- Hardcover: 224 pages
- Publisher: Portrait; Reprinted Edition edition (3 Nov 2005)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0749950811
- ISBN-13: 978-0749950811
- Product Dimensions: 18.4 x 11.6 x 3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 364,891 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
The Gripes of Wrath
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
The Gripes of Wrath is the perfect gift book for the 'grumpy' generation. It is guaranteed to make you laugh - and also make your blood boil! This mind-blowing collection of absurd and yet completely true stories, rules, claims, and crazy legislation portrays the Britain that we have become, almost without realizing it. Political columnist Simon Carr has scoured national and local newspapers, Hansard parliamentary reports, the minutes of parliamentary committee meetings, statements from quangos and local councils to compile hundreds of true stories, anecdotes and events that will prompt the scandalized response of: 'I don't believe it!'. From political sleaze to massaged waiting lists, from barmy health and safety concerns to bizarre compensation claims, everyone who believes in justice, decency, fair play and common sense will find something in this attractively produced book to infuriate them.
About the Author
Simon Carr has been the Independent's parliamentary sketch writer and columnist for the last five years, and is, by common consent, the rudest of them all. An engaging and amusing talker and writer, Simon Carr was speech writer for the prime minister of New Zealand from 1992-4.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Paperback
I don't usually bother to write reviews of my purchases, but I feel I must make an exception for this one, in order to warn you off it.
This is a lazy and unsatisfactory book, cobbled together, one guesses, for the Christmas stocking list. It consists for the most part of a profusion of short, unrelated gobbets, loosely placed under chapter headings, but with no effort made to give the work any narrative drive, nor to contextualise the excerpts, or even, by and large, to give any provenance or attribution for them, and where there is anything given it is defective in proper details such as place, date and time.
If you like to read, for example, the bald statement that a distinction in the ABC cake decoration course is worth more points (55) than an A in an academic course such as maths, English and science, or that at a figure of very nearly $4 billion a year America spends more on aid to its cotton farmers than on aid to Africa, or that a third of all 15-34 year-olds were unaware that the Battle of Britain took place in the second world war, or that Asian high-seas fishing vessels set drift nets up to 64 km long, without in any of these, or scores of similar, cases anything further being said on the point whether by way of attribution or context, then this may be the book for you, but even then I am fairly sure you will actually find it profoundly unsatisfying.
Far, far better books of this type can be found, such as Bog-Standard Britain by Quintin Letts, Big Babies by Michael Bywater, and Bad Laws BY Philip Johnston.
This is a lazy and unsatisfactory book, cobbled together, one guesses, for the Christmas stocking list. It consists for the most part of a profusion of short, unrelated gobbets, loosely placed under chapter headings, but with no effort made to give the work any narrative drive, nor to contextualise the excerpts, or even, by and large, to give any provenance or attribution for them, and where there is anything given it is defective in proper details such as place, date and time.
If you like to read, for example, the bald statement that a distinction in the ABC cake decoration course is worth more points (55) than an A in an academic course such as maths, English and science, or that at a figure of very nearly $4 billion a year America spends more on aid to its cotton farmers than on aid to Africa, or that a third of all 15-34 year-olds were unaware that the Battle of Britain took place in the second world war, or that Asian high-seas fishing vessels set drift nets up to 64 km long, without in any of these, or scores of similar, cases anything further being said on the point whether by way of attribution or context, then this may be the book for you, but even then I am fairly sure you will actually find it profoundly unsatisfying.
Far, far better books of this type can be found, such as Bog-Standard Britain by Quintin Letts, Big Babies by Michael Bywater, and Bad Laws BY Philip Johnston.
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