Black to the Grindstone.

Gordon Turner is the author of Empress of Britain: Canadian Pacific’s
Greatest Ship and the editor of SeaFare, a quarterly newsletter on sea
travel.

The three-time winner of the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour has returned with 90 short articles, culled from his syndicated newspaper column, and he is in top form. Whether he is pricking the pompous, castigating the credulous, or jawing against jargon, he does so with a fine sense of the quirkiness of life. He searches worldwide for his topics, but there is no shortage of Canadian content in these pieces. In fact, quite a few originate on his home territory of British Columbia’s Salt Spring Island. Themes, home and abroad, include bureaucratic blunders, paranoia, cow-tipping, book tours, lawyers, silence, obesity, today’s technology, high-priced shores, and much, much more. This reviewer found 83 of the essays downright funny, and he still managed to raise a chuckle or two on the other seven. There are no duds at all in this volume.

Black is the master of the segue; he moves with effortless ease from Playboy clubs to the Australian dance fly within a few lines. He has a knack for applying the most precise word and the most telling phrase—and he manages to put his individual humorous twist on almost every situation. His comments on the absurdities of Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code are hilarious. Arthur Black’s 12th book is every bit as good as his earlier ones. Maybe even better.