“Postmortem: What Survives the John Wayne Gacy Murders"

By Courtney Lund O’Neil

ISBN No. 978-0-80654-299-7

www.penguinrandomnouse.com

Who doesn't love a road trip? Exotic locales. Fast food. Interesting people. A chance to lose or find yourself.

Courtney Lund O'Neil and her mother, Kim Byers, start their road trip with Simple Minds' "Don't You Forget About Me" playing in the cassette deck. Yes, cassette deck because this road trip takes mother and daughter all the way back to the late 1970s. For Byers the song is nostalgic for an era when kids were sent out to play and told to come home when the streetlights come on and if they didn't... well, the police would convince you they'd run away. For O'Neil the song is more complicated. Neither, we learn, has been able to escape the loss of a childhood friend of Byers' or the serial killer who took it. 

The book - and the road trip - goes from Des Plains, Illinois in 1978 (where Byers grew up and the murder took place) to present day. Childhood friends (now in their 60s), parents, prosecutors, a teenager's diary, and even a mailman try to explain, make sense of, and come to peace with the unfathomable. The book has an impressive pedigree: O'Neil's mother was a coworker and friend of Robert Piest and saw a contractor named John Wayne Gacy talking to Robert around 5PM on December 11, 1978. Robert disappeared and Byers connected Robert to Gacy. Gacy told the police he'd never talked to Robert. A search of Gacy's home found Robert's parka and the small receipt Byers had slipped into one of its pockets. They also found the bodies of 29 young men under the floorboards. Byers was a star witness at Gacy's trial where he was found guilty, sat on death row for 14 years, and was eventually executed in 1994.

Mother and daughter go back to the school Byers and Rob attended (and where the movie "The Breakfast Club" was filmed), to where the pharmacy stood, the site of the murder(s), and the river where Robert's body was dumped (and lay frozen until the Spring thaw, where it was finally found, "bloated...gummy," O'Neil writes). Along the way there's enough gore in the autopsy reports to keep even the morbidly curious up at night and some revelations I had to read twice - but O'Neil never loses the humanity of everyone involved. Byers went on to have children and a career in medicine but Robert's childhood best friend, who keeps a picture of him and Rob on his phone, was too worried about losing a child to have one of his own. Most everyone in this book is still haunted by the wide-awake-2AM questions that O'Neil asks in her final chapter: was there anything anyone could have done to stop Robert from going with Gacy? How many other boys would have been killed if Robert hadn't gone with him? What Gacy didn't anticipate, this book says, is now that Gacy's gone his legacy will be written by his victims and their families. 

Popular culture still celebrates the sexy, brilliant and/or misunderstood serial killer (even C. Thomas Howell - yes! Pony boy! - played one!) even though their stories are all the same (childhood trauma, mental disorders). After reading "Postmortem", though, the most fascinating character, the real "get" of an acting role, is Elizabeth Piest, the mother of Gacy's last victim; the woman who stood there as her youngest son said he'd be back in a few minutes and then never saw him alive again. She was the mother of the child who brought down a monster and for that she carried a biblical weight of grief, remorse, and stoicism to her grave. She had a life worthy of being played by Meryl Streep. Hollywood, are you listening? 

“Here’s Mike”

By Mike McCardell
978-1-55017-562-2
www.harbourpublishing.com
These days every news outlet has its “salter”. That’s the industry term for the on-camera person who’s so sensitive to the little wonders around him/her, that they’re always stopping and smelling the flowers and then shoving them into everyone else’s face. (The term “salter” comes from an episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” where news anchor Ted Baxter, after surviving a heart attack, begins to appreciate the wonders of everything – starting with grains of salt.)
“Hey Mike”, by Mike McCardell (who’s been smelling the flowers for a local TV station for some time now) is full of salt - the minutia and ephemera others might miss. He’s a nicer Mickey Rooney. In the internet age of the nanosecond attention span, a book of McCardell’s meanderings would seem iffy but in execution it reads like letters from a friend (although the best thing McCardell ever did was catch a litterbug in the act - and on camera - and confront him, turning the segment into both a public service announcement and a “Judge Judy”).
Sure, the audience for “Hey Mike” is likely to be blue-haired and bingo-playing, but it’s a book that everyone can read – and appreciate. Maybe little “wow”s and shared “guess what I saw today”s are the new tradition of oral storytelling. “Hey Mike” solidifies McCardell as the God of Little Things.

