by Alfa-Betty Olsen and Marshall Efron
Foodaholics waiting for the right fad diet to come along—the Banana Split and Chocolate Donut Way to Instant Weight Loss, for example—need a few laughs. This book, which aspires to be the Non-Runners Handbook for gourmands, doesn't quite make it. The authors, best known for producing segments of PBS' old Great American Dream Machine, concoct a few good puns ("Nobody knows the truffles we've seen") and offer an ad for the "Evelyn K. Food Eating Dynamics Institute," whose graduates can eat a seven-course meal in four minutes. The send-ups are overdone, though, and are too full of lines like, "For a quick eye-opener, add four or five drops of Tabasco sauce to your Visine." It's hardly enough to distract even a semipro eater for very long. (Viking, $8.95)
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