I’ll come right out and say it. I wish I had enjoyed this more.

I’m a longtime Dave Barry fan. I’ve read several of his books, including a few of his fiction titles, and I’ve genuinely enjoyed them. So I expected his memoir to be packed with laughs from start to finish. There were definitely funny moments, but a large portion of the book consisted of Barry reading excerpts from his old newspaper columns. That made it feel like I was revisiting material I had already read.

He did include some background stories behind those columns, and I found parts of the book genuinely intriguing. The sections about his childhood and his parents were especially compelling and added a layer of seriousness I hadn’t expected but appreciated. I also had no idea he was in a literary rock band with Stephen King, which was a delightful surprise. There were LOL moments scattered throughout, but I kept hoping for more fresh content and deeper insights into his life. Rather, much of the book focused on work that longtime fans are already familiar with.

I listened to the audiobook, which Barry narrated himself. That was a highlight. His voice and delivery made it feel like a personal conversation.

In the end, it’s his story to tell, and he’s earned the right to tell it his way. I just couldn’t help wishing for more personal revelations and fewer recaps of his well-known work.

Thank you @netgalley and @Simonbooks for the eARC, which I have read and reviewed honestly and voluntarily.

Dave Barry is a very talented, good man, who manages to write social commentary, sometimes critical, while offending virtually no one. I have followed his career since the sixties when his column appeared in the Chicago Tribune Sunday magazine and find him as relevant and hysterical today as I did back then.

I'm glad NetGalley knew me well enough to send me a comp copy... just sorry it took me so long to read it!

Dave Barry has made a career out of writing books, essays, and opinion pieces based on experiences in his real life, but until now, he had not published a memoir. In "Class Clown," the Pulitzer Prize winner largely focuses on his upbringing and career. For a younger reader like myself, Barry's perspectives on how comedy, journalism, and society have changed over his lifetime are interesting and insightful. "Class Clown" offers some career highlights and revisits some of the writer's favorite columns, all with Barry's trademark sarcasm and wit. At several points, I laughed out loud.

While I'm not a die-hard Barry fan/reader, I do find him funny, and this was a fun and interesting read, while not diving too deeply into traditional "memoir" territory. He largely leaves his relationships with romantic partners and children out, choosing to keep his private life private in that regard. But with 77 years of life experience, there's still plenty of stories to tell and also some fun photos sprinkled throughout. There are some very warm and touching stories focusing on family, friends, and colleagues, displaying Barry's true range as a writer and why he is so successful- his ability to connect on a human level and his meticulous focus on putting together just the right words. The book even manages to end on a hopeful and uplifting note, which feels rare in the current climate.

Reading "Class Clown" is like sitting down for stories from your most interesting uncle. Fans of Barry's are sure to enjoy this charming trip down memory lane, and even casual fans or fans of comedy will surely enjoy the time spent.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the advanced read.

4.5 stars

Dave Barry (b. 1947) is a prize-winning American writer and journalist who wrote a nationally syndicated humor column for the Miami Herald from 1983 to 2005. Barry has also penned books of humor and satire as well as comic novels and children's novels. In this memoir, Barry takes us from his childhood to the present, giving us a glimpse of his home life, education, employment, hobbies, and more. This is a fun book suffused with laughs.

Barry grew up in Armonk, New York, which at that time was a village of about 2,000 people. Dave's father was a beloved Presbyterian minister whom people trusted, confided in, and counted on; and Dave's mother was a busy suburban housewife raising four children. Both Dave's parents liked to laugh and have a good time, but Dave's wit comes from his mom, who had a wicked sense of humor.

Barry had a happy childhood in a typical suburban atmosphere where his parents hosted or attended cocktail parties every weekend. Later on, Barry's father developed a serious alcohol problem and his mother - who suffered from depression - committed suicide. Dave tried to help both his parents, and is open about his efforts and regrets.

Harking back to his youth, Barry writes about attending Wampus Elementary School in the 1950s, during the nuclear arms race. Dave recalls assembling a survival kit with, among other things two Hershey bars. He writes, "I apparently thought [the chocolate bars] would provide me with vital sustenance in the radioactive hellscape that Armonk would be reduced to following an exchange of nuclear missiles with the Russians."

