The great graphic novelist, Chester Brown, was kind enough to write a blurb for my book, You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos:

We think we understand our society’s taboos, I certainly thought I did. But reading Robert Arthur’s fascinating, powerful book showed me how little I knew about the subject. You Will Die challenged me in the way that really good books do.

He also gave me a copy of his celebrated biography of the Canadian revolutionary, Louis Riel, with a signed drawing on its title page (pictured above). As the kids used to say back in the 1940s, it blew my wig.

Brown’s latest best-selling graphic novel, Paying For It (2011), details his life as a patron of sex workers. His intimate description of the practice is a welcome rejoinder to the media’s portrayal of all johns as callous misogynists.