The Book of Heroic Failures
By Stephen Pile
The Book of Heroic Failures, was written by Stephen Pile and first published in 1979. This book is essentially a collection of hilarious, ironic and unusual people and events. This sole theme is that of ironic failure, each story being anywhere from a few sentences to several paragraphs. The book itself is split into eleven different sections so that the reader may dip in and out of the book at will, which is a very helpful format considering the layout of the stories. My favourite sections include the glory of the stage, stories we failed to pin down and the art of being wrong. From the poet whose footnotes were longer than his poems, to a bill ruling that the value of pi was four, there is no shortage of entertaining stories within this books pages. To those who wish to read only the best of these stories I would advise that you read some of the longer ones as more tends to go wrong, causing a domino effect of mild humour. The humour in this book is relatively subtle and therefore won't be suited to everyone, for this very reason I imagine it would also be quite uninteresting to anyone under the age of ten.
Overall this book was thoroughly enjoyable and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys comedy or needs a new perspective on what qualifies as 'success'.
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