Please don't think me churlish, but I will kick off by saying that this book is not terribly well crafted - it's repetitive and poorly copy edited. So, if you're snobby about writing, I suggest you give it a miss. That said, it'll be your loss, as it is a heartwarming book with an important message, for reasons other than its prose.Bowen describes how he was `invisible' when he was homeless, and the difference it made when he found Bob and took him busking with him. Suddenly people - the public - saw James, interacted with him, respected him. Having Bob humanised the man who was with him, and helped James turn his life around.It echoes why this book matters: were it entitled `A Man Named James' I strongly suspect it would be invisible too. I doubt it would be published, let alone topping the bestseller charts, with James on TV sharing his experience. As a cat lover, it was Bob that made me gravitate to the story, and I'm sure I'm not alone (he is a particularly fine feline for all sorts of reasons) but there's so much more to this than fluff: through telling us about Bob, James is also able to share what it's like living on the streets, to busk, to sell the Big Issue and to come off drugs - all things most of us would otherwise shy away from reading about.James Bowen isn't a writer, and he acknowledges at the end that he had some help in putting his story together anyway. But whilst A Streetcat Named Bob might not be great literature, it increases our understanding of people who often don't have a voice, and for that deserves its plaudits.

You do not talk about Fight Club, but...Upon winning the Oregon Book Award for best novel and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, Chuck Palahniuk’s visionary debut novel, Fight Club, was shot to the veins of mainstream fiction. Following the success of its 1999 film adaptation directed by David Fincher, Fight Club gained cult classic status and has become a disturbingly accurate interpretation of our modern world.The unnamed male narrator, suffering from a long streak of insomnia, finds cure by attending cancer support groups. But when Marla Singer—a sallow, heavy-smoking nihilist—enters the evening meetings and mirrors his own fraud, his insomnia returns, so he confronts Singer to split schedules with him.On the night when his condominium mysteriously blows up, he calls Tyler Durden, whom he had previously met—under strange circumstances—on a beach. They agree to meet at a bar, where, after drinking, Durden asks him a favor, “I want you to hit me as hard as you can.” The narrator swings the punch that cradled Fight Club into the world. Shortly, a multitude of men with white-collar jobs join them. Every weekend, in the parking lots and basements of bars, they hold these late-hour no-holds-barred-and-barefisted fights that “go on as long as they have to.”These one-on-one melees curiously evoke psychotherapeutic effects—resembling that of enlightenment—within the men: they are reborn from their entombed lives.Fight Club soon evolves into Project Mayhem, an anarchic army led by Durden, who seeks to fulfill his visions of global enlightenment through organized chaos, public unrest, and demolition.Fight Club is a social satire on the dehumanizing effects of consumerism: alienation brought by chronic materialism, illusory comforts, overindulgence, and career and lifestyle obsessions fueled by advertising. “The modern world is for business—not for the people,” as what the great psychoanalyst Carl Jung said.“It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything.” Skillfully fusing Zen elements with Durden’s extremist ideologies, Palahniuk has written a provocative expression of metaphysical rebellion. The collective revolt against the existential vacuum is Durden’s nucleus and what draws men toward him.Fight Club’s noir ambience and the solid economy of its prose are reminiscent of Albert Camus’s The Stranger, but with the sharp nonlinear narration executing its plot; inheriting Kurt Vonnegut’s dark humor, Chuck Palahniuk is among today’s distinct and intriguing voices.

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