, this position is extremely uncomfortable for him. His body reacts in strange ways - he can't seem to urinate, he experiences near-blackouts, and his nose has been brutally ripped open like in Chinatown by an angry colleague (a bizarre accident as she only meant to hit him in the face with a spiral-bound notebook).

All of Russo's books start slowly and then build. Straight Man, being a comedy, builds more quickly and reaches a somewhat manic pace. This type of book depends on a rapid succession of events and tends to end abruptly. Russo doesn't deviate from this time-honored approach, and as a result, by the end, I was reading faster and faster, unable to put it down. It's a very funny book indeed.

That was a great pleasure. Funny, with depth, but also with the courage to be cheeky, philosophical, but also silly. Certainly not the last book that I will have read by Richard Russo.

This book truly stands out. It has a unique charm that combines various elements in a wonderful way. The humor is both witty and engaging, making it a joy to read. At the same time, the depth of the themes explored adds an extra layer of substance. The author's ability to be both philosophical and a bit silly creates a balance that keeps the reader entertained and思考ing.

I can't wait to explore more of Richard Russo's works. His writing style is captivating, and each book seems to offer something new and exciting. I'm sure that there are many more great reads in store for me from this talented author.

I loved this so much <3 Russo is truly hilarious in a plethora of ways.

The plot masterfully combines wry, observational humor with some broader, farcical elements, resulting in a great effect.

The majority of the characters are as shabby and sad as William's dysfunctional, downscale English department. However, this doesn't make them any less enjoyable to read about.

Russo makes them extremely vivid and believable, which helps to ground some of the more absurd plot shenanigans.

I could happily read about their petty squabbles and backbiting all day long.

This isn't as profound as the other Russo book I've read, Bridge of Sighs, but it's pure entertainment.

On a sidenote, not related to the quality of the book, it's a bit disheartening to see how much worse the academic job market has become since this was published in 1997.

Reading about tenured professors without PhDs and publications, even in a small, unremarkable school, is truly astonishing from my 2018 perspective.

There are so many intelligent, talented individuals out there who would do anything to "fail" in the way the protagonist of this book has.

Life's a duck!

or a goose?

Whatever!

Sometimes you just have to grab it by the throat and give it a good shake if you want to make sense of it.

As I tell my students, all good stories begin with character, and Teddy's rendering of the events fails entirely to render what it felt like to be William Henry Devereaux, Jr., as the events were taking place.

Richard Russo strikes [gold] again!

I definitely managed to get into the mind of Hank, an English teacher at a small university in Railton, Pennsylvania, as he goes through a midlife crisis. (... promotion in an institution like West Central Pennsylvania University was a little bit like being proclaimed the winner of a shit-eating contest.) Hank's story is similar in many ways to those of other Russo protagonists that had won me over with their messy, humorous, heart-wrenching attempts to make sense of life, love, family, friends, aging, failure and everything in between.

Odd details and unexpected points of view are the stuff of which vivid stories are made.

What makes William Henry Devereaux, Jr special in this typical Russo panoply of underdogs living in decrepit blue-collar towns, is his academic background. As a teacher of creative writing, Hank is allowed to include in his narrative and share with the reader a few of his writer's tricks, a glimpse at the way he makes storytelling an art form.

Teddy is a fellow English teacher, an earnest fellow, more than a little in love with Hank's wife, but his major failure is a lack of sophistication in his narrative presentation. Hank, with a published novel under his belt, although one written more than two decades previously, is ever ready to correct him.

I don't see how you could 'not' kid about love and still claim to have a sense of humor.

Here I think is one key to unlock any of the Richard Russo novels: despair is always waiting right around the corner, ready to wreck our lives, and the only way to deal with it is to laugh in its face. Hank deliberately chooses the role of buffoon as he tries to steer his deeply divided English department through a perfect storm of budget cuts, staff cuts and failed dreams. Like the decrepit car he is driving, Hank feels his life is sliding backward on an icy slope instead of climbing up to his house on a hill.

My spiritual position is the outfield. True, I might be a good target for shortstops to throw at, but I'm most myself ranging in the outfield after fly balls.

Russo is a master of the complex metaphor, always finding an odd, surprising, funny angle to illustrate his hero's struggle. It could be an old car, a baseball game, a poor goose on the campus pond, a bloody nose from an outraged poet. Hank seems to do a lot of leg pulling and clowning, especially in the beginning of the novel, but you can always feel the underlying despair at reaching fifty years of age and asking yourself what had you done with your life, with your youthful aspirations.

In English departments the most serious competition is for the role of straight man.

