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Dawn of the Dumb: Dispatches from the Idiotic Frontline by: Charlie Brooker List Price: £9.99 City Travel Guides Price: £5.77 You Save: £4.22 (42%)Prices subject to change. |
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Binding: Paperback EAN: 9780571238415 ISBN: 0571238416 Label: Faber and Faber Manufacturer: Faber and Faber Number Of Pages: 368 Publication Date: November 01, 2007 Publisher: Faber and Faber Studio: Faber and Faber Sales Rank: 460 Related Items:
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Editorial Review: Synopsis: Polite, pensive, mature, reserved ...Charlie Brooker is none of these things and less. Rude, unhinged, outrageous, and above all funny, "Dawn of the Dumb" is essential reading for anyone with a brain and a spinal cord. And hands for turning the pages. Picking up where his hilarious "Screen Burn" left off, "Dawn of the Dumb" collects the best of Charlie Brooker's recent TV writing, together with uproarious spleen-venting diatribes on a range of non-televisual subjects - tackling everything from David Cameron to human hair. Customer Reviews
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 Rating: - Charlie Brooker is right about everythingThis is a collection of Charlie Brooker's newspaper articles and TV reviews from 2004 to 2007. About half is television reviews, the other half is what I'd hesitantly call 'lifestyle' which can cover anything from Facebook to haircuts to Banksy. Brooker is the best ascerbic angry writer and reviewer there is. Maintaining an almost constant level of fury throughout, underneath the sarcasm and the comedic threats of violence are reams of very interesting points about the TV we watch and the culture we're a part of it. To really appreciate some of the TV reviews you'll be better off if you do have an idea how Big Brother works, or who Gillian McKeith is, and if you do know those things but you wish you didn't, then even ... Read More: Rating:  - Spider Jerusalem meets Oliver Kalkofe ... the first one being the "Transmetropolitan" comic series cynic' journalist/hero, the second being a German comedian feared and loved for his witty comments on German TV rubbish. Too obscure? That's exactly my problem with Brooker's book: Not coming from the UK, I haven't heard of half of the TV shows he refers to, and hardly ever bothered to watch the (usually: continental version of the) other half. But brainless idiocy is a world-wide phenomenon - the mindless TV formats and media goons are indeed so generic that it doesn't really matter. Throughout most of the book, the author is busy shouting back at TV shows that would insult a six-year-old's intelligence and sense of taste. Funny, witty, and aimed at a deserving ... Read More: Rating: - Puerile, mordant, geniusPoor old Charlie Brooker. He's a man out of time, trapped in a world he understands little and likes even less. Here is an essentially decent, liberal man who feels the need to defenestrate himself for our reading pleasure each week in the dear ol' Grauniad. Reading this book is really like reading a potted social history of recent times, or at least for most of this book the televisual part of it. CB takes random and withering potshots at most of the deserving targets of our pathetic adulterated culture. Thankfully, most of the time, he manages to score direct hits. And how. This book is not really to be read cover to cover, instead to be dipped in and out of because these columns were produced to be satisfying little gobbets; ... Read More: Rating: - The Best Stand-Up Comic You Never SawMany books claim to be laugh-out-loud funny. This is the Real Deal. I'm just glad I've never read it in public as there were moments when I genuinely couldn't get my breath. I've not been a Brooker fan long (I only discovered Screen Wipe during the last series, which wasn't that long ago) but, on the strength of this material, I'm now a fully-fledged convert to his brand of excoriating, sardonic, not to mention laugh-your-lungs-up-funny bile. He's like the best stand-up comic you never saw - imagine Bill Hicks doing 'Harry Hill's TV Burp'. The weaker chapters are merely inspired but there are definitely pieces that are touching genius, if only for the completely original thought processes that Brooker goes through. These are most evident in the non-TV related ... Read More: Rating: - Scabrous and HilariousDawn of the Dumb, the latest collection of Charlie Brooker's writing from the Guardian and the Observer confirms his position of the master of the celebrity insult. Only a man who can describe racing pundit John McCririck as lookign like a partially shaved womble deserves to be awarded that status, and that man is Brooker. His talents don't end pouring scorn on Z-list 'celebs' (and A-Y List ones too if they deserve it). If you like your humour blacker than pitch, cynical and served with a side order of general loathing he is also your man. With some of his columns causing uncontrolled public chuckling, Brooker is a genuinely funny writer about a wide variety of subjects (although if you have no interest in contemporary popular culture and specifically ... Read More: |
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