Writing about his youth, Dave includes anecdotes about the Davy Crockett fad; the first polio vaccines; Sputnik starting the space race; his awkward first date, with his mom driving; the Twist craze; attending the 1963 March on Washington and seeing Martin Luther King; being elected 'Class Clown' in high school and much more.

After high school, Barry went to Haverford College in Philadelphia, where he majored in English and played in a rock band. Barry writes a good deal about the band's gigs, noting, "Frat parties were the trickiest, especially when the brothers decided they wanted to grab our microphones and sing, or worse, play our instruments. More than once I found myself wrestling some drunk bro mid-song for possession of my guitar."

At Haverford College Barry learned a smattering of literature, wrote the occasional humor column for the student newspaper, and got experience in real journalism as an intern at the 'Congressional Quarterly' in Washington, DC. After college Barry became a reporter for a Philadelphia paper called the 'Daily Local News', and writes, "I never knew for sure what I'd be doing when I got to work, where I'd be sent that day - maybe to a fire, and maybe to a speech by John Kenneth Galbraith. I covered shootings, parades, charity canoe races, a smokestack demolition, the grand opening of a regional sewage treatment facility, and a campaign stop by presidential candidate George McGovern."

Barry goes on to say, "The Daily Local News is where I learned journalism....and where I started regularly doing the thing that eventually changed my life: writing humor columns." In a funny piece about surviving in the wilderness, Barry wrote, "If you or one of your companions gets bit by a snake, don't panic. Take a razor blade and make a cut shaped like an 'X,' then suck out all the blood. Snakes just hate this, and after you've done it to them one or two times, they stop biting people altogether."

From the 'Daily Local News' Barry went on to various other jobs, one of which was teaching effective writing to businesspeople. For this tough crowd, Barry used a lot of humor: jokes about dangling participles and jokes mocking the stilted language people use in business correspondence ('Enclosed please find the enclosed enclosure.')

During this time Barry also wrote freelance humor columns, which eventually landed him a job with the Miami Herald's Sunday Magazine, 'Tropic', where he worked for over two decades. Barry includes numerous excerpts from his freelance columns. Here are two passages:

"Let's look at the positive side of nuclear war. One big plus is that the Postal Service says it has a plan to deliver mail after the war, which is considerably more than it is doing now."

"My family had a system for car travel. My father would drive; my mother would periodically offer to drive, knowing my father would not let her drive unless he went blind in both eyes and lapsed into a coma."

Barry spent decades with the Miami Herald and tells lots of tales about those times. Dave has high praise for his editors Gene Weingarten and Tom Shroder, who would give the 'go ahead' to any topic, no matter whom it offended. Dave writes, "So Tropic was not a well-oiled machine. It was more like the laboratory of a mad scientist in an old black-and-white movie, with strange contraptions spewing sparks and smoke, and in the middle of it all a wild-haired lunatic as he prepares to throw a giant switch and launch an experiment that will, if it goes according to plan, produce some wondrous benefit to humanity, but there's a chance that it will go catastrophically wrong and unleash some unspeakable horror. That was Tropic philosophy: What the hell, let's try it."

Barry includes examples of humor that garnered tons of reader mail, such as his critique of Neil Diamond's song 'I Am....I Said'; North Dakota debating a name change to Dakota; Indiana's nickname 'the Hoosier State'; and more. Fans also sent Barry innumerable newspaper pieces meant to inspire him, including an ad sent by Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens about exploding cows and anti-flatulence medicine.

For Barry, no topic is off-limits if it will get a laugh, including politics, screenplays, book tours, the worst songs of all time, band names, harmonica safety, football coaches, basketball rivalries, and anything else you might think of.

Chatting about celebrity occupations, Barry lists the Top Thirty Celebrity Occupations. Some of these, from the top down, are:

Taylor Swift
Musical superstar other than Taylor Swift
Whoever is currently dating Taylor Swift
Stephen King
Person doing some idiot thing in a viral video
The Pope
Whoever was previously dating Taylor Swift
Nobel Prize Winner
Author other than Stephen King
Member of Congress

Outside of writing, Barry engages in recreational activities, and he's a member of the Rock Bottom Remainders band - composed of authors with no musical talent; and the World Famous Lawn Rangers - a marching unit that performs maneuvers with lawnmowers and brooms.

Barry doesn't write much about his personal life, though he mentions being divorced twice before he met his current spouse. Thus the memoir is more about Dave's professional life than his private life.