“West Coast Wrecks & Other Maritime Tales”

By Rick James
ISBN No. 978-1-55017-545-5
www.harbourpublishing .com
Herman Melville ends “Moby-Dick” with a line about a shipwreck at sea where suddenly everything falls in on itself, is swallowed by the water, and the sea rolls on as it had for 5,000 years. Wow…
There’s a mystery in the idea of a shipwreck that transcends the TV punchline of people stranded on, and voting each other off, a deserted island. Of course, there’s the cruise ship/paradise aspect of the sea, and all that “Pirates of the Caribbean” silliness for the ADD generation. And unless you’re running for Republican office the sea is that primordial pool from which all life – even sushi! - came. Archaeologist Rick James knows all this and he unpacks an engrossing – that’s right! – treasure trove of 140+ years of maritime disasters, sailing folklore, and finally, definitively explains why British Columbia’s nudist retreat is named Wreck Beach. The book is like a baker’s dozen of Titanics and is as addictive as TV’s “The Deadliest Catch.” The black-and-white pictures are appropriate for the eras (late 1800s and early 1900s) and amp up the little asides that’ll roll around your head for days after reading (like when evacuating a burning ship was hindered because the Chinese employees didn’t speak English).

“My Korean Deli”

By Ben Ryder Howe
ISBN No. 978-0-385-66412-7
www.randomhouse.ca

Now this – THIS – is a memoir! Forget all those whinefests about escaping the Nazis and recovering from a meth addiction, “My Korean Deli” is “The Godfather” of corner stores. The premise is right out of a TV sitcom: It all starts when Howe’s wife (the daughter of Korean immigrants) buys her Mom a convenience store. When Mom can’t keep the business going, it falls to Howe and his own Mrs. to run it. What follows is the American class struggle squared: In bleakly hilarious and yet thoughtful prose, Howe explains how he edited The Paris Review by day (alongside George Plimpton) and then sold lottery tickets and bologna by night. What makes “My Korean Deli” such a good read is that it seemingly covers all genres of entertainment. There’s the fish-out-of-water premise: At first, Howe writes, “It seems unreal to be on the other side of the checkout counter.” Then there’s the cost of doing business in a mercilessly political correct marketplace (the coffee has to be from “ecologically responsible land tenure systems in countries that provide universal pre-K-through-3 education and have no military.”). And finally, there’s the suspenseful power struggle: the threat of two new convenience stores in the same neighbourhood. It should all read like a really long magazine article but Howe turns his tiny, intimate story into an engrossing epic about the changing face of American culture.

“Zeitoun”

By Dave Eggers
ISBN No. 978-0-307-39906-9
www.randomhouse.ca
The first thing you notice about the paperback edition of this book, about a married couple suffering through Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, is the praise. It’s the first thing you notice because you can’t miss it. It’s the first seven, eight, nine, (no, wait, there’s some of the back page) TEN pages of the book. You’d think “Zeitoun” was “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” (another Eggers’ title). But the praise overload is fittingly ironic because when Bush 2 spun the deadly hurricane into an empty aria about the brave American spirit, even Mama Bush (Barbara) got into the act. (She suggested that camping out in a stadium was a step up for most New Orleanians. Most New Orleanians thought not.)
The Zeitoun of the title is Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun, a New Orleans married couple and their two daughters dealing with, first, a flood of biblical proportions and then bureaucratic blunderings (racial profiling, accusations of terrorism) worthy of a Joseph Heller novel. For the sake of surprise no spoilers will be revealed here. Suffice to say that cataloguing each new humiliation Eggers’ becomes something like Rodin’s The Thinker, and the Zeitouns the helpless souls he’s looking down on as they wither and flail in the seven circles of governmental hell.
Interestingly, while Eggers still writes beautifully, he now seems to write intentionally beautifully. For instance, the opening scenes of Abdulrahman recalling magical nights of fishing for sardines in Syria (the gathering fish looked like “…a slow mass of silver rising from below”) is just too perfect, poetic and lulling a description in a book this blunt. He needs a hard word in there because having things too perfect (and then too awful) is such a clichéd American way to write. Still, that’s a minor complaint for a book that deserves every bit of praise the mainstream media have given it. As well, genre-wise, “Zeitoun” is the latest in a hopeful publishing event. Like the vastly superior “Columbine” (by Dave Cullen – who really did write “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”) it’s non-fiction that’s more engrossing than any fiction.

