When advertising legend Jim Riswold is stricken with leukemia and prostate cancer, he quits the business that made him famous to become a ';fake artist,' creating a controversial body of work with a controversial cast of characters, from Hitler to Mao to Kim Jong-Il. It was a decision that would save his life.Advertising legend Jim Riswold is a Big F****** Deal. Ask him, he'll tell you. But when Riswold is stricken with leukemia and prostate cancer (a two-fer!), the freewheeling adman quits making commercials, and starts making art. But not just any artHitler art. Mussolini art. Stalin-in-a-bathtub art. This is not a sad cancer story. This is a molotov cocktail of raunch and heart and 18-gauge biopsy guns. This is a taboo-busting laugh riot, a raspberry blown straight at dying-guy preciousness and monsters of all kindscancer and world-historical bad guys included. Be warnedcontents of this book include: One profanity-spiked TEDx talk. Several very public, full-frontal dick picks. Two adorable children. Something called ';Interferon Family Fun Night.' Jim Riswold leading a crowd of people in a rousing rendition of ';Happy Birthday' to his oncologist. Relentlessly funny, and scorchingly subversive, this is a bruised and bruising memoirit is also tubed, scarred, stapled, and irradiated. But here's the secret: Jim Riswold, enfant terrible, the man Charles Barkley once called ';a role model for morons,' is kind of a sweetheart. The wise-guy posturing is just a cover for his pulpy heart. Another secret: This book isn't about Hitler. It's about the beautiful, stupid, gross, foolish, and fantastic things we're willing to do for love and family and not-dying. It's about a guy who, with due respect to Lou Gehrig, considers himself the luckiest man on the face of the earth. Really, Jim Riswold owes cancer a thank-you. Thanks to cancer, his tombstone will no longer read: Here Lies That Guy Who Did That ';Bo Knows' Commercial. Now, it will say Here Lies the Guy Who Put Cancer in Its Placeand Mussolini on a Tricycle.
