Product Description

This book is highly entertaining, but it also provides significant insight into contemporary life in America. Caudron reveals why people are indulging in their fanatical passions, and how that indulgence is transforming community life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #576166 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-25
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Jim Walsh, City Pages
...A poignant exploration of what makes people tick, what community means these days, and why it's OK to love both Klingons and Christ.

Bette Erickson, Boulder Daily Camera
If you're searching for the ideal nightstand book, then Who Are You People? may be for you. Funny yet poignant, the stories provide important insight into present-day life in America.

Entertainment Weekly, September 15, 2006
Subcultures that inspire rabid devotion--from Barbie collecting to ice fishing--are examined with wit and compassion.

Customer Reviews

Searching for passion
I loved reading this book. Shari's writing style hooked me in the introduction. She chose fascinating subjects. Her insights were wonderful and she used her journalist's curiosity to ask great questions while avoiding judgement. I learned a lot from the book. I think Shari's passion is in learning new things. I am sure she can find a conference hosted by those with a similar hobby!

Likeable author on misguided mission
I took to Shari as a person who was very outfront about her own perceived flaw of a life lacking in passionate persistence at hobbies; she right away reveals many other personal proclivities that helped win my trust and affection. But after the first few chapters reporting on assorted offbeat hobbyist groups, I felt I wasn't learning anything terribly interesting or being well entertained. I think we all instinctively know there any number of people in our own hometowns with idiosyncratic recreational interests; it seemed contrived for Shari to have fashioned a 3-year cross country oddysey to 'discover' that there are groups obsessively dedicated to their Barbie doll collections or to memorizing trivia from, and re-enacting episdoes of, their long-gone favored TV sit-coms. A catalog of a dozen or so peculiar pastimes and some cursory chats with a few ardent devotees is suitable for a quick magazine-length read; the heft required to make a book-worthy effort takes far more passionate digging than Shari musters here. An excellent example of a superlative book about the addictiveness of an offbeat hobby is Dan Koeppel's "To See Every Bird on Earth: A Father, A Son, and a Lifetime Obsession" -- for which I gave a 5-star review.

Good but not great
This is a good book and gives good info about stuff that is not vital information. Enjoyable reading but "put-downable".