Pre-Owned COMPLETE & UTTER FAILURE (Hardcover) 0385472919 9780385472913

So you've got these fond hopes for blissful love,??professional glory, fame, and fortune. But in the??back of your mind there's that nagging fear. The??man of your dreams will laugh in your face. Your??hated office rival will come up with some whizbang??marketing idea and get promoted, while you'll be??asked to "help out with the phones."??Steven Spielberg will buy the rights to your??screenplay, spend $40 million producing it, and the critics??will savage the film, mercilessly singling out??your work for especially contemptuous, poisonous??derision. But hey, everybody fails sometime. It's??inevitable. So don't fear failure.??Embrace it. In Complete And Utter??Failure, Neil Steinberg joyfully explores the many??fascinating facets of failure, from pointless??failure (a brief history of several very dumb??attempts to climb Mount Everest) to product failure??(Reddi-Bacon, smokeless cigarettes, and Baby Jesus??dolls) to institutionalized failure (the horrifying??Dickensian spectacle of the National Spelling Bee,??in which 8,999,999 children out of 9,000,000 fail??in an excruciatingly public and humiliating??fashion). This delightful book is filled with surprising??and useless arcana--who really invented the??telephone, what turned on Isaac Newton--guaranteed to??help you annoy people at cocktail parties. Along??the way Steinberg meditates on his own myriad??miscues and disappointments, beginning with his failure??to perform a magic trick in front of the??neighborhood kids at age four (he blames Captain Kangaroo).??Complete And Utter Failure is a??wonderfully literate, witty book that issues a??ringing message for our times: If at first you don't??succeed, have a scotch and forget about it.