Product Overview
So you've got these fond hopes for blissful love,professional glory, fame, and fortune. But in theback of your mind there's that nagging fear. Theman of your dreams will laugh in your face. Yourhated office rival will come up with some whizbangmarketing idea and get promoted, while you'll beasked to help out with the phones. Steven Spielberg will buy the rights to yourscreenplay, spend $40 million producing it, and the criticswill savage the film, mercilessly singling outyour work for especially contemptuous, poisonousderision. But hey, everybody fails sometime. It'sinevitable. So don't fear failure.Embrace it. In Complete And UtterFailure, Neil Steinberg joyfully explores the manyfascinating facets of failure, from pointlessfailure (a brief history of several very dumbattempts to climb Mount Everest) to product failure(Reddi-Bacon, smokeless cigarettes, and Baby Jesusdolls) to institutionalized failure (the horrifyingDickensian spectacle of the National Spelling Bee,in which 8,999,999 children out of 9,000,000 failin an excruciatingly public and humiliatingfashion). This delightful book is filled with surprisingand useless arcana--who really invented thetelephone, what turned on Isaac Newton--guaranteed tohelp you annoy people at cocktail parties. Alongthe way Steinberg meditates on his own myriadmiscues and disappointments, beginning with his failureto perform a magic trick in front of theneighborhood kids at age four (he blames Captain Kangaroo).Complete And Utter Failure is awonderfully literate, witty book that issues aringing message for our times: If at first you don'tsucceed, have a scotch and forget about it.
