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Title: Generica by Will Ferguson ISBN: 0-14-029984-X Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: April, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.00

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Average Customer Rating: 3 (2 reviews)

Rating: 4
Summary: Hilariously written and a unique concept
Comment: I laughed out loud reading this book. The writing style & timing is absolutely hilarious. The premise is a bit unbelievable, but it's supposed to be. It's a fictional "what if" and it's told, as it should be, from the viewpoint of a cynical editor. The idea that a Charles Mansonesque brainwashing con artist could change the world is laughable, but makes you wonder...could it happen? I'd recommend this book to anyone who craves a unique storyline and escape to a world that could be.

Rating: 2
Summary: If Only ...
Comment: On the up side, the concept is very very clever ' What if a self-help book could really lead every reader to happiness? What would happen to the world?

On the down side, most of the answers are depressingly obvious, or they seem so after every irony (some of them wonderful!) has been belabored a dozen different ways.

I loved, for example, that the hero on which our author of ultimate-self-help actually models himself is the hell-raising actor Oliver Reed. But my amusement at the first round of reasons palled as the biographical details kept on coming ' relevant but redundant.

Worse, our experience of a world transformed is filtered exclusively through the experiences of publishing-world cynics who do not change. Trenchant points are made (and remade), but idealism shows up only to be mocked.

How lucky for her fame and fortune that Ayn Rand, who wrote similarly melodramatic parables about social values, did not aspire to comedy! Social criticism is present in Generica, but it would take a gifted editor to carve a lean satire out of this flabby epic of humorishness.