If Why Shoot the Teacher, Never Sleep Three in a Bed, and The Night We Stole the Mountie’s Car made you smile, chuckle, and laugh out loud, then here (as the man said) is just the book for you! Yes, Max is back! And Braithwaite fans, along with anyone who reads for the warm companionship of a good laugh and some delightful insight, need look no further. Here is Max’s Book of Books – the wit and wisdom of a forty-year career that has won the author hundreds of thousands of book-reading and movie-going fans, and a Stephen Leacock Award for Humour as well. Here is Braithwaite on growing up on the prairies in the twenties and thirties, on the growing pains associated with raising children of your own, on Ontario, where he now lives, on himself, and on his writing career. Each fiction and non-fiction piece in this colourful collection is prefaced by the author with a short introduction dealing with the work itself and the author’s own feelings about it. Together, these personal observations provide a warm and insightful look at one man’s career and personal life throughout a lifetime of writing for and about Canadians. Max: The Best of Braithwaite brings together all the places, times, and faces – pensive, nostalgic, humorous – that Braithwaite fans have come to expect and love. Maximum Braithwaite indeed!
Max Braithwaite has the unique capacity to be both tender and caustic – both nostalgic and uncompromisingly honest. He is also one of Canada’s few original humorists. All these qualities are present in his latest bittersweet recollections of life on the Prairies during the early Thirties. It was a time of depression and drought; but for Max, a young schoolteacher, it was also a time for courtship and marriage, for those hilarious episodes in Wannego, Saskatchewan, which did much to belie the grimness of the era. There was Max’s disastrous umpiring of a Ladies’ Softball game; his writing and directing of a play that generated more drama off-stage than on; the awful problem of the wasps at the outhouse, and much, much, more. The Night We Stole the Mountie’s Car follows Never Sleep Three in a Bed and Why Shoot the Teacher? and completes the story of Max’s early years. It is also Braithwaite at his vintage best – lusty, thought-provoking, and consistently amusing.
Set in the Saskatchewan prairies during the Depression, Why Shoot the Teacher is the Canadian classic that tells the story of a young man’s first collision with reality: an ill-paid teaching assignment in an isolated country school. This autobiographical novel is riotous, grim, candid, and infinitely entertaining. While it is perhaps Braithwaite’s best-loved book, it is also a vivid evocation of the Dust Bowl desolation wrought by the “Dirty Thirties” on the Saskatchewan Prairies, the ordeal of youth among a people bereft of pity and charity, and the human compassion that adds warmth and poignancy to an unforgettable story.
Max is back! After a Lusty Winter in Ontario, Canada’s hearty humorist returns to the prairies with a naval spoof that’s awash with nautical nonsense. The time is early in the Second World War, the setting is Wabagoon, Saskatchewan, and the “ship” is a converted garage, christened hmcs Porpoise and used for the training of local navy recruits. And when the Porpoise weighs anchor in the Canadian dustbowl, the navy insists that sand is water, windows are portholes, and floors are decks. In the midst of it all – and very much at sea – is Robin Evelyn Francis Diespecker, familiarly known as “Dink”. A young, brash, impetuous boy, eager for adventure, Dink joins the war to get away from home and the Great Depression. But the “war,” as embodied on board the Porpoise, gives him both more and less than he bargained for, as one misadventure follows another. The people he meets and the exploits he survives – both “ashore” and “on board” – are rendered with the master touch of Max Braithwaite, whose wry humorous vision keeps a salvo of satire and comic escapades right on target all the way through. A riotous romp with a poignant edge, Braithwaite’s newest novel makes a mockery of war and finds fathoms of fun in human foibles.
Going home isn't easy and almost always emotionally disruptive as famous playwright Hugh Windmar realizes when he returns to his hometown of Saskatoon. There he re-acquaints with family, people almost strangers to him now; more importantly, his own past rears its ugly head as Hugh meets with the woman he abandoned during his rise to fame. Max Braithwaite's All The Way Home so clearly portrays the discomfort of revisiting the past it sends readers into an unexpected period of their own self-reflection.
In Lusty Winter, Braithwaite portrays the contemporary world as a place of luxury, ambition, and endless potential where survival is difficult and often impossible. The person trying to survive the lusty winter of his life is George Wilson, a 65-year-old who is hale, hearty, and full of hate for modern society. Escaping from city life and his ambitious celebrity wife, Wilson sets himself up in an isolated cabin in northern Ontario. However, the detached lifestyle he seeks is continuously thwarted by rocky love affairs and violent snowmobilers.
A book as rollicking and exuberant as the boyhood pleasures and perils it recalls, Never Sleep Three in a Bed combines humour and realism in a nostalgic but unsentimental journey into Max Braithwaite's—and Canada's past. From the pinnacle of his remarkable writing career, the popular author and humorist casts a perceptive eye over the world he shared with his family and friends in western Canada during the first quarter of the twentieth century. That world comes to life in vivid anecdotes of how things were. Highly entertaining and unexpectedly thought-provoking, this is Max Braithwaite at his impressive best. Never Sleep Three in a Bed is the first book in an autobiographical trilogy.
If Why Shoot the Teacher, Never Sleep Three in a Bed, and The Night We Stole the Mountie’s Car made you smile, chuckle, and laugh out loud, then here (as the man said) is just the book for you! Yes, Max is back! And Braithwaite fans, along with anyone who reads for the warm companionship of a good laugh and some delightful insight, need look no further. Here is Max’s Book of Books – the wit and wisdom of a forty-year career that has won the author hundreds of thousands of book-reading and movie-going fans, and a Stephen Leacock Award for Humour as well. Here is Braithwaite on growing up on the prairies in the twenties and thirties, on the growing pains associated with raising children of your own, on Ontario, where he now lives, on himself, and on his writing career. Each fiction and non-fiction piece in this colourful collection is prefaced by the author with a short introduction dealing with the work itself and the author’s own feelings about it. Together, these personal observations provide a warm and insightful look at one man’s career and personal life throughout a lifetime of writing for and about Canadians. Max: The Best of Braithwaite brings together all the places, times, and faces – pensive, nostalgic, humorous – that Braithwaite fans have come to expect and love. Maximum Braithwaite indeed!
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