How do you give a good wedding toast? How do you fix a clogged drain? How do you babysit a one-year-old? Questions like these—some highly practical, others amusing—make up this engaging do-it-yourself guide. Collected from the popular feature how-to columns in the Chicago Tribune called "Life Skills," this book is filled with often humorous instructions on performing tasks that many of us have never gotten around to figuring out, or that we've always wondered about. Some are truly useful pieces of advice on technical topics with straight-forward explanations, while others are good for a laugh or cover the more ambiguous, open-ended grey areas of social interactions, such as how to end a relationship or tell someone his or her fly is down.

Life Skills covers a broad range of subjects, with chapters on home economics, for work and for play, technical topics, and social issues. Each "how-to" features step-by-step instructions and many are accompanied by a helpful, often-humorous illustration. Life Skills is not your usual "self-help" book. Rather, it is a simple guide to the many skills it takes people a lifetime to learn and perfect. A quick and easy read, Life Skills will certainly teach you many new things and may eve supply you with plenty of conversation points for your next party.