I laughed and laughed while reading this book, and recommend it to anyone who needs a chuckle, especially Dave Barry fans.

Thanks to Netgalley, Dave Barry, and Simon and Schuster for a copy of the book.

I have been a fan of Dave Barry’s since middle school. I own just about all of his books, many of them signed and personally inscribed, and have been lucky to have met him several times and had some correspondence with him over the years since. When he hand-wrote me a letter when I was a sophomore in high school and asked him about his career, he solidified my choice to dedicate my life to the written word and helping others to be lifelong readers and writers. This stranger that eventually recognized me when he saw me and appreciated my presence at events, introduced me to Arthur Golden once, and is all around a truly quality guy who I could tell truly believed in me, of all people.

It comes as no surprise that one of the things I wish I knew more about – besides what he occasionally disclosed in his columns – is how he got to where he is and what his personal life is like. This was a healthy obsession, stemming from admiration and a true wish to try to make similar choices in getting to be where he is and make a living from my words. I took a similar path, writing a humor column, working for a newspaper, getting a bachelor’s, master’s, and MFA in English, and connecting and networking with other writers to create friendships, workshops, publications, and peer support. It has been a different ride – I mean, the newspaper industry is all but dissolved – but it has been a wonderful one that really came from his great advice over the years to a random kid who wanted to be a writer.

I was excited to learn that he finally wrote a memoir, and I devoured it. It is a funny look at his life from childhood to his current 77-year-old self, and mainly discusses the route his professional career has taken to get to retirement. From torturing frogs and smoking corn cob pipes, to his college days, to how he got started in the newspaper business and made a variety of remarkable career choices that could have flipped on a dime had he made others, to touring the country and world as he earned syndication, this was the type of material I was always looking for learning about him growing up. His personal life is mainly left out of the story, another thing that I always wanted to know more about, but he is a respectfully private person and lets his work speak for itself on its own terms and for a hardworking someone with a family who is in the public eye, that’s pretty commendable and understandable. That said, one of my favorite jokes in the book mentioned his wife buying shoes for the Oscars when he was writing for Steve Martin.

A great memoir from one of the great humor columnists of the 20th century. Barry certainly has entered the pantheon of great columnists such as Erma Bombeck, Art Buchwald, and Andy Rooney, but has also been a man of multiple talents, weaseling his way into Hollywood, music, standup, and even the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile. I am looking forward to what he accomplishes in retirement – self-described here as only taking on and working on projects without deadlines and too much travel – and I am forever grateful for his motivating me to follow my writing dreams and making the diversified career I absolutely love in adulthood. The only piece of advice he gives that I disagree with is ‘you should not confuse your career with your life.’ See, he helped me understand that if you live your life the way you want to, and somehow you are lucky enough to have a career that is everything you want your life to be, and you can be paid to do what you love, then your career doesn’t even feel like work. I got that lucky, and I am thankful to him for helping me realize it.

Class Clown is scheduled for publication on May 13, 2025 from Simon and Schuster

I've loved Dave Barry and thought of him as one of the funny Florida writers for a long time. Of course he's not from Florida, and this book covers his life from his beginning, through his childhood, and then to his different jobs.
He has a way with words and there were a lot of chuckles, but I was surprised how serious the book was. There were parts that broke my heart, especially about his mother.
Talk about a full life-- Barry worked closely with people I consider legends, and at the end he talks about losing them as time went on. He's definitely a guy who led a fulfilling life and made a big impact on a lot of people.

Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass was everything I wanted it to be and more. It’s laugh-out-loud funny, yes, but it’s also unexpectedly heartfelt and reflective in the best possible way. Dave Barry has always had a talent for making even the most ordinary things absurdly hilarious, and that voice carries through every page of this memoir. But here, he pairs the comedy with genuine warmth and insight.

He takes us through his childhood, career, marriage, parenting, aging, and even the loss of loved ones — and he does it all with a voice that’s completely self-aware and never takes itself too seriously. You can tell he’s lived a full, ridiculous, joyful life, and he doesn’t mind poking fun at himself along the way. There’s a real honesty to this book that caught me off guard. Behind the jokes, there’s wisdom and experience, and I found myself underlining moments that felt surprisingly profound.

I loved the way he structured the book. It reads like a series of stories you’d hear over a long dinner with someone who’s lived a wild, meaningful life and still knows how to make you snort-laugh your drink through your nose. The pacing never drags, and even when the subject matter shifts into more serious territory, it never loses that signature Dave Barry tone.

