Download or read book Wit s End What Wit Is How It Works and Why We Need It written by James Geary and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Entertaining, illuminating, and entirely unique, Wit’s End “convey[s] the power of wit to refresh the mind” (Henry Hitchings, Wall Street Journal). In “this inventive and playful book” (Tom Beer, Newsday), James Geary explores every facet of wittiness, from its role in innovation to why puns are the highest form of wit. Adopting a different style for each chapter—from dramatic dialogue to sermon, heroic couplets to a barroom monologue—Geary embodies wit in all its forms. Wit’s End agilely balances psychology, folktale, visual art, and literary history with lighthearted humor and acute insight, demonstrating that wit and wisdom are really the same thing.

Download or read book At Wit s End written by Erma Bombeck and published by Fawcett. This book was released on 2011-02-02 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "America's irrepressible doyenne of domestic satire." THE BOSTON GLOBE Madcap, bittersweet humor in classic Erma Bombeck-style. You'll laugh until it hurts and love it! "Any mother with half a skull knows that when Daddy's little boy becomes Mommy's little boy, the kid is so wet, he's treading water. What do you mean you're a participle in the school play and you need a costume? Those rotten kids. If only they'd let me wake up in my own way. Why do they have to line up along my bed and stare at me like Moby Dick just washed up onto a beach somewhere?"

Download or read book The Case of the Imaginary Detective written by Karen Joy Fowler and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2015-03-12 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rima Lanisell has a habit of losing things - car keys, sunglasses, lovers, family members. Following the death of Rima's father, she goes to stay with her godmother Addison, a wildly successful, albeit eccentric, mystery writer. Addison's beach house seems the place to make sense of Rima's loss, yet she is soon caught up in a mystery of her own. Who stole a small and highly valuable object from Addison's kitchen? Why is Rima corresponding with an obsessive fan, using someone else's family name? Most importantly: what exactly was the relationship between Addison and Rima's father, and why did Addison name a murderer after him in one of her novels? A funny, sad and wise literary mystery from the author of The Jane Austen Book Club.

Download or read book Wit s End written by Sue Scheff and published by Health Communications, Inc.. This book was released on 2008-04-29 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sue Scheff turned to a therapeutic boarding school for solutions to her out-of-control teenage daughters behavior problems. Wits End is the story of how her attempt at saving her troubled teen turned into a nightmare and includes the program that she now implements to consult other parents who are at wits end through her national organization Parents Universal Resource Experts (PURE).

Download or read book Wit s End written by Karen Joy Fowler and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-04-01 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “delightful and eccentric new tale”(The Boston Globe) from the bestselling author of The Jane Austen Book Club subverts the whodunit and gives us a thoroughly modern meta-mystery with wit, warmth, and heart. At loose ends and weary from her recent losses—the deaths of an inventive if at times irritating father and her beloved brother—Rima Lansill comes to Wit's End, the home of her legendary godmother, bestselling mystery writer Addison Early, to regroup...and in search of answers. For starters, why did Addison name one of her characters—a murderer—after Rima's father? But Addison is secretive and feisty, so consumed with protecting her famous fictional detective, Maxwell Lane, from the vagaries of the Internet rumor that she has writer's block. As one woman searches for truth, the other struggles to control the reality of her fiction. Rima soon becomes enmeshed in Addison's household of eccentrics: a formerly alcoholic cook and her irksome son, two quirky dog-walkers, a mysterious stalker, the tiny characters that populate Addison's dollhouse crime-scene replicas, and even Maxwell Lane himself. But, wrapped up in a mystery that may or may not be of her own creation, Rima discovers to her surprise that the ultimate solution to this puzzle is the new family she has found at the house called Wit's End. Here, Karen Joy Fowler delivers top-notch storytelling—creating characters both oddball and endearing in a voice that is utterly and memorably her own—in this clever, playful novel about finally allowing oneself to grow up-with a dash of mystery thrown in.

