Brian Bethune

If there is a key statistic in Lezlie Lowe’s deeply reported and engagingly anecdotal book about Canada’s public-access washroom situation, it is ensconced deep inside, when Steven Soifer gets lost in some surprisingly appalling arithmetic. Soifer, CEO of the International Paruresis Association, is one of the few activists willing to talk openly about his condition, better known as shy bladder…

Robert McCrum, once the books editor for the Observer, is a literary man, an official senior citizen since his sixty-fifth birthday in July, and the survivor of a major stroke almost a quarter century ago, which he wrote about in My Year Off. No surprise, then, that he is more inclined to think of death than his…