Warning: This book makes jokes about the Third Reich, the Reign of Terror, World War I, cancer, Millard Fillmore, and Chernobyl.
Advertising legend Jim Riswold is a big f---ing deal. Ask him, he''ll tell you. But when Riswold is stricken with leukemia and prostate cancer (a two-fer!), the freewheeling adman quits making commercials and starts making art.
But not just any art - Hitler art. Mussolini art. Stalin-in-a-bathtub art.
This is not a sad cancer story. This is a molotov cocktail of raunch and heart and 18-gauge biopsy guns. This is a taboo-busting laugh riot, a raspberry blown straight at dying-guy preciousness and monsters of all kinds - cancer and world-historical bad guys included.
Be warned - contents of this book include:
- One profanity-spiked TEDx talk
- Two adorable children
- Something called "Interferon Family Fun Night"
- Jim Riswold leading a crowd of people in a rousing rendition of "Happy Birthday" to his oncologist
Relentlessly funny and scorchingly subversive, this is a bruised and bruising memoir - it is also tubed, scarred, stapled, and irradiated.
But here''s the secret: Jim Riswold, enfant terrible, the man Charles Barkley once called "a role model for morons", is kind of a sweetheart. The wise-guy posturing is just a cover for his pulpy heart.
Another secret: This book isn''t about Hitler. It''s about the beautiful, stupid, gross, foolish, and fantastic things we''re willing to do for love and family and not-dying. It''s about a guy who, with due respect to Lou Gehrig, considers himself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.
Really, Jim Riswold owes cancer a thank you. Thanks to cancer, his tombstone will no longer read: Here Lies That Guy Who Did That "Bo Knows" Commercial.
Now, it will say Here Lies the Guy Who Put Cancer in Its Place - and Mussolini on a Tricycle.
