A Critic's Meta Review: 4/5
I will be honest with you, with all of you: I am a little disappointed right now. In fact, I am much more than just a little disappointed right now; I am pretty flippin’ P.O.’d, man. I legitimately thought this was going to be a book about midg- er, uh...the vertically challenged (if you will...will you? Oh, please!). Now, at this point, some people might be saying to themselves, “Wow, man - you must be pretty damn stupid to have thought that...did you really think that? Please tell me this is sarcasm. Seriously. I literally require this to be sarcasm”, but to those people I would simply ask: why are you so surprised?
I mean, come on.
It’s in the freaking title, dude.
For real, how are you going to put out a book called Little Men and expect people not to think that it’s about...well...little men? Where else could the mind possibly venture in response to being presented with such a title?
The only other alternative I can possibly think of, aside from an exploration of dwarfism in the male population, is a book centered around the (obviously fictionalized) adult life of “Little Boy”, the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima exactly fifty years before the day I made my arrival onto this here planet (still trips me out). Or perhaps another work of historical fiction, of the same era, in the same vein - but, this time, focusing on the inspiring weight loss journey of “Fat Man”, the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki exactly fifty years before the day Jerry Garcia, my tubby, jolly spiritual predecessor from the groovy, happening (at least it was at the time, when those words actually used to mean something aside from signifying that the person using them was some sort of old weirdo whose mind never escaped the summer of 1967) town of San Francisco, tragically passed away.
What does all of this information mean? I don’t know, kid. Why are you asking me? Oh, yeah. The review.
Well, I mean, obviously this book is a classic - we would not be talking about it almost a century and a half later if it wasn’t. There would not have been three films, one Canadian television show, and one Japanese anime series all based on it if it were not, in some way, culturally significant. So there you go. Now leave me alone. I am going to go look up clips of Tony Cox from Bad Santa (sidenote: did you guys know he played an ewok in Return Of The Jedi? For real.)
