If you’ve polished off the books discussed in Alison Gillmor’s essay, and your appetite for canine life-lessons isn’t sated, try Mark Doty’s Dog Years: A Memoir (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2007). Doty goes through hard times, adopts a dog, grows as a person, etc. You know the drill.
More, you say? Why not try living one of the books. First, you’ll need to ruin your life to the point that it’s crying out for doggie intervention. Acquiring a drinking problem would be a good first step, and in this venture you’ll find the folks at Modern Drunkard magazine an invaluable resource.
Soon you, too, will need to learn how to love and laugh again. Now it’s time to visit the Humane Society of Canada, where you can adopt a new best mate. May we suggest something in a golden retriever? You can really sell a golden retriever. Because that’s really where we’re going with this. Elizabeth Lyon’s Nonfiction Book Proposals Anyone Can Write: How to get a Contract and Advance Before Writing your Book (New York: Perigee Books, 2002) will equip you with all the tools you need to turn your personal story of salvation at the paws of a loveable canine into a pitch that no publisher with pedigree will be able to turn down. Next stop: the bestsellers list. Doesn’t it feel good to be back on top?
Forgotten, But Not Gone
Janine MacLeod
pp. 34-37
Environmental Defence has published a series of reports on the accumulation of toxic chemicals in Canadians’ bodies, recent installments of which are available here and here. Their most recent and high-profile report revealed the levels of toxic chemicals present in four federal politicians. They also maintain a website devoted to the subject, Toxic Nation.
Dr. Paul David Blanc’s book How Everyday Products Make People Sick: Toxins at Home and in the Workplace (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007) is an accessible examination of how the products we use and the processes employed to manufacture them affect public health.
After surviving cancer, scientist and poet Sandra Steingraber decided to examine the toxic chemicals that permeate the part of rural Illinois from which she hails. The resulting work, Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley Publishing, 1997), is both a personal account of Steingraber’s struggle with the disease and an indictment of the disregard with which we treat toxic substances in the environment.
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