This book is a celebration of not growing up, of staying curious and silly and deeply human, even as the years fly by. If you’ve ever laughed at one of his columns, or if you just enjoy memoirs that balance humor with heart, I can’t recommend this enough.

I was a huge Dave Barry fan growing up. Not only did I buy all of his books (yes, even the early ones on DIY, marriage, and becoming a CEO), I would read them repeatedly, with “Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits” being one of my all-time favorites. I would get the Sunday Chicago Tribune just to read his columns, and really looked forward to his end-of-the-year annual summaries. That makes me part of the target audience for “Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass”, a memoir that peels back the curtain (a bit) on Dave’s life and inspirations.

Dave takes us through his younger years, growing up and starting his career. Not everything was rosy, alcoholism and suicide helped shape Dave’s world view from a young age. Journalism was his first foray into writing, for a small newspaper in Pennsylvania, where his humor columns soon became his main focus. The Miami Herald came calling (among others), and that’s where Mr. Barry got comfortable, given the freedom to write about anything and everything that caught his interest, and would eventually lead to a Pulitzer Prize. Syndication, TV shows, books (both fiction and non-fiction), The Tonight Show, Oprah, rock and roll, fame and fortune soon followed.

Which brings us back to this book. A lot of what Dave writes about, stories he tells, are more detailed versions of things his fans have seen before, from his mother’s death to his colonoscopy to the anger of Neil Diamond fans. That doesn’t mean that they’re not funny, but it’s revisiting old stories instead of hearing new ones, which makes this wistful for longtime fans. Dave glosses over some topics (mostly around his divorce) and spends a lot of time on others, but I guess he’s earned that right. Some of his comments will anger some readers, but speaking personally those readers deserve to be angered, more people need to speak the truth.

A great stroll down memory lane with an American institution. It will make you want to reread all of his past works and laugh once again.

I requested and received a free advanced electronic copy from Simon & Schuster via NetGalley. Thank you!

If you are a Dave Barry fan, ,you will love this scamper down memory lane. He combines his usual irrepressible humor with sweet memories and leaves his readers feeling well entertained and perhaps understanding a little better what makes this writer tick.
All in all, a nice respite from the usual vitriol published in the daily news.

If you’ve enjoyed any of Dave Barry’s other books, or his columns, you’ll probably enjoy this. It’s actually somewhat informative, as well as laugh out loud funny. Barry has a gentle sense of humor that I really appreciate. He can poke fun at anyone and everyone without being mean or resorting to foul language. He talks a bit about his family of origin, but doesn’t reveal too much about his adult life outside of his work. Some of the stories will be familiar to his fans, but that gives this the feel of sitting around talking with an old friend over a beer. Remember when? Oh yeah, good times.

Thanks to Simon & Schuster for providing me with an ARC through NetGalley. I volunteered to provide this honest review.

4.5 stars, rounded upwards.

The first time I read a Dave Barry column, it was 1984, and a friend sent it to me. We had only snail mail back then, but it was so funny that she snipped it out of the airline magazine she’d read on a business trip and mailed it to me. I don’t remember which column it was, but it left me gasping for air, I laughed so hard. This was a difficult time for me, a young mother with two small children, a third on the way, and almost no money, and I floated along on the laughter that article brought me for a solid month. I hung it on the fridge where I could reread it whenever the urge struck me. That is how I became a Dave Barry fan.

Since then, his work has either hit or missed for me; almost all of the time, it has hit and although times are easier for me now, laughter is always a balm. When he misses—which is rare—he misses bigtime. But this time he’s golden, the Dave I remember reading that first time.

My thanks go to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for the invitation to read and review. This book is for sale now.

It strikes me again how frequently the funniest humorists, be they journalists, novelists, standup comedians, or comic actors, have tragic backgrounds. Barry has experienced more than his fair share, with a schizophrenic sister who’s been institutionalized, a father that died too young, and a mother that couldn’t recover from his loss, and took her own life. Barry wrote about her when it happened, and he reprints some of it here.
He reprints some other things, too, and I expected that. I don’t think that it cheats the reader when he documents parts of his professional journey by reprinting some of the things he wrote; he’s been writing prolifically for thirty years, and it seems to me that it was probably a lot of work just choosing what to include and what to leave out. It feels strangely like a school reunion, rereading the excerpts from drop dead funny columns that I enjoyed for the first time when they were originally published. Oh, my heart, “Ask Mr. Language Person!” I’m an English teacher, and I’m in stitches all over again.

