...the FUNNIEST being Plunket's first novel MY SEARCH FOR WARREN HARDING. This novel again will have readers laughing their socks off. Each page is more delightful than the one preceding it. Plunket really knows how to create truly eccentric (an not so likable) characters. But who said the hero (or in this case the heroine) of a novel has to be likable. Having lived and come out as a gay man in the 1980's in New York I can relate to a lot of the incidents and characters in the book. I've known my share of Mimis along with some of the others. A funny book that is hard to find but don't pass up the chance to buy a copy if you happen across one.

This book is one of the 3 or 4 laugh out loud funny books I have ever read. I think it is best appreciated by gay men who lived through the 1980s and have a broad sense of humor.

I have read this book at least 6 times and each time I have enjoyed it more. Definitely one of those books where you can't help laughing at loud. I first discovered the book shortly after it was published. I was browsing one evening at the great, old (and now, alas, departed) Doubleday Bookstore at 58th & 5th in Manhattan. The title just jumped out and me and I knew I had to read this book even though I knew nothing about it. I had been living in NYC for about 4 years at the time and had only visited LA once for about a month in the late 70's. Plunkett must have lived there at about the same time because everything was so recognizable. I understood how out-of-place a New Yorker can feel in the land of swimming pools and movie stars. My job transferred me to Los Angeles in 1991 and I read the book again. It resonated even more for a recently transplanted New Yorker. Now I've lived in Los Angeles for eight years (only one year shy of my New York experience). I recently pulled my well-worn copy of the book off the bookshelf, dusted it off, and re-read it. The book is as funny as ever but there is something sad about it now when I realize how much not only I have changed over the past fifteen years but also New York and Los Angeles. As a New Yorker at heart I can daily find a hundred reasons New York is better than LA but at the same time LA is my home now I can't ever imagine myself living in NYC again. This time I read the book not as a New Yorker laughing at Los Angeles but as a Los Angelo laughing at a New Yorker laughing at LA. How the times change. Still, this is the best and funniest book ever written about the differences (both good and bad) between New York and Los Angeles. A must read for anyone who loves/hates either city.

A friend loaned me the book about 8 years ago. I passed it on and eventually lost it. I found a few new copies a few years ago... I ordered it through a bookstore in Maine. They're hard to come by! I have since given it to many other friends who have said it's one of the funniest books they've read. It's one of my all-time favorites. Very sarcastic... and very entertaining. "Harding" has my highest recommendation!

No book has ever made me laugh more. I've reread it more times than I can count. The Falls Church reader is right that the main character skewers everyone, but he's such a mess himself that it all comes out even. With all the sooo sooo serious books being published, thank goodness for this one. An all-time favorite.

"Walker Evans: Florida," following on the heels of last year's "Walker Evans: Signs," is the second volume in what I hope will become a series from the J.Paul Getty Museum. Revealing as well as entertaining, it presents the Getty's holdings of Florida photographs that Evans made on assignment in 1941 for "The Mangrove Coast," with text by Karl Bickel, published the following year. This is a lesser-known body of Evans's work, somewhat overshadowed by his monumental document of the Great Depression collected in the files of the Library of Congress, and in the pages of innumerable volumes since his original "American Photographs" and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." The value of this small volume is that Evans's excellant Florida work is now back in print; and if his whole career is ever to be properly evaluated, then all of its facets must be fully examined. My only criticism is with the book's design and layout. As with "Walker Evans: Signs," the photographs are often guttered and bled off the edge of the page, and the type is laid out in such an artsy way that it is often confusing. Evans would not have approved. The enjoyable introductory essay by Robert Plunket adeptly balances information about Evans and West Florida, with personal experiences of the author, a long time Sarasota resident. This is a book that all serious students of Evans will want to have.