Download or read book Reporting at Wit s End written by St. Clair McKelway and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-07-22 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Why does A. J. Liebling remain a vibrant role model for writers while the superb, prolific St. Clair McKelway has been sorely forgotten?" James Wolcott asked this question in a recent review of the Complete New Yorker on DVD. Anyone who has read a single paragraph of McKelway's work would struggle to provide an answer. His articles for the New Yorker were defined by their clean language and incomporable wit, by his love of New York's rough edges and his affection for the working man (whether that work was come by honestly or not). Like Joseph Mitchell and A. J. Liebling, McKelway combined the unflagging curiosity of a great reporter with the narrative flair of a master storyteller. William Shawn, the magazine's long-time editor, described him as a writer with the "lightest of light touches." His style is so striking, Shawn went on to say, that "it was too odd to be imitated." The pieces collected here are drawn from two of McKelway's books--True Tales from the Annals of Crime and Rascality (1951) and The Big Little Man from Brooklyn (1969). His subjects are the small players who in their particulars defined life in New York during the 36 years McKelway wrote: the junkmen, boxing cornermen, counterfeiters, con artists, fire marshals, priests, and beat cops and detectives. The "rascals." An amazing portrait of a long forgotten New York by the reporter who helped establish and utterly defined New Yorker "fact writing," Untitled Collection is long overdue celebration of a truly gifted writer.

Download or read book At Wit s End written by Jeff Jay and published by Hazelden Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents guidance and encouragement for family members on ways to help loved ones suffering from both psychiatric and addictive disorders.

Download or read book The Best of Wits End written by Harold J. Ellner M.D. and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2008-11-11 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Who knew doctors could be flat-out funny? In fact, who knew they were so smart? For several decades, the last page of Diversion, the leisure magazine for physicians, held a monthly contest for doctors. Their best is offered in this volume. Could Julius Caesar have been an orthopedist (I came, I saw (ed), I conquered”)? Would our litigious society cause MDs to experience flashes of barristopratfallophilia? When utilization review comes to Washington, one physician envisions government posts such as Joint Sheaves of Chaff. Might a sports team be known as The Heimlichs (they never choke under pressure), or The Sphincters (Nothing gets by them, and they have the best tight end in the business.) Another posits that a GI series is a military baseball competition. And somewhere in this great country there is – or certainly should be – a podiatrist named Mehta Tarsal. The surface has just been abraded.

Download or read book At Our Wits End written by Edward Dutton and published by Andrews UK Limited. This book was released on 2018-12-20 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We are becoming less intelligent. This is the shocking yet fascinating message of At Our Wits' End. The authors take us on a journey through the growing body of evidence that we are significantly less intelligent now than we were a hundred years ago. The research proving this is, at once, profoundly thought-provoking, highly controversial, and it's currently only read by academics. But the authors are passionate that it cannot remain ensconced in the ivory tower any longer. With At Our Wits' End, they present the first ever popular scientific book on this crucially important issue. They prove that intelligence — which is strongly genetic — was increasing up until the breakthrough of the Industrial Revolution, because we were subject to the rigors of Darwinian Selection, meaning that lots of surviving children was the preserve of the cleverest. But since then, they show, intelligence has gone into rapid decline, because large families are increasingly the preserve of the least intelligent. The book explores how this change has occurred and, crucially, what its consequences will be for the future. Can we find a way of reversing the decline of our IQ? Or will we witness the collapse of civilization and the rise of a new Dark Age?

Download or read book At Wits End written by Kirsten Weiss and published by misterio press. This book was released on 2020-04-06 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A laugh-out-loud mystery that’s out of this world… Men in Black. Conspiracy-crazed old ladies. Can a clueless innkeeper catch a killer … and stick to her carefully crafted schedule? When control-freak Susan Witsend inherits her grandmother’s UFO-themed B&B, she’s ready to put her organizational skills to the test. She knows she can make the B&B work, even if there is a faux-UFO in the roof. After all, what’s not to love about a Victorian nestled in the high Sierra foothills? But none of her carefully crafted policies and procedures can prepare her for a corpse in room seven – the body of her small-town sheriff’s ex-husband. Good thing Susan has her own plans to solve the crime. Is there a government conspiracy afoot? Or is the murder a simple case of small-town vengeance? Susan must keep all her wits about her. Because the killer isn’t finished, and if she isn’t careful, her fate may be written in the stars… At Wits' End is book one in the Wits' End mystery series. Get cozy and beam up this hilarious mystery today!

