A famous author was once asked if she wrote non-fiction. “I don’t write non-anything,” she replied. Nevertheless non-fiction titles capture winning sales at the bookstores. The Coast has produced many good non-fiction writers and three of them have released three wildly differing books, described briefly here.
*Boats in My Blood (Harbour Publishing) $24.95, available at Talewind Books, Sechelt
This book about a life spent in boat building by Barrie Farrell has hit the best seller lists. Not a surprise – the Farrell name is respected ever since Barrie’s father, Allen Farrell, became a legendary boat pioneer and eccentric. Barrie quit Grade 7 and went to work with the loggers for a while. He built his first 14-foot rowboat in his spare time and he hasn’t stopped since.
Farrell’s boat-building and other adventures take him to Pender Harbour and across the Strait of Georgia numerous times. He learns to fish, he meets the Union Steamship boats at Irvine’s Landing, he is marooned on an island for five days, he marries more than once and continues throughout his long life to design and build vessels for himself and others. It’s a life devoted to an art that all boaters will appreciate.
*There Are No Horseshoes in Heaven (Cavallo Press) $17.99 CAD, available on Amazon.com in print and e-reader
This passionately told book by Roberts Creek writer Carole Herder has a subtitle: Escape the limits of tradition and discover the path to perfect health for you and your horse. It’s a lengthy phrase that captures the gist of the book. But there’s so much more to Herder’s approach – the rapport between horse and rider is vital and Herder has devoted a greater part of her life to making her equine friends more comfortable. “Wild horses run free,” she writes … “they run a lot – barefoot.”
Observing horses fraught with hoof problems and lameness triggered her investigation into the 1,500 year old practice of traditional horse shoeing.
“People are led to think that metal shoes protect the hoof, but when you really look into the issue, we can do a whole lot better for the horse than nailing metal onto their feet.”
Almost overnight, she made the decision to pull the metal off her own horses. She went on to design an alternative called hoof boots, along with other comfort-inducing accessories that are described in the book and on her website (www.cavallo-inc.com)
*The Velvet Rope (Dick Candy Productions) $14.95 US, available in print and e-reader at Chapters, Amazon and Barnes and Noble
Brent Lymer’s book, The Velvet Rope, is hugely entertaining – that is, if you’re a fan of shows like South Park. Lymer seems like an intelligent guy and why, at the age of 30, he takes on a job as a bouncer at various Vancouver nightclubs in the 1990s is the subject he explores in his slightly fictionalized memoir.
The former Elphinstone Secon-dary School student, now with a career in marketing, Internet security and software design, returns to the Coast often to visit his father. You might have seen him playing at one of his passions, hockey, as for several years he organized the Marylou Lymer fundraising charity hockey games in honour of his late mother.
Lymer describes his former job as a nightclub doorman using a wealth of expletives and funny anecdotes. The upside of the job is the camaraderie with his bouncer colleagues. The men play asinine pranks on each other or retaliate with gross and terrible vengeance to customers who harass the bouncers. See the chapter titled Tainted Bagels – no spoiler alerts here as to what they were tainted with. A former popular Gibsons nightclub in the early ‘90s is spotlighted in the chapter titled Old Spice – that’s right, the scent your fathers used.
As vulgar as is the content, you will find yourself laughing. It’s lowbrow humour at its finest.
