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Book Review
Publisher: Ebury Press
Sun, 9 January 2005
by: Tyz
There are two aspect of this book’s title that you may find confusing.
Firstly – a “Googlewhack” is what happens when you put two words into the Google search engine, and it comes back with one page found. If you have any idea of how the Google search engine works, you would know this is quite an unlikely event.
Secondly – now you know what a Googlewhack is, how the hell could someone ever have an experience with it that could ever be called an “Adventure”! This doesn’t seem that strange however if you know anything about Dave Gorman.
I first heard his name a few years ago when I was at the Edinburgh Fringe. The stand-up comedian I was watching perform was suddenly distracted by the man sitting next to me. She leaned over and said “Are you Dave Gorman? Sorry, you probably hear that line all the time”. I was duly confused.
It turns out that my neighbour was indeed Dave Gorman – British TV personality, stand-up comedian and author. He had made his mark on the entertainment world with Are you Dave Gorman? – the TV show, the stand-up show and the book. It is the charming story of he and his flatmate Danny Wallace travelling all over the world trying to meet 54 people who happen to be also called Dave Gorman.
After their adventure, the flatmates went their separate ways. Danny went on to start a cult (as documented in the book Join Me) while Dave secured his celebrity status with a TV show about living your life by following the newspaper horoscope exactly (very funny show if you can get your hands on the DVD).
This is where we find Dave at the beginning of Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack Adventure. He has turned thirty, grown a beard and decided to start living a grown-up life. While trying to write a “proper” novel, Dave is informed by an anonymous e-mail that his site is a Googlewhack. This intrigues him and he starts looking for others. He finds one, then meets him on a whim. This man then finds Dave another – and Dave’s plans for his novel take a drastic turn as he spends the next year of his life trying to find a chain of ten Googlewhacks before his 31st birthday.
This new offering for Gorman is original, funny, cleverly written a great read. Gorman has had a great idea in labelling each of the four sections of the book with titles that tell you what happens at the end of the section – making you want to know exactly how the author got into this bizarre situation. The story does tend to drag a little in the lead up to the end due to the repetition of the author meeting new people again and again. This is a minor point however and Gorman has tried to cut this down as much as possible while still maintaining the completeness of the tale.
As with Danny Wallace’s Join Me and the combined effort Are you Dave Gorman?, this is a great read if you want a light-hearted story that shows the amazing things people can do if they have the inclination. People like Gorman may not save the world, but they will make it a bit weirder – and we can all thank him for that.
by: Tyz
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