Book picks similar to
Wag the Dog by Larry Beinhart


fiction
politics
book-becomes-movie
political

Napalm & Silly Putty


George Carlin - 2001
    I THINK.In Napalm & Silly Putty, George Carlin, the thinking person's comic, offers a hilarious new collection of razor-sharp observations on God, language, death, pets, driving, food, sports, airplanes, advertising, news, businessmen, and much, much more!* Just when I discovered the meaning of life, they changed it.* If people climb Mt. Everest because it's hard to do, why do they go up on the easy side?* With a little effort, oxen can be trained to genuflect and whistle softly in the moonlight.* How can it be a spy satellite if they announce on TV that its a spy satellite?* If people stand in a circle long enough, they will eventually begin to dance.* Guys don't seem to be called "Lefty" anymore.* No one quite knows what's next, but everybody does it.* I think it would be great if you could make a guy's head explode just by staring at him.* Am I the only one who's noticed that the Lone Ranger and Tonto never got their laundry done?You'll learn what Carlin thinks of saving the planet, his suggestion for revamping the prison system, and why he prays to Joe Pesci. Add to the mix "The Ten Most Embarrassing Songs of All Time," "The 20th Century Hostility Scoreboard," and "People I Can Do Without," and you have an irresistible assortment of quips, probes, thrusts, and verbal ordeals that are as smart as they are infectiously funny.

Lost & Found


Brooke Davis - 2014
    But one day, Millie’s mum leaves her alone beneath the Ginormous Women’s underwear rack in a department store, and doesn’t come back.Agatha Pantha is an eighty-two-year-old woman who hasn’t left her home since her husband died. Instead, she fills the silence by yelling at passers-by, watching loud static on TV, and maintaining a strict daily schedule. Until the day Agatha spies a little girl across the street.Karl the Touch Typist is eighty-seven years old and once typed love letters with his fingers on to his wife’s skin. He sits in a nursing home, knowing that somehow he must find a way for life to begin again. In a moment of clarity and joy, he escapes.Together, Millie, Agatha and Karl set out to find Millie’s mum. Along the way, they will discover that the young can be wise, that old age is not the same as death, and that breaking the rules once in a while might just be the key to a happy life.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes


Anita Loos - 1925
    Outrageous, charming, and unforgettable, she’s been portrayed on stage and screen by Carol Channing and Marilyn Monroe and has become the archetype of the footloose, good-hearted gold digger, with an insatiable appetite for orchids, champagne, and precious stones. Here are her “diaries,” created by Anita Loos in the Roaring Twenties, as Lorelei and her friend Dorothy barrel across Europe meeting everyone from the Prince of Wales to “Doctor Froyd” – and then back home again to marry a Main Line millionaire and become a movie star. In this delightfully droll and witty book, Lorelei Lee’s wild antics, unique outlook, and imaginative way with language shine.

Auntie Mame: An Irreverent Escapade


Patrick Dennis - 1955
    It was made into a play, a Broadway as well as a Hollywood musical, and a fabulous movie starring Rosalind Russell. Since then, Mame has taken her rightful place in the pantheon of Great and Important People as the world's most beloved, madcap, devastatingly sophisticated, and glamorous aunt. She is impossible to resist, and this hilarious story of an orphaned ten-year-old boy sent to live with his aunt is as delicious a read in the twenty-first century as it was in the 1950s.

Skinny Legs and All


Tom Robbins - 1990
    This is a gutsy, fun-loving, and provocative novel in which a bean can philosophises, a dessert spoon mystifies, a young waitress takes on the New York art world, and a rowdy redneck welder discovers the lost god of Palestine.

Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free


Charles P. Pierce - 2008
    Wearing a saddle.... But worse than this was when the proprietor exclaimed to a cheering crowd, “We are taking the dinosaurs back from the evolutionists!” He knew then and there it was time to try and salvage the Land of the Enlightened, buried somewhere in this new Home of the Uninformed.With his razor-sharp wit and erudite reasoning, Pierce delivers a gut-wrenching, side-splitting lament about the glorification of ignorance in the United States, and how a country founded on intellectual curiosity has somehow deteriorated into a nation of simpletons more apt to vote for an American Idol contestant than a presidential candidate.With Idiot America, Pierce's thunderous denunciation is also a secret call to action, as he hopes that somehow, being intelligent will stop being a stigma, and that pinheads will once again be pitied, not celebrated.

Our Gang


Philip Roth - 1971
    Nixon.In the character of Trick E. Dixon, Roth shows us a man who outdoes the severest cynic, a peace-loving Quaker and believer in the sanctity of human life who doesn’t have a problem with killing unarmed women and children in self-defense. A master politician with an honest sneer, he finds himself battling the Boy Scouts, declaring war on Pro-Pornography Denmark, all the time trusting in the basic indifference of the voting public.

Mercury Falls


Robert Kroese - 2009
    That is, until she meets Mercury, an anti-establishment angel who's frittering his time away whipping up batches of Rice Krispy Treats and perfecting his ping-pong backhand instead of doing his job: helping to orchestrate Armageddon. With the end near and angels and demons debating the finer political points of the Apocalypse, Christine and Mercury accidentally foil an attempt to assassinate one Karl Grissom, a thirty-seven-year-old film school dropout about to make his big break as the Antichrist. Now, to save the world, she must negotiate the byzantine bureaucracies of Heaven and Hell and convince the apathetic Mercury to take a stand, all the while putting up with the obnoxious mouth-breathing Antichrist.

