I'm in love. I mean, I was before, anyway, after reading "Three Men in a Boat". Then "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Gentlemen" really cemented my adoration of this man. "Second Thoughts" is just icing on an increasingly potent, mature and tasty cake. These "Thoughts" titles have not the laugh-out-loud hilarity of "Three Men." The themes are universal, timeless, and humorous in the way that life is never what you imagine and always what you don't expect. These essays are of thoughts fully developed and wry with a questioning and longing for better but an experience of life that is dubious of real change. What these essays tell me is that it is only our outsides that ever change - our clothes, our accoutrements, our homes, modes of transportation, etc. All the technology in the world cannot make a more fully realized human being. We have been this way, and had these thoughts, and suffered these disappointments for eons. And we will continue the same way, more or less, for better or worse, until we kill the planet and ourselves. ( )

Not a reprint