Humor is one way to deal with this despair, and Hank has turned his goofing into an art form, but there comes a time when you can no longer dodge the incoming balls (I've slipped into baseball lingo myself, and I don't even know the rules of the game). So what do you do when the going gets tough? Flee from town or turn back and fight? Play the clown or the straight man?

We might manage to be happy, even here, if the faces around us were new, but we have to look at each other every day, and this reminds us of ourselves and all the opportunities we found compelling reasons not to seize.

The other tool Hank has in his arsenal is William of Occam, a reminder that we need to focus on what is the most important thing in our life, and eliminate the distractions, the false paths, the unnecessary complications. All fine and dandy in theory, but not so easy to apply when it comes to a human heart.

Like it happened with all my previous novels by Richard Russo, writing a review is a hard task because there are so many things that relate directly to my personal experiences, so many moments of laughter in the face of adversity or of tenderness from the most unexpected directions. I feel like I would need to write ten reviews instead of one. It's not only about Hank. Every little side character in the story deserves at least a mention, to have his or her own struggle remembered – estranged parents, daughters leaving the family home, colleagues facing their own disillusions, neighbours who are more than comic relief.

Richard Russo writes variations of the same novel over and over again, but this novel is all encompassing of our modern life, of our economic and personal failures, of our endurance and of our hopes for the future.

Other people make their peace with who they are, what they've become. Why can't I?

Peace is usually to be found in the aftermath of a war. In this present novel, the war between the factions of the Railton University English Department ends in a compromise between generations, between the firebrands we were in our early years and the limitations of our older selves.

Growing old, as someone once remarked, is not for sissies, but age is not the issue so much as diminishment.

I have mentioned humor and Occam's razor as tools to deal with the hard knocks from life. The third one for Hank, and for us, is literature / art. Hank's parents were both bookworms, so absorbed in their fictional worlds and in their academic careers, that they became distant and distracted from their own son. Hank's revenge was to become a writer instead of a reader and critic of novels, probably also a way to impress his parents and finally get noticed. But when he falls in love it is with another English teacher. His daughters may be shunning an academic career: My daughter has never found a moment's comfort in a book, and this provokes in me a complex reaction.. Julie swears she will not become a 'fool of books', but is this the reaction of a rebellious teenager or a way to get noticed. There are patterns and themes everywhere, but if I were to pick only one it is the story of Rachel, the department secretary with literary aspirations. It's maybe the truest path to redemption for Hank. He may not write another novel, but he can guide the next novelist along.

That's about all I have to teach her, since the requisite heart, voice, vision, and sense of narrative are already there, learned intuitively.

also, on the subject of being accepted for publication for the first time:

She will consider the possibility that the leaky vessel of her talent may be seaworthy after all. Instead of being dictated to by the waves of doubt that threaten to swamp all navigators, she'll turn bravely into the wind. The moment she does is the moment I envy.

I never wrote or published anything myself, but if I can steer somebody else towards a good read, I believe I can be at peace with myself and with my love for the written word. Thanks, Richard Russo.

University life has long been a captivating and irresistible subject for some of the most hilarious satire in modern literature.

After a brief stint of teaching at Sarah Lawrence College, Mary McCarthy set an extremely high standard with "The Groves of Academe" (1952), her scathing satire of a liberal college for women. Just two years ago, Jane Smiley, who teaches at Iowa State, launched a fierce attack on a Midwestern university in "Moo: A Novel" (Random House), a bestseller that introduced dozens of strange and uproariously funny characters.

The narrator of the latest addition to this genre, "Straight Man" by Richard Russo, remarks with a touch of wryness that "virtually everybody in the English department has a half-written novel stashed away in a desk drawer. Sad little vessels all. Like Scruffy the Tugboat, lost and scared on the open sea. All beautifully written, all with the same artistic goal - to display a superior sensibility."

Fortunately, Russo's fully written novel is neither sad nor overly wrought. He showcases an abundance of elegance and impeccable timing. He demonstrates that it is possible to laugh at and with someone simultaneously.

The novel commences at the height of a budget crisis at West Central Pennsylvania University, which poses a particularly severe threat to the English department. Forced into the center of this debate is the reluctant interim chair, William Henry Devereaux Jr., who proudly confesses that his "lack of administrative skill is legendary."

In a moment of ill-judged fury, he preempts the televised dedication of a new Technical Careers Center by threatening to kill one of the campus geese every day until a budget lands on his desk.

With outrageous yet deadpan retorts that endear him to us but enrage his colleagues, Devereaux endeavors to endure and even find enjoyment in the contentious characters who loathe their jobs at this third-rate university but, like the campus geese, are too lazy to take flight.

