The Sound of No Hands Clapping: A Memoir - Softcover

Young, Toby

2.95

263 ratings by Goodreads

9780306815348: The Sound of No Hands Clapping: A Memoir

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0306815346 ISBN 13: 9780306815348

Publisher: Da Capo Pr, 2008

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The eagerly anticipated follow-up to the best-selling "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People" - everyone's favorite self-saboteur continues to chase celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic even as he makes a determined but sometimes decidedly rocky adjustment to married life and fatherhood.When even his friends refer to him in print as "a balding, bug-eyed opportunist with the looks of a punctured beach ball, the charisma of a glove puppet, and an ego the size of a Hercules supply plane," the odds of Toby Young scoring - in any sense - appear to be slim. But then "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People", his account of the five years he spent trying (and failing) to take Manhattan, improbably catapults Toby to bestsellerdom, and his book is translated into twelve languages, including American.Now Tinseltown beckons.After receiving a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity from a big Hollywood producer, Toby sets his sights anew on a high-flying career, this time on the West Coast. But it doesn't take long for Toby's fabled "brown thumb" and self-sabotaging instincts to reassert themselves. On the home front, though, things seem to be looking up: Toby manages to persuade his girlfriend to marry him and move to Los Angeles-but then she decides to abandon her promising legal career in order to become a fulltime homemaker...and mother. Toby's increasingly hapless attempts to pursue a glamorous showbiz career while buried in diapers will strike a chord with all modern fathers struggling to find the right work/life balance...and with their utterly exasperated wives. Failure-and fatherhood-have never been funnier.

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Review:

'As a chronicle of ambition run amok it has no peer'
-- Sunday Tribune

'I liked it so much I sent Toby Young an e-mail congratulating
him' -- Telegraph

'Toby regales us with delicious drubbings, past and present,
delighting us with tales of his uproarious ineptitude ... unbelievably
humorous' -- Spectator

'Very funny ... we would all love to be as successful a failure as
he is' -- Sunday Express

'Young remains a solid comic writer with a winning awareness of
his own absurdity. I couldn't put it down' -- Time Out

`A fun and - if true - rather insightful account of the bitchy,
self-serving world of the London media set'
-- Metro

`If you like your reading to have a certain voyeurism, this is
probably a must'
-- Observer

`Only Young could have failed so spectacularly and turned the
experience into such a funny and addictively readable story' -- Evening Standard

`Side-splittingly funny. I laughed out loud several times in every
chapter' -- Daily Mail

`The doyen of Loser Lit is back, as bumptious as ever. And still
very, very funny' -- Sunday Times

Book Description:

* After the international success of HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS & ALIENATE PEOPLE Toby Young returns with another hilarious memoir about social and professional failure

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