You can read Kurt Anderson’s ‘How to Back Up a Trailer’…or you can just back up a trailer

If you don’t know how to back up a trailer, change a tire or shuffle cards like a pro, you may not be from this planet. In which case, Kurt Anderson’s How to Back Up a Trailer . . . And 101 Other Things Every Real Guy Should Know will be of some help.

Trouble is, you can’t do any of the things in this book—fix your water heater, clean a fish, hit out of the rough or back up a trailer—with a book in one hand. Try it that way and you’ll flood your house, cut off your finger, lose your ball or run into something.

This is merely a primer for the jobs that really require the services of your most annoying capable friend, the one who can ride shotgun while shotgunning a beer (also in here) and tell you to hurry up and do it right, idiot! Whatever it is.

How to Back Up a Trailer is your starting point, and it does have some useful information. In the section on sweating copper pipe, the author suggests stuffing a hunk of bread up the pipe to absorb any excess moisture. That’s how a lot of home plumbers really do it.

But only you can earn and supply the experience—which comes only, for instance, with hours of filthy, smelly, backbreaking toil under a spider-infested, frame-siding bungalow that isn’t bolted to the foundation after all. With this book, maybe you’ll be inspired to try—to try . . . building a potato gun or dismounting and patching your own tubed tires.

Why do we need a section on patching tubed tires with a diagram of how to dismount a tire by hand? Every self-respecting hot rodder I know lets the gas station do that, saving time for more important things, like shooting each other with Airsoft guns.

So why do we need that? Because, as J. Peterman once observed, they don’t make Duesenbergs anymore.

HOW TO BACK UP A TRAILER . . . AND 101 THINGS EVERY REAL GUY SHOULD KNOW BY KURT ANDERSON | SOFTCOVER | 205 PGS | ADAMSMEDIA.COM | $12.95

Tags: Books, how to back up a trailer, masculinity