Book Review: The Alphabet of Manliness

Last Saturday as I was preparing for my early Monday morning flight, I thought to myself, “I’d better head down to the bookstore so that I have something to read on the plane.” So there I was when something immediately caught my eye; it was a bright read book cover with a drawing of a chiseled looking guy punching a gorilla in the face.

“Oh my god”

I actually think my pants got slightly tighter when I saw the cover. The book is titled “The Alphabet of Manliness” and was penned by one of the very first absurdist writers on the Internet, Maddox. For those of you who don’t know, Maddox is responsible for The Best Page in the Universe (which clearly hasn’t had a layout update since it launched 1997, but that’s part of its awesomeness).

Anyways, the book is pretty much a rundown of the alphabet, that’s A through Z for those of you who didn’t know of everything manly, for example A if for ass kicking and I is for irate. Now to be honest, I started to get a little worried when I was reading the chapter on boners next to a 70 year old woman at the airport terminal and I got even more worried when I began to laugh out loud and all the other 70 year olds heading to West Palm Beach were looking at me.

Honestly, this book is hilarious. There have maybe been 3 or 4 things that I’ve read on the Internet in my life that have made me laugh out loud and there have probably been zero books, but this one changed all that. I found myself laughing loudly to several chapters in the book, except the Chuck Norris chapter (only because the Chuck Norris fad has been so played out since last January).

So do yourself a favor and go out and buy the book and don’t check it out from your local library because libraries are for little kids and people that don’t own computers. And make sure you don’t take yourself too seriously when reading it, take it in stride and enjoy yourself. If you find yourself wanting to write some kind of hateful email to the author after reading the first few chapters go ahead and do it, I’m sure it will appear in his hate mail section. Following that you may want to consider suicide because you’re clearly incapable of having any sort of fun whatsoever.

P.S. 95% of the reviews you read on the Internet are bullshit. That’s because the reviewers usually get the book/movie/whatever they’re reviewing for free and if they want to continue to get free stuff from that publisher, they won’t be too scathing in their review. This isn’t one of those cases, I paid $15.95 for the book and so should you.