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Tarfumes.com - In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash
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List Price: $14.95
Our Price: $10.17
Your Save: $ 4.78 ( 32% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Main Street Books
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780385021746
ISBN: 0385021747
Label: Main Street Books
Manufacturer: Main Street Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 272
Publication Date: 1991-05-28
Publisher: Main Street Books
Release Date: 1991-04-28
Studio: Main Street Books
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Editorial Reviews:
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A beloved, bestselling classic of humorous and nostalgic Americana, reissued in a strikingly designed paperback edition.
Before Garrison Keillor and Spalding Gray there was Jean Shepherd: a master monologist and writer who spun the materials of his all-American childhood into immensely resonant--and utterly hilarious--works of comic art. In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash represents one of the peaks of his achievement, a compound of irony, affection, and perfect detail that speaks across generations.
In God We Trust, Shepherd's wildly witty reunion with his Indiana hometown, disproves the adage "You can never go back." Bending the ear of Flick, his childhood-buddy-turned-bartender, Shepherd recalls passionately his genuine Red Ryder BB gun, confesses adolescent failure in the arms of Junie Jo Prewitt, and relives a story of man against fish that not even Hemingway could rival. From pop art to the World's Fair, Shepherd's subjects speak with a universal irony and are deeply and unabashedly grounded in American Midwestern life, together rendering a wonderfully nostalgic impression of a more innocent era when life was good, fun was clean, and station wagons roamed the earth.
A comic genius who bridged the gap between James Thurber and David Sedaris, Shepherd may have accomplished for Holden, Indiana, what Mark Twain did for Hannibal, Missouri.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: The director of Christmas Story made this book great
Comment: Back in the day, the Christmas Story was a movie caught on television once every holiday season, and that was if you were lucky. Then WGN or WTBS bagan to play it every day up to Christmas and then the 24 marathon on Christmas Eve. The movie is a classic, so the temptation is to buy the book that inspired it. Unfortunately, this is a great example of how the movie made the book. While there are some good lines and ideas in the book, they are catchy and good because we remember them from the movie. The book starts off with Ralphie going back to his hometown along a street called Memory Lane. Then he meets up with Flick, we know him from the tongue to the flag pole incident, and begins to drink. The Christmas part of the book is blown through relatively quickly in the first 50 pages, and then things just limp along slowly. People buy the book for the movie, but it contains so much more not related to it. In addition, the Christmas story director, Bob Clark, wove the poorly detailed and random memories from the book, to create a very coherent and attention keeping story. The simple note is the movie, specifically Bob Clark, is owed a world of gratitude from Jean Sheppard for making his book better than what it is actually.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Simple and honest but also exaggerated and larger than life stories
Comment: "You'll shoot your eye out!" That single sentence evokes so many emotions, all stemming from the 1984 film "A Christmas Story." It captured the trials and tribulations, wonders and amusements of childhood so succinctly, it's hard not to smile just thinking about some of the scenes from one of the best Christmas movies ever. Shepherd's "In God We Trust; All Others Pay Cash" captures those same feelings, mostly because "A Christmas Story" is based on his tales.
The narrative structure of the book is somewhat contrived, but it works to introduce each separate story and therefore serves its purpose. As far as the stories themselves are concerned, like most collections of stories, there are some fantastic ones and some that are not quite up to snuff. And like many collections, the good ones are so good that they grossly overshadow and help the reader forget those that are not so enjoyable.
Shepherd has an immense gift for storytelling. The book reminded me of the movie "Big Fish," because his stories all seem like they've been told over and over again, picking up details and being exaggerated as they go, until they become almost legendary. The simplest events in his stories are told with such force and magnitude it's as if even though they are perfectly ordinary, they had never happened like that before and will never happen that way again. Reading Shepherd's work is like reading about world that's completely real and yet caricatured into something fantastic and unable to be duplicated.
Consequently, because these stories rely so heavily on great storytelling more than interesting events, it can at times be a bit too much to handle trying to wade through the oceans of metaphor and hyperbole. Thankfully, the narrative strung along in between the stories gives a slight reprieve and helped more regain focus.
All in all, the book was a lot of fun and took me back to my own childhood, despite my never experiencing anything similar to most of the events in the book. And I think that says quite a bit about the talents of the writer.
Customer Rating:
Summary: In God We Trust, all others pay cash
Comment: An excellant book that reviews a typical midwestern childhood from the humorous viewpoint of an adult. A must read for every man over 55 but entirely unnecessary for women of all/any age.
Customer Rating:
Summary: best
Comment: Shepherd as clear and crisp as when his storied craft was developing before our very ( and not so very) adolescent ears and eyes. There is something very archtypical in the Raulphie, Flick, The Old Man, Mom, Winnie Randie and the enevitable unobtainable Wanda Hickey that we all coveted and set our eyes on the reality of our own fragile and wonderful lifes!
We love ya' Shep!
Long live "I Libertine" The 1st Virtually produced instant success!
Customer Rating:
Summary: You can go home again
Comment: This book took me back, an interesting assortment of characters who shaped the time(s) and town(s) we all grew up in. From the school yard bully to the nosey neighbor to the town oddities, they are all there. You'll remember things from that time that you thought you forgot.
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