“The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book”

By Gord Hill
ISBN No. 978-1-55152-360-6
www.arsenalpulp.com

Batman, Spiderman, X Men; all comic books; all turned into blockbuster movies. For a while there it looked like the comic book had gone the way of the Sunday newspaper funnies: light, disposable entertainment. And now comes “The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book” and it’s a reminder about just how complacent popular culture has become in the oppression of human rights, and how wonderfully engaging and provocative comic books can be if they’re done properly. The set-up is simple. Gord Hill, a member of the Kwakwaka’wakw nation, and an activist in the Indigenous people’s movement, whose causes stretch from the 1990 Oka Crisis to the anti-2010 Olympics campaign, documents – through historically accurate black-and-white drawings and text – the resistance of Indigenous people to the European colonization of the Americas. The images and stories are shocking – and not just for the gore quotient. They’re shocking because when it comes to the calendar of the world, Columbus’ visit to America in 1492 is pretty recent and still ripe for re-interpretation and correction (both political and humanistic). What’s really impressive about the book, however, is how the medium fits and re-energizes the message perfectly: the anarchy of comic books, and their ability to shape young minds. And therein lies the true importance of a comic book as brave as this one: it has echoes of the topicality of headline-grabbing causes that the government ignores, wishes would go away (and, thus, get worse). Wow…

Columbine

By Dave Cullen
ISBN No. 978-0446546928
www.twelvebooks.com
In the 1970s Vincent Bugliosi wrote “Helter Skelter”, an exhaustive investigation of the Manson murders. The book began with a note that anyone of a certain age can paraphrase: this book will scare the hell out of you. Now, Dave Cullen has written what surely must be the definitive document on the Columbine school massacre, and given the millennial generation its own “Helter Skelter.”
But what can Cullen tell us about the worst high school shooting in America that the mainstream media already hasn’t? LOTS, it turns out which is a miracle in itself. While Bugliosi had the tactile advantage of detailed coroner’s photos, police reports and court papers to sift through, Cullen had to unpack all that and a veritable internet server of information, perceptions, and false memories, to piece together exactly what happened before, during and after the shooting. Even harder, he has to correct the hyperventilating media that insisted the massacre be crunched down to a TV show plotline. That the book reads like a book at all is a testament to Cullen’s ability to turn newsprint back into flesh and blood. Along the way “Columbine” – the book - becomes something bigger than just a savvy, smart re-think. I mean it as the highest compliment that, in a cultural environment where books, movies and music no longer inspire (or you’ve already read the “Twilight” series a dozen times), a book as good as “Columbine” reads like the most touching teenage love story, the most compelling parental drama, the most devastating Greek tragedy. Most novels try and fail to tell a single story; “Columbine” tells the grand arc of several lives all at once and does so brilliantly. “Columbine” is the first great book of the Millennium.

So a Goat, an Ojibway, and four Chinese families walk into a bar...

“Give a Goat”
By Jan West Schrock; Illustrated by Aileen Darragh
ISBN No. 978-0-88448-301-4
www.tilburyhouse.com

“One Native Life”
By Richard Wagamese
ISBN No. 978-1-55365-364-6
www.douglas-mcintyre.com

“Yi Fao: Speaking Through Memory: A History of New Westminster’s Chinese Community 1858-1980”
By Jim Wolf and Patricia Owen
ISBN No. 978-1-894974-40-0
www.heritagehouse.ca


