Lunatics

by Dave Barry, Alan Zweibel

Overview

Philip Horkman is a happy man, the owner of a pet store called The Wine Shop, and on Sundays a referee for a local kids’ soccer league. Jeffrey Peckerman is the proud and loving father of a star athlete in the girls’ ten-and-under soccer league, and he’s not exactly happy with the ref.

The two of them are about to collide in a swiftly escalating series of events that will send them running for their lives, pursued by the police, soldiers, subversives, bears, revolutionaries, pirates, and a black ops team that does not exist. Where all that takes them you can’t even begin to guess, but the literary journey there is a masterpiece of inspiration, chaos, and unadulterated, well, lunacy. And they might even learn a lesson or two along the way.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101565773
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/10/2012
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	261,704
File size:	708 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Dave Barry is proud to have been elected Class Clown by the Pleasantville High School class of 1965. From 1983 to 2004, he wrote a weekly humor column for the Miami Herald, which in 1988 won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. He is the author of some thirty books. His most recent bestsellers include his Peter Pan prequels, written with Ridley Pearson; his Christmas story The Shepherd, the Angel, and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog; Dave Barry’s History of the Millennium (So Far); and I’ll Mature When I’m Dead. Barry lives in Coral Gables, Florida, with his family and a domestic staff of forty-seven.

Alan Zweibel is an original Saturday Night Live writer who the New York Times said has “earned his place in the pantheon of American pop culture.” He is the winner of lots and lots of Emmy Awards for his work in television, which also includes It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, Monk, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and PBS’s Great Performances. He won the Thurber Prize for his novel The Other Shulman and collaborated with Billy Crystal on the Tony Award–winning play 700 Sundays. Zweibel and his wife, Robin, live in Short Hills, New Jersey, because they enjoy paying exorbitantly high property taxes.

Hometown:

Miami, Florida

Date of Birth:

July 3, 1947

Place of Birth:

Armonk, New York

Education:

B.A. in English, Haverford College, 1969

Website:

http://www.davebarry.com

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Putting Barry and Zweibel in close proximity is sort of like juggling torches while walking a wire over a vat of kerosene; sooner or later, there’s gonna be a big, big bang. A rocket-fueled romp whose pages practically turn themselves.”—BookPage

Editorial Reviews

Humorists Barry (Tricky Business) and Zweibel (The Other Shulman) team up to spin the madcap adventure of Philip Horkman and Jeffrey A. Peckerman, who meet on the soccer pitch of a Fort Lee, N.J., girls’ 10-and-under league championship game, where Horkman calls Peckerman’s daughter offside. Alternating chapters of mutual loathing between Horkman, a coarse, “forensic plumber,” and Peckerman, the progressive owner of a pet store called the Wine Shop, chronicle a fight that escalates by accident and miscalculation to encompass high seas piracy and revolution. As unwitting as the characters in Woody Allen’s Without Feathers—or, better yet, as inept as Bananas’ Fielding Mellish—Horkman and Peckerman stumble over themselves trying to escape police, nudists, a lemur named Buddy, a tank in Tiananmen Square, fruit-wielding Somalis, Yemeni terrorists, Chuck E. Cheese, and Donald Trump. Energetic, scatological, and profoundly silly. Agents: (for Barry) Amy Berkower, Writers House; (for Zweibel) Laura Nolan, Paradigm. (Jan. 10)

Publishers Weekly

"An outrageously funny, irreverent, over-the-top comic mystery."--Sun Sentinel

"A s**tload of hilarious fun."--The Kentucky Democrat

"As bizarre as their adventures are, there's a strange sense of believability...That helps keep the story fresh and the pages turning...Creative, unusual and over the top." --The Associated Press

"Rare political satire...With world affairs in the toilet, Barry and Zweibel bring us what we need: comic relief."-- The Boston Globe

From the Publisher

Barry’s third humorous thriller, cowritten with Zweibel, follows two suburban New Jersey-ites, whose feud escalates into a globe-hopping series of mishaps that alter the world’s political landscape. Horkman (Zweibel) and Peckerman (Barry) each tell parts of the story, in succession. Zweibel is excellent as Horkman, decent, thoughtful, and long suffering. Barry’s reading is also fine, but he sounds too intelligent to fully convince as the boorish, knuckleheaded Peckerman. For those familiar with Barry’s reading of earlier books, Peckerman’s nastiness and foul mouth may be jarring, and the book starts out more unpleasant than entertaining. But when the gonzo slapstick and satire kick in, this blackly humorous farce is frequently laugh-out-loud funny. Interpolated “newscasts” with “Brian Williams” and “Tom Brokaw” are especially amusing. W.M. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine

MARCH 2012 - AudioFile

A novel for those who love one-liners, outrageous characters and loopy plots. Jeffrey Peckerman has a beef—plenty of them, in fact, but his initial one involves what he views as an unfair offsides call at his 11-year-old daughter's soccer game. The ref who makes the questionable call is Philip Horkman, owner of a pet store incongruously called The Wine Shop (because his in-laws, the Wines, funded his business venture). And thus begins one of the strangest buddy novels of this or any century. The hapless characters begin a hate-hate relationship that literally takes them around the globe, starting with an escaped lemur, an insulin pump and the misapprehension that Peckerman and Horkman are members of al-Qaeda trying to blow up the George Washington Bridge. To escape, they make their way onto a cruise ship about to leave New York harbor, only to discover that it's clothing optional. Horkman starts to fall in love with a nun (after all, she's not wearing her habit) and plunges overboard to save her when she's swept away in a storm. From here events get even goofier, as the two opponents land in Cuba (and co-lead a revolution), then go to Mozambique (and are captured by pirates), thence to Yemen (where they are rescued by the Mossad), afterwards to Beijing (and lead a protest in Tiananmen Square), and finally to California, where they meet Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention and where Horkman, despite being a Democrat, is nominated for president. (Later, Peckerman becomes the Democratic nominee, but his obscenity-laced speeches are the despair of his handlers.) Throughout their romp around the world they're constantly at each other's throats, either literally or metaphorically, Horkman's prissiness playing off of Peckerman's crude cynicism. An antidote, if one is needed, to gritty urban realism.

Kirkus Reviews