Encyclopedia Paranoiaca

National Lampoon luminaries Beard and Cerf have created a guide to all the common nightmares, with a few hundred new ones tossed in. Their alphabetized, intensively cross-referenced tome confirms the great truth of modern life: everything is bad for you. The list includes the big (global warming), the small (bed bugs), the innocuous (blueberries), the unusual (zombification), and the ubiquitous (sitting on the toilet). Life, it seems, is inevitably fatal, especially on a postindustrial globe filled with pesticides, radiation, superbugs, and random accidents. Despite its presentation of contemporary dangers, the book is charmingly old-fashioned, with a structure and format that pay tribute to the reference books that lined the shelves of academics and nerds before the Internet reshaped the personal library (“cybersex” earns an entry in an age when “over 15 million Americans are using cybersex in ways that are risky and showing signs of compulsivity”). In another nod to outmoded fashions, Beard and Cerf write with wit in this ironic take on a world where we live in constant fear of dairy products, lemon wedges, shopping carts, and vitamins. (Nov.)