Bøger af Starbuck O'Dwyer

Named a 2012 Indie Reader Discovery Awards finalist (parenting) and a 2011 Foreword Reviews Book of the Year finalist (both humor and essay categories), How to Raise a Good Kid is a collection of 23 hilarious, honest and heartfelt stories about raising children that help parents teach lessons about core values such as faith, honesty, courage, hard work, perseverance and love. Guaranteed to make you laugh, each story is authentic, universal in theme and perfectly suited to start conversations about the importance of integrity and character, bullying, prejudice, first love, honesty and many other topics. Already translated into five languages and an international best-seller, How to Raise a Good Kid is highly entertaining and meaningful and one of the best books about parenting and the process of growing up that you will ever find.

Named one of only two 5-star finalists for the 2012 Indie Reader Discovery Awards in the humor category, Goliath Gets Up is one of the funniest books you will ever read. Indie Reader describes it as, "a sidesplitting read in which you find yourself shamelessly and boisterously cheering for the most outrageous band of misfits to ever have a dream." The story of friends-by circumstance who decide they must do something important in order to change their lives, Goliath is a rollicking underdog tale about a misguided attempt to bring the Academy Awards ceremony to Rochester, NY and save the city in the process.

Welcome to High School Dance, the sequel to How to Raise a Good Kid and the 2016 Global E-book Awards gold medalist for non-fiction humor. I'm glad you're here. This book is the culmination of a project that began shortly after my wife and I welcomed our son to the world. Like most first-time fathers, I felt a new and profound sense of responsibility and immediately became determined to pass along every lesson I believed was important. So even though my pride and joy was only drooling, pooping and sleeping at this point, and was years away from absorbing his dad's hard-earned wisdom, I refused to let any of those pesky details get in my way. First, I made a list of the events of my childhood that taught me the most, the ones that made the biggest impressions, both good and bad. This exercise forced me to revisit many harrowing experiences such as batting zero in little league baseball, my chronic addiction to a blanket, my disastrously unsuccessful try-out for the role of Winthrop in The Music Man, and the time I mooned the entire sixth grade. I wanted to let my son know whatever hardship he might face; his father had already been there, learned something of value and survived. I also wanted to let him know about all the fun and joy I experienced as a child and the love my parents showed me. After compiling my list, however, I realized it wasn't going to be enough. What if, God forbid, I wasn't around to tell him the full story behind each enumerated item? I couldn't bear the thought so I decided to turn the list into a book of stories about my childhood. Over time, the project evolved into two books: one about my grade school years, How to Raise a Good Kid, and one about my junior and senior high school years, High School Dance. I truly hope you enjoy these collections. Few times in life are more memorable than our school years. Humiliation, heartbreak and failure are abundant, and that's on a good day. No matter who you are, coming of age is exciting, confusing and sometimes downright dangerous, and I've tried to capture both the agony and the ecstasy. My wife and I were fortunate enough to add a daughter to our family in the intervening years and my great hope is that she and her brother will someday read these stories, learn a few lessons, come to know their father even better, and above all, remember how much I love them.

What would you do if you were a few months from collecting early retirement—a pension for which you'd sucked up and sycophanted almost twenty years—when your obscenely overweight and extremely crass boss told you that if you didn't raise the company's market share by the end of the year, you'd be out on your ass without a dime? If you're Sky Thorne, Senior V.P. of Tailburger—a fringe fast food chain whose specialties are batter dipped, deep-fried meat patties and 96-oz. beef-flavored shakes—you'll get to work on as many harebrained, desperate schemes as you can think of. And if that means launching a marketing campaign that asks the public, "Why just abuse your body when you can torture it?” then damn it, that's what you'll do! Because Sky Thorne is ready to fight dirty and do anything necessary to earn the pension he sees as the reset button on life, liberty, and the pursuit of unadulterated deep-fried happiness.Red Meat Cures Cancer is a hilarious and poignant romp through a world of excess, and marks the arrival of a great new satirical voice in American literature.