"Grumpy Old Men": New Year, Same Old Crap

This book does exactly what it says on the label - SAME OLD CRAP! - This is the worst load of Crap that it has ever been my misfortune to be given.

It has no structure and is just the author attemping to be witty but acheiving a vitriolic boring mess.

I do not believe it! how can anyone publish/sell this dross and even worse what prompted my wife to buy it for me

Lazy, unnecessarily vitriolic and self-satisfied (7/9 people found this helpful)

I have to admit I was really disappointed with this book. I eagerly bought it, expecting to nod in a sage manner on the train, shaking my head in agreement while reading thoughts roughly equivalent to those expessed on the popular TV programme of the same name. You know, slightly bemused men anywhere over the age of forty reacting often with sheer disblief and resigned nonplussedness to the senseless and irritating idiosyncracies of a society that is ever so gradually marginalising them. Therein lies the appeal of the TV show. This book, however, is somewhat different in approach. The title appears to have been purloined from the TV show, as the author has had nothing to do with the said programme.

The reader is treated to the views of one grumpy old man only - the author David Quantick. Quantick was (surprisingly, in my view) born in 1961. However, his narrative reads like the work of a late-twenty/early thirty something, packed full of vitriol aimed at those whose views or actions he despises, and his invective is peppered with juvenile studenty expletives aimed at these people such as "knobstone", "monkey boy", "bozo boy", "gimpaloid" and so on. Anyone who uses the word "gimpaloid" should be cannon fodder for a grumpy's ire. He writes using capital letters a lot to emphasise his points like a chat room bellower, and at times the whole thing reads like the very "blogs" he criticises. He praises "girl power"; he has no healthy cynicism with regard to Americans; he sees no need to show black and white films ("why bother now we've got colour"); he despises any rock band that has existed for more than five years. For Heaven's sake these are not the views of a "grumpy old man". They are the very views that true grumpies loathe. Quantick seems to fall into the exact category that many of us over forties and beyond have no time for at all. Rather than eschewing the modern world he seems (on many occasions) to fully embrace it, lambasting any of us too slow to catch up, as he patronisingly explains to us what "MySpace" and "YouTube" are. Surely the very antithsesis of the grumpy ideology ? (By the way, I know what MySpace and YouTube are, I just don't care about them or want to use them).

Furthermore, most subjects get no more than a paragraph (or maybe two) of the Quantick treatment. He could, and should, have written reams on reality TV, talent shows, breakfast television, news presenters and weather presenters etc. He didn't. He just hammered out a few lazy lines. Quantick wrote this in a few weeks, I should imagine, and the book becomes typical of today's shabbily-produced, "let's make a quick killing at Christmas" product. Quantick displays the symptoms of the very disease true grumpies despise.

He redeems himself somewhat with excellent passages on the internet, mobile phones, the Russian space programme and (brilliantly) second-hand bookshops, but overall he could have done so much better, or maybe not. Maybe he is simply a man in his forties stuck forever in his early thirties, as he defends binge drinking in an act of staggering "look at me, I'm down with the yoof" stupidity. So many of these sort of "soundbite" collection books are piled up in megastores these days and they offer very little other than more ammunition for the genuine grumpy to carp about people like David Quantick who personifies a large part of the very society we are all irritated by.

I found Quantick's views to be unnecessarily acerbic and (at times) worryingly reactionary and right-wing, amazingly enough (particularly the "people" section). He's clearly not right-wing and no doubt would be appalled to see that I've said that, but that is how he comes across at times. Cheap shots at the French and the Germans just don't pass for the behaviour of a grumpy I'm afraid. A true grumpy should never have that much bile in his belly, that much hate in his veins. He should just let most of it pass him by with a wry shake of the head as he grows more tired of today's world as the wan sun begins to set...

For that reason, Mr Quantick, I'm out.

"Grumpy Old Men": New Year, Same Old Crap

David Quantick

Reader Reviews:

Grumpy Old Men New Year, Same old crap (1/1 people found this helpful)

Lazy, unnecessarily vitriolic and self-satisfied (7/9 people found this helpful)

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