“Your call is important to us.” We’ve all this line before, but if my call were truly important to you, I would be talking to a living being instead of hanging on hold and being reassured about how important I am. This is just one of the points in Laura Penny’s first book. Penny, who has had a variety of careers, is currently a teacher and writer based in Halifax.

Penny sweeps across the fields of politics, government, public relations, advertising, media, pharmaceuticals, insurance, and retailing. She examines the craft of bullshit from the latter half of the 20th century onward. Bullshit misrepresents by diverting our attention from the issue, using “exaggeration, omission, obfuscation, stock phrases, pretentious jargon, faux folksiness, feigned ignorance and sloganeering homilies” to achieve its goal.

An admitted crank on a rant, Penny’s rollicking full-tilt prose style will leave you laughing on the outside while weeping on the inside. The author, who came of age in the 1980s, has watched the Baby Boomer generation turn a trickle of bullshit into the tidal wave of today. She machine guns at the reader instance after instance of bullshit at its best, showing off the sorry state of moral affairs in America and Canada. About 75% of her examples of bullshit are American in origin. As she points out, Americans are much more outrageous, better funded, and just plain superior to Canucks at the craft of bullshit.

Penny freely admits that she has no solutions to this deluge of bullshit. What she does bring to the readers’ attention is the importance of critically examining everything you see and hear for evidence of bullshit. So read Your Call Is Important to Us while today’s batch of untruths are still warm from the oven, because a fresh batch of crap will be coming your way again tomorrow.