Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit?
The Encyclopedia of Modern Life
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
If you hate: loft living; bar-clubs; Tony Blair; chick lit; global warming sceptics; Keane; loyalty cards; IKEA; Kabbalah; bling and Richard Curtis...
... then you need IS IT JUST ME OR IS EVERYTHING SHIT? - an encylopedic attack on modern culture and the standard reference work for everyone who believes everything is shit. Which it is.
This book is for the large percentage of the population interested in saying NO to the phoney ideas, cretinous people, useless products and doublespeak that increasingly dominate our lives. This book is designed for everyone who thinks they may have mislaid their soul in a Coffee Republic. Never before has there been a book so completely full of shit.
This very funny, well-informed, belligerent rant of a book adds up to an excoriating broadside against consumer capitalism that the authors hope will sell loads of copies.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lowe and McArthur filled two books for the U.K. market with cynically profane critiques of the ephemera of contemporary culture; this edition features material from those volumes combined with new entries from Hay, a former writer for The Daily Show. Nonetheless, a strong British streak running runs throughout, particularly when it comes to vocabulary such as "posh jackasses" and "cobblers to your iPod playlist." The targets are for the most part predictable celebrities, rich people, George W. Bush, etc. How much space a topic rates is sometimes mystifying: the entries on Chinese Communist Party and the hidden teachings of Scientology go on for several pages, yet the Blackberry rates only a single line. There's even an entry on people in bear costumes on motorbikes advertising stuff which, they say, "happens more than you might imagine." It's all amusing enough in small doses, but not quite as clever as, say, the Onion.
