Zusatztext Highly funny and entertaining but also insightful. Washington Book Review Informationen zum Autor Dave Barry is the author of more bestsellers than you can count on two hands! including Lessons From Lucy ! Dave Barry's Complete Guide to Guys ! Dave Barry Turns 40 ! and Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up . A wildly popular syndicated columnist best known for his booger jokes! Barry won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He lives in Miami. Lessons From Lucy INTRODUCTION I've always been a dog person. When I was a boy our family had a standard poodle named Mistral, which is a French word for a cold northwesterly wind. The name wasn't our idea. Nobody in my family had ever been to France; we were the kind of family who would name a dog Buster. Mistral was named by his previous owners, a wealthy family who gave him to us because they could no longer keep him. When we got him, he was a pampered indoor dog who had one of those professional poodle hairstyles with the ridiculous poofs, including one on his head. I believe Mistral was embarrassed about how he looked, as if he'd gotten invited to a dog party where the invitation said, Come in a wacky costume! and he was the only dog who did. But after a short while in the Barry household, wrestling with us Barry kids and racing around in the woods and marshes behind our house and never receiving any kind of even semiprofessional grooming, Mistral was transformed from a foo-foo house dog into a red-blooded, slobbering, leg-humping, free-range American dog so shaggy and filthy that it would not have been surprising to see soybeans sprouting from his coat. I had a special bond with Mistral because I illegally fed him under the table at suppertime. As a child I was a very picky eater; the only foods I really liked were vanilla ice cream and ketchup. 1 But we Barry children were not allowed to leave the table until we cleaned our plates. So I was in big trouble when my mother, an otherwise decent human being, decided to serve us brussels sprouts, whichthis has been shown in laboratory studiesare actually the severed heads of Martian fetuses. I could not eat them. I could barely look at them. The rest of the family would finish supper and go watch Gunsmoke on the RCA Victor TV with the massive wooden cabinet housing an eleven-inch, black-and-white, no-definition screen, and I'd be stuck at the table, sitting in front of a plate of cold green slimy alien spheres, an abused child with nothing to look forward to except a slow death by starvation. That changed when we got Mistral. At suppertime he would camp underneath the table in front of me and wolf down anything I slipped himmeat, fish, pasta, the occasional napkin, even vegetables, including brussels sprouts. In those days there was a TV show called Lassie, wherein every week a boy named Timmywho was, with all due respect, an idiotwould get stuck in a well, or fall into some quicksand, or get into some other dire predicament. Then his faithful collie, Lassie, would race back to the farmhouse and bark at Timmy's parentswho were not themselves rocket scientists 2 until they finally figured out, with some difficulty (What's wrong, girl? Are you hungry?), what Lassie was trying to tell them, even though this happened every single week. So they'd go rescue Timmy, and everybody would praise Lassie for being a hero. To my mind Mistral was way more heroic. Any dog can run around barking. But show me the episode where Lassie eats Timmy's brussels sprouts. So I was a dog lover from the start. Ou...

“Highly funny and entertaining but also insightful.”
— Washington Book Review

Autorentext
Dave Barry is the author of more bestsellers than you can count on two hands, including Lessons From Lucy, Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys, Dave Barry Turns 40, and Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up. A wildly popular syndicated columnist best known for his booger jokes, Barry won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He lives in Miami.

Zusammenfassung
In this “little gem” (*Washington Independent Review of Books), Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist and *New York Times bestselling author Dave Barry learns how to age happily from his old but joyful dog, Lucy.

As Dave Barry turns seventy—not happily—he realizes that his dog, Lucy, is dealing with old age far better than he is. She has more friends, fewer worries, and way more fun. So Dave decides to figure out how Lucy manages to stay so happy, to see if he can make his own life happier by doing the things she does (except for drinking from the toilet). He reconnects with old friends and tries to make new ones—which turns out to be a struggle, because Lucy likes people a lot more than he does. And he gets back in touch with two ridiculous but fun groups from his past: the Lawn Rangers, a group of guys who march in parades pushing lawnmowers and twirling brooms (alcohol is involved), and the Rock Bottom Remainders, the world’s oldest and least-talented all-author band. With each new lesson, Dave riffs hilariously on dogs, people, and life in general, while also pondering Deep Questions, such as when it’s okay to lie. (Answer: when scallops are involved.)

Lessons from Lucy shows readers a new side to Dave Barry that’s “touching and sentimental, but there’s still a laugh on every page” (Sacramento Bee). The master humorist has written a witty and affable guide to joyous living at any age.

Leseprobe
Lessons From Lucy

INTRODUCTION

I’ve always been a dog person. When I was a boy our family had a standard poodle named Mistral, which is a French word for a cold northwesterly wind. The name wasn’t our idea. Nobody in my family had ever been to France; we were the kind of family who would name a dog Buster. Mistral was named by his previous owners, a wealthy family who gave him to us because they could no longer keep him. When we got him, he was a pampered indoor dog who had one of those professional poodle hairstyles with the ridiculous poofs, including one on his head. I believe Mistral was embarrassed about how he looked, as if he’d gotten invited to a dog party where the invitation said, “Come in a wacky costume!” and he was the only dog who did.

But after a short while in the Barry household, wrestling with us Barry kids and racing around in the woods and marshes behind our house and never receiving any kind of even semiprofessional grooming, Mistral was transformed from a foo-foo house dog into a red-blooded, slobbering, leg-humping, free-range American dog so shaggy and filthy that it would not have been surprising to see soybeans sprouting from his coat.

I had a special bond with Mistral because I illegally fed him under the table at suppertime. As a child I was a very picky eater; the only foods I really liked were vanilla ice cream and ketchup.1 But we Barry children were not allowed to leave the table until we cleaned our plates. So I was in big trouble when my mother, an otherwise decent human being, decided to serve us brussels sprouts, which—this has been shown in laboratory studies—are actually the severed heads of Martian fetuses. I could not eat them. I could barely look at them. The rest of the family would finish supper and go watch Gunsmoke on the RCA Victor TV with the massive wooden cabinet housing an eleven-inch, black-and-white, no-definition screen, and I’d be stuck at the table, sitting in front of a plate of cold green slimy alien spheres, an abused child with nothing to look forward to except a slow death by starvation.

That changed when we got Mistral. At suppertime he would camp underneath the table in front of me and wolf down anything I slipped him—meat, fish, pasta, the occasional napkin, even v…