Who Put the Skunk in the Trunk?: Learning to Laugh When Life Stinks (Paperback)

Here is a review I read in a Canadian newspaper by Joe Woodard of the Calgary Herald. This proves I'm not the only one.

Phil Callaway has just published his fifth book, Who Put The Skunk In The Trunk? While his earlier books were funny, this one will prove both funny and useful-useful because it is funny. Callaway's book is a more practical version of works like Philip Yancey's Where is God When It Hurts or Harold Kushner's When Bad Things Happen to Good People. Callaway does not try to explain the mystery of human suffering, Instead, he tells dozens of stories of people rising above their suffering with faith and laughter. This book is meant for those who have "a skunk in their trunk." The recurring motif of the book is "the skunk in the trunk." When young, Callaway enticed a skunk into the trunk of his Sunday school teacher's car, just before a holiday trip. The teacher and his family started to drive off, but a moment later, skidded to a stop. The man opened the trunk, then slammed the lid, kicked the fender and swore a blue streak. "We all end up with skunks in our trunks," Callaway said. "The question I'm asking here is, what makes some people laugh rather than cry? Rejoice rather than resign?" The book's 40 chapters are grouped into five sections, each illustrating a different "skunkbuster secret." Secrets like:

 The world is full of cactus, but you don't have to sit on one.  When opportunity knocks, don't complain about the noise  Courage is fear that has said its prayers.  Laughter sure beats Prozac, but there's no medicine quite like hope.

"I can't believe the response I'm getting already," said Callaway. "It's only been released in Canada for a week now, and I've had calls for a dozen copies, six copies, one for twenty." "A woman in Ontario called yesterday to order eight copies. She was reading it in a cancer clinic, waiting for chemotherapy. Eight other ladies were sitting there, all gloomy and scared, and she started laughing. They looked at her strangely, so she said, `Would you mind if I read this out loud?' Nobody said anything, so she started reading, and soon they were all laughing, and the gloom had lifted. So she wants a copy for each of them." The power of prayer is demonstrated in the continuing story of the Callaway family's battle with the mysterious seizures suffering by Ramona, the wife and mother. For some five years, the family feared that she was dying of Huntington's disease. But even prayer itself becomes an occasion for levity. A family friend was coping with a house full of sick children, and asked the Callaways to pray for them. The friend began baking cinnamon buns. The glass baking pan suddenly shattered in the oven...so butter dripped onto the burner and caught fire...so she threw flour into the oven to put out the fire...so flour spread all over the wet floor that she had just washed...so he kitchen floor was coated in a later of soapy dough. With that, the friend e-mailed Callaway with an urgent message: "Stop praying!" When Callaway was in his early teens, his hockey team finally went to the championship. Young Callaway himself scored the tying goal, and then, in overtime, the winning goal. "I swatted the puck across the goal line. The red light lit. The girls screamed. But they were not cheering for me. I had just scored into my own net." The climax of the story comes, however, when Callaway went home to face his sick father, who was unable to attend the game. He described his humiliation to his dad, only to have his father respond with laughter. Soon, they were both laughing. "I don't know what laughter is, but I think it's spiritual," the adult Callaway now mused. "Somehow, we're forced to give up our stoic self-control, and that lets us realize that we're not the masters of our own lives. And that's a good thing to realize." "The book ends with our reason for hope," Callaway said. "I wanted to end with hope, because if we don't have that, we don't have much of anything."