Review: PLAIN FUN & DELIGHTFUL READ!
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 4, 2014
Mark Twain's Guide to Audacious Sarcasm Volume 1, Lowell Smith has lumped together, for your careful consideration, twenty of the classic cantankerous and belligerent tales and sardonic observations of Mark Twain’s celestial career. It is a small volume of less than 100 pages which will entertain and delight fans Mark Twain.Samuel Longhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, was, perhaps, the greatest American humorist-philosopher of his age - if not of all times. He has a way of observing things both disparaging and bold. His sense of humor is incomparable, bordering on the absurd. This collection of tales is a telling portrayal of Mark Twain, one of the most prolific satirists in American literature.The tales in the volume incude: Aurelia's Unfortunate Young Man, The Personal Habits of the Siamese Twins, Frontier Justice, The Sight of A Woman, Science vs Luck, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, The Arrival of the Mesmerizer, Church Smells, Early Days in Eden, Corn-Pone Opinions, On the Decay in the Art of Lying, The Collywobbles of English Mary, How to Cure a Cold, The Private Habits of Horace Greeley, The Nobel Red Man, Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses, The War Prayer, The Last Words of Great Men, Amended Obituaries and Threescore Years and Ten.I enjoyed all the tales and had a smirk smile all throughout. But I particularly like his take on The Last Words of Great Men. After deriding several great men for their senseless “last words” he has this to say about John Quincy Adams. “Relying on his splendid abilities and his coolness in emergencies, he trusted to a happy hit at the last moment to carry him through, and what was the result? Death smote him in the House of Representatives, and he observed, casually, “This is the last of earth.” The last of earth! Why “the last of earth” when there was so much more left?”