HOW TO DO THINGS RIGHT: THE REVELATIONS OF A FUSSY MAN

In L. Rust Hills's masterful work, HOW TO DO THINGS RIGHT: THE REVELATIONS OF A FUSSY MAN, Reese's tone is confident and deadpan. His rueful, old-fashioned voice is perfectly suited to the author's. For one thing, HOW TO DO THINGS RIGHT is permanently applicable. In it Hills demonstrates with ludicrous exactness how the most trivial matters are profoundly elemental, giving advice on everything from refolding a road map to being good. In his view, life's petty irregularities are simply microcosmic expressions of the chaotic forces that confound a reasonable existence. The book is a brilliant combination of quasi-serious advice, self-mockery, autobiography, jeremiad and epicurean ethics. The encouragement of order and self-fulfillment are its goals, but they're promoted with such delicate irony and witty appreciation of disorder and misery that one very quickly finds enjoyment in the comic dimension of one's own ill-regulated life. K.A.P. ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine [Published: FEB 96]