SOURCE: A review of The Dog with the Chip in His Neck: Essays from NPR and Elsewhere, in Kirkus Reviews, Vol. 64, June 1, 1996, pp. 797-98.

The following review identifies Codrescu's best essays in this collection as those which deal with the most personal subjects.

Prolific belletrist, novelist, and NPR commentator Codrescu offers his trademark benign-oddball perspective on a broad array of cultural topics in another scattershot collection.

Codrescu grew up in Communist Romania and came to America in 1966, and most of the essays here are either explicitly or implicitly about the experience of exile, whether linguistic, political, or geographical. The subject of computers and the Internet prompts several Luddite outbursts about the failure of communication; the titular pet's surgically implanted ID tag inspires a brief technophobic fantasy poised between humor and genuine uneasiness. Codrescu cocks an eye at young lesbians in San Francisco, a Japanese game show, Brancusi's life...