David Sedaris became a star autobiographer on public radio, onstage in New York, and on bestseller lists, mostly on the strength of "SantaLand Diaries," a scathing, hilarious account of his stint as a Christmas elf at Macy's. (It's in two separate collections, both worth owning, Barrel Fever and the Christmas-themed Holidays on Ice.) Sedaris's caustic gift has not deserted him in his fourth book, which mines poignant comedy from his peculiar childhood in North Carolina, his bizarre career path, and his move with his lover to France. Though his anarchic inclination to digress is his glory, Sedaris does have a theme in these reminiscences: the inability of humans to communicate. The title is his rendition in transliterated English of how he and his fellow students of French in Paris mangle the Gallic language. In the essay "Jesus Shaves," he and his classmates from many nations try to convey the concept of Easter to a Moroccan Muslim. "It is a party for the little boy of God," says one. "Then he be die one day on two... morsels of... lumber," says another. Sedaris muses on the disputes between his Protestant mother and his father, a Greek Orthodox guy whose Easter fell on a different day. Other essays explicate his deep kinship with his eccentric mom and absurd alienation from his IBM-exec dad: "To me, the greatest mystery of science continues to be that a man could father six children who shared absolutely none of his interests."

Every glimpse we get of Sedaris's family and acquaintances delivers laughs and insights. He thwarts his North Carolina speech therapist ("for whom the word pen had two syllables") by cleverly avoiding all words with s sounds, which reveal the lisp she sought to correct. His midget guitar teacher, Mister Mancini, is unaware that Sedaris doesn't share his obsession with breasts, and sings "Light My Fire" all wrong--"as if he were a Webelo scout demanding a match." As a remarkably unqualified teacher at the Art Institute of Chicago, Sedaris had his class watch soap operas and assign "guessays" on what would happen in the next day's episode.

It all adds up to the most distinctively skewed autobiography since Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia. The only possible reason not to read this book is if you'd rather hear the author's intrinsically funny speaking voice narrating his story. In that case, get Me Talk Pretty One Day on audio. --Tim Appelo


Amazon.com Audiobook Review
"It's a pretty grim world when I can't even feel superior to a toddler." Welcome to the curious mind of David Sedaris, where dogs outrank children, guitars have breasts, and French toddlers unmask the inadequacies of the American male. Sedaris inhabits this world as a misanthrope chronicling all things petty and small. In Me Talk Pretty One Day Sedaris is as determined as ever to be nobody's hero--he never triumphs, he never conquers--and somehow, with each failure, he inadvertently becomes everybody's favorite underdog. The world's most eloquent malcontent, Sedaris has turned self-deprecation into a celebrated art form--one that is perhaps best experienced in audio. "Go Carolina," his account of "the first battle of my war against the letter s" is particularly poignant. Unable to disguise the lisp that has become his trademark, Sedaris highlights (to hilarious extent) the frustration of reading "childish s-laden texts recounting the adventures of seals or settlers named Sassy or Samuel." Including 23 of the book version's 28 stories, two live performances complete with involuntary laughter, and an uncannily accurate Billie Holiday impersonation, the audio is more than a companion to the text; it stands alone as a performance piece--only without the sock monkeys. (Running time: 5 hours, 4 cassettes) --Daphne Durham


From Publishers Weekly
Sedaris is Garrison Keillor's evil twin: like the Minnesota humorist, Sedaris (Naked) focuses on the icy patches that mar life's sidewalk, though the ice in his work is much more slippery and the falls much more spectacularly funny than in Keillor's. Many of the 27 short essays collected here (which appeared originally in the New Yorker, Esquire and elsewhere) deal with his father, Lou, to whom the book is dedicated. Lou is a micromanager who tries to get his uninterested children to form a jazz combo and, when that fails, insists on boosting David's career as a performance artist by heckling him from the audience. Sedaris suggests that his father's punishment for being overly involved in his kids' artistic lives is David's brother Paul, otherwise known as "The Rooster," a half-literate miscreant whose language is outrageously profane. Sedaris also writes here about the time he spent in France and the difficulty of learning another language. After several extended stays in a little Norman village and in Paris, Sedaris had progressed, he observes, "from speaking like an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly. 'Is thems the thoughts of cows?' I'd ask the butcher, pointing to the calves' brains displayed in the front window." But in English, Sedaris is nothing if not nimble: in one essay he goes from his cat's cremation to his mother's in a way that somehow manages to remain reverent to both of the departed. "Reliable sources" have told Sedaris that he has "tended to exhaust people," and true to form, he will exhaust readers of this new book, tooDwith helpless laughter. 16-city author tour. (June) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
In this collection of 27 fairly short essays, some of which appeared in Esquire and The New Yorker, Sedaris gives the impression of ease and naturalness. Whether he iswriting about overcoming a lisp, learning to play the guitar, trying to master French, or taking an IQ test, whether the locales are North Carolina, New York, or France, the author is both amused and amusing. Call what he writes essays, sketches, minor discourses, whimsicalities, reminiscences, curiosities, vignettes, chronicles, orbits of narrativeDno convenient blanket phrase covers them allDit is a testimony to his talent that he manages to infect the pieces with his geniality. They are all based on the author's own experiences and are all nicely constructed, cheerful, and absolutely not taxing on the brain. This is the sort of book from which you can read a chapter at random before turning out the lights at the end of the day. Recommended.DA.J. Anderson, GSLIS, Simmons Coll., Boston Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Jonathan Reynolds
At his best, he makes you laugh out loud, which indeed may be worth the price of admission.


Wall Street Journal, 6/2/00
"...as hilarious and insightful as his earlier work...."


New York Times, 6/16/00
"...reveal a writer who is capable not only of being funny, but touching, even tender, too."


