25-year old Ivy League transplant, Tal, ventured West wide-eyed and earnest in his desire to write. Instead, he found a real job, lost the real job, and is now adrift on floes of temp jobs. A shadow at the mercy of his stuntwoman-girlfriend, who looks to L. Ron Hubbard for her own answers, he steals a week to escape from L.A. to New Orleans where out of the serendipitous chaos of Mardi Gras his best friend from college appears. Land Morales is brilliantly mad, but despite a once inseparable friendship with Tal, the two have careened into altogether different orbits. The empty space between them is spanned only by Land's quixotic last words to Tal - that he was embarking on a search for a community. Thrown together again, they thrust the reader into a jaunt that bebops through the conundrum of identity and faith both have grappled with while attempting to ward off the terrific delirium tremens flush of the American Century.

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To invest in vice can be a sound financial decision, but despite the lure of healthy profits, individuals and mutual funds have been reluctant to invest in this type of stock. After all, who would take pride in supporting the tobacco industry, knowing it sells a deadly product? And what social responsibilities do investors bear with respect to compulsive gamblers who have lost so much money that suicide becomes an attractive option? Canada the Good considers more than five hundred years of debates and regulation that have conditioned Canadians’ attitudes towards certain vices. Early European settlers implemented a Christian moral order that regulated sexual behaviour, gambling, and drinking. Later, some transgressions were diagnosed as health issues that required treatment. Those who refused the label of illness argued that behaviours formerly deemed as vices were within the range of normal human behaviour. This historical synthesis demonstrates how moral regulation has changed over time, how it has shaped Canadians’ lives, why some debates have almost disappeared and others persist, and why some individuals and groups have felt empowered to tackle collective social issues. Against the background of the evolution of the state, the enlargement of the body politic, and mounting forays into court activism, the author illustrates the complexity over time of various forms of social regulation and the control of vice.