Title: Dave Barry In Cyberspace
Author: Dave Barry
Published: 1996 by Crown Publishers
ISBN: 0-517-59575-3

Normally I love Dave Barry but this book left me lacking. The humor seems forced and it's severly out of date. Granted, part of that is my fault for not having read it earlier but I don't exactly have a time machine and neither do you. In the end, I didn't finish even half the book and felt a bit let down.

There are a number of bright spots in the book however. I particularly enjoyed this abuse of analogy:

I could go on and on, listing the ways in which computers enrich our lives. But I've made my point, which is that we live in the Computer Age, and you need to get with the program. You are standing in the airport terminal of life, and the jet plane of the 21st century is about to take off. You must make a choice: Do you remain in the terminal, eating the stale vending-machine food of outmoded thinking? Or do you get on the plane and soar into the stratosphere of computerization, swept along by the jet stream of evolving technology, enjoying the in-flight snack of virtually unlimited information access, secure in the knowledge that if you encounter the turbulence of rapid change, you are holding, in this book, the barf bag of expert guidance?


Barry includes a section devoted to his favorite websites, including toilet humor and Swedish swear words. Unfortunately many of the sites are no longer on the internet. And it's a little bit humorous, at least to me, that in some places he went to all the effort of adding "index.html" to the URL when it is redundant in most cases. Ok, so I've just proved that I don't deserve to write a humor book.

I looked through and tried fo find a quote that seemed to exemplify the general lack of ROTFL quality humor, but nothing really stood out. It was more an overall feeling I guess. Or perhaps I'm not very observant. I suppose I could have quoted the crude sexual humor which turned me off but that's not really my style.

In summary, I would recommend looking to other books by Dave Barry if you've got a craving for some humor. Dave Barry Does Japan was pretty good. If you've read them all or your library is fresh out, I suppose it will do. Just don't get your hopes up.