Picked this up in the humor section, but thought it wasn't engaging enough for a long trip, but ended keeping it, because of the East European slant. There was only one place that I found myself laughing out loud - when Wakefield tries to find an outlet in an airport to charge his phone, and finds every one of the miserably small number of outlets already used to charge phones, computers, i-pods and all sorts of electronic devices. I have definitely developed a talent for finding outlets in strange places.
Our alienated hero Wakefield is visited by the Devil, and they strike a deal that he has to find a fulfilling direction in life within a year. Wakefield travels around the country as a motivational speaker, who never prepares speeches, but meets with some of the people and then does a stream of consciousness type speech I rarely found amusing, but most probably do. He travels to unnamed cities, but they are pretty easily identifiable as New Orleans (his home), Chicago and Seattle. He has a Russian taxi driver buddy back home, he is now divorced from a Romanian woman, and ends up meeting various other East Europeans along the way.
The other part I thoroughly enjoyed was the mention of librarians descending on his home town for a national conference. Since there was an American Library Association conference in New Orleans in 2006, I was convinced that this was what he was talking about, though I didn't catch any references to the devastation from Katrina in 2005 - well, it turns out the book came out in 2004, so pre-Katrina and pre-ALA conference. Oh well, maybe he just thought he would use us for some laughs - that I highly appreciated.
All in all I stuck with the book and found it enjoyable in enough places to maybe try something else by the author.
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