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Cake or Death: The Excruciating Choices of Everyday Life [Import] [Hardcover]

Heather Mallick (Author)
2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)


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Book Description

April 10, 2007
A brilliant new book from one of Canada’s most popular columnists – a no-holds-barred riposte to the mess we’ve made of things.

"Mrs. Tittlemouse is heaven in a sponge mop. I read Beatrix Potter’s books as a child and love her paintings, her stories, her home-boiling of squirrels so her watercolours could be anatomically exact. But most of all, Beatrix Potter made domesticity desirable. All right, she didn’t, but she domesticated me. Personal order has become my badge and it’s the only thing that really works with melancholy."

Heather Mallick is sorely disappointed. The world has not turned out quite the way she had hoped it would. But rather than retreat from it, she takes the world head on, fearlessly and formidably on her own terms.

In a new work of entirely original writing, we have Heather unplugged (some might even say unhinged), and uncensored from the restrictions of her Globe and Mail column writing. As her many fans have come to expect from her, she is incisive and outrageous, whether she’s cataloguing the many situations and items in our daily lives that we are told we should fear, teaching us how to cope with people we just can’t stand (ruthless mockery is the key, really, says Heather) or writing about the valuable life lesson to be learned from one of her childhood heroes: Mrs. Tittlemouse, the original domestic goddess.

A candid reflection on the complicated state of our lives and our world today, viewed through the lens of Heather’s inimitable wit and outlook on life, Cake or Death: The Excruciating Choices of Everyday Life will provoke and delight readers.


Editorial Reviews

Review

“Mallick delights in being out of step, which is highly attractive. . . . Her playful collusive style . . . lures you in.”
The Globe and Mail

Praise for Heather Mallick:

“Mallick has an engagingly skewed way of looking at the world. . . . At times her puckish, macabre sense of humour in these snippets echoes Atwood or early Jeanette Winterson.”
Quill & Quire

“Frank and funny, Mallick is titillating and makes you laugh at things that you might normally consider inappropriate.”
Hour (Montreal)


From the Trade Paperback edition.

About the Author

Heather Mallick’s first book, Pearls in Vinegar: The Pillow Book of Heather Mallick, was a national bestseller. She has worked as a reporter and columnist at the The Globe and Mail and Toronto Star, as chief copy editor at the Financial Post and as review editor at the Sunday Sun in Toronto. She lives in Toronto.

Product Details

  • Hardcover: 240 pages
  • Publisher: Knopf Canada (April 10, 2007)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0676978401
  • ISBN-13: 978-0676978407
  • Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
  • Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,306,319 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

 

Customer Reviews

4 Reviews
5 star:
 (1)
4 star:    (0)
3 star:
 (1)
2 star:
 (1)
1 star:
 (1)
 
 
 
 
 
Average Customer Review
2.8 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2.0 out of 5 stars How Do I love me? Let me count the ways., January 1, 2011
These essays, like Mallick's Toronto Star columns, are an endless exercise in narcicism. Her work is a churning kaleidoscope of facts, factoids and notions, the only constant being her out-sized ego. She has written that her husband is the only man she knows who is smarter than her. Kidding, not so kidding. Not surprisingly, the most common word in her writing is "I". Oh, and she despises Amazon reviews.
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5.0 out of 5 stars laughing out loud, July 19, 2010
Laughing out loud while reading is a rare pleasure. There aren't many books that make you lose yourself so completely that you snort out loud, guffaw, catch yourself unawares.

This is such a book. I sniggered all through it, but Heather's "Letter to my Writer's Block" had me giggling helplessly and snorting in a most unladylike way. (Perhaps too close to home?). Yeah, Heather does rant on about Americans in a hurtful way but it's so cleverly, surgically done that I couldn't help but laugh there - and really, what WAS there to like about Bush?

It's an honest book, and it made me feel like Ms. Mallick was sitting across the table from me with her second glass of wine and some home made food of the Martha variety and we were sharing laughs at the foolishness of life together. I'm on the hunt now for her other book and I am an eternal fan. Anyone who can throw together words in such a witty wonderful way has my soul for life.

Bravo.
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1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars Persuaded, December 1, 2008
By 
This review is from: Cake or Death: The Excruciating Choices of Everyday Life (Hardcover)
I'm going to buy this book on the basis of the two reviews above. Never before have I read reviews that persuaded me more that I would like someone's writing. "Only a Canadian" indeed! We're more welcome, more loved and more respected than some of our neighbours (you can guess who), so we'll wear the "only a Canadian" label with our usual self-deprecating pride; it's far preferrable to the overweaning hubris of some in North America.
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