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Not only is this a terrific bunch of stuff, it also functions as a personality test, and the things you find out about yourself might not be the things you particularly wanted to know.

I was completely unaware of this Moth phenomenon. It’s been going on since the late 90s, it says here, and it’s all about storytelling. Some person will get on a stage and talk into a microphone and tell the audience a story. This has become a really big thing. What did I know. Me and the zeitgeist, we are not so close anymore.

I should say straight off that they are using this word storytelling in a specialized way. These aren’t made up fictional stories, these are autobiographical mini-essays. It’s all true. And these are not some random amateurs telling us their experiences. This book could have been called

THE MOTH : A COLLECTION OF CURIOUS AND AMUSING INCIDENTS FEATURING MOSTLY MIDDLE CLASS AMERICANS WITH MOSTLY ARTISTIC CAREERS

Normal people are not invited to the Moth. Let’s take a random sample of four tale tellers here : Sara Barron is the author of the story collections blah blah blah, her work has featured in Vanity Fair blah blah; Stephanie Peirolo is the author of the novel Radio Silence; Dr Mary-Claire King is American Cancer Society Professor at the University of Washington in Seattle� she was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Obama; Simon Bill is an artist and writer, his novel Artist in Residence blah blah�.

So the first part of the personality test made me uncomfortably aware that I am quite prejudiced against this flowing parade of the great and the good, and when I came to Tony Wheeler’s account of how he was this guy with a wanderlust who whisked his jolly family all over the world in this jolly smug hippy way and created the Lonely Planet series of travel books and made billions I couldn’t stop counting up the pitifully few countries I’ve visited and the years wasted without founding a single publishing empire and frankly I resented Tony Wheeler and I didn’t feel so good about that.

But Tony is an anomaly. In general what you get here is a whole series of being thrown into the middle of situations.

One guy was working inside the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant on the day of the earthquake March 11, 2011

One woman discovers a family secret � her dad was black! She thought he was white!

One woman has to decide if her brain damaged son should be switched off

One guy wrote Go the Fuck to Sleep and tells us about the media typhoon that blew his life to pieces because of that

One guy gets to be an extra in Silence of the Lambs - and blows his scene, repeatedly

And there are a number of really grim ones too. One guy’s daughter is raped and killed. He describes the trial and his thoughts about the murderer and how he eventually met the murderer and forgave the murderer and here is another part of the personality test of this book � when he forgave his daughter’s murderer I could not accept it! I was thinking No! You can’t do that! Forgive a moral degenerate like that! This book will get you like that, and uncomfortable truths are revealed. A new mother’s painful feelings when her baby has Downs; an experience in Congo trying to rescue people who will otherwise be killed. But then on the next page you will get an account of the kosher food problem when you’re ultra Orthodox. Psychological whiplash is the result of reading this stuff straight through. Which you can’t stop � like a bag of Revels, oh just one more , just one more until the whole bag is gone. In double quick time.

You may be thinking � aren’t these just 49 Readers Digest articles? “I am John’s spleen�, “I fell off the Eiffel Tower and died�, “My wife was in the Manson Family�, that sort of thing. Well, yes, It’s kind of true. Okay, it is completely true. Busted! But I didn’t care, it was great, funny, good, bad, strange and annoying, some times all at once.

Kind of recommended.