A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race
Starred review from September 27, 2010
Eight-time Emmy-winner Stewart (America: The Book) seeks to expand his audience to aliens who might land on earth after the extinction of the human race and be puzzled over the artifacts we've left behind. "Greetings… on behalf of not only ourselves, but the entire Viacom family," he writes in this laugh-out-loud, rollicking social satire. In place of skits there are elaborate, color illustrations accompanied by captions written with his trademark deadpan humor; for instance, a photo of a mother and baby-elephant holds the caption, "advances in contraception and industrialized food production allowed modern couples to have fewer offspring, while leaving the total weight of families constant." Nothing is off-limits here, not even Benjamin Franklin, whose pithy saying "Nothing is certain but death and taxes" Stewart expands upon. The book ends with a plea to the aliens to reconstruct the human race from DNA in the hope that, with guidance from the visitors, "we could overcome the baser aspects of our nature… and give this planet the kind of caretakers it deserves," revealing the tears behind Stewart's clown. Photos.
January 1, 2011
The premise of this follow-up to Stewart and crew's best-selling America (The Book) is that the human species has expired; the purpose of it is thus to explain the now-extinct human society and history to whatever alien life forms may someday occupy Earth. Its real purpose, of course, is to satirize society for the entertainment of today's humans, especially Americans. The volume's nine chapters are devoted to "Earth," "Life," "Man," "The Life Cycle," "Society," "Commerce," "Religion," "Science," and "Culture." At its best, the book is uproariously funny, particularly when it ridicules political shibboleths or daringly tackles major world religions. At its worst, it can be a bit repetitious and too obvious in its choice of targets. VERDICT Overall, this is very entertaining. The intermittent use of obscene and scatological terms makes its target audience readers 18 and over. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 4/15/10; see the review of the audiobook, p. 50.--Ed.]--Jack W. Weigel, Ann Arbor, MI
Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
September 15, 2010
A goofy guide to our planet, with literate ironist Stewart (America: The Book, 2004) at the helm.
Continuing in the vein of America, but with a touch more detail in both words and images, Stewart and his Daily Show comrades posit that someday soon the ETs we've been hailing for all these decades will arrive--only to find us gone. And why would we not be here? Well, Stewart relegates the possible answers to an appendix that opens, "At some point between the time this was written and the time you are reading it, we perished." Some of those possibilities include ecological catastrophe, nuclear holocaust, disease, robot rebellion and rapture--the last with a generous 30:1 chance of occurring, and evidenced by an "overall 'Jesus-y' feeling in the air." To gauge by the rest of the book, however, the end may well come by dint of our souffl�-like culture's having finally become too airy and collapsed. So it is that Earth is studded with images of all those pop-culture and media figures that one would gladly leave the planet to escape, from Bernie Madoff to Nicole Kidman and J-Lo (or, if not J-Lo, a convincing simulacrum). Stewart lampoons with a broad brush rather than the scalpel with which he dissects pomposity and prevarication on his Comedy Central show. Some of his targets include creationists and school boards, fast-food restaurants, obesity, the medical bureaucracy, the Venus of Willendorf and, not connected to the aforementioned Venus, the use of the brassiere as an instrument of social control. George Bush doesn't escape, of course; but then, neither does Florence Henderson.
The legions of readers of America will know exactly what they're in for--and readers of whatever stripe, save those who are fans of McDonald's and Satan, are likely to enjoy this one.
(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)