You're Too Smart for This

April 3, 2006
Ball's guide to the world after "four years of all-night keggers, random hook-ups, and drone-on professors" aspires to be a career guide for all recent college grads, but the author's narrow focus on "grunt" white-collar jobs and his pedestrian contrarian worldview together conspire to muffle the few rewarding tidbits Ball sneaked into this collection of pedantic conjecture. Ball's 100 lies range from the adroit ("Good Ideas Sell Themselves") to the irrelevant ("You'll find 'the One' in a Bar"), and his discourse on each is distinctive only in stereotypes, as in, "Most guys have their priorities dictated to them by their penis and their wallet," while women, the reader learns later in the same paragraph, are interested in "finding a husband and finding a shoe sale." A slick design encased in a small, portable sized book works in lots of quotations from ancient and modern sages, but even here, Ball can't contain his gauche gushing: "We do not remember days; we remember moments," for example, is followed by Ball's rejoinder, "For men, the hope is that the moment isn't too fast." The clever design may attract some readers, but the allegedly bubble-bursting content is as groundbreaking as a yellowed Dilbert clipping.

April 17, 2006
Ball's guide to the world after "four years of all-night keggers, random hook-ups, and drone-on professors" aspires to be a career guide for all recent college grads, but the author's narrow focus on "grunt" white-collar jobs and his pedestrian contrarian worldview together conspire to muffle the few rewarding tidbits Ball sneaked into this collection of pedantic conjecture. Ball's 100 lies range from the adroit ("Good Ideas Sell Themselves") to the irrelevant ("You'll find 'the One' in a Bar"), and his discourse on each is distinctive only in stereotypes, as in, "Most guys have their priorities dictated to them by their penis and their wallet," while women, the reader learns later in the same paragraph, are interested in "finding a husband and finding a shoe sale." A slick design encased in a small, portable sized book works in lots of quotations from ancient and modern sages, but even here, Ball can't contain his gauche gushing: "We do not remember days; we remember moments," for example, is followed by Ball's rejoinder, "For men, the hope is that the moment isn't too fast." The clever design may attract some readers, but the allegedly bubble-bursting content is as groundbreaking as a yellowed Dilbert clipping.

Copyright 2006 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.