How to Travel With a Salmon & Other Essays

New York: Harcourt and Brace & Company - A Harvest Book, 1995. First Paperback Edition . Trade Paperback. Near Fine. 4 1/2" x 7 1/4. 248 Pages. Attractive trade paperback with dust jacket like flaps. Umberto Eco on how to avoid contagious diseases: I read recently that according to the revelations of Professor Matre, heterosexual contact is carcinogenic. High time somebody came out and said it. I would go even farther: heterosexual contact causes death, period. Even a fool knows that it ends in procreation, and the more people are born, the more people die. Eco on the frustrations of trying to replace a lost driver's license: All of us know that any ordinary terrorist is able to produce, in a few hours, dozens of fake licenses -- and remember, it takes more time to produce a fake license than a genuine one. Now, if we don't want citizens who have lost their licenses to start frequenting murky taverns of ill fame in the hope of making contact with the Red Brigades, there is just one solution: employ all repentant terrorists in the license office. And that's only the beginning: Eco on gadgets, including the Electric Nose Hair Remover ( an instrument that would have fascinated the Marquis de Sade), Eco on 33-function watches, fax machines and cellular phones, express mail, in-flight meals, Amtrak trains, porn movies and Westerns, computer jargon, bureaucrats. You name it. Umberto Eco, dubbed the Andy Rooney of academia by the Los Angeles Times, is a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna. He is the author of numerous books, including two other collections of popular essays and three novels: The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, and, most recently, The Island of the Day Before. He lives in Milan.