What do books about a goat, a native Ojibway and four families of Chinese settlers in Canada have in common? Well, they’re all serious: serious for kids, socio-political serious and Michael Cunningham serious.
First up, the inspired, catchy title of “Give a Goat” is a huh?-worthy refresh on the tired activist cheer of “Give a damn!” about world hunger and poverty. The goat of the title is the gift that a classroom of privileged Maine kids fundraise to send to a family in Uganda after reading about an organization called Heifer International. Working like a petting-zoo version of online bill payment HI will will take your donation and buy things like goats, chickens and water buffalo for families in developing countries. This is the kinder, gentler version of that tiger park in China where tourists can buy chickens for the cats that’ll be promptly served freshly thrown out of the window of a car driven around the reserve by a guide. According to the book, the goat of the title is a goose laying golden eggs. The goat will be a vineyard: providing enough milk to feed the family and enough surplus to sell and send the family’s kids to school. It’s a cute, serious piece of work with nice pictures and a socio-political lesson that’s palatable for both children and adults. And even if you’re not a kid or a smart adult the book has an even bigger selling point: a typo! For those of you who collect these things the book is a must-have.
“One Native Life” is the super-serious title, a back-from-the-brink memoir by a 52-year-old Ojibway native who, living in a cabin in Kamloops , B.C., re-traces a life of abandonment, alcoholism and search for identity. It should all sound lecture-ish but given that Vancouver, B.C.’s downtown east side has practically become a mediagenic genre unto itself (lots of news reports and books and films about displaced, depressed natives) it’s actually nice to hear a single-person account about how it all goes wrong and what can be done to make it right.
Even better – especially if you syndicate for radio like me - the book has a chapter called “My Nine-Volt Heart”, a lovely love-letter to the first thing that the author remembers calling his own: an old General Electric transistor radio. “It was as if the world had come within my reach,” he writes. “That old radio taught me that there’s more to the world than what I can see, and I owe it to myself to seek it out.” Sigh…
The four family oral and photo album history, “Yi Fao”, is the Michael Cunningham-ish title; a book that looks at the big, grand, poignant full-arc of life in small, simple families. The book’s title means “second port” but it was also lingo for New Westminster, B.C.’s status as the second point of entry to British Columbia (Victoria was the first) for early Chinese settlers. The book follows the Law, Lee, Quan and Shiu families as they live, grow, marry, work, retire and die. That’s it. Essentially the book invites you to listen in as they live their whole lives. Yet there’s something awesomely humbling about bearing witness to their struggles and triumphs. The oral history format is particularly effective here. There’s a sense that things are being passed down from one generation to the next just as they must have done in pre-historic times. When George Quan recalls “My mother would make these deep-fried cookies that were very crunchy and very tasty” your heart breaks – until his next line. “I would bring them over to the gambling hall and sell them for five cents each,” he writes, and then you realize that you’re reading a better-than-fiction real story. Even better (or as an assistant of mine once said “lots more better”), the pictures are haunting. My only complaint is about the book’s format: a book this grand deserves the same hardcover treatment as Paul Yee’s wonderful “ Saltwater City : An Illustrated History of the Chinese in Vancouver ” (2006; www.douglas-mcintyre.com). On the other hand “Yi Fao”’s paperback format really adds to its story’s sense of impermanence.

The New Endangered Species

"Me Sexy: An Exploration of Native Sex and Sexuality"
by Drew Hayden Taylor
ISBN No. 978-1-55365-276-2
www.douglas-mcintyre.com

"The White Guy: A Field Guide"
by Stephen Hunt
ISBN No. 978-1-55365-302-8
www.douglas-mcintyre.com

Remember that line from "Annie Hall" when Carol Kane tells Woody Allen she loves being reduced to a cultural stereotype? Well, it's 1977 all over again - but with a big twist. In the ensuing thirty years the stereotypes have either crystallized or caved in.
"Me Sexy" is the progressive title. This is an honest, unflinching and surprisingly well-researched argument about viewing the native man and woman in a hot new light (the cover of the book is of a native man in a pulp romance clench with a fair-skinned woman). What makes the book's plea for a re-think of native culture so palpable is the humour with which it's all written about - along with some things you probably never, ever thought about. There are chapters about indigenous erotica and sexually provocative Inuit art in this book that will have you looking at soapstone in a whole new light.
"The White Guy" is the dark side of cultural stereotyping, onein which the white man is seen as Satan. Stephen Hunt does a great job blaming white men for every conceivable ill of the world - and then some. He studies their leisure habits, their quirks, their likes and dislikes - and then blames them some more. It's a witty piece of work, owing much of its existence to that bible of whitebread stereotyping anthropology, "The Official Preppy Handbook" that was published two or three decades back and treated wealthy whites as some sort of exotic species and studied their shopping and mating habits. Considering that, "The White Guy" should feel dated but weirdly it doesn't. It's a credit to Hunt that his book seems like both a topical episode of "Wild Kingdom" as well as a starting point for the inevitable snappy sequel.

