Borat: Touristic Guidings to Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

I bought this as a gift for a coworker who loves Borat. He couldn't put it down. Great gift for Borat fans.

WARNING: You MUST have an unconditional sense of humor to appreciate this book. I couldn't stop laughing from the first to the last page... on both sides of the book! Brilliant comedy. Sacha Baron Cohen is a comedic genius, no doubt. It's a great read. No matter how your day has been, you will forget all your troubles once you pick up this book.

I can recommend...............NOT ! ! this book high enough. A house of power. A tour de farce. I laugh. I cry . I loose 15 kilos! I must buy! PS. I get stange call from mans named Steven. He yells I must take words down. I tell Mr. Kolbert that in U. S.and A. I have speech freedoms. He says me his lawyer will call me soon. Probably loolee-loolee jew.

All I can say is that I read the U S and A part in a bookstore, and I was constantly laughing loudly out loud. (A guy came over and said he was getting the book because of my laughing.) Ali G TV made me laugh so much my sides hurt, the Borat movie was hilarious, but I think the book might be even funnier. If you are an arrested development adult male without any sexual hangups, you will think this is one hysterical bit after another. I repeated some of the "observations" to my wife and my teenage son. My son laughed, my wife-not so much. But for the next few days, I would just think about how much I laughed, and that would make me laugh. You can't ask much more out of printed pages.

Borat humor, like fermented horse urine, is definitely an acquired taste. There's plenty here to seriously offend almost everyone--those who are not offended by anything in this double-ended (one part USA, the other Kazakhstan) book have got to be rather strange to begin with. It's almost incessantly outrageous, but that's what makes it a lot of fun. Not everything works quite as well as it should: you may turn to a page and scowl or look revolted--but just turn to the next page and you're smiling again. There are lots of nice color pictures--cheap shoddy color usually, but that's part of the idea. What do you want? Current technology? The text can be a bit slow-going at times ("I was also very happy face at time of my junior schoolings.."), but that's also part of the fun. Borat talks of the "Glorious Tinshein Swimmings Pool" and it's wonderful filtration system ("remove 80% of human solid waste"). It's a book that you can wander through and enjoy. I think that the main delight with Borat so far is that it is very creative and original humor. The danger is that we may see it overdone. Men in Black was an original, creative film: MIB II was neither--it broke no new ground. Animal House was great--but the popularity led to each of the TV networks doing spinoffs which failed to capture and appreciate just why the original was so good. I would hate to see the same thing happen to Borat. A strong word of caution: the book is definitely not for younger children. Some of the photographs are such that you would never see them reproduced on network TV. But the main danger for letting, say, an 8-year-old look at the book would be having to explain to the child why the humor is funny. A good semi-serious documentary could be made of a parent trying to explain the humor to a son or daughter--explaining about the birds and the bees would be trivially easy in comparison. So--not for everyone--but for the Borat fans, truly a gem.