I will be appearing in support of That Good Night at the fabulous Furby House Books in Port Hope at 3 pm on Saturday, May 2.
A couple of weeks ago, I mailed a copy of That Good Night: Ethicists, Euthanasia and the End-of-Life along with a copy of the fabulous Spring 2009 issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism to my friend Amy, who lives in Los Angeles, California. Yesterday, the package arrived encased in tape that said it had been resealed by the US Postal Service. The magazine was there, but the book wasn’t. Would someone really confiscate a book because it had the word “euthanasia” in the subtitle?
As I mentioned in my last post, I was on CBC Radio’s Wild Rose Country today. Lots of Albertans called in — far more than host Donna McElligott expected and far more than could fit into a half hour segment. And, in fact, Donna didn’t get to interview me as much as she’d hoped.
This didn’t surprise me. In the last two weeks, I’ve realized that people really do want to talk about death. I’m not saying they find it easy to talk about — just that they are aching to do it. Not only are they watching their parents and grandparents die and being disturbed by what they see, they are starting to think about what awaits them.
So far the medical and ethical communities haven’t shown much interest in having a public discussion about the negotiated death — let alone ideas such as assisted suicide and euthanasia — but I don’t think they will be able to control the masses much longer. I hope That Good Night helps ignite the conversation.
I will be talking about That Good Night during the phone-in segment of CBC Radio’s Wild Rose Country today at 12:30. Listen at 1010 AM and 99.1 FM in Calgary and 740 AM and 93.9 FM in Edmonton.
When I was doing the research for Drive: A Road Trip through Our Complicated Affair with the Automobile, I kept hearing car lovers blame the decline of the Big Three on the beancounters who had replaced the car guys in the executive suites of the automakers. But Grant McCracken, who shows up in Drive, offers a different take on his blog.
He argues that those companies should have hired chief culture officers: “What Detroit needed was a man or a woman in every C-Suite who understood what was happening in culture. It needed someone who understood what was happening in the minds of boomers (and why they were so deeply wedded to German luxury cars), in youth culture (when the muscle car culture was back with new and strange differences, and why cars like the funny, boxy little Scion was flourishing), in the life, the heart and the mind of the soccer mom (for many of whom the mini-van felt like the end of everything and especially their youth and their joy). Detroit needed a senior executive who understood the consumer, and the American feeling for mobility in every sense of the word.”
Instead, McCracken points, Bob Lutz who was into speed, not culture — and famously dismissed global warming as “a crock of shit” — ran GM’s product development. And now that Lutz has retired, a guy from the powertrain division is taking over.
Stuart Laidlaw has two stories in today’s Toronto Star that you should read. “Dead when the doctor says you are” is a good look at end-of-life ethics in the wake of the Kaylee Wallace case at the Hospital for Sick Children. “Ethicists help negotiate life and death decisions” is about That Good Night. Laidlaw’s Medical Ethics Blog is also worth reading, especially if you’re interested in the Baby Kaylee case, and you can follow him on Twitter at @StuartLaidlaw.
Given a choice between a review that praises the writing, but belittles the book, and one that praises the book, but belittles the writing, I’ll take the latter. So I guess I should be okay with this review of That Good Night by Bert Archer in the National Post, though I was tempted to go with this headline: “Imperfect writer reviews imperfect book for imperfect newspaper.”
Stuart Laidlaw of The Toronto Star interviewed me about That Good Night yesterday and put a few thoughts about the word euthanasia on his blog. He is working on a story that should appear in the paper soon.
Andrew Cash — musician, writer and a fine Friday afternoon hockey player — explains in Now why the government needs to invest in artists rather than automakers.
The proof is in the numbers: “The arts and culture sector, it turns out, is bigger in Ontario than agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining, oil and gas and the utilities sectors – combined! More people work in arts and culture than directly in auto. With every dollar of public investment in the arts netting governments $1.84, it sounds like a pretty safe bet, especially compared to the teetering car business.”
If you care about long-form journalism, then you must read the keynote speech that Gerald Marzorati, editor of The New York Times Magazine, gave at the 2009 CASE Editors’ Forum. I love this line: “I would trust leaving my children with anyone who can fold a broadsheet newspaper properly.”