I'll seize the day tomorrow

Jonathan Goldstein, 1969-

Book - 2013

On the eve of his fortieth birthday, the author reflects upon his life, which does not include a wife, kids, car, or a house, in a series of humorous stories that discuss automatic hand dryers, toy poodles, and the McRib.

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Subjects
Published
Toronto : New York : Pintail/Penguin Group (USA) c2013.
Language
English
Main Author
Jonathan Goldstein, 1969- (-)
Physical Description
xv, 233 p. ; 21 cm
ISBN
9780143187516
  • Foreword
  • Youth
  • The Things Left Undone
  • Popeye Loves His Olives
  • Why a Duck?
  • Survival of the Fittest
  • Seizing the Day
  • Atonement
  • What if Henry Heimlich Were Choking?
  • "I am. I am. I am."
  • Friends Who Do No Kill You Make You Stronger
  • Guys' Night Out
  • bed
  • The Great Gazoo
  • Loss of Memory
  • The Tears You Cry in Dreams
  • Two Yarmulkes
  • Knights of the Roundtable
  • Unpredictable
  • Space and Mass
  • Real Tears, Finally
  • New Year's
  • Judgment
  • A Mission
  • A Thousand Monkeys and Darwin
  • Beginnings, Middles, and Ends
  • Padding the Dream
  • Baby Steps
  • A Covenant
  • Two for One
  • Soulmates
  • Honeymoon for One
  • The Power of the Written Word
  • Irreversible
  • It Can't Be That Bad
  • The Weight of Worry
  • The Writer's Life
  • Picasso Goldstein
  • A Still Shark Is Still a Shark
  • A Place to Hang One's Cape
  • Medium Is the Message
  • As Elusive as a Peach Slice
  • Timing
  • Stuff
  • Inbetweenness
  • Perfect Imperfection
  • Beating God to the Punch
  • To the Bottom!
  • On Being the Fastest Runner: The Hare Retorts
  • Sing the Tune Without the Words
  • Down the Aisle
  • The Levy Equation
  • The Great Rabbi
  • City Folk
  • A Final Toast
  • Musical Chairs
  • Social Studies
  • Another Lap Around
  • Face to Face
  • Late Bloomers
  • Afterword by Gregor Ehrlich
  • Acknowledgments
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Radio personality and novelist Goldstein (Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bible!, 2009, etc.) relates the details of the anxiety-ridden final 12 months of his youth before he turned 40. "I wish you could leap from thirty-eight, straight to forty," writes the author. "More dignity to it than hanging on to the last dregs of your thirties. Forty was the age at which I thought I'd have a house full of oak shelves spilling over with hardcover books." Unfortunately, the title is a telling prelude to the kind of bland, nonknee-slapping humor in the latest from the This American Life contributor. The author is another squeaky-clean Seinfeld-ian humorist whose more-clever-than-funny attempts to milk mundaneness and quotidian life for laughs never quite hit their mark on a consistent level. To be fair, it's not exactly easy to bring an original twist to dealing in print with one's childish fears of turning 40, and Goldstein breaks no new ground in the long history of writers fretting about getting old. The author structures his brief existentialist-lite vignettes by the week, beginning at number 52 and counting down, ending with a chapter on his dreaded 40th birthday. Along the way, his silly midlife crisis manifests itself in experimenting with colognes, conversing with automatic hand-dryers, eating large quantities of ice cream, adopting a toy poodle, vacationing in Puerto Rico, obsessing over McDonald's McRib sandwiches and ruminating about how the local coffee jerk resembles Eugene Levy. Though mildly amusing, these activities are never as hilarious as Goldstein obviously thinks they are. There's no real penetrating comedic insight into the human condition, just a jumbled mass of existential clowning and absurdist verbiage that's more self-indulgent than self-examining. Safe, collegiate humor that makes Dave Barry look like Bill Hicks.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.