Now Dave Barry, the nationally syndicated columnist whose elevator has always stopped a few floors short of the attic, has gone completely—and delightfully—bonkers. Big Trouble, his first mystery novel, reads like Elmore Leonard on laughing gas.
Barry, who has long been one of our leading students of stupidity, has a field day with the question at the heart of this caper: How could a pair of complete idiots get their hands on a nuclear weapon? Quite easily, of course. In Barry's wacky vision of South Florida, everyone has a gun, and no one, not even the hit man, knows how to use it. Though the plot ranges from antic to predictable (a chase scene, Dave?) to downright silly, it's just the pretext for what Barry does best, which is ridicule both the colorful local species of knucklehead and the hopelessly screwed-up world we all share. "It was the standard airport security operation," he writes, "which meant it appeared to have been designed to hassle law-abiding passengers just enough to reassure them, while at the same time providing virtually no protection against criminals with an IQ higher than celery."
Barry fans will be at home with many characters (no one portrays a contemporary teenager or a dumb dog better) and with the author's writing style—if that's the word for something straight out of his columns, only with more cursing and boob jokes. (Putnam, $23.95)
Bottom Line: Daft fictional debut
Eric Garcia
Beach book of the week
Leapin' lizards! Turns out dinosaurs aren't extinct after all but are roaming the earth disguised as humans. Private eye Vincent Rubio is a Velociraptor under his latex exterior, and as he makes his way from Los Angeles to New York City on a seemingly routine arson investigation, he becomes entangled in a world of murder, conspiracy and surprisingly saucy interspecies sex. Ridiculous premise? Absolutely. But first-time novelist Eric Garcia pulls it off, keeping the laughs frequent and the plot intriguing. After a few chapters, it seems downright logical to believe we're surrounded by a cast out of Jurassic Park. Huge football players? Actually, they're undersize brontosaurs in pads and helmets. Used-car salesmen? They're just a bunch of vile ankylosaurs, traveling incognito. Rubio's condescension toward humans evinces similar whimsy: "Little Neanderthals," he complains. "If another one rubs up against me, I think I may become ill."
Apart from showing off a splendidly warped imagination, Garcia provides a solid mystery. In true noir fashion, our hard-boiled hero falls for a femme fatale, suffers an addiction (to basil sprigs) and loses his temper (with humans and reptiles alike)—all the while cracking a case that whips around like a stegosaur's tail. (Villard, $23)
Bottom Line: Dino-mite detective yarn
Eddie Fisher, with David Fisher
Most people remember him as the guy who dumped Debbie Reynolds for Liz Taylor, the guy Taylor dumped for Richard Burton, or later, as Carrie Fisher's father. But once upon a time, back in the '50s, pop singer Eddie Fisher was a true superstar, though hardly "bigger than the Beatles," as the crooner boasts. His downfall, as they say in self-helpese, was that he preferred playing musical beds to making music. In Been There (written with David Fisher, no relation), the singer chronicles his sexcapades with a jaw-dropping conga line of conquests that included Ann-Margret, Marlene Dietrich, Michelle Phillips and JFK mistress Judith Exner. The only one Fisher trashes is ex-wife Reynolds, whom he calls a "self-centered, totally driven, insecure, untruthful phony." What's both surprising and charming here is that for a showbiz guy who was hooked on amphetamines (for 37 years) and ménages à trois, Fisher emerges as remarkably unjaded, still the sweet innocent from Philly. It's almost as if Pat Boone had stumbled into Frank Sinatra's life by accident. (St. Martin's, $24.95)
Bottom Line: Affable bed-and-tell memoir
>the Dalai Lama
With two current bestsellers, the Dalai Lama, 64, competes for shelf space with the likes of Judy Blume and Jesse Ventura. But the gentle author of The Art of Happiness (with Howard C. Cutler) and the recently published Ethics for the New Millennium owns a couple of distinctions no other popular writer can claim: He is the political and spiritual leader-in-exile to some 6 million Tibetans, and his mission is not to tell great stories or sell books but to spread a message of enlightenment, compassion and nonviolencé.
Sitting barefoot in a New York City hotel room, in the lotus position, the winner of the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize says that he wrote Ethics because "I felt that we are lacking the sense of greater responsibility, [what] I call global responsibility." In 1950, Chinese forces seized control of his homeland, eventually driving him into exile. On a recent trip to New York City, His Holiness drew a crowd of 40,000 in Central Park, an event cosponsored by actor Richard Gere, a longtime friend. (Other supporters include Harrison Ford and his screenwriter wife, Melissa Mathison.) But the Dalai Lama, who lives simply in Dharamsala, India, discounts his own fame. "I am just an ordinary human being," he says.
- Contributors:
- Harry Bauld,
- Jennifer Wulff,
- Victoria Balfour,
- Liz McNeil.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