Two Books with the Word "Hope" in their title

"Where Hope Takes Root: Democracy and Pluralism in an Interdependent World"
by His Highness The Aga Khan
ISBN No. 978-1-55365-366-0
www.douglas-mcintyre.com

"Hope in Shadows: Stories and Photographs of Vancouver 's Downtown Eastside"
by Brad Cran and Gillian Jerome
ISBN No. 978-1-55152-238-8
www.arsenalpulp.com

So this is what it's come to... Maybe it's the current climate of Obama vs. McCain but His Highness The Aga Khan sure sounds like he's running for something. Much (most? all?) of his book is speeches and much of the speeches unfortunately read like the empty platitudes of the hopelessly political, sound and fury signifying not much of anything if you listen really closely. "Civil society organizations need to reach for the highest level of competence to justify their support," he bravely writes. "Without support for pluralism, civil society does not function," he writes a few pages later, going wayyyy out on a limb. In another chapter he writes tha- [Sigh] Whatever... Just as the nightmares of TV news turning into entertainment from 1976's "Network" have actually come to pass so too, apparently, has the disheartening evolution of spiritual leaders into the likes of the Peter Sellers' character from 1979's "Being There" (the slow-witted gardener who comes out with in-plain sight observations like "There will be growth in the spring" and is declared a genius.) The problem with "Where Hope Takes Root" is that some of us have heard real activists who actually SAY things that MAKE sense that ARE solutions; not highbrow fundraiser cocktail party chat. (Hmmm... maybe I should have just reviewed "A Passion for This Earth" [www.douglas-mcintyre.com; ISBN No. 978-1-55365-375-2] instead. Now David Suzuki, THERE'S an activist who perfectly marries the high and lofty with the nuts and bolts! And come to think of it APFTE is also a collection of essays too - by 20 Susuki-psyched journalists, scientists and environmentalists - but they don't read like speeches at all.) "Where Hope Takes Root" does have a reason to exist, however. For one thing, it’s excellent reading for university students majoring in political science and anyone else interested in the semantics of political discourse.
"Hope in Shadows" is, as Aga Khan might say, "another book with the word 'hope' in the title." But that's where the similarities end. See, "Where Hope Takes Root" is like those mediagenic tours the Governor General takes every now and then through Vancouver, B.C.'s downtown east side (DTES). You know, the ones where she wanders down a single run-down main street, making empty promises, giving false hopes and exploiting every photo op possible while surrounded with a bunch of bodyguards. (Tellingly, appropriately, Canada 's former GG, Adrienne Clarkson, writes the introduction to Kahn's book.) "Hope in Shadows," however, is the smart activist yelling at the GG from the sidelines.
"Hope in Shadows" is also the kind of book I like to think as being not just part of the solution but also beyond review. To go Aga Khan-lofty for a second it's about something so profound, important and topical that all a reviewer can - and should - do is bring it to the attention of others. For the past five years, Vancouver's Pivot Legal Society's annual Hope in Shadows photography contest gave DTES residents 200 disposable cameras and asked them to document their lives in Canada's poorest neighbourhood. This book is an archive of the personal stories behind those photographs. Whew... and wow! What else is there to say? It's all here: heartbreak, class struggles, drug addiction, poverty, dreams and a sense of home. Coming from the same publisher that brought out the stunning "Every Building on 100 West Hastings” in 2002, "Hope in Shadows" is - to go Aga Khan-lofty again - that rare document: a palpable, user-friendly piece of academia about a people and place that will be studied decades hence to find out what kind of people we were. I heartily recommend Adrienne Clarkson get a copy of it.

