Hitler Saved My Life

Warning: This book makes jokes about the Third Reich, the Reign of Terror, World War I, cancer, Millard Fillmore, and Chernobyl.

Advertising legend Jim Riswold is a big f---ing deal. Ask him, he'll tell you. But when Riswold is stricken with leukemia and prostate cancer (a two-fer!), the freewheeling adman quits making commercials and starts making art.

But not just any art - Hitler art. Mussolini art. Stalin-in-a-bathtub art.

This is not a sad cancer story. This is a molotov cocktail of raunch and heart and 18-gauge biopsy guns. This is a taboo-busting laugh riot, a raspberry blown straight at dying-guy preciousness and monsters of all kinds - cancer and world-historical bad guys included.

Be warned - contents of this book include:

• One profanity-spiked TEDx talk
• Two adorable children
• Something called "Interferon Family Fun Night"
• Jim Riswold leading a crowd of people in a rousing rendition of "Happy Birthday" to his oncologist

Relentlessly funny and scorchingly subversive, this is a bruised and bruising memoir - it is also tubed, scarred, stapled, and irradiated.

But here's the secret: Jim Riswold, enfant terrible, the man Charles Barkley once called "a role model for morons", is kind of a sweetheart. The wise-guy posturing is just a cover for his pulpy heart.

Another secret: This book isn't about Hitler. It's about the beautiful, stupid, gross, foolish, and fantastic things we're willing to do for love and family and not-dying. It's about a guy who, with due respect to Lou Gehrig, considers himself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.

Really, Jim Riswold owes cancer a thank you. Thanks to cancer, his tombstone will no longer read: Here Lies That Guy Who Did That "Bo Knows" Commercial.

Now, it will say Here Lies the Guy Who Put Cancer in Its Place - and Mussolini on a Tricycle.