Haircut

I really enjoy Tom Perrotta as an author, having stumbled upon "The Wishbones" by accident and enjoying it so much that I read "Joe College" and "Election" in rapid progression thereafter. This novel, written as a series of short stories detailing different events as Buddy, the protagonist, grows up in Cranwood, NJ.

The novel introduces us to an 8-year old Buddy as a Cub Scout and leaves us when Buddy comes home from college before he ends his teenage years. There are many funny moments throughout. For example, the "weapon" Buddy chooses to take to the race riot made me laugh aloud. There are also many poignant snapshots of disappointment and maturity, such as the one provided by the "bad haircutter".

Despite all of this, I left the book feeling that I never really got to know Buddy that well. Sure, he seems like your average kid who has hopes and fears and experiences more than his share of peer pressure, but other than that, who is he?

Some of my fondest memories are from the 1970s. If you spent
most of your childhood in the 70s, do yourself a favor and
read this book. It's a quick, easy read that will put a
smile on your face.

Bad Haircut consists of stories about Buddy in the 70's. We begin with him at about Jr. High age and going all the way through High School and into college. The tales of Buddy are often funny and sometimes bittersweet. While each story is its own, there is some weaving between them -- certain characters get mentioned, certain places are repeated, etc., but it doesn't become the same story told again and again.

If you're a kid from the 70's, I think you would appreciate this book. Even if you aren't, the stories are timeless, but certain references would be lost on you. I wouldn't let that deter you from reading it, however. It was a time when a kid could walk around the town late at night without any trouble -- it's those kinds of differences that I write of.

This is a quick read and really entertaining. Perrotta is also the author of Election, which was made into a movie -- if you're familiar with that and liked the movie, then I think giving Bad Haircut a try is worth your time.

I have recently taken to reading O'Rourke's book's (Give War a Chance, Holidays in Hell, Republican Party Reptile, and All the Trouble in the World) and have found them all enjoyable. He is a humorist with a conservative bent, which I admit is a good part of the reason that I like him. It is always nice to read something that you agree with and especially so if the author has original, well considered ideas and can present them in an humorous way. More liberal readers will, in all probability, not like him at all, unless they have an extraordinary capacity for taking criticism. Part of the reason for his venom towards the left is that he was once one of them. In the sixties he got about as liberal as he could, living in communes and writing for underground papers, damning capitalism. This book follows his development from there to his current occupation, writing about foreign politics and fast cars and damning communism. The first section of the book, a collection of pieces written for those underground papers, is juvenilia and really only interesting as such. It takes time for a writer to become good and he in the late sixties O'Rourke had not had that time yet. Politics aside, it simply is not very good. The part that I enjoyed the most was his experiments with something called "concrete poetry" which seems to be a version of those pictures that people draw with characters and have on the bottoms of their e-mail, only not as interesting. I don't know who decided that this was poetry but I found the whole thing very amusing. Which is okay because that's the point. The next part is things that he wrote about his experiences in the sixties, a bit later and after he had begin to rethink some of his political ideas. The style has improved here, as it does steadily through the book, but the subject matter is a bit too self obsessed to be really good reading. The rest is various articles for which the O'Rourke was actually paid and they are mostly pretty to very good. I liked this book, but not as much as a liked some of his others, mostly because there weren't too many of his stories about international trouble spots, which for some reason are my favorites.

I first got into PJ O'Rourke when I started reading his book "Republican Party Reptile" and realized that I could laugh heartily at his wit, as opposed to the often divisive rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News Channel. O'Rourke is equally scathing in his approach to "born-again" nutjobs as he is to "pinko" enviromentalists, and his is a style of writing I wouldn't mind trying to emulate in my own belated (and as yet unpublished) career as a writer.

"Age and Guile" caught my fancy because I had heard it was a collection of his pieces from over the years, and I tried to find it at the local library and various bookstores, but was unlucky in my pursuit. I ended up checking out a Books-on-Tape version of the book, read by Norman Deitz, and I was quite pleased.

The early material is amatuerish, to be fair, but there are nuggets of wit to be found amongst the "juvinelia". The Truth About The Sixties was actually one of my favorite parts of the book, I found it very involving and fascinating to hear. The rest of the book tickled my funny bone. I just don't have enough good things to say about this book.

So, I ordered it on Amazon, and I've recieved it, and it's joined my collection of P.J. O'Rourke books. A liberal at heart myself, I agree with a previous reviewer that O'Rourke celebrates individual freedom and doesn't care for those who try and take it away. I only hope I can be as good at conveying that in my own writing, he's certainly one hell of a teacher.

