Mere Anarchy Review

The pieces themselves span cults (religious or otherwise), the travails of a little-known character actor with delusions of grandeur, the invention and sale of clothing with unusual properties,  an increasingly vitriolic series of letters from the director of a film camp and the father of a successful young student, a nanny tell-all book, a Maltese Falcon mystery of a giant white truffle, the perils of home remodeling, a history of the philosophy of dieting and good eating, and Mickey Mouse's testimony at a Disney trial.

To offer a few quotes from the stories:

From "On a Bad Day You Can See Forever"(the home remodeling story):  "In the end I settled on a suspiciously sensible estimate originating from the office of one Max Arbogast, alias Chic Arbogast, alias Specs Arbogast-a waxy little ectomorph with the glinting eyes of a claim jumper in a Republic western."

From "Attention Geniuses:  Cash Only":  "Jogging along Fifth Avenue last summer as part of a fitness program designed to reduce my life expectancy to that of a nineteenth-century coal miner, I paused at the outdoor café of the Stanhope Hotel to renovate my flagging respiratory system with a chilled screwdriver."

From "Glory Hallelujah, Sold!":  "When the ratings came out and The Dancing Ombudsman got a minus thirty-four, there was some talk at Nielsen that people who accidentally tuned in the show then put their eyes out like Oedipus."

These are only a few of the sentences that made me laugh as I read Allen's pieces.  Mere Anarchy is a wonderful collection of short humor and I easily recommend it to anyone who enjoys reading humor or who appreciates the way a writer strings together words to complete his sentences.  This was a delightful and easy read.