A bitter doctor unfairly accused and sent to prison, an old and ornery Frenchman in Louisiana who just wants people to leave him and his lawn alone, a paranoid ex-crooner trying to mount a comeback in the age of human jukeboxes, a dis-gruntled academic whose career is being sabotaged, and a Rabelaisian narrator who has united them all in a tavern tale. Delight in the satirical volleys of vitriol and angry, streaming fury from the mouthiest, most opinionated, and disillusioned old men in a book that surreptitiously draws the essence of polemic in the history of literature and expresses the most outlandish statements with a double donkey punch of humour and shock. This is certainly not a book for the delicate.