The Real Ultimate Power website has become, over a few years, one of the internet's leading memes and in-jokes. The deliberately poorly formatted webpage, with its dead-on satire of overly enthusiastic fan pages, managed to strike a chord with net users.
The author of the book, supposedly a ten year old boy named Robert Hamburger, has turned his succesful webpage into a book. But can a webpage with a few pages of content translate into a 185 page book without repeating the joke too much? Or will this book turn out to be like one of the many Saturday Night Live movies, where a 5 minute skit unsuccesfully tries to fill up 90 minutes?
Surprisingly enough, Robert Hamburger (whoever he really is, the book never, from cover to cover, breaks persona) manages to keep the book fresh throughout the length, even while staying on the subject of ninjas and how totally sweet they are. Other characters other than ninjas (such as Benjamin Franklin and Santa Claus) occasionally appear, but the book is more or less the content of the webpage, repeated over and over again.
One of the major problems with the book is that the original source material was made more or less as a satire on bad html as much as anything else. In the book, of course, the author can't revert to using bright red type (or annoying looping midi)on the page, so the focus of the book shifts, to being a type of biography of the young Robert Hamburger.
This book helps us learn more about the personal life of Mr. Hamburger, and why that led him to his ninja obsession. He apparently suffers from ADHD, and has a pair of parents that barely tolerate his rambunction. The book details, usually obliquely in the middle of a talk about ninjas flipping out, some of the betrayals that Robert feels at the hands of his teachers and fellow students. It almost, in fact, becomes emotionally moving. Of course, the main focus of the book still remains ninjas and how they flip out and kill people anytime they want.
As an added bit of humor, this book is actually filed in the Dewey Decimal System as a book on martial arts.