The thing about an autobiography is that the author is also the subject, and so when he decides what parts of his own life to write about and what to keep private, we readers need to accept that. At the same time, it does seem disingenuous to completely pass over his marriages and divorces. A paragraph for each, maybe? Just give us the benchmarks.

I hadn’t known that he was responsible for Talk Like a Pirate Day, and both I and my middle school students owe him for that one! But the thing that is most striking to me, and that I appreciate most, is his reflection about the political discourse in the U.S., and the way we have become polarized and too often, uncivil. In the past---and he cites the Kennedy/Nixon campaign—arguments between family and friends were “heated, emotional, sometimes angry, but never nasty. At the end of the night everybody hugged everybody, because they were friends, and they understood that they could disagree about politics without believing the other side was evil. Mistaken, maybe. Evil, no.” All I can say about that is thank you, Dave, and amen.

Because I was running late, I checked out the audio version from Seattle Bibliocommons. Barry does his own reading, and it's even better that way.

There are a lot of hilarious experiences he recounts, but the thing about Barry that binds all of the experiences, the columns, and the books he’s written is his refusal to take himself too seriously, and it is his complete and delightful intolerance toward pretentiousness that keeps me coming back. I cannot imagine Dave Barry snubbing anybody, ever. Wouldn’t the world be a better place if everyone was like that?

Highly recommended.

Great read - Kept me amused and also informed- hope he comes out of retirement and writes another book.
Glad to see a good person rewarded for his contributions to journalism.

Thanks to Netgalley for an ARC of this book. I read Swamp Story from Dave Barry, and I loved it. It’s amusing, and at times made me laugh out loud, anxious to share what I’d read, but for some reason, I found it slow reading. I began to realize that maybe I just really like reading fiction, with a plot that follows characters from beginning to end, with challenges along the way. This was more of a retelling of Barry’s life, which was interesting, but just didn’t grab me the way his fictional work does. That said, there were some very funny bits, many of which I can’t even begin to include.

For example, when Barry was a kid, the polio vaccine was released and his school was part of a test group. He takes umbrage with the way the local newspapers portrayed the students as excited about participating in this test. He hated it, particularly since he hated getting shots. But what made it even worse is that after going through all of the shots, he found out he’d been given the placebo, so he was forced to go through it all over again—effectively getting two shots for every one that his sister got. He ends by saying, “I think this at least partly explains why I ended up being an atheist.”

One of the humor articles for which he received wide acclaim had to do with getting a colonoscopy. I loved his description of the prep: “You spend several hours pretty much confined to the bathroom, spurting violently. You eliminate everything. And then, when you figure you must be totally empty, you have to drink another liter of PoviPrep, at which point, as far as I can tell, your bowels travel into the future and start eliminating food that you have not even eaten yet.”

One of the things he got to do was travel to Moscow to take part in a writer’s exchange workshop. This statement took me by surprise, and made me laugh. “On our second night in Moscow, I stupidly did the one thing you should never, ever do in Russia: I ate at a Mexican restaurant." He proceeds to describe the intestinal agony he experienced over the next few days.

And then he introduced a running gag, describing his writing friend thusly, "He also had a very large head, a head that would not look out of place on Easter Island, but he's sensitive about it, so I plan to delete the sentence much later.” Obviously, he did not.

But he doesn’t stop there. “Alan, a very funny guy who's easy to work with once you get used to the size of his head, about which I will say no more.” This is followed by a footnote that says: “Seriously, it's enormous.” Then he talks about working together with two of his friends, while he and the other guy spend a lot of time “making fun of Alan's head.” Fortunately, for Alan, this is the last mention of his gigantic cabeza.

The appendix had something I enjoyed, a list of WBAGNFARB, phrases that Barry had identified Would Be A Good Name For A Rock Band. The list goes on for several pages. Not every one is gold, but there are enough good ones in there to make it worth considering buying this book if you’re planning to form a rock band.

Overall, I definitely enjoyed the book. It just didn’t feel like the compelling kind of reading I’m accustomed to, where I’m dying to know what happens next. It’s not making it to my list of absolute favorites. That said, I still recommend it.

