The Balder the Better

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

“If the three perfect circles in the year 2000 represent three bald
heads, this could be the best news you’ve ever had!” proclaims the
author. The tress-challenged Taylor claims to have seen an ancient
manuscript, copyrighted AD 1000, which predicts that in the year 2000
bald people will finally take their rightful place at the head of the
evolutionary pyramid and that “the chosen one, above everything else,
must have a good sense of humour.” And humour is what this book is
supposedly about: bald humour with a millennial spin.

Like many New Age prophets, Taylor lays the foundation of his
hypothesis on some shaky Bible exegesis—“Behold, Esau my brother is
a hairy man, and I am a smooth man” (Genesis 27:11), which supposedly
implies that if baldness was good enough for the patriarch Jacob, it
should be good enough for the rest of us. Taylor, of course, neglects to
mention that to compensate for his baldness, Jacob later decides to wear
a rug (literally).

The New Age parody soon wears thin on the reader—and maybe even on
the author himself, because by mid-book the millennium theme disappears
without warning. With half a book still to go, Taylor tries to evoke a
few more laughs by offering a chapter about quack cures for baldness.
After that, though, the humour becomes all second-hand and generally
second-rate. The final 30 pages present a hodgepodge of unrelated
stories about great bald men, photos of bald men, full-page quotes from
bald men, and several New Yorker cartoons about bald men. In sum, the
book begins well enough but unfortunately has a hard time maintaining
momentum on a single joke.