Download or read book Wit s End written by James R. Gaines and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P. This book was released on 1977 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book At Wit s End written by Louis Kaplan and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CHOICE: OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE A scholarly and thought-provoking work that places Jewish humor at the center of a discourse about Jewish and German relations through most of the twentieth century. At Wit’s End explores the fascinating discourse on Jewish wit in the twentieth century when the Jewish joke became the subject of serious humanistic inquiry and inserted itself into the cultural and political debates among Germans and Jews against the ideologically charged backdrop of anti-Semitism, the Jewish question, and the Holocaust. The first in-depth study to explore the Jewish joke as a crucial rhetorical figure in larger cultural debates in Germany, author Louis Kaplan presents an engrossing and lucid work of scholarship that examines how “der jüdische Witz” (referring to both Jewish wit and jokes) was utilized differently in a number of texts, from the Weimar Republic to the rise of National Socialism, and how it was re-introduced into the public sphere after the Holocaust with the controversial publication of Salcia Landmann’s collection of Jewish jokes in the reparations era (Wiedergutmachung). Kaplan reviews the claims made about the Jewish joke and its provocative laughter by notable writers from a variety of ideological perspectives, demonstrating how their reflections on this complex cultural trope enable a better understanding of German–Jewish intercultural relations and their eventual breakdown in the Third Reich. He also illustrates how selfcritical and self-ironic Jewish Witz maintained a fraught and ambivalent relationship with anti-Semitism. In reviewing this critical and traumatic moment in modern German–Jewish history through the deadly discourse on the Jewish joke, At Wit’s End includes chapters on the virulent Austrian anti-Semitic racial theorist Arthur Trebitsch, the Nazi racial propagandist Siegfried Kadner, the German Marxist cultural historian Eduard Fuchs, the Jewish diasporic historian Erich Kahler, and the Jewish cabaret impresario Kurt Robitschek, among others. Shedding new light on anti-Semitism and on the Jewish question leading up to the Holocaust, At Wit’s End provides readers with a unique perspective by which to gain important insights about this crucial historical period that reverberates into the present day, when potentially offensive humor coupled with a toxic political climate and xenophobia can have deadly consequences.

Download or read book Surviving the Applewhites written by Stephanie S. Tolan and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The side-splittingly funny Newbery Honor Book about a rebellious boy who is sent to a home-schooling program run by one family—the creative, kooky, loud, and loving Applewhites! Jake Semple is notorious. Rumor has it he managed to get kicked out of every school in Rhode Island, and actually burned the last one down to the ground. Only one place will take him now, and that's a home school run by the Applewhites, a chaotic and hilarious family of artists: poet Lucille, theater director Randolph, dancer Cordelia, and dreamy Destiny. The only one who doesn't fit the Applewhite mold is E.D.—a smart, sensible girl who immediately clashes with the defiant Jake. Jake thinks surviving this new school will be a breeze . . . but is he really as tough or as bad as he seems?

Download or read book Applewhites at Wit s End written by Stephanie S. Tolan and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-05-08 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jack Semple and E.D. Applewhite are back, in this middle-grade sequel to Stephanie S. Tolan’s Newbery Honor Book Surviving the Applewhites. Teenager E.D., the not so artistic, not at all eccentric member of the unconventional Applewhite clan, can't believe the plan her father has hatched to save the family from financial disaster. He’s decided to transform their rural North Carolina farm into a summer camp for creative children. Soon the farm is packed with temperamental artists, out-of-control campers, and an even more out-of-control goat. It's all a little too much for structure-loving E.D., even before threatening notes begin appearing in the family mailbox. Together with Jake Semple--the boy who survived his first year in the Applewhites' home school—she's determined to save the camp and the family from disaster. Like Carl Hiassan’s Chomp, Applewhites at Wit's End combines outrageous humor and the frustrations and joys of being part of a family.

Download or read book The Best of Bombeck written by Erma Bombeck and published by BBS Publishing Corporation. This book was released on 1987 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A treasury of works by America's favorite humorist.

Download or read book Elements of Wit written by Benjamin Errett and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Got wit? We’ve all been in that situation where we need to say something clever, but innocuous; smart enough to show some intelligence, without showing off; something funny, but not a joke. What we need in that moment is wit—that sparkling combination of charm, humor, confidence, and most of all, the right words at the right time. Elements of Wit is an engaging book that brings together the greatest wits of our time, and previous ones from Oscar Wilde to Nora Ephron, Winston Churchill to Christopher Hitchens, Mae West to Louis CK, and many in between. With chapters covering the essential ingredients of wit, this primer sheds light on how anyone—introverts, extroverts, wallflowers, and bon vivants—can find the right zinger, quip, parry, or retort…or at least be a little bit more interesting.

Download or read book Erma Bombeck written by Allison Engel and published by Samuel French, Incorporated. This book was released on 2016 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "From the writers of the smash hit Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins comes a comic look at one of our country's most beloved voices. Erma Bombeck captured the frustrations of her generation by asking, "If life is a bowl of cherries, what am I doing in the pits?" Discover the story behind America's most beloved humorist who championed women's lives with wit that sprang from the most unexpected place of all - the truth."