The lazy person's guide to helping yourself. Review on I Moved Your Cheese - Darrel Bristow

I moved your cheese

I Moved Your Cheese, a satire on self-help books, written by Darrel Bristow-Bovey. This book has 96 pages (including last 3 pages BLANK to make the book look thicker) and has been published by New Holland Publishers (UK) Ltd (2002) and is distributed in India by Dolphin Publications.

The author, using humour, expresses his utter contempt for self-help books and those who read them and adds that the problem with the self-help books that litter the shelves of the bookstores and bedside tables of the nation, besides the fact that they are poorly written by unattractive authors, is that they expect you to do all the work. You are required to read them, remember key words, and perhaps even put their teachings into practice in everyday life.

The title I Moved Your Cheese implies a direct attack on the similarly named ?Who Moved My Cheese?? by Dr. Spencer Johnson, a self-help book about dealing with change. But Darrel Bristow-Bovey has not limited himself to ridiculing just this; he makes disdainful references to Deepak Chopra and other self-proclaimed ?gurus?.

I Moved Your Cheese is a total laugh riot. Darrel Bristow-Bovey, with his absurdly funny anecdotes and instances, will not disappoint readers seeking ridiculous humour. His chapter about the mango-throwing wise guy guru is hysterically funny and his take on Oprah and feng shui will have you sniggering smugly in your couch. His other stories about the Xam, his neighbour Bill, and his friend Chunko are sidesplitting.

Instead of writing words of wisdom in cheese, like his forerunner, the author is found sardonically writing in the sand. Across the book, he is yelling, ?Who moved my keys?? ?I moved your geese? and other deliberately mocking lines.

And of course the process of ?Osmatix?, which the author himself has patented. The process where the reader not need read this book but should simply buy this book and keep it in a prominent position will make him/her a brighter, happier and more desirable person. Since, the pages have been treated with a revolutionary new formula that allows wisdom to pass directly from the page into the atmosphere, where it can be easily inhaled from any position.

With hilarity oozing from cover to cover, this book is a must-read for those who enjoy humour at it?s mirthful best.

Moksh Juneja