The Lessons from Lucy book was exceptional, This one not so much. The stories behind the stories were interesting and early life events correspond to most of us Boomers. While on the end years of Boomers, I too remember hiding under a desk in case of nuclear attack, However I also remember saying the pledge of allegiance and a prayer at the beginning of a day. I probably should have stopped reading when he blatantly declared being an atheist. On this subject, I would direct him to the books written by Lee Strobel. Being an avid reader and the book mostly interesting I trudged on until I read the statement about his opinions of the current President of the United States and the half of the population of the US that voted for him. Many of us are professionals - not total idiots and many hold college degrees.) To us so called idiots you are correct, we will never trust the press again. You lost that when CNN reported the location of US troops to the Viet Cong.This president has been attacked by the press and other politicians as never before. What we all like about him is that he isn't A politician. He says things that the rest of redneck USA think. If you atheists had left prayer and patriotism in school we wouldn't have so much deviant,violent behaviors in the generations that have followed. Mr. Barry has become one of them, a liberal socialist and elitist who has lost touch with the common citizen,Too busy living the rich life to understand what real working people experience. As he said frequently, he couldn't believe he got paid to to some of the things he did. Thus this book became a name dropping arrogant personal opinions, not totally what one thinks of as a memoir -usually a life story, life experiences and lessons learned . I was provided and advanced reader copy at my request. The opinions expressed are my own. Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book.

Dave Barry is a well known, award winning humorist who has been writing steadily for over fifty years and has written innumerable newspaper columns syndicated across the country and dozens of books, none of which I’ve read. I did just read, however, an advanced reader’s copy of his autobiography, “Class Clown,” provided to me by NetGalley. My review of this book is voluntary.

It is often hysterically funny, causing me to laugh out loud repeatedly. When not hysterically funny, it’s just plain amusing, entertaining, and enlightening. Mr. Barry’s career has been long and incredibly diverse, allowing him to cross paths with a vast array of interesting and noteworthy people, many of whom are celebrities or famous in their fields. I enjoyed reading about his work and career, as well as his philosophical leanings, and his brief discussion of his novel and the movie based on it, “Big Trouble,” made me want to read the book and then watch the movie.

Class Clown is the memoir of Dave Barry - a syndicated humor columnist for many years. This book is full of some of his favorite stories and anecdotes - most of which appeared in a past column. There are lots of laughs, including stories from his childhood and his time as a new reporter. He got to have a job where he could make fun of everything and get paid for it. (All of us that were ever class clowns are jealous) His experiences covering the political conventions were interesting as well as his time marching in Obama's inaugaration parade. One of the funniest things was his list of band names at the back (The Wood Tick Snorkels, Shy Fruiter and the Saplings, Flamimg Squirrels, Earl Piedmont and the Dipthongs)

We could all use a laugh and this is a great place to start.

Dave Barry is well known for his writing, particularly his humor column, He also had a television program based upon two of his books. While his memoir has some very serious moments, (such as his mother’s suicide), much of his life story is expressed in a light-hearted matter. He doesn’t seem to take himself very seriously, and he does seem to know how to have a great time. He had several mock runs for president, and played with a rock band that he freely admits was loud but not very good.
Fans of Dave Barry would enjoy this book, and other readers would find this memoir worth reading as well.

"Class Clown" offers us a look into Dave Barry's life. I enjoyed his regular newspaper columns in the past, and enjoyed his look back at his career and his life. Anyone who has enjoyed Barry's columns will enjoy this walk down memory lane with him.

Special thanks to NetGalley and the Publisher for the Advanced Reader Copy of this book - Class Clown is available now.

I love memoirs that give you a glimpse into other people’s lives through humor and this was perfect for that. Dave Barry’s astute observations on life, politics, Miami, the media, and other events had me laughing out loud and sharing snippets with my husband. His brushes with celebrities, particularly Barbara Bush, were so relatable that I couldn’t help but laugh and feel a little of his embarrassment, too. This was a quick, fun read.

I have enjoyed reading Dave Barry over the years, be it his columns, novels, or nonfiction books, and I enjoyed this memoir as well. It was fun to see how he got started and I appreciated his sprinkling in some excerpts from his columns, which worked well in the text. My only complaint is that it’s a little slim and I feel he could have included more. That being said, it’s well worth the read for his fans.