When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris.

When I picked up this book at the library, I knew precisely two things about David Sedaris.

• He occasionally wrote essays for This American Life.
• His sister Amy Sedaris was in a commercial with a lot of rabbits.

Also, I discovered a third fact about him while I was trying to find a digital copy of the cover art for his book.

• White people like him.

When You Are Engulfed In Flames is a collection of essays.  Each one is a short and fascinating story from Sedaris’s life, sparsely embellished with digressions from the topic at hand. It’s easy to see how Sedaris got his start in public radio, and it’s even easier to imagine him reading the essays aloud as you’re reading them, if you have ever heard his voice on the radio.  Reading the book is a bit like being next to a very interesting person at a party, the sort of gifted soul who can keep a monologue going for fifteen minutes without boring anyone in the room.

Sedaris is generally billed as a humorist and there are widespread reports of folks finding his work milk-out-the-nose funny.  I am not in this group.  Sedaris is funny, but this is a sort of subtle humor that is rather more under the surface and it keeps the text from feeling like it belongs in a joke book.  What Sedaris really has a knack for is observation and a particularly effective way of relating stories and thoughts.  A lot of these essays touch on deep topics, but Sedaris resists the urge to pontificate heavily and seems content to relate the details in a way that lets the reader draw their own conclusions. After you read about, say, the author’s self-doubt concerning whether his umbrage at a fellow airline passenger is justified, or confess to not knowing what a dingo is, you can’t help but feel like you’ve had the same experience.  

This book earns my recommendation.  It’s light reading, to be sure, but not the sort that you feel like you have to hide under a colorful book jacket, because every now and again you’ll get a beautiful little pop of insight about life, or death, or whether you should wear a bowtie.  4/5.  

(A word of warning–this is definitely a book for adults due to its language and content.)