Complete and Utter Failure: A Celebration of Also-rans, Runners-up, Never-weres and Total Flops

So you've got these fond hopes for blissful love,  professional glory, fame, and fortune. But in the  back of your mind there's that nagging fear. The  man of your dreams will laugh in your face. Your  hated office rival will come up with some whizbang  marketing idea and get promoted, while you'll be  asked to "help out with the phones."  Steven Spielberg will buy the rights to your  screenplay, spend $40 million producing it, and the critics  will savage the film, mercilessly singling out  your work for especially contemptuous, poisonous  derision. But hey, everybody fails sometime. It's  inevitable. So don't fear failure.  Embrace it. In Complete And Utter  Failure, Neil Steinberg joyfully explores the many  fascinating facets of failure, from pointless  failure (a brief history of several very dumb  attempts to climb Mount Everest) to product failure  (Reddi-Bacon, smokeless cigarettes, and Baby Jesus  dolls) to institutionalized failure (the horrifying  Dickensian spectacle of the National Spelling Bee,  in which 8,999,999 children out of 9,000,000 fail  in an excruciatingly public and humiliating  fashion). This delightful book is filled with surprising  and useless arcana--who really invented the  telephone, what turned on Isaac Newton--guaranteed to  help you annoy people at cocktail parties. Along  the way Steinberg meditates on his own myriad  miscues and disappointments, beginning with his failure  to perform a magic trick in front of the  neighborhood kids at age four (he blames Captain Kangaroo).  Complete And Utter Failure is a  wonderfully literate, witty book that issues a  ringing message for our times: If at first you don't  succeed, have a scotch and forget about it.