Don't Stand Too Close to a Naked Man Hardcover – October 7, 1994
by Tim Allen 
 
The comic who's a guy's guy is now a bookseller's dream. The star of ABC's Home Improvement, the #1 show on television, Tim Allen has written the book millions have been awaiting--the naked truth about his outlook on life, love, and lathes. Allen's movie debut this November in The Santa Clause is certain to generate additional media attention. Line drawings.
 
From Publishers Weekly
Allen is best known as the lead actor in the TV comedy series Home Improvement. Here his approach is mostly humorous with a few serious essays. It quickly becomes clear that he honed his talents in venues frequented by the 18-30 age cohort, for he concentrates on the differences between men and women in such areas as sex, clothes, hobbies, friends and reactions to the environment. Some of the selections are entertaining, like the one about changing his original surname, Dick. Others, like "More Power," about tools, are markedly less so. The humor is a strange amalgam of the callow and the sophisticated and the result is only intermittently funny, and then only mildly so. 500,000 first printing; first serial to TV Guide and Playboy.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
This is another differences-between-the-sexes-har-har book, and we can't get enough of those, can we? Its advantage vis-{…}a-vis the others is that it is written by Allen more or less in the persona of his character in the TV sitcom, Home Improvement. Unfortunately, it is to a large degree an extended routine that Allen does very well but that features nothing new or really insightful. Such an Allen insight as "It's a man's place to pretend something doesn't hurt" typifies the tenor here, as does the extremely brief chapter "The Secrets Men Never Tell Women," which consists of a single throwaway punch line. As comedy, this has the disadvantage of being static and scripted; as literature, the disadvantage of covering familiar territory familiarly. Oh, it's still funny but probably considerably more so to fans of Allen and his popular TV show than to other readers. Mike Tribby
 
3.12