The Perfect Solution to Absolutely Everything/Arthur Hoppe/303 pp.

Another MULSA book sale remainder!
This volume consists of essays by Hoppe, previously published in the San Francisco Chronicle, on a variety of topics, including politics, the Vietnam War, birth control, Mother's Day, the arms race, and rutabagas. (Yes, rutabagas.) All of the essays were written in the mid-1960s, so a large portion of them deal with Vietnam and the Johnson administration.
Hoppe starts off, tongue firmly in cheek, by stating that the solution to overpopulation is... total birth control. As in absolutely no babies being born, period. He goes on to say that Mother's Day should be a national day of mourning, since mothers are to blame for every single bad thing that has ever happened. ("...extensive historical research shows that every evildoer, from Atilla the Hun to Adolf Hitler, had, somewhere in his background, a mother... If we wipe out Motherhood, we will unquestionably wipe out not only overpopulation, but war, soil erosion, dental caries, air pollution and people who cough on buses.") He warns against trusting anyone over thirty, as well as anyone under thirty, and advocates drinking courses for teenagers, as well as the legalization of bananas and other psychotropic drugs.
This book is a hilarious demonstration of how ridiculous so many things are, from politics to bigotry to xenophobia, and how we, as a people, take ourselves waaaay to seriously. If you're not familiar with the 1960s, some of the topics may be a bit confusing, but otherwise the book is very enjoyable.

Enough's Enough/Calvin Trillin/251 pp.

Syndicated columnist Calvin Trillin, a Kansas City native and sometime visitor to Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion, offered this 1990 collection of some of his best columns from the late 1980s. While Trillin is not a political columnist per se, some of these columns do deal with the Reagan and Bush (Sr.) administrations and political campaigns, along with such 80s figures as Michael Milliken, Gary Hart, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, Imelda Marcos, and Manuel Noriega (not to mention Noriega's red underwear and his evil voodoo tamales). Trillin also covers more everyday topics, like family vacations (and Packing Greatness), empty-nest syndrome, and three a.m. car alarms. Since this was written over 20 years ago, some of it was a little out-of-date, but some topics were strangely similar to issues being dealt with today - the invasion of Grenada by the Reagan administration, and of Noriega's Panama by the Bush administration, bring to mind the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in our recent history, for example.
I enjoyed Trillin's easy-going, dry sense of humor, and the shortness of the columns (average of 2-3 pp.) lends them to easy reading. Trillin is one of my favorite columnists, and I recommend the book. By the way, this was another MULSA book sale remainder!