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Outrages of Everyday Life
Regan Books
October 2006
On Sale: October 3, 2006
288 pages
ISBN: 0060819081
EAN: 9780060819088
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Like Kofi Annan, Larry Miller is one of the most
irresistible comic personalities working today. Known for
years as an actor, writer, comedian, and sexual pioneer,
he's gained a new following as a cultural commentator and
frequent guest on political shows. Now, in Spoiled Rotten
America, he fixes his gaze on what's funny about our daily
lives-;which includes, roughly speaking, everything. From
middle-aged drinking ("When you're in your twenties, you can
drink all night and bungee-jump off a bridge the next day.
If I drank all night, I'd want to go off that bridge without
the cord") to the excesses of our eating habits ("This is
why the world hates us: the size of the portions we order.
Thank God they've never shown us eating on Al Jazeera-;that
would be the end of it"), Miller finds the silver lining of
absurdity within every black cloud. Ultimately,
though, Spoiled Rotten America is more than just the
average yukfest. It's an insightful, and surprisingly
heartfelt, plea for us to notice what's best and worst about
ourselves. "The American pendulum only swings to extremes,"
he writes. "The news is on all day, but we know less and
less; there's music in every mall, but we don't hear it;
everyone has a phone but nothing to say. The chubbiest of us
have the strictest diets, because we can't learn to modulate
and moderate. It's all or nothing. One bite of a cookie, and
suddenly you're on a plane to Vegas with a hooker. To the
Cranky Nitpickers of America-;a club I'd join in a second if
I weren't already its president-;it's long been understood
that the world is going to Hell in a handbasket.
"What better time for a collection of seventeen comic
essays?" What better time indeed.
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