Space Team


Barry J. Hutchison - 2016
    Imprisoned and forced to share a cell with a cannibalistic serial killer, Cal thinks things can't possibly get any worse. He is wrong. It’s not until two-thirds of the human race is wiped out and Cal is abducted by aliens that his day really starts to go downhill. Whisked across the galaxy, Cal is thrown into a team of some of the sector's most notorious villains and scumbags. Their mission should be simple enough, but as one screw-up leads to another, they find themselves in a frantic battle to save an entire alien civilization - and its god - from total annihilation. A hilarious, fast-paced space adventure from the author the Independent calls "the new Terry Pratchett."

The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving


Jonathan Evison - 2012
    Bursting with energy and filled with moments of absolute beauty, this bighearted and inspired novel ponders life’s terrible surprises as well as its immeasurable rewards.

In Her Shoes


Jennifer Weiner - 2002
    The last thing she needs is her messed-up, only occasionally employed sister Maggie moving in: drinking, smoking, stealing her money - and her shoes - and spoiling her chance of romance. If only Maggie would grow up and settle down with a nice guy and a steady job. Maggie is drop dead gorgeous and irresistible to men. She's going to make it big as a TV presenter, or a singer...or an actress. All she needs is a lucky break. What she doesn't need is her uptight sister Rose interfering in her life. If only Rose would lighten-up, have some fun - and learn how to use a pair of tweezers. Rose and Maggie think they have nothing in common but a childhood tragedy, shared DNA and the same size feet, but they are about to find out that they're more alike than they'd ever believe.

Crooked Little Vein


Warren Ellis - 2007
    What he got was a virtual cattle prod to the crotch, in the form of an impossible assignment delivered directly from the president's heroin-addict chief of staff. It seems the Constitution of the United States has some skeletons in its closet: the Founding Fathers doubted that the document would be able to stave off human nature indefinitely, so they devised a backup Constitution to deploy at the first sign of crisis. In the government's eyes, that time is now, as America is overgrown with perverts who spend more time surfing the Web for fetish porn than they do reading a newspaper. They want to use this "Secret Constitution" to drive the country back to a time when civility, God, and mom's homemade apple pie were all that mattered.The only problem is, no one can seem to find it . . .So who better to track it down than a private dick who's so down-and-out that he's coming up the other side, a shamus whose only skill is stumbling into every depraved situation imaginable?With no lead to speak of, and no knowledge of the underground world in which the Constitution has traveled, McGill embarks on a cross-country odyssey of America's darkest, dankest underbelly. Along the way, his white-bread sensibilities are treated to a smorgasbord of depravity that runs the gamut of human imagination. The filth mounts; it is clear that this isn't the kind of life, liberty, or happiness that Thomas Jefferson thought Americans would enjoy in the twenty-first century.But what McGill learns as he closes in on the real Constitution is that freedom takes many forms, the most important of which may be the fight against the "good old days." Like Vonnegut, Orwell, and Huxley before him, Warren Ellis deftly exposes the hypocrisy of the "moral majority" by giving us a glimpse at the monstrous outcome that their overzealous policies would achieve.

Snobs


Julian Fellowes - 2004
    While visiting his parents' stately home as a paying guest, Edith meets Charles, Earl Broughton, and heir to the Marquess of Uckfield, who runs the family estates in East Sussex and Norfolk. To the gossip columns he is one of the most eligible young aristocrats around.When he proposes. Edith accepts. But is she really in love with Charles? Or with his title, his position, and all that goes with it?One inescapable part of life at Broughton Hall is Charles's mother, the shrewd Lady Uckfield, known to her friends as "Googie" and described by the narrator---an actor who moves comfortably among the upper classes while chronicling their foibles---"as the most socially expert individual I have ever known at all well. She combined a watchmaker's eye for detail with a madam's knowledge of the world." Lady Uckfield is convinced that Edith is more interested in becoming a countess than in being a good wife to her son. And when a television company, complete with a gorgeous leading man, descends on Broughton Hall to film a period drama, "Googie's" worst fears seem fully justified.

First Contact-Or, It's Later Than You Think


Evan Mandery - 2010
    This smart and biting novel by Evan Mandery—an author equally well-versed in the lives of the U.S. presidents, existential philosophy, and the Simpsons—offers much food for intellectual thought along with an all-you-can-eat buffet of laughs, as it chronicles the first close encounters between earthlings and a vastly superior extraterrestrial race from Rigel-Rigel. As the subtitle of First Contact so presciently informs us, “It’s Later than You Think.”

Hector and the Search for Happiness


François Lelord - 2002
    Hector is very good at treating patients in need of his help. But he can't do much for those who are simply dissatisfied with life, and that is beginning to depress him. When a patient tells him he looks in need of a vacation, Hector takes a trip around the world to learn what makes people happy—and sad. As he travels from Paris to China to Africa to the United States, he lists his observations about the people he meets. Is there a secret to happiness, and will Hector find it? Combining the winsome appeal of The Little Prince with the inspiring philosophy of The Alchemist, Hector's journey ventures around the globe and into the human soul. Lelord's writing inspires us to consider life's great questions. Uplifting, empowering, and optimistic, this is a fable for our times and all time.