The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave

My husband is a huge fan of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, so I surprised him by requesting a copy of The Death of Bunny Munro for him to review.

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Chick Lit this is not.

In the future, women describing the psyche of men will have a new cliché:’ “He's so Bunny Monro.”

Tragically, I myself fall into this category and believe that if left unchecked by spiritual grounding, some situational ethics and acceptable standards of morality, it would take little time for me to find myself thinking along Bunny Monro’s Cligulaian lines.

The Death of Bunny Monro is not a book designed for those who have a hard time looking at the side of themselves they would rather their mother did not know existed.

Bunny Monro is a door-to-door salesman for a product line marketed to women. His career path leads him to the doors of women of all walks of life and often Bunny uses the samples in his product case to massage his way further into the lives of customers and others he comes in contact with. Bunny is almost always bordering on a mindset kind people would simply call depraved.

That his wife kills herself is but one of the first insights readers get into realizing that the depravity of Bunny Monro is going to be paid for--first by those around him and as the title implies, ultimately Bunny Monro.

The introduction of Bunny’s young son, also Bunny Monro, and his sickly and equally perverse father, also Bunny Monro, had me wondering who would be the one who would die. Would it be the young boy, torn from his fathers callous but loving arms. Would it be the aged, sickly oafish prick of a father who would at last expire in a pool of excrement and spittle, while sitting in a chair whose compartments and between seat cushion spaces are filled with stratified food? Bunny Junior is weighted with the childhood responsibility of being the sane voice of reason in a world ruled by adults whose only claim to adultship is that they do not have to dress when someone else tells them to.

Many readers will relate to all aspects of the many manifestations presented and be pleased with the final outcome, as it appears to be just and true.

Women are presented in a variety of modes, sometimes even kindly, yet as a reviewer it is important to remind future readers that the worldview detailed by Bunny Monro is the exclusive domain of Bunny Monro, and the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons or maybe "the person who sins will die. The son will not bear the punishment for the father’s iniquity, nor will the father bear the punishment for the son’s iniquity; the righteousness of the righteous will be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked will be upon himself." (Ezekiel 18:20)

Don't Call Me a Crook! by Bob Moore

My friend Josh agreed to take up the challenge of reading this one and writing a review.* Thanks, Josh!

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“It is a pity there are getting to be so many places that I can never go back to, but all the same, I do not think it is much fun a man being respectable all his life…”

So begins a book--a dark memoir that this reviewer was shocked to learn was deemed worthy to be republished (originally published in 1935). I am not alone in my opinion that this book has no redeeming qualities.

As a precautionary measure before plunging in to Bob Moore’s telling of his life as a wayward Scotsman; don’t say I didn’t warn you!

A self-proclaimed thief, liar, and gunrunner (one must add racist, drunk, and murderer to the list!), Don’t Call Me a Crook! is a 245 page slog through the murky waters of violence, corruption, and all else in bad taste.

The book is separated into fourteen chapters but his telling of the story feels disjointed and hardly goes together seamlessly from one part to the next. And as an added insult grammatical errors abound; that Dissident Books (the publisher) purposely left in to illustrate the sparse and saucy language of the time. It does not work in the book’s favour, rather creates a choppy, broken progression that detracts from the prose.

More than once I was ready to throw the book in to the trash. It is painful to read. The author is a despicable character.

Don’t Call Me a Crook! is a work of self-denial. Bob Moore is a crook!


*I couldn't finish it; I read to page 79.

Shift by Charlotte Agell

Adrian lives in a society ruled by religious zealots, and they insist the apocalypse will be any day now. Could they be right? Check out my review of at Shift The Well-Read Child!

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart

I really enjoyed The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks. For more details, check out my guest review at The Well-Read Child.

Girls who enjoyed John Green's Looking for Alaska will want to read this book, too.

Ikonica: A Field Guide to Canada's Brandscape by Jeannette Hanna & Alan Middleton

For this book, my readers are getting three reviews: mine (an American's view), my husband's and a knowledgeable and wise friend's (both Canadian)--not necessarily in that order.
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Knowledgeable & Wise Friend:
The companies profiled are well known to Canadian consumers. Products, logos and signature lines, etched in our everyday lives. But this book adds little to our knowledge and understanding of the dramatic creation and development of these enterprises or the backgrounds of the risk-takers, visionaries and adventurers who dreamed the impossible dream in a country not known for taking chances. Instead we get button-down profiles right out of the annual reports and faint images and pale ghosts of the greatness of capitalism and free enterprise.

No energy, no excitement and few insights to celebrate these iconic companies - ironic.

iKonica/ironiKa

Muse:
I wanted to read Ikonica because it looked fun and educational for this American living in Canada. Part coffee table book, part Canadian marketing overview, Ikonica was not as fun as I thought it would be. I learned some stuff--there are a few brands/companies I didn't know were Canadian (like Umbra, the company that designed the liquid soap dispenser I bought in NYC). Mostly, though, Ikonica is a book that boils down to a pat-yourselves-on-the-back book for Canadian companies (which seems to have been the purpose of Hanna and Middleton). Readers, whether they are Canadian or not, will quickly tire of of "Canadians are so great" statements that appear at least three times a page.

I also disliked the comparisons between American marketing and Canadian marketing (though I don't know if it's avoidable); I detected definite anti-American sentiments from some of the contributers, and even when they weren't referring to the myopia of American consumers, the CEOs and presidents and VP's and founders all made a point of discussing how "modest" Canadians are.

Overall, the book lacked substance. No one discussed anything that had ever been done wrong or badly in their companies, with the exception of the marketing VP for Cirque du Soleil mentioning that they tanked in Niagara Falls because of ill planned marketing and branding.

