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Fly Fishing with Darth Vader: And Other Adventures with Evangelical Wrestlers, Political Hitmen, and Jewish Cowboys |  | Author: Matt Labash
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Category: Book
List Price: $25.99
Buy New: $6.22
as of 7/30/2010 09:18 CDT details
You Save: $19.77 (76%)
New (37) Used (17) from $1.59
Seller: sweetgingert
Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 157500
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 336
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.4
ISBN: 1439159971
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.9
EAN: 9781439159972
ASIN: 1439159971
Publication Date: February 9, 2010
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Matt Labash has regularly regaled us with his incisive wit, self-deprecation, and provocative candor. Blessed with his uncanny ability for extracting comic humanity from even the wariest politicians, con artists, and rogues, as well as for shedding light on the darkest corners of our American experience, Labash is a singular talent, and Fly Fishing with Darth Vader for the first time assembles his best feature writing, showcasing the true breadth of his work.Labash's masterful profiles of the outsized and outrageous characters who populate America's murky periphery -- Pirate Kingfish Governor Edwin Edwards, Recovering Crackhead Mayor Marion Barry, Dirty Trickster Roger Stone -- are published alongside devastating pieces on the dying cities of our nation such as Detroit and New Orleans. His hilarious tirades on the health hazards of Facebook and the virtues of dodgeball seamlessly segue into stories celebrating such joyous but overlooked pockets of American culture as old-timey gospel and the musicians of the Big Easy's Second Line. He chronicles Al Sharpton's eating habits on the campaign trail, fishes the Snake River with Dick Cheney, and investigates the "great white waste of time" that is our neighbor to the north. Full of his signature insight and humor and marked by Labash's trenchant grasp of the American scoundrel, Fly Fishing with Darth Vader is the long-awaited debut collection by one of the funniest and most gifted journalists writing today, sure to be cherished and talked about for years to come.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 7
 Weekly Standard Magazine articles? February 6, 2010
Lee Phelps (Tampa, Florida)
18 out of 25 found this review helpful
Great title, I have not bought the book because I have been a regular reader of the Weekly Standard and I remember most of the people mentioned in the preview being profiled in the magazine.If you are a regular reader I doubt you will find anything new. HOWEVER if aren't then pick this book up and be ready to laugh your head off. Great writing, funny and insightful.
Mudcat, et al February 23, 2010
Roland Lazenby
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
I spend a fair amount of time hanging out with Dave "Mudcat" Saunders, and Labash nails that profile while finding humor in all the man's complexities. He does a tour of politic's characters. He's found the right people, and Labash knows how to render them, taking them right down to the wood. It's a great read.
Roland Lazenby
author of Jerry West, The Life And Legend Of A Basketball Icon
Good to the Last Page April 9, 2010
Loyd E. Eskildson (Phoenix, AZ.)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Humor, scandal, and/or empathy writers usually wear thin before the third chapter - their talent isn't that good, or the material is a badly dated collection of material most no longer have any interest n. Not so with Matt Labash - he's good to the last page, even though the material is a wee bit old.
Labash begins with "Detroit - The City where Sirens Never Sleep," and tells of schools that haven't ordered new textbooks in 19 years and the lowest high school graduation rate of any large district (24.9%), a city with half the population of 1950 and an estimated 60,000 vacant houses that once gave its key to the city to Saddam Hussein. Where 47% of adults are functionally illiterate, the local football team was 0-14, and the populace has been honored as America's 'fattest city,' and its 'sexual disease capital.' The sirens never stop - driven by arson in abandoned homes, factories; its abandoned train station may be next. At the same time, Labash also visits with a homeless person living under a bridge, and possessing more common sense than most of those driving overhead.
The title, "Fly Fishing with Darth Vader" obviously refers to V.P. Cheney. Expecting a nasty hit piece, I instead found a delightful story of another side of Mr. Cheney - an ordinary guy with a strong interest in fly-fishing and those who do it. It's all 'catch and release' - even the trout come out good, and I can't wait to see more the great Wyoming scenery described by Labash as he fly-fishes with the V.P.
Other treats include the life of an evangelical wrestler, and executives and managers acting like kids in an effort to keep employees happy so they, in turn, keep customers happy. It's "The Office" all day long, an antidote to dour-faced efficiency experts and sophomoric business guru cliches - all backed up by 'research' and stories told by funsultants.
In between, Labash also writes with empathy of his visits with a 9/11 widow.
Labash is truly a multi-faceted writer, a man with a wide range of talents.
A Smorgasbord of Tasty Delicacies March 8, 2010
James R. Holland (Boston, MA)
This is a collection of twenty-three of Mr. Labash's previously published magazine articles from "The Weekly Standard" and "Salon." The reader has his or her choice about whether to sample humorous entrees of such items as "Detroit: The City Where the Sirens Never Sleep", "Yippie Kay Oy Vey: Kinky Friedman Runs fro Governor", "Arnold Uber Alles: The Wild, Final Days of the Schwarzenegger Campaign", "Trump on the Stump", "Rev Gotta Eat: Al Sharpton's Hungry for a Place at the Table, " or "Fly Fishing With Darth Vader."
