James Houston is the kind of man you’d love to meet at a dinner party – especially after reading Zig Zag, his new memoir. The book is a sequel to his bestseller, Confessions of an Igloo Dweller, and is a collection of vignettes and reminiscences primarily of Houston’s life in Manhattan during the 1960s, when he was a designer for Steuben Glass.

The New York that Houston describes is a glamorous, optimistic city, like that of John Cheever’s short stories, a city and generation filled with “river light … and truly nostalgic love and happiness.” As a recently divorced man, Houston was highly eligible and often called upon to make up the numbers at society dinner parties, where he met Nelson Rockefeller and Bill Blass among others. During this time Houston was also a novelist, an art teacher in Harlem, and the designer of National Geographic’s centenary cover. More recently, with his second wife, Houston has been a sheep farmer, lived in the historic house that once belonged to Whistler’s mother, and been a fly-fisher near his cottage in the Queen Charlotte Islands.

Houston’s other claim to fame is that he was instrumental in bringing Inuit art to the attention of collectors; throughout his experiences you can see how deeply moved he was by native ideas and the time he spent in the North. As he zigs back and forth between civilization and wilderness, Houston juxtaposes his experiences to make penetrating comparisons. For example, he compares Steuben designers at meetings to nomad hunters, each vying for territory. Houston also comments on the many changes he’s seen in the Arctic way of life over the past few decades, mainly due to the introduction of snowmobiles and satellite dishes.

This is not a revelatory book; Houston keeps his distance. His family heritage is Scottish, and he is the kind of gracious gentleman Toronto produced in the 1950s. Zig Zag is a genial, civilized collection of reminiscences by an accomplished storyteller.