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 Grab Your Shades and Step Into The Future Feb 13, 2009
This is one to keep on your bookshelf. I had to replace the copy I lent to a friend, because the friend wanted to keep it. Scott Adams is his usual, funny self--he seems to have worked where I once did (or maybe he just has spies there?). In any case, most of the book is LOL funny, but I found the last chapter pretty interesting and thought-provoking. It's definitely worth a read even if you don't agree with everything Adams puts forth--and he'll tell you that himself!
0 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 Dilbert is funny. Scott Adams, not so. Sep 27, 2008
'Dilbert Future' is a hodgepodge of thoughts by Scott Adams about present day society and the future. Interwoven into the text are Dilbert cartoons which often reflect what the author is trying to express. This book *should be* hilarious. It's not. The author's pontifications on life and the future are dumb, not funny. And towards the end I found them very boring. Thankfully the Dilbert cartoons are humorous. But even those are not "best of breed" Dilbert. I thought this book would lead to hysterical laughter. Not so. Only a wry smile or two.
Bottom line: Scott Adams is a great cartoonist that seems to be unable to write comedic/satiric pieces. Best avoided.
The future Sep 16, 2008
This book is wacky, zany, and humorous. Sometimes impossible, it portrays the picture of the workplace in the future. Workers are non-traditional and sometimes with out-of-this-world attitude. The elderly will have a hard time to accept the would be scenarios. The conversations are not typical of our grandparents' days. A warning to educators and authorities. They have to rethink their policies and programs if they want to avoid a future society like this.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 It's ok, but does not hold the audience like the Dilbert series Jun 03, 2007
I'm even being generous by giving this 2 stars. Scott Adams is very talented but he should just stick to Dilbert Comics.
3 of 4 found the following review helpful:
Stick with Dilbert Collections Jul 06, 2006
Scott Adams is a cartoonist. He is not a stand-up comedian nor is he Dave Barry, though this book makes it quite clear that he really wants to be. Still, there is a reason he tells jokes in three-panel comic strips instead of 30-minute monologues. Here he addresses various aspects of life and makes tongue-in-cheek predictions, interspersed with Dilbert cartoons. It was obviously written in sections rather than as a whole, and the entire time all I could think about was how much more fitting these musings would be in somebody's blog than a hardbound tome published by Harper Business, especially since so many of the predictions have gone out of date since its publication (such as his erroneous predictions for the futures of the cable modem and ISDN). There were some vaguely amusing parts but nothing was anywhere near laugh-out-loud funny, and I had to yawn a bit at the tired "women really rule the world" section - that idea was beaten to death decades ago and hasn't gotten any funnier in the meantime. Frankly, the most humorous parts were the cartoons, and if I wanted to read those I could have just picked up a collection.
The final chapter, "A New View of the Future," was inappropriate in this context. For this section Adams "turned the humor mode off" and discussed his personal philosophies. They were interesting but did not fit whatsoever with the rest of the book. His ideas on perception and cause and effect would also have been much more compelling had he bothered to actually research any of the theories and experiments he mentioned. I understand that the goal of this section was nothing more than to make the reader think about the universe a little differently, but it would have been much more effective had he spent an hour at the library finding a couple of references to cite. Saying things like "I'll simplify the explanation, probably getting the details wrong in the process, but you'll get the general idea" does not instill in me a desire to take him very seriously.
Despite the incongruity of the chapter, I still enjoyed it about as much as I did the rest of the book, but for different reasons (the first part was vaguely amusing, the second vaguely intriguing). Ultimately this felt like a Dilbert collection trying to be a Dave Barry book. I think I'll stick with the comic strips from now on.
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