"Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I've Learned" By Alan Alda

I had never read a book of celebrity memoirs until this one and I must say it was a great way to introduce myself into the genre. The book is separated into three "acts," each representing a different period of his life. The acts are the only thing chronological in the book. His stories jump around depending on the topic of each chapter, which actually makes the book more interesting, because you feel like he's actually talking to you.

I went into the book expecting him to be like his character on M*A*S*H, but he wasn't at all. In retrospect, I'm glad I came into it with this expectation because I think I was able to compare and contrast and see the real Alan Alda instead of reading the biography of Hawkeye Pierce. I was surprised to see that he really didn't use a lot of pages to describe his time on M*A*S*H. This bothered me at first because that's what I wanted to read about. After I passed that part of the book however, I found myself still curious about other issues he was dealing with.

Like his character in M*A*S*H, Alda is witty and loves improvisation. Both contributed to the draw of this book. To put it simply, I loved this book because some of his thoughts are so me. Here are some of the one's I liked:

"My mother didn't try to stab my father until I was six, but she must have shown signs of oddness before that." p.3

"Memory can be a kind of mental taxidermy, trying to hold on to the present after it's become the past. I didn't know this them. Change was coming, and I was going to have to com out of my cocoon soon. But I wasn't ready for the next stage in my ,life, and I hung on to the early times as long as I could." p.24

"This was putting my finger in the emotional light socket." p.27

"Other people's obsessions are boring." p.37

"I had to be careful about bumping up against reality. I could break my nose on it." p.41

"If you can make a nun laugh, can God frown?" p.46

"Don't chew on it. Don't' even let it touch your teeth. Above all, don't let it stick to the roof of your mouth. Oh, God, you did it. You let it happen. God is stuck to the roof of your mouth. How are you going to get Him off? You have to get this off and swallow it. What if it just gets hard and stays there? You can't walk around for the rest of the day with God in your mouth. Oh, God. Melt, melt." p.46

"'You have a plump hippocamus!' she said. I had never received that compliment before, and I couldn't tell if it was what she told all the boys, but I grinned with pride anyway." p.186

"You can tell a lot about people by the way they treat the help." p.220

"[about the last MASH unit being decommissioned]I could have thanked them- not just for keeping alive thousands of wounded, but also for keeping alive that amazing human impulse we have at times to put ourselves in the line of fire to save another person's life: someone we don't know, someone who may never know we were even there. They gave us a look at the finest part of ourselves. Their devotion was, in fact, the finest kind." p.234

I recommend this book to anyone who's a fan of Alan Alda, M*A*S*H, theatre, or comedy, or who needs a good summer read.