PJ O'Rourke has always been one of my favorite cultural and political commentators. An unrepentant Libertarian Republican who used to be an unrepentant Marxist radical, O'Rourke is a conservative who writes with all the wit and verve that, supposedly, only liberals are capable of. P.J. O'Rourke is the Al Franken of the American Right, if Al Franken were actually funny. Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut is made up of O'Rourke's previously uncollected writings over the past three decades. As such, the book begins with a few choice pieces from his angry days as a Marxist journalist in the early '70s (where, it must be said, O'Rourke still writes with a wit that proves that funny is funny not matter what the ideology) moves on to cover his brief period as an adherent to Concrete Poetry (an art form that he admits still having no idea what to make of) and finally closes with a few of his recent essays as Rolling Stone's Foreign Affairs Editor. Best of all, O'Rourke includes a few short stories that he wrote and published while editor of National Lampoon. The stories, all dealing with his past as a '60s radical, are a perfect mixture of radical nostalgia and modern day clear headedness and, along with an unexpected pathos for his lost characters wandering through the political wilderness of protest, they also rank amongst the most hilarious of O'Rourke's writings, perfectly displaying his trademark style of detached irony and self-depreciating wit (one can always sense O'Rourke saying, "Can you believe they actually pay me to write this stuff?"). Perhaps most nicely, the pieces in this collection are arranged by chronological order so that the reader literally goes through O'Rourke's political and literary evolution with him over the course of the book. As such, we're provided with a nice view of the political odyssey of both O'Rourke and America over the past 30-odd years. If one thing remains the same it is that O'Rourke, whether conservative or liberal, consistently refuses to accept anything at face value. He remains, always, the eternal skeptic. And we, as readers, are all the better off for it.

This book was alright, but it's kind of unrealistic that Karen's hair grows back completly in the next book.I mean, who's hair can grow that fast?

it's nice karen wanted to feel good about herself and went to the hairdresser's, but it's SO UNREALISTIC that the hair dresser would cut her hair all wrong, especially when karen is just a little kid and she gave the hairdresser a picture of the haircut she really wanted!! But it's still a good read, and though hannie was being mean, karen was really cute when she started sneaking makeup to school, and hannie's pretend wedding to scott was unrealistic but adorable. It's a nice read if you're about 7 or 8, the age I was when I bought this book

This book is called Karen's Haircut. It is about a girl named Karen and she thinks she is ugly and she is supposed to be in a wedding! Then Karen gets a haircut and looks even uglier. Then she can't be in the wedding. But then Karen's hair grows back. Now Karen can be in the wedding!
This is a good book.

In the book called "The day of the bad haircut", there is a little girl named Molly. Her mother wants Molly to get a hair cut and she keeps telling her for weeks that she could really use one. So Molly agrees to get a hair cut. Her Mom gets out the scissors and cuts her hair, but when Molly sees her hair she wishes she hadn't gave her mother permission to cut it. Molly doesn't ever want to be seen. This book teaches kids that no matter what you look like on the outside your always the same on the inside even if you have a bad hair cut it will always grow back.
This book is recommend for children from age 5-7.
This book was good; it was neat seeing what her hair looked like after it got cut.

although the book is well written and interesting reading, it is not at all what i wanted or expected. i am looking for a serious reference book which provides names, addresses, phone numbers, and ratings of the top barbers in the country. in fact, the subtitle of the book, which i feel is very misleading, is "in search of america's great barbershops". what search? i expected several hundred listings of barbers from across the usa. Instead, this book is a mishmash of history, haircutting and shaving techniques, and barber jokes, and i think it's aimed mostly at barbers themselves, rather than the public at large. it features barbers the author has visited personally, but it doesn't provide the pertinent information necessary to locate them. like most people, i've been the victim of many a bad haircut in my day, and i would like to find a simple, no nonsense directory of top rated barbers across the country.

I suppose this book might be ok if the reader knows beforehand not to expect a serious work. The level of writing is about what one would find in one of those Sunday supplement feature articles. In fact, the book gives the impression of being a collection of such features. Some of the chapters repeat nearly word-for-word things that have already been said in other chapters, such as the anecdote about the ruler Hadrian. The book is a combination memoir/essay/comedy script, not a serious history. Most of the jokes are incredibly bad, and I don't mean the barber jokes, but the lame ones the author attempts. Many things about the book are annoying. The font is huge, almost the size of large-print text, which means you are actually not getting 176 pages. There are several typos, such as a period instead of a comma in the middle of a sentence, and using the article "a" when "an" is called for. The chapter promising to explain the origin of the barbershop quartet is clear as mud. On the positive side, the discussion of the origin of the barber pole and Bill Marvy's role in manufacturing the poles is good. Also I sympathize with the author's lament over the decline of traditional barber shops. But the book simply disappoints and is not worth the cover price. Borrow it, or get it used if you still want to read it.

I saw this book discussed on the Today Show, where Matt Lauer spent several minutes reminiscing with Vince Staten about boyhood experiences at the barbershop. Then I heard another feature about the book on NPR. So I figured either the author had a really good PR person, or the book was interesting. Fortunately, it's the latter.