Ikonica reaches the height of boring readers by the halfway point (sooner for the less tolerant) if you read it straight through, after which readers will have a hard time focusing and may just flip through the pages to look at the pictures.

Muse's beloved husband:
Ikonica goes to great lengths to re-broadcast the corporate "message" as written by those pretending to be the messenger, the CEO's and Chairmen/women of the boards.

To read this book and believe the words contained, I would come away thinking that if it weren't for George Stroumboulopoulos, I would have no cultural bellwether with which to guide myself.[Insert finger in mouth here to imitate gag] If it were not for Roots, my understanding of the beaver would be lost forever. [Puff out cheeks here to imitate mouth filling from reflux and gag reaction] I do not watch The Hour, by choice. I have never worn Roots clothing, by choice.

Where is mention of Take Thirty and the ground breaking work of Moses Znaimer? Where is the nod to the many industrial innovations of Canada? Jeepers and golly gee there hasn't been a true-sounding Canadian tone since the death of Peter Gzowski. (At least he admitted to being a bit of a fraud with his "creation" of the award-winning front cover of the burning tree burning the forest fire sign.)

Little is said in Ikonica about the failures, and the struggle... the ashes and anvil where success is forged. Ikonica comes in at last place in selections of books I would choose to offer as representative of Canadian anything. Ikonica reminds me of early family portraits, stood for at the dawn of photography; Mother and Father, straight-faced and turned out in clothes more suited to a funeral parlour; children looking equally dour, standing poised and upright. It becomes known later that each person had a stiff set of metal fingers gripping them by the neck to ensure steady pose and lack of movement. That is Ikonica.

High quality production in print and photography amount to little more than an advertisement from the writers of this book that they will produce for your company, a very slick press release, which you can write yourself.

I will stick to Why I Hate Canadians by Will Ferguson as a gift to the interested.
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Thanks to Mini Book Expo: Business Edition & Douglas & McIntyre for sending this book.

Click by Bill Tancer

This is another guest post by my beloved husband. I will probably be reviewing it myself sometime in the near future.

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http://www.hyperionbooks.com/author_video.asp?ISBN=1401323049 will take you to a website showing a video of Bill Tancer talking to the Google demagogues about his new book Click.

http://www.hyperionbooks.com/titlepage.asp?ISBN=1401323049&SUBJECT=business will take you to a website with a publisher's synopsis/review of Bill Tancer’s new book Click.

Of course, clicking on the book cover or title will allow you to order your own tactile experience of Click through Powell's Books.

“The medium is the message" (Marshall McLuhan) best describes the impressive multi-media experience and concepts outlined by Tancer in Click. The author does not give the nod to McLuhan. Tancer's demonstration of data is his implied agreement with the ideas of a media-driven society, obsessed by its own desire to know which way it will turn next. One begins to understand, as they read, the mouse and keyboard must not be far away.

Bill Tancer is honest and straightforward as he parleys his understanding of his place in this world. He relates his mission is not one he picked up while seeking an easy major/minor combination at the state university. Indeed, he has come into his calling after a lifetime of watching his own fascination with data and how numbers and people relate in the real world. Click is a 212 page business card for Bill Tancer and Hitwise, the data, information company he is a part of. 212 pages of stories mixed with information and frontline insights that will excite prescient readers into understanding something about themselves and how they relate to their own public or market segment.

A book written as if it were spoken, cleanly without the uhhh and ummm and pause while words are sought for. After reading Click I went online to investigate what sort of press Hyperion is. They have a wide range of titles and include contemporary authors I have read, like Mitch Albom. I watched the video of Tancer’s lecture at Google and was impressed to see the same “aw shucks” sort of guy I meet in Click. Tancer is a plain language speaker, who does not shirk from hard questions or difficult problems. I would imagine if I wanted to know what the next thing was going to be, based on internet use, I would turn to Bill Tancer and Hitwise to see if he could illuminate further in the same way Click did.

I am wondering if the apple would bob so close to the surface if it knew it were next.

Tar Sands by Andrew Nikiforuk

Ladies and gentlemen, my husband asked me to let him review Tar Sands, as he knows quite a bit more about the subject than I do, so here is my first guest review, by my beloved husband.

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Take two dishes and place them on your desk. Fill one with adjectives and adverbs which immediately bring to mind associations things often considered evil or wrong, even though in themselves the thing or idea is benign or ambiguous. Fill the other bowl with wide sweeping generalizations and some indistinct segues between actual quotes and random unattributed ideas. Next, pick a topically hot subject that most of society is knowledgeably ignorant about but vaguely aware of. Mix together with the skill of a Gamey Bird newspaper-trained journalist (Car crash on the front page. If there was none that week, dig one out of the files.) and you will come up with a close approximation to Nikiforuk’s Tar Sands.

Let’s try using some of his own style.

Andrew Nikiforuk lives in a dangerous Calgary neighbourhood frequented by crack users who have broken into one of his two gas guzzling cars to steal money, leading one to wonder if this is not simply the poor addict's attempt at saying “no” to the petro-jobs which would earn him substantially more income than the dollar his neglectful wife left behind.

There. See how easy that is?

You know, if one were to substitute any other group besides tar sands executives, it is very likely there would be a case here for a human rights tribunal hearing into hate literature.

I got to page 87 and could go no further.

Thank you to Douglas & McIntyre for the review copy.

The Hanging Woods by Scott Loring Sanders

I've reviewed The Hanging Woods for The Well-Read Child. It's scheduled to be posted today!

Northlander by Meg Burden

Hi, everyone. Jill at The Well-Read Child sent me a few books to review as a guest blogger for her site, and the first one is Northlander.

My review is scheduled to be posted at The Well-Read Child today!




By the bye, in two months I will be turning 31. I'm just sayin'.