Martin Amis gets his very own 9-11

"The Second Plane"
by Martin Amis
ISBN No. 978-0-676-97785-1
www.randomhouse.ca

It should have been so simple; an easy bet; a no-brainer: America 's greatest writer vs. the cultural context of 9-11.
And while most of reviewers have been kind to Amis' collection of essays and fictions about 9-11 I seriously suspect they didn't understand it - or read it all the way through. Because "The Second Plane" is a red herring; a book that must have been published when Amis' editors were still in shock. And the shock now is tenfold.
Certainly the book expands the vocabulary about 9-11 and anything by Amis is a welcome publishing event. But there are missteps (a looong what-if about one of the hijacker's last day). There is hard-to-remember political contextualizing (did he call them "radical Muslims"? "Irate Iranians"? Man, I cannot remember...). And then there are the curious words that seem to pop out of Amis' mind alone and stop the reader's eye cold and remind one of Dan Rather's homespun cornpone dialect. It’s like Amis was ahead of all the other writers trying to describe the image of the second plane hitting the towers juuuuuuust right; it’s a literary free-for-all (it’s kind of like the myth that Eskimos have 20 words for snow). It'll all make you wonder if Amis did indeed write his masterpiece"The Information" (one of the few books I took a highlighter to just to make it easier to get to those passages I wanted to read to friends over the phone) all on his own. (He does, however, include in "The Second Plane" a splendid piece about conspiracy theories.)
But 9-11 was a literary trap other august writers with pent-up dinner party pontifications were waiting to fall into. Don DeLillo and John Updike both wrote interesting failures ("Falling Man" and "Terrorist", respectively) and a relative newcomer, Jonathan Safran Foer, wrote one that was practically unreadable (“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”). Apparently the victims from 9-11 are still being counted.
All of which means that even America's finest writers are as confused and conflicted about 9-11 as the layman on the street which makes 9-11 even more disturbing than it was the day it happened.

The World Without Kids

“Nobody’s Father: Life Without Kids”
Edited by Lynne Van Luven and Bruce Gillespie
ISBN No. 978-1-894898-74-4
www.touchwoodeditons.com

A sequel to 2006’s “Nobody’s Mother,” this collection of essays by and about men reconsidering fatherhood is so emotionally honest it’s almost a bit embarrassing. Yes, the title conjures up those mediagenic divorced fathers’ rights stunts that make it into the newspapers (dads dressed as superheroes flying banners from bridges complaining about the unfairness of divorce law) but “Nobody’s Father” is about a quieter group of men; those who don’t have children and whose lives might not leave any footprints once they’re gone – and they’re sort of okay with that. Basically, the book is a series of perceptive first-hand accounts about why some very hard-thinking men got fed up with doing their societal duty: carrying the family name past the present tense.
The book starts off hopefully enough with John Gould’s “Mine”. This story about how the typical hopes and dreams of graduating teens get turned on their head when having kids is removed from the equation is bookended with Don W. Maybin’s stunning summation of how choices and circumstances can turn a childless man into “Everyone’s Uncle.” Between them the stories pile up in ways that don’t remind you so much of the rumour that Adolph Hitler’s siblings made a pact to not have kids as it does of the recent book about humanity dying out, “The World Without Us”. “Nobody’s Father” is a really interesting, intimate document; a piece of work that might be studied decades from now by archaeologists trying to figure out what kind of people we were.

Reality Check

“The Doctor is In(sane): Indispensable Advice from Dr. Dave”
By Dr. Dave Hepburn
ISBN No. 978-1-55365-408-7
www.greystonebooks.com

“I Was a Really Good Mom Before I Had Kids: Reinventing Modern Motherhood”
By Trisha Ashworth and Amy Nobile
ISBN No. 978-0-8118-5650-8
www.chroniclebooks.com

“Our Days are Numbered: How Mathematics Orders Our Lives”
By Jason I. Brown
ISBN No. 978-0-7710-1696-7
www.mcclelland.com