Naturally, after looking over the entire buffet, I went directly to the items that seemed to wet my appetite the most--the desserts. I chose two spicy dishes of tarts and cheesecake appropriately entitled "Among the Pornographers."
"This odd assemblage has gathered for a four-day World Pornography Conference in the Universal Sheraton, amid the strip-mall sprawl of the San Fernando Valley, porn production capital of the world. The meeting is sponsored by the Center for Sex Research at California State University, Northridge--a sort of Left Coast Kinsey Institute."
More than 500 "academics--sociologists, anthropologists, sexologists, film and gender studies teachers, and interdisciplinary seekers from across the country--are attending under the guise of studying `Eroticism and the First Amendment.' But the real aim is simpler: to celebrate pornography." The place is awash in exotic porn stars and samples of the world of porn. The various college types hope to vastly improve their own college or university's collection of porn. The Northridge Center is hoping "to get more [Pornography] deposits from the industry--so we'll have the biggest porn collection in the country."
"Academics, it seems, are the only people who can de-eroticize sex more completely than pornographers."
This reprint of the satirical magazine article was a laugh, or at least a chuckle riot. Having wet my appetite I returned to the buffet table and decided to taste a dish labeled "Down with Facebook!" This article points out that "'Time' magazine recently declared Facebook more popular than porn. But who are they kidding? Facebook is porn. With porn, you watch other people take off their clothes and abase themselves in public. On Facebook, where there's technically an anti-nudity policy (thus defeating the whole purpose of the Internet), you get to figuratively do the same." The author then proceeds to build a case against the social networks as a very dangerous form of suicide for too many of its "Facetards." For the addicted, there is nothing that they won't post on their Facebook page. It's costing many of them jobs as more and more employers check the Facebook pages of prospective employees.
Beginning to sate my appetite, I decided to have a main dish of "The Wild, Final Days of the Schwarzenegger Campaign." After stuffing myself on beefcake enhanced with steroids I then returned to the smorgasbord to enjoy the headliner dish from the front of the book's cover--fresh 22-inch long Mountain trout caught in Wyoming by Darth Vader, the nickname for Vice President Dick Cheney.
Labash hoped to use his mutual love of fly fishing to discover how the legendary closed mouth and secretive Vice-President reached his political decisions. He got his day long, eight-hour interview while floating lazily along the river with Cheney, who catches twenty-two fish to his two, but all he discovered is that Cheney is not only an expert fly fisherman who gets really excited about the sport, but that he loves the natural beauty of the Snake River and the wilds of Wyoming, Idaho and other beautiful and inaccessible fishing havens around the planet. Surprisingly, Labash allows his readers to realize that Dick Cheney would be the very last person in the world who would wish to despoil the environment.
On one fly fishing trip a "young man who worked for the Idaho Fish and Game" jumped out of the bushes and checked to see if everyone had their fishing license. Even though he was reading Dick Cheney's license while he looked him directly in the face, he failed to recognize the Vice-President. Labash didn't mention whether the clueless ranger eventually put two and two together and made the connection when he checked the licenses of the flotilla of trailer boats following Cheney that were packed with wetsuit clad Navy Seals and a small army of heavily armed secret service agents. Who knows he probably wanted to see their hunting and fishing licenses?
Finally, stuffed with broiled Snake River cutthroat trout, I decided to stop eating even though some of the desserts at the end of buffet still looked particularly inviting. All the glassy eyed professors were still ogling the porn star tarts and wanting to pose for photos with their arms around them.
The buyers of this humorous collection of yummy, fluffy soul food book won't be disappointed. Even "Rev Gotta Eat!" Matt Labash is like another Dave Barry or P.J. O'Rourke and the latter added a testimonial to the book that is printed on the cover. "Matt Labash's Book Rocks. He is Hunter S. Thompson on Acid." Hum I thought; I didn't see any acid on either the buffet table or at the bar. I must have been distracted with my own ogling of the beautiful porn tartists and all the intoxicating, luscious and surgically enhanced cheesecake.
 A fun ride February 26, 2010
Sam (Detroit)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
The book is a collection of long form journalism stories most of which were originally written for the Weekly Standard. Despite what you might think though if that was your only knowledge the book is 1. Not really a political book in any partisan sense and 2. Quite edgy. The book starts with a portrait of Detroit, that is compelling but perhaps uneccesarilly hopeless and ends with a piece on New Orleans which was my favorite in between are a number of pieces on political eccentrics including Donald Trump, Al Sharpton, Jim Traficant, Marian Berry and fringe California gubernatorial and presedential candidates. Sprinkled in between are stories about topics ranging from a pseudo-academic porn convention, dodgeball, facebook, a cd collection of spirituals, and a dailykos bloggers convention in Vegas. Throughout Labash is funny and insightful. Occasionally he does veer towards being too cynical such as in the piece about the Kos convention, though it should be noted that his objections had more to do with the form of communication on Kos and not the content perse.
A WSJ article I read compared Labash to Tom Wolfe or Hunter Thompson. I can't speak for the Thompson, comparison but the Wolfe comparison while not completely off base is a little misleading. Most of Labash's works have a much more overtly comedic tone to them Wolfe's writings, think of it as being like Joel Stein doing long form journalism.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 7
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