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Title: Tricky Business by Dave Barry ISBN: 0399149244 Publisher: Putnam Pub Group Pub. Date: 30 September, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.64
Rating: 3
Summary: Enjoy It For What It Is
Comment: If you want to read a fun story that is an easy read and will make you laugh, pick up this book and enjoy yourself. If you are looking for serious literature with important insights on the human condition and the meaning of life, I suggest you look elsewhere.
This funny story set on a gambling boat sailing in a hurricane is quite witty and creative. Along the way Barry manages to skewer local news broadcasters, organized crime, backsliding professional musicians, senior citizens, and the primal urge to gamble.
The story itself which involves underworld drug dealing and profit skimming along with an action plot isn't all that important. It's merely there to give Barry an opportunity to make funny observations and create memorable characters.
The bottom line is that it's funny but I'm not sure I would recommend paying the full hardcover price for it. [...]
Rating: 5
Summary: An Almost Laugh Out Loud South Florida Caper
Comment: Welcome Dave Barry's second and most enjoyable novel. This time around, he moves closer into Carl Hiaasen's domain of South Florida social commentary. The book opens with the approach of (soon to be) Hurricane Hector which is destined to cross paths with The Extravaganza Of The Seas (a three-mile limit gambling cruise ship) and the various characters fated to be on board her at the time.
Included in this mismatched character conglomeration are Fay (a single mom and cocktail waitress), Wally (member of the ship's semi-untalented band Johnny and the Contusions), Arnie and Phil (a couple of gambling addicts from a senior citizens home) and tons of assorted hulks, brutes, cons and other sordid, devious or just plain kooky characters. With a group like this, anything can and does happen. Especially once the storm starts mixing things up.
Though I believe I enjoy his first novel BIG TROUBLE a bit more, Barry is in pretty good form with TRICKY BUSINESS and he provides a plot and characters that will take you from mildly to wildly funny. I enjoyed it, and if you enjoy a good laugh with a good book you will, too. It earned my **** rating.
Rating: 2
Summary: Misfires with gratuitous violence and sex
Comment: "Tricky Business" is the story of a rundown cruise ship that makes nightly runs three miles offshore so people can gamble away their money. Of course, being a Dave Barry book, it includes a large assortment of oddball characters, including a pothead guitarist, a single-mom cocktail waitress, a guy in a conch costume, and an entrepreneur who specializes in both newspaper-filled car air bags and badly augmented breasts.
As someone who giggled and guffawed his way through Dave Barry's "Big Trouble," I eagerly awaited his second novel, fully expecting the same gonzo writing that made his first book so appealing. But when I sat down to read "Tricky Business," I instead found gangsters killing each other in ever more inventive and bloody ways, a repulsively detailed mass-vomiting scene, and truly gratuitous amounts of sex.
And yet the book would have been acceptable even with all this, had it been funny. Instead, the belly laughs that made "Big Trouble" so enjoyable are largely absent in this book, mostly replaced by weak grins and an occasional chuckle. There are a few very comical scenes involving such oddities as flatulence during sex and how the band winds up on this cruise ship to hell; these alone save "Tricky Business" from a one-star rating. But when I pick up a Dave Barry book, I really don't want to read in excruciating detail about how one lowlife amputates various body parts off another lowlife. I can see stuff like that on the evening news for free.
Sadly, Dave Barry has badly misfired with "Tricky Business." He should steer clear of murderously unfunny criminals and get back to what he's best at, namely booger jokes.
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Title: Big Trouble by Dave Barry ISBN: 0425184129 Publisher: Berkley Pub Group Pub. Date: 02 April, 2002 List Price(USD): $7.50 |
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Title: Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway: A Vicious and Unprovoked Attack on Our Most Cherished Political Institutions by Dave Barry ISBN: 037550219X Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 02 October, 2001 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: "The Greatest Invention In The History Of Mankind Is Beer" And Other Manly Insights From Dave Barry by Barry ISBN: 0740715259 Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing Pub. Date: 15 March, 2001 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: The Dave Barry 2003 Block Calendar: America's Pulitzer Prize-Winning Humorist by Dave Barry, Andrews McMeel Publishing ISBN: 0740724495 Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing Pub. Date: July, 2002 List Price(USD): $10.99 |
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Title: Chasing the Dime by Michael Connelly ISBN: 0316153915 Publisher: Little Brown & Company Pub. Date: 15 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
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