“Migraine”
By Oliver Sacks
ISBN No. 978-0-3073-9817-8
www.vintagebooks.com

Today’s epic column is all about reality checks and what better way to start our check with a check-up from a real live doctor?
If you don’t have a daily newspaper that publishes Dr. Dave Hepburn’s column then “The Doctor is In(sane)” is a great way to catch up on why he’s been called “The Dave Barry of medicine” and the new Frasier. Like the teaspoon of sugar that helps the medicine go down (anyone under 20 should Google the line for an explanation) Dr. Dave turns a visit to the doctor into a visit to the comedian. He’s “Grey’s Anatomy” with an anatomical punchline.
”A patient’s worst fears are too often followed by a patient’s burst tears as the diagnosis of herpes is explained to them,” he writes. “They often then deeply desire to bring a fatal conclusion to that attractive source of their disease.” He’s a witty, friendly doctor who’ll teach you new things and ways to look at the world as well as make you laugh.
He’ll also make you think about the bigger picture in ways you won’t imagine. When a columnist for a daily newspaper allegedly committed suicide; allegedly suffering from alleged depression and alleged severe back pain, I unallegedly crinkled my forehead and wondered: if they couldn’t get something worthwhile out of all the articles their paper runs about depression and back pain then what could there possibly be in there for the masses besides ads for leaky condos and work-at-home scams? In short, “The Doctor is In(sane)” made me wonder why the dailies continue to publish advertorials about cures for back pain and depression when even their own writers don’t get something out of them. People don’t need empty platitudes. They want to be informed, entertained and maybe learn a little something along the way. That’s where Dr. Dave comes in. His book has enough wow-worthy medical advice to necessitate the book’s index and enough humour and heart to make reading about even the toughest disease digestible.
The wonder of science – well, the results of procreation – figures prominently in “I Was a Really Good Mom Before I Had Kids.” Hmm…maybe “wonder” is too ambitious a word.
These authors have really gotten the Mommy Mindset down to a science – a nuts-and-bolts science. They catalogue every conceivable duty, obligation and thought that can pop into a Mom’s head – and then make great fun of it in a let-off-some-steam kind of way. Wisely, the book takes the women’s magazine format of LOTS of breezy, easy to read lists, quizzes and tips. There are user-friendly chapters titled “Am I a Bad Mom if I Don’t Buy Organic Spaghettios?” and quizzes like “Rank these questions in order of bitchiness.” But the best part of the book is the dozens of “Dirty Little Secret” entries where Moms confess stuff like “I want my own apartment because I don’t like people touching my stuff. And I would prefer if my husband didn’t visit.” Yes, even when you’re finished the book a certain “you had ‘em, you raise ‘em” mentality remains but the biggest recommendation I can give the book is that even guys will find it worth reading.
“On any ordinary day, from the time we get up in the morning until we go to sleep at night, mathematics shapes our lives.” That’s the starting line from “Our Days are Numbered” and if you’re like me (a math-hater) your first inclination is to prove the book wrong. Wrong in any way you can! Sure, you might wake up at a certain time (clocks are full of numbers) and you might have TWO pieces of toast and you might bike EXACTLY 1.2 miles to work, but like all those reality TV shows, if you ignore them they really kind of don’t exist. Math, like humour in medicine and good parenting is really all about having a mindset: it’s as complicated as you want to make it. And “Our Days are Numbered” wants to make it REAL complicated. The book starts out well. And like the start of the year in high school math you think you get what the book is about – until about halfway through when the teacher starts talking about differential equations and “logic.” Like cocktail chatter the book that started out interesting devolves into a highbrow bore. Sure, there’s something here for the geeks. And there’s something here for the squinters who have a lot of time on their hands. The book IS readable and its applications to daily life entertaining. The problem is that this book about days being numbered turns your daily life into a numerical, joyless grind.
After visits to the doctor, parents with screaming kids and dull math teachers it’s no wonder we finish off with a “Migraine.” This book from another doctor, Oliver Sacks. Sacks is so well known (Robin Williams played him in the adaptation of his own book in the 1990s movie “Awakenings”) that he doesn’t even use the title “doctor” on the cover of his book.
But then again, maybe he didn’t have any space left over. The elegantly understated font in this book could singlehandedly give you a migraine, and Sacks is sometimes so verbose that I’m pretty much reduced to quoting his book’s jacket to tell you what the book’s about:
“The many manifestations of migraine can vary dramatically from one patient to another, even within the same patient at different times. Among the most compelling and perplexing of these symptoms are the strange visual hallucinations and distortions of space, time, and body image which migraineurs sometimes experience.” The results, says Sacks, have been things like “Alice in Wonderland” (yes, “Alice in Wonderland”) and the art created by people while in the migraine “aura.” “Migraine” reminded me of people who try to draw or write songs while they’re high. They pretty much depress themselves when they sober up and finally see the evidence of their unlocked “creativity” is merely scribbles and vomit. Migraines and “Migraine” - according to Sacks - are vastly different and much more fascinating. This time the art comes straight from an illness within. In our over-medicated age “Migraine” is a really rare document; a medical mystery that even Advil can’t solve. This book is a horror story in sunlight. Now THAT’s a reality check.

