Reviews for Don't Walk by Something Wrong!: Learning about Life, Business and Public Service from the HR...

The average rating for Don't Walk by Something Wrong!: Learning about Life, Business and Public Service from the HR... based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-02-03 00:00:00 Regan Daws The high school friend who managed - somehow - to hitch me with my lifelong soulmate and wife from a distance of thousands of miles away, many, many years ago, was FIFTH BUSINESS! Whuzzat, you ask? Well, to find that out you’ll have to read the book. But it’s some sort of really Strange Magic, as ELO sang at the time I met my wife in the Seventies... Davies’ trilogy is Magic too. This is the first book. All three together make up a long and intriguing journey through the magically murky labyrinths of the human mind. Life’s not easy, as we all know! But here it’s magical - and parochial, small-town Ontario was never so strangely and savagely serendipitous BEFORE Boy Staunton threw that accursed Snowball.. . And suddenly it’s a World of Good and Evil Wonders, as if suddenly blanketed in a new two-foot sparkling carpet of Lake Effect snow, with ironic icicles hanging by the wall! That’s where this novel starts. You step into medias res, like in a classical epic - only, if you’re the impressionable kind I was, it seems to open up much like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe presented Narnia - in a shimmering Ice Age of the human spirit. And Fifth Business is a progressively more complicated, murky and allusive affair, as it morphs into the carnival of capricious capers that lurks in the two companion novels of this, the Deptford Trilogy, all set off aptly by the plodding, dourly academic main character (Davies himself?) Dunstan. I could have met Robertson Davies back in those early days of my life, had my high school marks permitted me to attend the U of T English Faculty. You’d see him most days of the week, they used to say, on the leafy campus - with his long white beard and long white hair, like some Old Testament prophet, decked out in a swanky beret, the nattiest tweeds and twirling an ivory cane! But he was a highly respected teacher, and a DYNAMITE writer. And a real old-fashioned CHARACTER! This book’s got it all: magic, mystery, and merry Bohemian and Bay Street Mayhem! And you know, if you trust in your lucky stars, even the WORST times in your life - like Staunton’s fateful snowball toss was for some - can end up producing very good things for you. Like the serendipitous Fifth Business that long ago introduced me to the girl that was to become my wife... And in a FLASH, the Evil in my life was transformed into Good. It’s like, if that unstable ‘mixture of frailties’ that is our own uneven lives HADN’T happened the exact way it did, we would never have been as happy as we turned out to be in the end - TRULY Deus Ex Machina, as they said in olden times. Though as Socrates says in Plato’s Eurythro, we all end up paying a penalty to each other for EACH misdeed! And if there is evil intent in an act of Fifth Business, that evil will be mitigated. And the good are saved harmless. Read the book to find out more... For as the old folks used to say in the good old days, back when life was simple, IT ALL COMES OUT IN THE WASH... FIVE of the FINEST STARS for this Magnificent Read.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-04-30 00:00:00 Michael Dew 4.5 stars "Those roles which, being neither those of Hero nor Heroine, Confidante nor Villain, but which were nonetheless essential to bring about the Recognition or the denouement, were called the Fifth Business in drama and opera companies organized according to the old style; the player who acted these parts was often referred to as Fifth Business." Dunstan Ramsay was born in the small town of Deptford, Ontario. In 1908, at the age of ten, he is unknowingly cast in "the vital though never glorious role of Fifth Business" due to an untimely event that will ultimately weigh on his conscience for the rest of his life. This role of course is not a literal one – Dunstan is not an actor in a play or opera, yet he is a person who seems to have an influence on the lives of another small cast of characters in his real life drama. His feelings of guilt over this tragic occurrence will ultimately affect many of the decisions he later makes in his life in order to atone for what he considers to be his sin. His story covers nearly forty years and is told in the form of a first-person sort of memoir. We as readers have to question whether his guilt is such that he should take on so much responsibility for his actions over the course of his life. On the surface, this book seems to be about growing up in a small-minded town, the effect of the horrors of World War I on a man’s body and psyche, the marvel of magic, and an obsession with the saints. It is about those things; but Canadian author Robertson Davies brilliantly weaves all of these elements together into something that is so much more than what we initially perceive. The narrative and the point of view used allow us to glimpse just a bit of what is really happening here a little at a time. While I enjoyed Dunstan’s story throughout, I did not realize just how cleverly this was written until I neared the end. The prose is crisp and clear and oftentimes with a bit of sarcastic wit. "Some thought that my known habit of reading a great deal had unseated my reason, and perhaps that dreadful disease ‘brain fever,’ supposed to attack students, was not far off. One or two friends suggested to my father that immediate removal from school, and a year or two of hard work on a farm, might cure me." The characters are well-drawn and memorable, all playing their ‘assigned roles’ quite perfectly in retrospect. I am finding it difficult to provide an overview of this novel, but it is most definitely one for those that crave something literary, creative, and meaningful. Choose it at a time when you want to exercise your brain – not that it is difficult to read by any means, but in order to get the most out of it you will want to clearly focus on all that it has to offer. It certainly made me question to what extent our actions – or omissions – affect the lives of others and at what point can we say that we have paid our debt so to speak. Or is the debt ever truly repaid? This is my first Robertson Davies book; and I will be adding the next in the trilogy and seeing what else I have missed by yet another gifted author. "This is one of the cruelties of the theatre of life; we all think of ourselves as stars and rarely recognize it when we are indeed mere supporting characters or even supernumeraries."