BuzzFlash Reviews

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS

BuzzFlash gets sent a lot of books, DVDs, and CDs to review for potential sale as premiums. We are only able to pick about one out of ten that we receive.

It's particularly challenging to choose humorous premiums. What is funny to one person may be boring or offensive to another.

Of course, it doesn't take much to get a laugh out of Bush material, because as Jon Stewart observered the other night, Bush provides his own unintentional comic material that you don't even have to take out of context.

But what about humor that is not political in nature? We get those books too.

Usually, we pass them up, because we are a progressive website, after all -- and we try to choose items that have something political or liberal about them.

But occasionally, we come across an exception, as we did when thumbing through a new release: "The Dead Guy Interviews: Conversations with 45 of the Most Accomplished, Notorious, and Deceased Personalities in History."

First of all, it's an ingenious idea. But it takes skill to converse with a dead famous person and still provoke laughter. And that is just what author Michael A. Stusser does.

Stusser, apparently, researched the historical figures before he "interviewed" them in seance mode, so you learn a bit in each back-and-forth. Stusser also begins each conversation with an introduction that provides some historical context.

But what makes the book so droll is that Stusser comes off as an interviewer with a style somewhere between David Frost and Merv Griffin (now deceased).

It's all very campy. Stusser plays with our preconceptions of how the historical legends might sound if interviewed, but also lets them have their own say so to speak. The banter is waggish, if sometimes punnish, but amusing throughout.

Not all creative sparks develop into successful books, but this is one of them.

It's great light, droll reading -- and you can peruse the 45 interviews one at a time or in a single sitting.

Heck, it's just fun and even a little enlightening.

Great idea with comic execution to spare.

Anyway, that's what we think, and we don't know the author from Adam.

From Penguin Press, the Publisher:

Ever wanted to ask Nostradamus for the winning lotto numbers or van Gogh about the whole ear episode? How about Napoleon about his complex, or if Frida might consider a brow wax? In The Dead Guy Interviews, journalist Michael Stusser has created forty-five interviews with some of the most famous personalities of all time, asking them probing questions about their lives, accomplishments, and what�s on their iPods. Based on his column in the acclaimed magazine mental_floss, this collection of conversations is incredibly funny, but each interview is also based on serious research, so in addition to laughing, readers actually learn real history.

The Dead Guy Interviews includes discussions with:

Alexander the Great
Beethoven
Napol�on Bonaparte
Buddha
Julius Caesar
Caligula
George Washington
Carver
Catherine the Great
Winston Churchill
Cleopatra
Confucius
Crazy Horse
Salvador Dal�
Charles Darwin
Emily Dickinson
Albert Einstein
Benjamin Franklin
Sigmund Freud
Genghis Khan
Vincent van Gogh
Henry VIII
J. Edgar Hoover
Harry Houdini
Thomas Jefferson
Joan of Arc
Robert Johnson
Frida Kahlo
Leonardo da Vinci
Abraham Lincoln
Mao Tse-tung
Karl Marx
Michelangelo
Montezuma
Mozart
Nostradamus
Edgar Allan Poe
William Shakespeare
Sun Tzu
Mae West
Oscar Wilde

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS