Genre: Memoir/Short
Story Collection
Description:
“Sooner or later, everyone comes face to face with a fiasco--even the
innocent, angelic types like Miss Nude Canada circa 1986. Generally speaking,
fiascos, which thankfully come in many different forms, are events where the
caca hits the fan; there's failure, breakdown or catastrophe of some sort and
everything just slithers off of the rails in a sickening, sideways fashion.
Human idiocy, in all of its glorious manifestations, is often the fiasco's
prime catalyst with ego-squashing humiliation its necessary outcome.
Fiasco-prone humans with an above-average surplus of caca-splattered fan-blades
in their closets have many (sordid) tales to tell. Mr Pearson, the floor is all
yours ....
In bars and taverns, on a Reserve, in a motel room, on a mine site. On
lakes and rivers, in a canoe, on a raft, in the backcountry, on top of a moose.
With homeless hobos in an inner city slum. And the question then begs to be
asked: is life just one, long, continuous chain of calamitous fiascos?? (Answer
inside).”
Author:
“Jeff Pearson was born in Pembroke, Ontario,
Canada in 1963 and attended Carleton and Lakehead Universities where he mostly
majored in Maximum Intoxication / Fiasco Production. Then he went
vagabond—rambling / exploring / travelling / working—for years … all over
Canada and beyond. He kept detailed journals and has been writing down
something or other for over thirty years: poetry, short stories, song lyrics, a
novel and now a memoir. For the past twenty years he has been manning various
fire towers deep in the Canadian wilderness.”
Appraisal:
This is the second part of a three-part memoir trilogy. Just like the
first part (and presumably the third part as well) this second part is made up
of humorous, non-fiction stories of adventures (or fiascos as the title and
description call them) that the author experienced a few years ago. (These
experiences happened as long ago as 1989.) If you’re looking for the fiasco
involving Miss Nude Canada, you’ll want to start with the first part of the
trilogy.
If you read and laughed at the first installment of the trilogy like I
did, you’ll find yourself laughing and enjoying your read of this as well. Whereas
Part 1 mostly involved things closer to Mr Pearson’s hometown in Ontario and
his adventures traveling south through the US and into Mexico, which obviously
involved a bit of culture shock and adaptation to cultural differences, this
book focuses on adventures and fiascos that happen in The Yukon. This is an
area of Canada that has its own set of unique aspects which add to the story. As
an extremely rural area, much of it with very few if any people at all, the
stories tend to involve a lot of things happening outdoors in more natural
settings with many more moose and bear figuring into the stories than with the
stories from points south. My favorite was probably the one involving the long,
end-of-season solo kayak trip that … well, it turned into a bit of a fiasco,
just as advertised.
Buy now
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FYI:
A small amount of adult language.
Format/Typo
Issues:
No significant issues
Rating: ****
Four Stars
Reviewed
by: BigAl
Approximate word count: 60-65,000 words
