Cabin Pressure: One Man's Desperate Attempt to Recapture His Youth as a Camp Counselor
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List Price: $22.95
Our Price: $4.82
Your Save: $ 18.13 ( 79% )
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 796.54
EAN: 9781401302603
ISBN: 1401302602
Label: Hyperion
Manufacturer: Hyperion
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 288
Publication Date: 2007-06-05
Publisher: Hyperion
Release Date: 2007-05-30
Studio: Hyperion
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Not a book for everyone
Comment: I can understand how other reviewers thought this book was funny, but I am afraid it just didn't hit a good note with me. I kept getting more and more depressed by the author's descriptions of his human relationships. I am sure that he was trying to make his short sighted insecurities funny but I guess I am the one reader not laughing. I kept expecting something interesting to happen. I at least expected that the lame communication with his bride to be would end in a messy break up. I am always looking for good outdoor stories but this book wasn't one for me. However, the author is a good writer and if being crammed in a cabin with stinky socks, belches and farts is your idea of a swell time, then you would enjoy this macho look at camp.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Here's to Gorp and Bug Juice
Comment: Reviewed by Vicky Burkholder
on 07/13/2008
Who has not been to summer camp, even if only for a day? And as an adult, who has not sat in his or her industrial beige/grey cubicle on a clear, beautiful summer day and wished they were once again that carefree youngster jumping into a frigid lake or pounding initials into a piece of leather?
Josh Wolk, a senior writer for Entertainment Weekly, decided to spend part of the summer before his wedding doing just that. He returned to his old haunt as a counselor, hoping to find his boyhood before stepping solidly into adulthood. His lighthearted look at the goings on at camp will keep you laughing. But, just as in life, all is not high-jinks and pratfalls. He is looking back at this from the perspective of twenty years beyond most of the people there. But he gives even the serious stuff a humorous edge.
If you've ever been to summer camp, or even if you haven't, you'll enjoy this book. It's both funny and nostalgic, a perfect blend of entertainment. So grab your gorp and bug juice and come along for the ride. You'll be glad you did.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Makes me ALMOST want to try camp again some day!
Comment: I am never at all sure why I like reading camp books. I hated the actual camp experience, due to overwhelming homesickness and general dislike of being in groups! But I love reading about camp, and this is probably the best book about it I've ever read. Josh Wolk spends the summer before getting married working as a counselor at the camp he attended for many summers as a boy. The best part of this book is that it really doesn't romantize the experience. Josh feels like a misfit much of the time, the 14 year old boys in his cabin can be very, very hard to deal with, the other counselor in the cabin doesn't pull his weight at all...but still, he has many moments of remembering what he loves about the camp. It sounds like a great camp. I have 13 and 10 year old boys, and I wish now that overnight camp wasn't out of our price range, as it sounds like it could be a wonderful experience.
I hope Wolk writes more books. I'd love to hear about his life as a parent, as he seems like someone with real insights.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Threshold apprehension.
Comment: I take that title from a Frank Black song, which I think is a pretty accurate way of describing the nervous step you take into full-fledged adulthood. "Cabin Pressure" details Josh Wolk's step.
I first took notice of Wolk through his terrific writing at "Entertainment Weekly." He wrote day-after commentary on the "Real World" that was so gut-bustingly hilarious my friends and I used to E-mail the highlights to each other. After a while, the writing was so good and the show so bad, we stopped watching the show and just read the wrap-ups.
Wolk's best skill as a writer is his gift of observation. Give him any scenario and he can instantly break it down, expose each player's motivation, and end it all with a hilarious analogy.
He brings that keen observation to "Cabin Pressure," his tale of heading back to camp as a counselor on the brink of his wedding day. Having remembered camp as a kind of innocent oasis, Josh wants to reexperience it one more time before he becomes, gulp, a husband and a father.
Wolk fills us in on summer-camp life -- what he remembered from his day, what has changed, and what hasn't. The best part of the book is Wolk's interaction with the kids in his cabin. He does an amazing job of letting you know each one, whether they are charming, maddening, or depressingly and prematurely stressed-out and miserable.
I don't necessarily think I bought into Josh's overall theme here -- this whole nostalgic innocence trip -- but it doesn't matter because "Cabin Pressure" is often hilarious and reading this book is like a well-spoken, really funny friend telling you his best summer-camp stories.
The tone can shift from body-odor humor to some strong emotional connections with the boys, and all the while Wolk's razor-sharp observation and pitch-perfect punchlines remain.
After reading Wolk in "Entertainment Weekly" all those years, and laughing my butt off, this book lives up to all of my expectations. Funny and insightful, "Cabin Pressure" is a wonderful debut book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: great read!
Comment: I enjoyed this book from line one. Josh Wolk is a wonderfully funny story teller. Even if you never spent any time in summer camp, you will love the stories and characters. I didn't want it to end!
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Editorial Reviews:
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What happens when a grown man returns to the site of his fondest childhood memories? A wry, clear-eyed, and laugh-out-loud look at the transition to adulthood Three months before getting married at age thirty-four, Josh Wolk decides to treat himself to a "farewell to childhood" extravaganza: one last summer working at the beloved Maine boys’ camp where he spent most of the eighties. And there he finds out that there’s no better way to see how much you’ve changed than to revisit a place that hasn’t changed at all. In these eight hilarious, uncomfortable, enlightening weeks, Josh readjusts to life teaching swimming and balancing on a thin metal cot in a cabin of shouting, wrestling, wet-willie-dispensing fourteen-year-olds who, contrary to the warnings of doomsaying sociologists, he finds indistinguishable from the rowdy fourteen-year-olds of his day in any way other than their haircuts. With his old camp friends gone, he finds himself working alongside guys who used to be his campers. Moments of feeling cripplingly old are offset by the corrosive insecurities of his youth when he’s paired in the cabin with Mitch, the forty-two-year-old jack-of-all- extreme-sports whose machismo intimidated Josh so much fifteen years earlier, and whom their current campers idolize. And throughout all this disorienting regression, Josh’s telephone conversations with his fiancée, Christine, grow increasingly intense as their often comical discussions over the wedding become a flimsy cover for her worries that he’s not ready to relinquish his death-grip on the comforts of the past. A hilarious and insightful look at the tenacious power of nostalgia, the glory of childhood, and the nervous excitement of taking a leap to the next unknown stage in life, Cabin Pressure will appeal to anyone who’s ever been young, wishes he was young again, but knows deep down it probably isn’t a good idea.
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