Take the Cannoli

I'm reading Sarah Vowell's Take the Cannoli, a compilation of essays she wrote and stories she did for the public radio show "This American Life." Below is a sample of her more apt/clever insights. She surely would have earned her an A in Professor Strebeigh's English 120 class on non-fiction writing during her first semester in college.

On Nick Hornby's novel High Fidelity, later turned into a movie starring John Cusack & Jack Black:

"Much of the book takes place in a London record store. Clerks Barry and Dick are emotional cripples stuck in that mostly male pop culture circle of hell in which having seen a film (the right kind) or owning a record (ditto) acts as a substitute for being able to express what these things mean to them." (How many of those do we know?)

On the Illinois driving manual:

"Rules of the Road is an alarming, apocalyptic work of literature filled with foreboding information such as 'carbon monoxide is a deadly poison' and 'if fire is an immediate danger you must jump clear of the vehicle' and 'if your vehicle runs off the roadway into water but does not sink right away, try to escape through a window.' (And if you can't swim?) I am nonplussed about the erratic portrayal of non-drivers [among whom she is one], the warnings that 'bicyclists may make unexpected moves.' The language is also transparently right-wing, full of diagrams in which the good car is white while the 'Black Car is Breaking the Law,' and then there's the Sieg Heil salute of a right-turn hand signal, or 'the vehicle on the left should yield to the vehicle on the right.' This booklet feels like a Wes Craven remake of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will and reading it made me panic."