Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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46 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Picture a sandpapered orang-utan on the verge of grabbing a pool cue in anger, 29 Nov 2007
Those aren't my words (sadly) but Brooker's uncanny description of Jade Goody's mother Jackiey. There's no doubting this Guardian journalist and co-creator of Nathan Barley has a way with the entertaining insult. From Nigella Lawson to Jamie Oliver to Jeremy Kyle, if their mug has appeared on TV then Charlie Brooker is almost certain to be slagging it off in some of the most inventively evil prose imaginable. Adrien Brody is 'a cross between Ross from Friends and a disappointed sundial'. I mean, really, that's genius. When Brooker's good, he's really good. I almost choked on my tea. 'Anne Robinson's face now appears so tight and Botoxed she seems to be pushing it through the taut skin of a tambourine'. I laughed until my ribcage ached.
The whole book isn't this funny, though. Which is good in a way because it gears you up for the really hilarious bits (and stops your cheek muscles from going into spasm). A quote from SpikeMagazine.com points out that he's not 'a one trick pony', but he kind of is, to be honest. That's not necessarily a problem, though - it depends on the trick. If you found a pony that did nothing but wash your dishes, you might not mind if it only knew the one trick. To compare Brooker to Chris (typed Christ first of all) Morris, his Nathan Barley writing partner, is to lose sight of the fact that Morris is a true innovator without whom etc etc, while Brooker is basically a curmudgeonly git, albeit the funniest one in the universe. He's like those two old men in the audience of the Muppet Show, with their white whiskery faces, heckling away. It's not just the gogglebox he loathes, but a variety of other random elements that impinge on his universe. He's spot on most of the time, except for the fact he hates kids and Macs, two things I'm especially fond of. It's unsettling to find yourself (or your likes) on the sharp edge of his tongue. He's bang on, though, about Richard Littlejohn, and George Bush, and Daleks patrolling the streets. Then he inexplicably goes ligging at Glastonbury with Aisleyne from Big Brother, and in one fell swoop shatters all the respect you built up for him over the past three hundred pages. It's like when Woody Allen decided, hey, the Oscars are cool after all; Bob Dylan getting into bed with Starbucks. A four-star read overall, then, with plenty of five-star sentences. And if you like this, try film critic Joe Queenan's 'If You're Talking to Me, Your Career Must be in Trouble', a kind of softcore ancestor of the rampant misanthropy that Brooker does so very, very well.
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65 of 74 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic compilation from Britain's best columnist, 29 Dec 2007
Unlike most of the other amazon reviewers here, I'm not going to attempt to come up with a blisteringly fantastic Brooker-esque metaphor to describe how captivatingly despicable this book is. I understand that I'll never be that clever a writer, and am in fact rubbish. This review is testemant to my miserable writing skills, which are evident in the way I just mispelled "testament". And "misspelled".
Anyway, Brooker is brilliant. Bitter, twisted and brilliant. Dawn of the Dumb is an excellent compilation of his best Guardian articles, and I was very pleased to find it under the tree this christmas. Read it during the ad breaks (to be clever), on the toilet, or when you're feeling drunk and misanthropic. Or just, you know, when you would read any other book.
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16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
"Kitchen sink" approach doesn't really do the reader many favours, 25 Sep 2008
Brooker is currently the best-loved pop culture pundit amongst the jaded workshy internet-hogging sullen misanthrope demographic. This is an indesputable fact. He has sat aside the collective imagination of this unhappy group like a grumpy colossus since the launch of the spoof listings website TVGoHome back in what now feels like the mid-1800s, and he continues to do so with his Guardian articles and the brilliant Screenwipe show, which I'll wager most of you have seen on the Guardian website and youtube respectively rather than in actual grubby print or on actual proper telly. This all feels very word-of-mouthy and grass-rootsy, with friends slinging URLs at you every time he says something particularly interesting or rude, and part of the reason for this popularity is that, despite his grumbling and slightly forced self-deprecation, Brooker seems like a likeable, smart guy and has an unmatched talent for a pithy little vignette.
Seriously, it's completely unmatched: I've never read anyone who can produce a one paragraph nugget that manages to be as clever, scatological, sharp, heartfelt, and funny as Brooker. When most columnists try this sort of recipe it comes out indigestible and smug, like trying to swallow a lump of self-satisfied rancid grease; Brooker pulls it off effortlessly and still manages to seem human. This is probably the reason for his enduring net popularity, as in the land of short attention spans and thousands and thousands of competing distractions short, brilliant quotes are the primary currency - and he has them in abundance.
Which is the problem with the book, really. It's like printing out an entire website to read through it page by page rather than being linked directly to the funny picture of the cat with the amusing caption. It's impossible to write the brilliant little gems mentioned above every single week, and between them his writing is either ephemeral at best or completely irrelevant at worst. For every brilliant insight and one-liner, there's pages and pages of wibbling about, say, 2006's Big Brother - perfect for a weekly column, but its inclusion in a book seems a little eyebrow-raising. The fact that its readable at all two years later on is a tribute to Brooker's skill, but still you get the feeling that you've been swindled a bit by some sort of bait-and-switch scam. Yes, I know it never claimed to be anything other than a collection of articles, but "Dispatches from the Idiotic Frontline" to my mind suggested something more trim and toned and toothier. Perhaps this is just an inescapable result of taking Brooker out of his natural environment and cramming him willy-nilly into a book or perhaps they just wanted to bulk the book out some, but the "kitchen sink" approach doesn't really do the reader many favours.
A genuinely mixed bag, this: undeniably a good read, but you feel sort of like you'd rather have just googled "best Charlie Brooker quotes" instead. On the plus side, Brooker is one of the most genuinely enjoyable columnists you can read today and you get the feeling that much, much better is still to come.
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