From AudioFile
David Sedaris's deadpan delivery is the perfect foil to the bizarre in his latest collection of essays, and it's hard to imagine another reader recounting these unlikely anecdotes. Most of the readings were recorded in a Paris studio, although some live performances are interspersed, complete with an appreciative live audience. But their easy responses, sometimes as automatic as a television sitcom's laugh track, are often more distracting than encouraging. Listeners accustomed to Sedaris's stories on Public Radio International's "This American Life" will find these readings, about his family, his early adult life, living in France and attempting to learn the language, a little less exuberant, a little more thoughtful, suffering only, perhaps, from the absence of producer Ira Glass's masterful editorial hand. The tone does seem fitting, though, for the essays slide in and out of fleeting sadness, even as they mock and self-deprecate and aim for irony. Sedaris is at his worst when glib, and his least successful essays are those that rant against modern life: New York restaurants, computers. He is at his best when he's describing the absurdity of childhood, moments so unexpectedly strange and yet recognizable, like Sedaris's boyhood dream of performing a one-man show as Billie Holiday singing commercial jingles (and he provides pitch-perfect renditions), that they prompt gleeful, giddy laughter. J.M.D.-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

FROM THE PUBLISHER

ME TALK PRETTY ONE DAY contains far more than just the funniest collection of autobiographical essays - it quite well registers as a manifesto about language itself. Wherever there's a straight line, you can be sure that Sedaris lurks beneath the text, making it jagged with laughter; and just where the fault lines fall, he sits mischievously perched at the epicenter of it all.

No medium available to mankind is spared his cultural vision; no family member (even the dynasties of family pets) is forgotten in these pages of sardonic memories of Sedaris's numerous incarnations in North Carolina, Chicago, New York, and France.

One essay, punctuated by a conspicuous absence of s's and plurals, introduces the lisping young fifth-grader David "Thedarith," who arms himself with a thesaurus, learns every nonsibilant word in the lexicon, eludes his wily speech therapy teacher, and amazes his countrified North Carolina teachers with his out-of-nowhere and man-size vocabulary.

By an ironic twist of fate, readers find present-day Sedaris in France, where only now, after all these years, he must cling safely to just plural nouns so as to avoid assigning the wrong genders to French objects. (Never mind that ordering items from the grocer becomes rather expensive.) Even the strictest of grammarians won't be able to look at the parts of speech in the same way after exposing themselves to the linguistic phenomena of Sedarisian humor. Just why is a sandwich masculine, and yet, say, a belt is feminine in the French language? As he stealthily tries to decode French, like a cross between a housewife and a shrewddetective, he earns the contempt of his sadistic French teacher and soon even resorts to listening to American books on tape for secret relief.

What David Sedaris has to say about language classes, his brother's gangsta-rap slang, typewriters, computers, audiobooks, movies, and even restaurant menus is sure to unleash upon the world a mad rash of pocket-dictionary-toting nouveau grammarians who bow their heads to a new, inverted word order.

FROM THE CRITICS

New York Times Book Review

...reveal a writer who is capable not only of being funny, but touching, even tender, too..

Los Angeles Times

Original, acid, and wild.

Publishers Weekly

Sedaris is Garrison Keillor's evil twin: like the Minnesota humorist, Sedaris (Naked) focuses on the icy patches that mark life's sidewalk, though the ice in his work is much more slippery and the falls much more spectacularly funny than in Keillor's. Many of the 27 short essays collected here (which appeared originally in the New Yorker, Esquire and elsewhere) deal with his father, Lou, to whom the book is dedicated. Lou is a micromanager who tries to get his uninterested children to form a jazz combo and, when that fails, insists on boosting David's career as a performance artist by heckling him from the audience. Sedaris suggests that his father's punishment for being overly involved in his kids' artistic lives is David's brother Paul, otherwise known as "The Rooster," a half-literate miscreant whose language is outrageously profane. Sedaris also writes here about the time he spent in France and the difficulty of learning another language. After several extended stays in a little Norman village and in Paris, Sedaris had progressed, he observes, "from speaking like an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly. `Is thems the thoughts of cows?' I'd ask the butcher, pointing to the calves' brains displayed in the front window." But in English, Sedaris is nothing if not nimble: in one essay he goes from his cat's cremation to his mother's in a way that somehow manages to remain reverent to both of the departed. "Reliable sources" have told Sedaris that he has "tended to exhaust people," and true to form, he will exhaust readers of this new book, too--with helpless laughter.

Library Journal

Sedaris, noted essayist and NPR radio commentator, is a master at turning his life experiences into witty vignettes that both entertain and comment on the human condition. This latest collection draws on his quirky childhood in North Carolina, where he was subjected to speech therapy sessions to correct his lisp; he countered by conveniently avoiding words that contained "s" sounds. Additional family recollections include his father's desire to create a jazz combo from his offspring--unfortunately, none of them exhibited any talent or desire to follow this career path, but Sedaris uses this opportunity to deliver a stellar Billie Holiday rendition. From there he moves onto a brief stint as a "clearly unqualified" writing teacher in Chicago, where his unorthodox lesson plans included watching soap operas and having the students write "guessays" on what would happen in the next episode. Then it's on to New York and ultimately to France. Sedaris chronicles his attempts to learn French and the confusion experienced by people who don't share the same culture or language. A little sadder at times and overall a little less uproariously funny than in previous works, Sedaris remains the champion of the underdog. Once you listen to him read his own words, it's hard to imagine settling for just the book. Very highly recommended for all libraries.--Gloria Maxwell, Penn Valley Community Coll., Kansas City, MO Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Lisa Schwarzbaum - Entertainment Weekly