Review: To Be Perfectly Honest by Phil Callaway

Title: To Be Perfectly Honest: One Man’s Year of Almost Living Truthfully Could Change Your Life. No Lie.
Author: Phil Callaway
Released: May 3, 2011
Publisher: Waterbrook Multnomah
Pages/format: 224 (Trade Paperback)
Genre: Nonfiction, Christian Memoir
Source: Blogging for Books

Quick Synopsis: In a social experiment spawned by his editor, Comedian Phil Callaway promised to tell the truth for an entire year, and this book is the result of that effort.

From Amazon:

Veteran author and speaker Phil Callaway is no stranger to daunting challenges. He has been laughed at—repeatedly—by large crowds of people from Halifax to Hong Kong. He fathered three children in three years, spent much of last year on airplanes built by the lowest bidder, and flipped an out-of-control ATV, which doesn’t mean he sold it for a profit. So who better than Phil Callaway to boldly accept a challenge that would make the average person run and hide?

Phil promised to tell the truth for an entire year, and he wasn’t joking. Twelve months later, his journal was crammed with successes, near-successes, and outright failures. During his year-long experiment with veracity, he made a disastrous financial investment, fielded hundreds of intrusive questions from friends and strangers, attended a thirty-year class reunion, and waded into possibly the most revealing—and hilarious—situations he has ever documented.

Quick Review: To Be Perfectly Honest tries to be funny, but comes across as a contrived effort.

In-Depth Review:

I decided to review To Be Perfectly Honest after reading a humor piece by Phil Callaway in Focus On the Family Magazine which was so hilarious it had me rolling around on the floor in hysterics. The premise of the book sounded interesting, and after my previous experience with Callaway’s humor writing, I expected to laugh my way through the pages.

Unfortunately, the book failed to impress me on all levels. For a humor book my “laugh tally” was pretty small. Zero in fact. There were a few semi-funny jokes which elicited an inner chuckle, but nothing that actually made me laugh out loud.

The book is formatted as a diary, with 365 entries chronicling the author’s year of trying to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I found this day-by-day format to be tedious, and it took me a full twenty-two days to finish this fairly short book.

Day 1. Things are going excellently well. Have yet to tell a half truth, skirt the perimeter of a lie, or fudge at all. Haven’t lusted, coveted, stolen, or even entertained an angry thought. The dog is licking my face, though. It’s time to open both eyes and get out of bed.

Day 8. Great sermon today, but suddenly my mind did a right turn, and I was thinking about all the fun I like to have on the phone. Will my truth vow prohibit me from playing jokes while using a Chinese accent?

Day 48. Is there ever a time in marriage for fudging the truth? Probably not, but Ramona told a sweet little lie today. She said, “I like you better with less hair.” I told her a little lie in return: “I like your haircut.”

Another complaint I have is that for a book about honesty, there were a lot of times I couldn’t tell whether the author was telling a true story, embellishing a true story, or outright fibbing.

Day 9. Got a Facebook friend request today from an East Coast romance novelist I met two years ago at a writers’ conference. At the time, she confessed that she’d had a dream about me. As she described it, with her hypnotic blue eyes dancing, the dream sounded straight out of one of her novels.

It took a full month to purge her dream from my head. What was I doing listening to it? I accepted her Facebook friend request, though. One never knows. It could present a good witnessing opportunity.

If I’m perfectly honest, my impression of Callaway after reading To Be Perfectly Honest is that he is a pitifully unfunny comedian with a chronic lying problem, half-hearted faith, and a penchant for following bad investment advice. I’m sure that’s not what he’s really like, but I couldn’t tell any different from this book. I know he has the potential to be funny (after all, his piece for Focus On the Family really was hysterical), but unfortunately his latest book comes across as a contrived effort.

If the excerpts I have shared hit a sweet spot on your humor meter, then by all means give this book a try. But if like me you find youself yawning at the screen, then skip this one.

About Phil Callaway:

Phil Callaway is an award-winning author and speaker, known worldwide for his humorous yet perceptive look at life. He is the bestselling author of 24 books which have been translated into languages like Polish, Chinese, Dutch, and English (one of which he speaks fluently!) Callaway is the editor of Servant Magazine and a syndicated columnist who has published hundreds of articles.