The nostalgia aspect of the book is certainly the part that will strike closest to home for most male readers - the way the shop smelled (like Lucky Tiger), the joy of reading a million comic books (not to mention Argosy), the feeling of manhood on the day when the barber finally let you sit in the chair without the extra board that raised a small boy to a reasonable cutting height.

But that only takes you back 10 or 20 or 50 years. In other parts of the book, Staten time-travels to ancient Egypt and Greece to unearth the beginnings of the barbering trade. In the present day, we get to hear the story direct from the mouths of some of the few hundred barbers Staten met while researching the book, and they're the best part. Because the community of the barbershop naturally reflects the personality of the barber.

It's a little sad, too. While you get the feeling that the emotional pull of the barbershop will keep the institution from completely disappearing - that it provides something all men need (the way the "beauty parlor" did/does for women) - the future doesn't look all that bright for barbering.

As in some of his other books, Staten has given us a strong sense of something lost, or at least something we're losing. But his delight and amazement in the sensual pleasure of the perfect barbershop shave makes even a bearded guy like me almost ready to settle into that red leather chair and luxuriate in that hot towel wrapped around my face. Almost.

It's fun.

This book is not "advanced", and the techniques are not those that professionals use! A disappointment!

Ms. Punches has distilled haircutting to its essentials. Intelligently and logically organized information, quick and easy to digest. The book is aimed at the home haircutter, but can also be a good guide for the barber (like me) who wants to get into women's haircutting, or even the hairdresser who went to a lousy beauty school.
Dwight M. Stark

This is a fairly good book, with some very good instruction, but I felt that the person who provided the illustrations could have done a way better job, or could have at least found someone to do better drawings than this. Other than that, a good text.

This book only has a handfull of good puzzles. Not surprisingly the best are about cars, that's what I expected from this book.

What I don't like are the "filler" problems in the classic logic&math genre; seen too many of those around in countless puzzle books. The hokey photos and silly puns just don't make up for the lack of originality of the puzzles -sorry fellas.

I hope the next book of cartalk puzzles will have more original puzzles.

Wow! This is one greak book.

In Last of the Moe Haircuts, the actual Stooge content is minimal, the humor is nominal and much of Flanagan's dated satire completely misses the mark. Only Stooge completists should bother adding this title to their libraries.

A tremendous satirical review of the Three Stooges impact on popular culture. I would recommend this title highly to anyone. The succession of the papacy as compared to the third stooge position (Popes John XXIII, Paul VI, and John-Pauls I & II vs. Curly, Shemp, Joe, and Curley-Joe)is alone enough genius to make the price worthwhile.

Most books I read that have only a one joke premise are boring after the second or third page. Levine's book, however, was short enough and diverse enough to keep my interest for quite a while. Levine has created a fictitious group, the DOA (Devotees of Film Art), composed of enthusiasts of particular types of scenes. There is the Cigar Scene group, who give their "Kipling" award (named after Rudyard Kipling who wrote "Betrothed" which compares cigars to women) a Neck Brace Scene group, a Fluttering Drape group, and several other categories. It's hard to believe there are so many groups out there that get all giddy over such small details. Nevertheless, that is the one joke premise of this book. Levine reports what the he has learned from these groups at their meetings and through their newsletters. Through this fiction we receive a collection of film scenes and brief explanations of how they are important in those sub-sub-subgenres. Levine often has problems with facts, muddling names, misattributing lines of dialogue, and printing the wrong dates from time to time. He also seems to have only seen a very few films in his life, or at least the DOA member groups have seen a limited number of films, as the book uses the same films over and over. The most enjoyable part of this film is that he tells us cute things about various films. Next time I see "The Uninvited" I'll pay more attention to the fluttering drape. After all, the members of the Fluttering Drape Fan Club might actually deserve that respect.

Much of P.J. O'Rourke's self-deprecating humor is funny, down-to-earth and insightful. But beware - when he writes in this manner he is joking on the level. So when you read the introduction to Age and Guile and see how low of an opinion he has of the material published in this book, TAKE HIS WORD FOR IT - THIS ISN'T VERY GOOD MATERIAL. If you're considering buying this book because you enjoyed P.J.'s other works, re-consider. This material earns at most an occasional, light chuckle and more frequently induces sleep. Some of P.J.'s other works, particularly Holidays in Hell, elicited much more appropriate reactions from this reader for a book with the word "humor" printed on the back cover. Several of P.J.'s travel essays from that book can be expected to cause the kind of painful laughter that makes it difficult to breathe, see or even stand, and in some readers will even cause loss of bladder control. So if you haven't read Holidays in Hell, then I recommend you buy that book instead of this one. Unless you're having trouble sleeping.