For People Who Like to Smoke
Jim McCormick smokes. He’s 69 and he’s smoked for 55 years. He says he likes to smoke. He says, “I actually believe I can outrace a doctor. I think I’m in very good health.”
Nine years ago, we reviewed a novel by McCormick called Last Seen Alive. It was a gloomy thriller set in Berlin and we liked it a lot. We admired sentences like this one: “In the formal coldness of the morning the thought of himself squatting over her was both sad and comic, yet their passion had been very real.”
A bombardier in World War II, McCormick knocked around Europe for a couple of years after the war, then turned up in Chicago. He became a copy editor, an occupation favored by intellectual loners, traveled and wrote in his free time, and retired from the Tribune in 1985. He’s published short stories in fine little magazines like the Kenyon Review, but he’s had no luck with the last two novels he sent around. “I have an agent–I won’t tell you her name. She said, ‘Jim, why can’t you be happy?’ I left her.
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Jim McCormick has a new book out. It’s sober. It’s cranky. It’s not one of those novels, which he is too proud to publish on his own. This is a book on nutrition–Light Up and Live: An Intelligent Guide to Safer Smoking–and it appears under the imprint of Brighton Press, which McCormick established for the occasion. Stuart Brent, Unabridged, and the downtown Kroch’s stores carry it.
“They include aluminum. They include arsenic. They include radioactive polonium. There’s hydrogen cyanide, nickel, ammonia, benzene, something called acrolein–it’s used in tear gas. There’s nitrogen dioxide–a gas that’s proven to damage lungs.”
“A lot of people don’t like to take tablets so I offer them food alternatives,” McCormick went on. “But the problem is, our soil is so depleted the vitamins aren’t there that they think are there.”
At least one prominent Chicago nutritionist fails to “understand” McCormick’s guide. This is Mary Hess, who told us, “The term ‘nutritionist’ is not a regulated term. Most of us who study nutrition and have no vested interest in vitamin or mineral sales will not agree that this is safe or more effective or desirable.”