When Reading is a Lot Like Work

“The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work”
By Alain De Botton
ISBN No. 978-0-7710-2603-4
www.mcclelland.com

“Historic Maps and Views of Paris”
By George Sinclair
ISBN No. 978-1-57912-798-5
www.blackdogandleventhal.com

“Pygmy”
By Chuck Palahniuk
ISBN No. 978-0-385-66629-9
www.randomhouse.ca

“Sips and Apps: Classic and Contemporary Recipes for Cocktails and Appetizers”
By Kathy Casey
ISBN No. 978-0-8118-6406-0
www.chroniclebooks.com

“Night: A Literary Companion”
Edited by Merilyn Simonds
ISBN No. 978-1-55365-396-7
www.greystonebooks.com

No one really enjoys their work. Why else would homemakers – those people in charge of flirting with the mailman and making sure Oprah has on what the TV Guide said she’d have on – tally up how much they’d be paid if making a home were real work? Reading “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work” feels like work - specifically morning at the office. It’s slow, plodding and has one major point to make (just like a university’s philosophy textbook). Listen: if you don’t know where a book that starts off with a chapter titled “Cargo Ship Spotting” is going then you deserve to keep working until you’re 105 years old. On one hand the author is mocking the worker bee for not smelling the flowers and on the other he’s saying you can get pleasure from your work if you just snort enough philosophy. Oh, there’s stuff to enjoy here: deep, dense thoughts, big questions, long walks (by the author) to wonder what it’s all about. What it’s all about is if this book were a wanted ad in our freefall economy it’d be looking for a very select audience: working people who aren’t tired of someone else telling them what to do or why they’re doing it. Communications Majors, please remember to footnote anything you quote from this book properly.
Now, depending on what you think of your job your day will continue in one of two ways. You may daydream about a great holiday in Paris that you can take with the money you’ve earned at work or you may want to buy a gun and thin out the crowd around the watercooler. For the former please refer to “Historic Maps and Views of Paris.” Remember a few years back when engineering blueprints and ancient maps of the world were considered art? HMAVOP is like that except it’s about Paris. This makes sense because with the Mexican health advisory and all, people aren’t thinking of tropical paradise anymore; they’re dreaming about being a stranger in a beautiful bustling city and watching other people go to work in beautiful buildings. The pictures in this book are just lovely; halfway between a watercolour painting and friendly directions to get to the Louvre. (And yes, they are definitely frameable.) However, if your workplace daydreams lean toward starring on the six o’clock news check out Chuck Palahniuk’s “Pygmy” for tips on maximum mayhem. This book is about a totalitarian state youth masquerading as an exchange student to infiltrate the U.S. and blow things up. As with all of his previous books, the premise is the hook and the production is hmm-worthy (some words are blacked out like you’re reading a declassified document; refer to Palahniuk’s “Survivor” – which brilliantly begins with a single man on a commercial airliner that’s about to crash. Of course the book’s page numbers start high and go low). The problem with “Pygmy” is that it continues Palahniuk’s inability to end a novel correctly and that even John Updike – John Updike! - wrote a book about a terrorist so it’s a done topic. “Pygmy” is readable but just too melodramatic in a world where suddenly everything is melodramatic. But then again there’s an excellent workplace message in this book: you can be a really successful writer and still hate the world.
Now, after work you’re most likely going to go home, make a drink and watch “Wheel of Fortune.” That’s where “Sips & Apps” comes in. And while it’ll get you fed and drunk the book will also remind you of great days gone by; that era when people actually liked other people and invited them over for nice, elegant evenings. Everything does look nice here. The food is colourful and fancy and the drinks should have their own best-dressed list. Ironically, the recipes for such well-dressed food and drink don’t read like differential equations; everything seems forthright and user-friendly. This book is about how a nice, classy party restores your faith in the capitalist system – and how if you drink enough you’ll forget about what happened at work. Even better: you can throw out that old, dog-eared cocktail recipe book your parents gave you and replace it with this beautifully produced one.
Okay, so you’re full of arty food and exotic liquor. Now what? Sleep, that’s what! And what better way to drift off than to a few entries from “Night.” Sure, it’s just the inside of your eyelids to you but like your boss yelled at you earlier today to think outside of the box, “Night” suggests a re-thinking of the dark hours by people much more successful than you (you know, the published kind). Night: it isn’t just for binners and racoons anymore. Now, reading any anthology requires a certain amount of patience; these books are kind of like everyone talking to you at once. But what talk! One entry is from a writer noticing a new star in the year 1572. This shiner stood out because, he wrote, “I had, almost from boyhood, known all the stars of the heavens perfectly.” And in a split second you realize how small your cubicle is, how wasteful your distractions of TV and the internet are, and what a grand world it is outside your workplace.