The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents Earth (the Book): A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race

by Jon Stewart

Overview

The eagerly awaited new book from the Emmy-winning, Oscar-hosting, Daily Show-anchoring Jon Stewart—the man behind the megaseller America (The Book).

Where do we come from? Who created us? Why are we here? These questions have puzzled us since the dawn of time, but when it became apparent to Jon Stewart and the writers of The Daily Show that the world was about to end, they embarked on a massive mission to write a book that summed up the human race: What we looked like; what we accomplished; our achievements in society, government, religion, science and culture — all in a tome of approximately 256 pages with lots of color photos, graphs and charts.

After two weeks of hard work, they had their book. Earth (The Book) is the definitive guide to our species. With their trademark wit, irreverence, and intelligence, Stewart and his team will posthumously answer all of life's most hard-hitting questions, completely unburdened by objectivity, journalistic integrity, or even accuracy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780446199438
Publisher:	Grand Central Publishing
Publication date:	10/18/2011
Pages:	244
Product dimensions:	10.02(w) x 8.12(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

Jon Stewart is a comedian, writer, actor, producer, director, bestselling author and former host of The Daily Show. He lives with his wife and children in New Jersey.

Editorial Reviews

Like the "Daily Show" this parody delivers wittily framed absurdities in a sweetly deadpan way…like the show, [it's] best when it takes on subjects of real substance…That's why the funniest material is about religion and science.
—The New York Times

Janet Maslin

Has it really been a full six years since Jon Stewart and the writers of The Daily Show released their last book? Well, the delay's understandable. It's a daunting task to cover the history of a 4.5 billion-year-old planet (including the entirety of human existence) in 244 pages.

You'll recognize Earth's faux-textbook design and irreverent tone from America (The Book), and some gags recur nearly unchanged — the terrifyingly nude bodies of the Supreme Court justices are replaced here with the terrifyingly nude body of Larry King. But the subject's bigger, and the high concept higher. Earth is written as a Baedeker for the aliens who will eventually discover our planet after our species has expired, likely by our own hand. All the entries, hitting topics like love (''liking another person very very very very very very much'') and work (''that which we didn't want to do, but had to, if we didn't want to eat dirt''), are written in the past tense. It's the ultimate gallows humor: We had it pretty good, and now we're all dead.

Earth is The Devil's Dictionary for a new generation, twisting our lives in the light and bringing mordant humor to the commonplace. Despite the timelessness of most topics, the writers manage to be pretty lively at times, such as when they refer to the Grand Canyon as ''the biggest rift in Arizona not involving Mexicans.''

Earth isn't meant to be read straight through. It's designed to be perused, so you can discover at your leisure all the fun gags and wordplay crammed into its nooks and crannies. Because there are a lot. Enough, in fact, to make you believe this would actually be a fairly comprehensive guide for extraterrestrial visitors, just so long as they have a sense of humor. A–--(Staskiewicz, Keith)

E.W.com

A goofy guide to our planet, with literate ironist Stewart (America: The Book, 2004) at the helm.

Continuing in the vein ofAmerica, but with a touch more detail in both words and images, Stewart and hisDaily Showcomrades posit that someday soon the ETs we've been hailing for all these decades will arrive—only to find us gone. And why would we not be here? Well, Stewart relegates the possible answers to an appendix that opens, "At some point between the time this was written and the time you are reading it, we perished." Some of those possibilities include ecological catastrophe, nuclear holocaust, disease, robot rebellion and rapture—the last with a generous 30:1 chance of occurring, and evidenced by an "overall 'Jesus-y' feeling in the air." To gauge by the rest of the book, however, the end may well come by dint of our soufflé-like culture's having finally become too airy and collapsed. So it is thatEarthis studded with images of all those pop-culture and media figures that one would gladly leave the planet to escape, from Bernie Madoff to Nicole Kidman and J-Lo (or, if not J-Lo, a convincing simulacrum). Stewart lampoons with a broad brush rather than the scalpel with which he dissects pomposity and prevarication on his Comedy Central show. Some of his targets include creationists and school boards, fast-food restaurants, obesity, the medical bureaucracy, the Venus of Willendorf and, not connected to the aforementioned Venus, the use of the brassiere as an instrument of social control. George Bush doesn't escape, of course; but then, neither does Florence Henderson.

The legions of readers ofAmerica will know exactly what they're in for—and readers of whatever stripe, save those who are fans of McDonald's and Satan, are likely to enjoy this one.

Kirkus Reviews