Sunday August 7, 2005
Ronald
J. Colleran/Buffalo News
Robert S. Swiatek of Amherst,
who has waged three battles
against cancer, displays the four books he has authored.
Author cooks up another
volume
Latest self-published book
takes whimsical look at human foibles
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You can tell something about a person by the name of his Web
site. Robert S. Swiatek's is called bobcooks.com "I love to cook," he said, seated in front of a bookcase
filled with back issues of Gourmet magazine. He has
more than two dozen recipes on his Web site and puts a new one up each month.
But he's more than an amateur cook. The Buffalo native has been a teacher, a
systems analyst and a writer who has just self-published his fourth book. His
whimsical book "for seeking eye dogs only!" looks at the
intelligence, or lack of it, of the human race.
"The amount of intelligence seems to be declining each
year," he said from his Amherst home. "There's a lot of stupid
things people do every day." In the
book, he singles out people like the airline employees who stole a raft from
a plane, took it out on the water, then noticed a helicopter hovering above
them. The Coast Guard had homed in on the emergency locator beacon that
activated when the raft was inflated. Swiatek also mentions such things as
handicapped parking signs standing in front of a skating rink and his trip to
the store, where he pulled out his credit card and the clerk said she could
not complete the transaction unless the card was signed on the back.
"When I asked why, she explained that it was necessary to compare
the signature I had just signed on the receipt. So I signed the credit card
in front of her. She carefully compared the signature to the one I had just
signed on the receipt. As luck would have it, they matched," he recounts
in the book.
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He said
he wrote the book because people should laugh at themselves. He has tried to get
his book into the National Park Service gift shops because he thinks the
light read is just what people are seeking on vacation. Not
surprisingly, his first book was a cookbook, "The Read My Lips Cookbook:
A Culinary Journey of Memorable Meals." He bills
it as a "humorous, semi-autobiographical cookbook with delicious,
healthy, economical and uncomplicated recipes." He also wrote a novel,
"Don't Bet on It," and "Tick Tock, Don't Stop," a
treatise on working and workaholics. At the
end of 2001, after he wrote "Tick Tock, Don't Stop," he retired.
" Otherwise
I figured I would have been a hypocrite," Swiatek said. While he
sees humor in the mundane and wants to share the chuckle, Swiatek has faced
cancer three times and writes about that on his Web site. He had surgery for
colon cancer in 1998, and in February 2004 had treatment for prostate cancer.
Two months later, he had a colon resection because of a return of cancer. These
days he's compiling a compact disc of favorite songs of the day for the 45th
reunion of his class at St. Mary's High School in Lancaster and collecting
material for a follow-up to "for seeing eye dogs only!"
"People should behave so they don't become part of the
sequel," he said with a smile. "for seeing eye dogs only!"
costs $11.50 and is available on-line and at Walden Books in Eastern Hills
Mall in Clarence, the Bookworm in East Aurora, From the Ends of the Earth in
Amherst, R. Salon, Talking Leaves and Rust Belt Books. ______________________________________
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