Christopher Cerf

A playful easy reader in the tradition of Dr. Seuss's Hop on Pop that teaches the basics of word construction. From award-winning humorist Christopher Cerf comes a super-simple, delightfully silly Beginner Book in which the rhymed text and the position of the words on the page teach the basics of word construction. Written in the style of Dr. Seuss's classic Hop on Pop with rhyming words placed directly above each other to show their shared construction, A Skunk in My Bunk combines phonics and word recognition to make learning to read easy--and fun With bright, charming illustrations by Nicola Slater, kids will be delighted to read for themselves about a goat in a coat in a boat in a moat, a pig in a wig dancing a jig, a skunk in a bunk, and much, much more Launched in 1957 with The Cat in the Hat and written specifically for emergent readers, Beginner Books combine an exacting blend of simple words and fun pictures that encourage children to read--all by themselves.

"Mission Accomplished Or How We Won the War in Iraq" is the definitive collection -- systematically categorized, indexed, and footnoted for your convenience -- of authoritative misinformation, disinformation, misunderstanding, miscalculation, egregious prognostication, boo-boos, and just plain lies, about the Iraq War. "Never before has such a large and diverse group of experts been so unanimously in favor of a particular national policy as they were in the case of the U.S. invasion of Iraq," note Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky, who, as co-founders of the Institute of Expertology, the nation's leading purveyor of expertise on expertise, were uniquely qualified to assemble this impressive collection. "In the face of such a consensus, we had no choice but to ask ourselves, 'Could the iron law of expertology -- the experts are never right -- be wrong'" At once an entertainment, a cautionary tale, a critique of mass media, a reference tool, and a postwar manifesto, "Mission Accomplished " presents, as no book has before, the collective wisdom of all those who are presumed to know what they talking about on the subject of America's adventure in Iraq. As this hilarious, yet depressing, volume demonstrates, they don't. From MISSION ACCOMPLISHED "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed." -- President George W. Bush, May 1, 2003 " Insurgents] pose no strategic threat to the United States or to the Coalition Forces." -- L. Paul Bremer III, Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, November 17, 2003 "Military action will not last more than a week." -- Bill O'Reilly, "The O'Reilly Factor, " January 23, 2003 "I couldn't imagine somebody like Osama bin Laden understanding the joy of Hanukkah." -- President George W. Bush, at a White House menorah lighting ceremony, December 10, 2001

"An amusing and cruelly accurate cultural critique" (The Wall Street Journal), this informative and utterly debilitating compendium explores the many surprising ways you might die a horrible death. DID YOU KNOW THAT CARROTS CAUSE BLINDNESS AND BANANAS ARE RADIOACTIVE? That too many candlelight dinners can cause cancer? And not only is bottled water a veri-table petri dish of biohazards (so is tap water, by the way) but riding a bicycle might destroy your sex life? In Encyclopedia Paranoiaca, master satirists Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf have assembled an authoritative, disturbingly comprehensive, and utterly debilitating inventory of things poised to harm, maim, or kill you--all of them based on actual research about the perils of everyday life. Thoroughly sourced and conveniently alphabetized for easy reference, this book just might save your life. (But it probably won't.)

Did you ever have the uneasy feeling that the experts are not ... well, experts?

An updated edition of the classic, irreverent collection of trivia gathers lies, misinformation, and errors propagated by experts in the fields of politics, science, technology, sports, art, entertainment, music, and business. Original. 40,000 first printing. Tour.