Carl Hiaasen's second novel for young readers is filled with his usual quirky characters, environmental themes, and Florida landscapes. Hiaasen's books translate well to audio with his short sentences and dialogue-driven plots. Noah's dad is so mad that the Coral Queen casino boat is dumping raw sewage into the waters of the Florida Keys that he sinks it. When the boat is refloated and his Dad goes to jail, Noah aims to succeed where his father failed. Michael Welch's youthful voice captures that combination of confidence and bewilderment that characterizes a teenager, and his timing is impeccable.
Placing failed humor within the broader category of miscommunication and drawing on a range of conversational data, this text represents the first comprehensive study of failed humor. It provides a framework for classifying the types of failure that can occur, examines the strategies used by both speakers and hearers to avoid and manage failure, and highlights the crucial role humor plays in social identity and relationship management.
In the matter of general culture and attainments, we youngsters stood on pretty level ground. True, it was always happening that one of us would be singled out at any moment, freakishly, and without regard to his own preferences, to wrestle with the inflections of some idiotic language long rightly dead; while another, from some fancied artistic tendency which always failed to justify itself, might be told off without ...
Kinsey Millhone steps into a dead man's shoes when she is hired by attorney Lonnie Kingman to find fresh evidence against a defendent in a five-year-old murder case. David Barney had been acquitted of shooting his wife when the prosecution failed to find him guilty "beyond reasonable doubt".
In his clever second novel, the author of The Liar introduces readers to Ted Wallace: failed poet, failed theater critic, failed father and husband, shameless womanizer, and self-confessed alcoholic. When Ted invites himself to the country estate of his beautiful and mysterious godson under the pretense of writing a family history, the result is "a deliciously wicked and amusing little fable"
