Scalawags

Literary Nonfiction. BC Books for Everybody pick. CBC Radio Toronto selection, one of the Best Nonfiction Books of the Year (2008). In these pages you will encounter gamblers and adventurers, conmen and conwomen, rodomontades and ragamuffins, outright fools and outrageous liars. SCALAWAGS, the lot of them. But you can be an adventurer, a conman or conwoman, a fool, liar, gambler, rodomontade or ragamuffin and not be a scalawag. Many adventurers are not even interesting, come to think of it, let alone scalawags. There is an ineffable quality, an indefinable something or other that sets some people apart, places them in the special category that Jim Christy calls scalawag. You might call them something else; nuts, perhaps. And quite frankly in many instances--George Francis Train, for instance, or Louis De Rougemont--you'd probably be right. In 2008, it was a CBC Radio Toronto pick for one of the best nonfiction books of year.

Christy's work reminds us that losers are cool, that the middle-of-the-road might be smoother but the ditches are more interesting, and that every rounder has a good story to tell. One is reminded of Blake: 'Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.'--The Globe and Mail

These are larger-than-life characters in stranger- than-fiction stories. From the film star Tallulah Bankhead, 'a force of nature' whose sexual appetites almost matched her appetite for fame, to Lady Jane Digby, who changed names, ranks and countries as she changed husbands, ending her life as the wife of a Bedouin sheik; from Morris (Two Gun) Cohen, who went from being a hired gun to working with Sun Yat-Sen, to Florence Lowe (Pancho) Barnes, who faced off against the US Air Force, these are curiosity- piquing figures. Most readers will wonder why they hadn't heard of them before. In a way, Christy's columns, and this book, are something of a public service...--The Vancouver Sun

If the proverb is correct and a life lived in fear is a life half lived, then these unapologetic oddballs knew nothing of doubt and fear.--The Westender