Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw

Book #17 was Will Ferguson's Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw: Travels in Search of Canada. Will Ferguson has drawn numerous comparisons to Bill Bryson, who is my single favorite author of all time (Malcolm Gladwell is making a run at the top, but still sits solidly in second). So seeing a book with Bill Bryson quoted on the front cover ("Mr. Ferguson is a very gifted writer") and compared to Mr Bryson on the back cover ("Will Ferguson is Canada's number one humorist, routinely compared to our own Bill Bryson.") was all I needed to purchase. Plus, the name is humorous enough to warrant at least a second look.

Beauty Tips is a travelogue - Mr. Ferguson takes a cross country tour of Canada, starting in Victoria, BC, and ending in L'Anse aux Meadows, and making historical, humorous, and otherwise observations all the way inbetween. I can see why Mr Ferguson draws comparisons to Mr Bryson, but he's not an exact substitute by any means. However, what the book lacked in utter hilarity and amusing historical interludes, it more than made up for in interesting Canadian trivia and tidbits. It embarassed me to realize how little about and of Cananda I actually know. I had the coasts covered decently well, but the middle was a wasteland to me - so it was fascinating to read up on all the different geographies and cultures in Canada.

One of the places Mr Ferguson visits is the Hudson Bay and the town of Churchill, which is the Polar Bear capital of Canada. I had no idea that Polar bears really truly and actually roamed around towns in Canada. Churchill apparently has a sign at one of the town boundaries which reads: Polar Bear Warning STOP Do Not Walk in this Area." Yikes. In this chapter, they go out further into the ice to meet Polar Bears face to face and to meet with the man who spends much of his life in an ice trailor tracking them - Dennis the Bear Man. Dennis the Bear Man runs the site polarbearcam.com, where you can, true to form, watch polar bears on the bear cam (offline until October). Pretty amazing.

But, not a great cover - thereby breaking my streak of being able to judge a book by its cover.