The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents Earth (The Book): A Visitor’s Guide to the Human Race | A-

Earth (The Book) is the latest work penned by Jon Stewart and his Daily Show writing staff and is following the rousing success of America (The Book). It's easy to pick it up expecting more of the same, and in many ways it's exactly that. The writing is no better or worse than the material on the show, and loyal viewers will know exactly what to expect. Still the book is an entertaining read from start to finish and has its fair share of surprises.

It starts with an introduction headed by the caption "To Our Alien Readers," and thereby sets us on our adventure across Earth with a framing device of surprising originality and cleverness. The premise of the book is to serve as a time capsule for alien visitors as they wander through our ruins, under the semi-reasonable assumption that we'll have long destroyed ourselves by the time they get here. It goes on to take us through a sprawling mess of images and words that form some strange mixture of textbook and scrapbook, resulting in an abnormally colorful spectacle much like our world itself.

The resulting birds-eye view of our world is one of humor, absurdity and beauty. Though the book touches briefly on the sciences, most of it focuses on humanity and all of its facets, covering subjects like art ("Artists felt and expressed the terrible beauty of our fleeting existence. The rest of us had jobs") and religion (which "provided great comfort to a world torn apart… by religion") and the human life cycle ("we called this living"). By the end, we get a strange, almost poetic combination of a eulogy and a love letter to life on Earth with no shortage of laughter on the way.

All in all, Earth (The Book) delivers nothing that fans don't already expect from The Daily Show. It's a smorgasbord of information taken from every corner of the world, resulting in a picture that is playful, brutally honest and tenderly cynical. Yet, given the group of writers we're discussing, more of the same can be pretty, pretty good.