The author, who taught at Colby College, has assembled the typical cast of temperamental faculty and incompetent administrators that enthusiasts of comic university novels will readily recognize. There's an earnest young professor so committed to gender-neutral language that Hank refers to him as "Orshe"; a modern theorist who completely rejects literature and teaches solely from videotapes of television sitcoms; a poet who communicates almost entirely by lodging grievances against her colleagues. Here are the frustrated high school teachers and faux scholars who never intended to stay for more than a year or two but became fatally comfortable when the university was expanding and now find themselves trapped by their lack of marketability.

Surrounded by accusations of betrayal in a rumor-ridden department on the verge of losing 20 percent of its faculty, Devereaux harbors a deep, redeeming affection for his colleagues as he goads them into open hostility with his straight man routine.

Even the unpublished poet who injures his nose with her spiral binder receives nothing but his benign understanding and ironic asides. "People have only a finite amount of meanness in them," Devereaux observes, "and most times they exhaust it quickly." Although the novel is unremittingly funny, it is Hank's profound appreciation for his colleagues' humanity that elevates it above so many other academic satires.

Life outside the hallowed walls of the university is no more stable for Hank than in his beleaguered department. While he frets that his long-suffering wife may be having an affair with the dean, he attempts not to offer advice to his aliterate daughter as her marriage disintegrates. Running beneath this chaotic week is Hank's dread of his brilliant father's return. This repressed yet constant concern about inheriting his errant father's talent, selfishness, and illness draws the novel into the psychological depth that validates the author's extraordinary talent for character portrayal.

Russo crafts repartee that sparkles with wit but never descends into artifice. Although his characters are often grappling with deep-seated sadness, the power of his wit is sufficient to convince us that such pain and sadness are not inevitable or final.

The feminist poet with the lethal binder ultimately admits, "You may not believe me, but I've always liked you, Hank. You're like a character in a good book. Almost real, you know?"

She hits the nail - and him - right on the head.

http://www.csmonitor.com/1997/1006/10...

I laughed out loud—a lot—and a few times I laughed so hard I cried.

This is a book that is most likely to appeal to academics, especially those in English departments. However, anyone who has ever worked at a college or university where budget cuts were threatened, which means pretty much any college or university anywhere, will appreciate the humor of this novel’s situations. Those who haven’t might not.

The narrator protagonist, William Henry Devereaux, Jr. (“Hank”), is the chair of a thoroughly dysfunctional English department (is there another kind?) at a mediocre state school in Pennsylvania. A very large building devoted to “technical careers” is under construction, while every other campus department is supposed to cull 20% of its faculty. When Hank’s beloved wife Lily leaves town for a few days for a job interview, she cautions him to try to stay out of either jail or the hospital. Hank, who teaches creative writing, would identify that warning as a classic gun on the wall moment.

Much of the book’s humor comes from the fact that Hank is a total smart ass. The blurb describes him as “a born anarchist” who refuses to take seriously the challenges of his position, thus annoying pretty much everyone in his life. In one of my favorite moments, Hank threatens to kill a goose a day until his department has a budget. I guess you had to be there.

In addition to the mordant humor about the realities of liberal arts budgets, I also chuckled over the observations about students and student writing. For example, “I set the brandy down on a remedial freshman composition entitled ‘My Neighborhood,’ a shrewd little piece of sociology that begins, ‘The reason my neighborhood is unique is because the people are so friendly,’ an observation it shares with over half the others in the stack, which, taken together, have the amusing effect of invalidating each other.” Been there, read that. Or an abysmally bad teacher who reminds me of a one-time colleague: “By requesting early morning and late afternoon classes, by enforcing a strict attendance policy, and by devoting the first three weeks of class to differentiating between restrictive and nonrestrictive noun clauses, Finny halves his teaching load each term. Students start dropping out by the second week of classes, and by the end of the term he has a seminar of seven or eight where once there were the regulation twenty-three.”

Some of the 1-star Goodreads reviews express distaste for Hank as a “smug asshole who needs to grow the fuck up,” a “useless prick,” “petty, mean-spirited, and pathetic,” “exasperating,” and “deeply unlikeable.” Yes, all that is true. Even Lily, who knows him better than he knows himself, tells him, “You can be *such* a jerk.” In other words, that is a lot of the point. Anyone who demands a likeable, fully admirable protagonist shouldn’t bother with the book. While in real life, I wouldn’t want to have Hank as a husband, professor, neighbor, or probably department chair (except that it would be constantly amusing), I thoroughly enjoyed reading about him.

Although I derived great pleasure from reading this book, it does, like Hank, lack Arnoldian “high seriousness.” That does not make it a bad book, but I would have liked a bit more “high seriousness” to award the book the 5 stars I would give to a book that represents the best that has been known and thought in the world. Still, for a lighter read in between books of higher seriousness, I certainly do recommend this book.