Having just finished reading this book and had to leave a positive review after having laughed myself silly for the last two nights. At a mere 79 pages, Inman's travel diary reads like a polished novella of the caliber of Paul Bowles. James Inman touches on a subject that many people have dealt with but few people have written about - without sounding like an ad brochure or meaningless moan from Lake Wobegon. This is a great literary tour through an unlisted United States.

You know what, I haven't even read this yet and I know its gonna be great. I've seen Mr. Inman perform excerpts of it live in concert and if its even half as funny as that its a bargain at twice the price. If that aint an endorsement, I dunno what is. Cough the $$$ up, chumps. You won't regret it.

~Johann

If you had, you wouldn't need me to tell you that it's like Heart of Darkness except not in the same era, doesn't take place in Africa and though he is being driven to places in air-conditioned coaches with "whisper quiet shock absorbers", Jim still finds stuff to complain about and learns nothing. What we learn is that James Inman is a very funny man. Or like Albert Einstein once said,"James Inman, you are a very funny man. But it's all relative."
This is the funniest documentation of someone losing their hair that I have ever read.

What could possibly be funny about traveling across the country on a Greyhound bus with a broken toilet and the mentally ill? Plenty. James Inman’s insights into the people who travel this country by bus (and the people who drive them) are hilarious and awful at the same time. Scenic landscapes would normally provide a welcome relief to the stark realities of life on the bus, but James’s gaze is focused in the opposite direction. The rants and foibles of his fellow passengers are much more entertaining than any vista a dirty bus window has to offer. From the arbitrary and capricious bus driver to the quiet dignity of the Amish passengers, James’s diatribes form a string of vignettes that shock and entertain, with vivid descriptions of life on the bus that leave the reader convinced that he can almost catch a whiff of that unholy stench emanating from the bathroom. Charles Kurault could never have accurately reported on this aspect of America; it takes a comedian like James Inman to tell it right.

As James Inman tells his story I get the sense that I have just witnessed Sam Kenison come back from the dead to devour David Sedaris and puke him out on the page in a spastic fit of motion sickness... and I mean that in the most pleasurable way. The talented Mr. Inman writes with the same energetic and caustic wit he uses on stage. My overt reactions to his chronicles of this hellish trip made people look at me funny when I read it in public. Roaring uncontrollable laughter has that effect at quiet places like the laundromat, the coffee shop, the office breakroom, church, etc. While James's bus trip itself was not worth the fare, this book is absolutely worth the trip. So take this ride - you won't regret it!

This is without a doubt the funniest documentation of someone losing their mind I have ever read. Everytime I see on the news that a Greyhound bus has flipped over a bridge, I can't help but to think that James Inman was on that bus or inspired someone else on that bus to play out his demmented fantacy. Because lets be honest, who hasn't wanted to do half the things mentioned in this brilliant masterpiece of a Diary. The only difference between Inman and the rest of us is......... Well you know.... Pyschiatric drugs! This is a must read for anyone who is planning on losing their mind and might not know how to go about it.

My world, and welcome to it. It's so easy to write this one off as humorous fiction, but the truth is out there, and James Inman has captured it and doccumented it.

I peed myself sick.

"Where are we going, America,
and why are we in this handbasket?"

I barely escaped a career as standup comedian. By 5th grade, I was doing sketch-comedy with a very talented classmate named John Brothers. Inspired by the televised genius of Sid Caesar, Shelly Berman, Jonathan Winters and Bob Newhart, we performed barber, dentist and psychiatrist sketches which our peers at least (and more than one teacher) found screamingly funny. This was back around 1960. Schoolmates told me I had real comic talent and urged me to pursue a career as a standup comic. My own extended family were trying to push me toward law school. I even got an opportunity to Emcee an entertainment night at the school auditorium, trying my hand (and tongue) at telling jokes before bright stagelights and a full house. I discovered a knack for saving jokes that flop by making faces and using silence, of turning impending public humiliation into laughter (I think I must have learned this from Jack Benny and Johnny Carson, though probably Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy are in there somewhere too and deserve credit). At one time, I thought I could be Johnny Carson.

I don't know where John Brothers is today. Probably an accountant somewhere. Or maybe on death row.

Luckily, I managed to transcend my South St. Louis environment and upbringing. I found an escape through further education, a career in literature and philosophy.

James Inman was not so fortunate.

When I say that James Inman is very funny guy, I'm not just offering a clinical diagnosis. During my long and checkered apprenticeship as writer, I worked for several years as mental health therapist. I also wrote a humor column for The Kansas City Business Journal.

So when I tell you that Inman's "Greyhound Diary" is very, very funny, I mean: it made me laugh. Explosively, unpredictably and often.

As Miguel de Cervantes' DON QUIXOTE demonstrated in the 17th century, cruelty is often at the heart of humor. Steve Martin wrote CRUEL SHOES, which is a very funny book. Like Robin Williams, Martin has since stretched into other, more demanding roles as actor and, most recently, novelist. I haven't read SHOP GIRL and probably won't get to the movie until my third incarnation.

Knowing James as I do, I can say with confidence: there is no such hope for growth and development of his considerable talents as a cruel and very funny observer of the human farce. Or: his only chance lies with the development and distribution of newer and more powerful, mind-and-behavior-warping pharmaceuticals.

But I hope he won't take them.

Inman writes unusually well for a comedian and monologist (many of whom seem to have had Laura Bush for literacy teacher).

The particular beauty of "Greyhound Diary" and its author's gifts lies in James Inman's acerbity and sense of immediacy. Inman's terrain is that nether zone of paranoid malaise, conspiracy theories and sociopathic cabals littering an American landscape that has come to be increasingly "informed" by Reality TV, infomercials, videogame addiction, proliferating meth labs, squalid hype and vicious lobbying, the ubiquitous suspicions of a culture that is lost in some Cronenberg-esque, electronic wilderness on bad acid, a culture deranged and raging with denial. A civilization positively frothing at the gills.

"Greyhound Diary" takes the pulse of America and is dialing 911.
—Dennis Weiser, poet-novelist-philosopher-shaman

In a civilized society, there should be a tertiary option for
travelers like Inman. His car breaks down, he can't afford to fly but
he should never be thrust upon other travelers, no matter how down and
out their fortune they might be.

Alas, there seems only one option for citizens like Mr. Inman: The
Greyhound bus.

As I read this book I was nauseated and lifted at the same time. While
these stories made me feel wildly better about myself knowing that my
life is infinitely better than his, I know well enough that this was
not a work of fiction. In fact I was sure there were some events he
was putting a milder shade of red on.

Finished with the manuscript, I had a less caustic reaction to it. It
told a story of desperation and need but not like so many other crap
books in print through the ages. This book was a tale of misery as
told through the eyes of a sociopathic genius. It's a study of the
American dream gone haywire. No one wins. Everyone is sick and the
entire story is a snapshot of the American lie. With a sharp shooter's
skill James Inman takes aim at the seedy underbelly of this great
nation.

The Greyhound Diary is the most important work to be written since The
Diary of Anne Frank. To be held hostage by one's own mind within a
system that conspires to keep it that way is more vile than any Nazi
in the attic hunting for children to murder.

I've broken bread, traveled, lived and lived to pray with James Inman.

He is insane and a brilliant writer. I loved this book.

James is a sick and twisted man -- no, I mean it, he really is -- and this book is as much a peek inside his own personal crazyosyncracies as it is an indictment of the Greyhound-riding, scum-chomping underbelly of America.