Reviews
The madcap brainchild of National Lampoon alums Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf, Encyclopedia Paranoiaca comprises a smartly researched, apocalyptic alphabet of exotic and everyday dangers and dreads--from bananas to fracking to sleeping on your back--that is scary, amusing, and informative., Be Afraid: Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf's Encyclopedia Paranoiaca Is Deadly to the Humor Averse., A humorous look at all of the ways, obvious and not, that humans have of doing harm to themselves. . . . The writing is witty and verbose, almost Monty Python-ish, but the science is good enough that hypochondriacs should be shielded from this book at all costs., Despite its presentation of contemporary dangers, the book is charmingly old-fashioned, with a structure and format that pay tribute to the reference books that lined the shelves of academics and nerds before the Internet reshaped the personal library. . . . Beard and Cerf write with wit in this ironic take on a world where we live in constant fear of dairy products, lemon wedges, shopping carts, and vitamins., "An amusing and cruelly accurate cultural critique, offering a "comprehensive and authoritative inventory of the perils, menaces, threats, blights, banes, and other assorted pieces of Damoclean cutlery" that hover over our collective head. . . . Beard and Cerf gleefully fan the flames of our paranoia", Encyclopedia Paranoiaca . . . [is] the only guide to super-paranoia that you'll ever need. . . .While the authors' tongues couldn't be more firmly in cheek from first entry to last, Encyclopedia Paranoiaca is written and compiled with scrupulous attention and extensive research. . . . Start worrying now., The madcap brainchild of National Lampoon alums Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf, Encyclopedia Paranoiaca comprises a smartly researched, apocalyptic alphabet of exotic and everyday dangers and dreads-from bananas to fracking to sleeping on your back-that is scary, amusing, and informative., What we think is healthful and harmless may well be deadly, or at least harmful, say the humorists. They've compiled a long list of everyday foods (cherries, carrots), clothing (skinny jeans, flip-flops) and items (drinking straws) that we can now worry about like never before. Thanks, guys., As two founders of the National Lampoon, Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf are responsible for some of the sharpest satirical humor of the past forty years. Their latest opus is a tongue-through-the-cheek encyclopedia of modern neuroses -- a work that will both confirm all your fears, then dispel them with fits of laughter., "A whimsical collection of the sometimes-scary, sometimes-silly things that threaten our modern-day lives…. As the late Gilda Radner once said, "It's always something.", As two founders of the National Lampoon, Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf are responsible for some of the sharpest satirical humor of the past forty years. Their latest opus is a tongue-through-the-cheek encyclopedia of modern neuroses -- a work that will both confirm all your fears, then dispel them with fits of laughter.
