Tales of the Truly Unpleasant: Humor columns by:

By Steve Johnston

Book Overview

Two decades of laughs and wisdom? For 20 years, starting in 1988 and continuing to 2007, Steve Johnston's humor columns were a reader favorite in The Seattle Times. Now, for the first time, his family... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1450222048
• ISBN13: 9781450222044
• Release Date: May 2010
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Length: 152 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Guy Erma Bombeck

You need not be a life-long Seattlite to get all the inside jokes, but it does make them funnier. And you don't have to be a parent to get all the family humor, but you'll probably chuckle more. Johnston is a little like Erma Bombeck, only a guy, and sort of a galoot. On paper he was constantly harangued by Mrs. Truly Unpleasant, but readers were in the joke. Exagerations? Plenty. That's storytelling. This nice guy didn't last forever, but his funny words will.

Even better than I remember

I read "Punch" faithfully when Steve Johnston was writing for the Seattle Times, and mourned the end of his columns...when I opened up my copy at random and read a column or two, I knew I'd have to ration myself to a few pages a day. The columns are even funnier than I remember---perhaps because I have now passed through the teenage years with my own children. Any adjective you like can be applied: what he wrote is laugh-out-loud, rib-tickling, laugh-til-you-cry funny. Never having met the Johnston children or read about them in anything but Steve's columns, I also enjoyed their brief comments in the introduction about the fame associated with being Steve's kids. Now I also mourn Steve's death, and the fact that we will never have any more of his fabulous humor pieces, or the occasional thoughtful pieces he wrote about MS. And as for the Truly Unpleasant Mrs. Johnston, she indeed IS St. Nancy, and a model of commitment to the vow of "in sickness and in health."

Great Read!!

Although I am somewhat biased, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I found new humor, and fresh perspectives on life and family, in columns that I remember reading 15 years ago.