Author: thepassionatereader

This lawyer and lecturer in psychiatry at Yale goes to great lengths to argue that revenge is best viewed as an addiction, responsible for most violence and wars, and he is very convincing. He relates personal stories of coming close to becoming a criminal killer, and momentarily enjoying prosecuting many cases of criminal activity, in the adversarial justice system before becoming an advocate for an alternative.

The stories he tells of military, KKK members, and other extremist groups seeking revenge for real or perceived wrongs are chilling in the extreme, but with some recognizing their all consuming revenge addictions as the cause of self harm and reforming to become advocates for forgiveness. The best advocate I can think of for forgiveness is Anthony Ray Hinton, related in his 2018 autobiography The Sun Does Shine. The history he relates of the atrocities of Hitler, Stalin and Mao are all related back to horrendous childhood abuse, with subsequent indiscriminate mass killings that often had nothing to do with the original insult, but stayed in their brains as a revenge addiction that had to be satiated for fleeting relief. There is abundant scholarly research cited throughout, including the role of revenge seeking in the Capital attacks of 2021, and the dedicated revenge addiction actions of Donald Trump.

The neuroscience of revenge is outlined in detail and contrasted with that of the opposite, forgiveness, with the self-harm the former involves and the self-healing of the latter, but may be difficult for nonscientists to understand without anatomical sketches.

There is little distinction made between revenge addiction and pure sadism, and some of the many examples that he discusses blur the distinction. His proprietary Nonjustice System, while no doubt beneficial for many, seems to me to be a little overhyped.

This is perhaps the most memorable book I have read in years with a unique novel premise. I did not enjoy reading about millions of horrific deaths from revenge addiction, but that is a necessary part of his scholarly approach.

4.5/5

Thanks, Al D.

After more than 70 pages of absolute drivel of the 1930´s Milwaukee gangland Prohibition slang, with more names than I could keep track of, I was about ready to give up. But then the 86 year old American novelist, sorta, kinda began to make sense with a loose plot that has little to do with the previous nonsense, so I kept going, hoping it would get better. In one way, it did, with a more understandable plot line, but there was still a lot of loose ends and too many characters. The gumshoe Hicks is abducted onto a ship where no one is honest as he tries to bring back the Wisconsin cheeze King’s rebellious daughter.

At the halfway point of this verbose nonsensical novel, I did something I seldom do- I gave up and returned it to the library.

I will not count it as read when I calculate the books I have read this year, but I am rapidly losing faith in the books that many popular reviewers recommend.

Thanks, The New Yorker

Apart from the frequent and unnecessary use of a very foul adjective not appropriate for polite company, this is the hilarious and in places very serious account of the training and trained obstetrician/gynecologist’s experiences within Britain’s NHS in the 2000s. Burnt out by criticism from the public and particularly by politicians who fail to understand the dedication, the highs and the lows and the frustrations that all of us in medicine have experienced, he quit the profession, in 2010 and went into television production (and writing.).

Although his specialty was very different than mine there are enough similarities to make this an easy to understand book, and the technical details are adequately explained in abundant footnotes for the general public.

Of many, I can relate some stories like the ones he writes about.

#1. Dashing down the corridor to the operating room for an emergency Caesarian section with my hand up a lady’s vagina to push the baby’s head off the prolapsed cord.

#2. Attempting and failing to retrieve a foreign body (in my case a beer bottle) from a rectum. When we gave up the note of referral to the surgeon read « This Bud’s for you. ».

#3. Sleep deprivation. After being on call in house for 72 hours and getting almost no sleep I did early morning rounds with the head nurse and, noting an empty bed, asked what had happened to old Joe. She laughed and stated « According to the night nurse, you came over here four hours ago and declared him dead. ». I had no recall whatsoever of doing so. I can only hope that I was not mistaken on that occasion.

I can also relate to the many occasions when I was off duty (and now am peranantly) and asked to give advice about the illness of a relative or friend.

I greatly enjoyed this book, now a T.V. series.

4/5

Thanks, Tony

John Steinbeck. 1962. 223 Pages. (Papaerback.).

The long laudatory introduction makes it clear that this travelogue is not just travel, but greatly embellished with fictional details that suit the famous author’s personality and world view.

In the fall of 1960, the famous author sets out in a truck converted into a home on a cross country trek to explore America, with his beloved poodle Charley. He documents a very diverse country, often interacting with locals while trying to maintain anonymity. The result is a great snapshot of the country as it then existed, and no longer does. From the potato growing fields of Vermont to his beloved Montana and the racist south, he describes a very diverse country, with encounters with an equally diverse group of individuals, making philosophical comments along the way.

The writing is engaging and typical of his writing style.

Not as popular as his fictional Of Mice and Men, or his The Grapes of Wrath, both of which I quite enjoyed, this book is a great reminder of what America once was. I can only speculate about what he would have to say about what America has become. Unfortunately, he died at the age of 66 in 1968.

4/5

Thanks, Lois.

This is Vonnegut’s most famous novel. The title seems to be loosely based on the Dresden German prisoner of war camp, before Dresden was almost obliterated by Allied bombing. It is a very antiwar tale with the main character, Billy Pilgrim alternating between being the rich American optometrist in Vermont and flashbacks to WWII prisoner of war experiences, with hallucinations of capture by Thalfamadore extraterrestrials, trillions of miles from earth, where space and time dissolve into an amorphous unity and war is unheard of. There are seven genders in Thalmadore, all required to reproduce an individual.

There is a lot of foul language, and a lot of death and carnage. There is even an attempt by a beautiful female earthling to have sex with a Shetland pony. One must admire the author’s imagination.

Even though science fiction is not my favourite genre, I quite enjoyed this old classic. But I will not venture into any other Vonnegut books.

“And so it goes.”

4/5

Thanks, Lois

This is Vonnegut’s most famous novel. The title seems to be loosely based on the Dresden German prisoner of war camp, before Dresden was almost obliterated by Allied bombing. It is a very antiwar tale with the main character, Billy Pilgrim alternating between being the rich American optometrist in Vermont and flashbacks to WWII prisoner of war experiences, with hallucinations of capture by Thalfamadore extraterrestrials, trillions of miles from earth, where space and time dissolve into an amorphous unity and war is unheard of. There are seven genders in Thalmadore, all required to reproduce an individual.

There is a lot of foul language, and a lot of death and carnage. There is even an attempt by a beautiful female earthling to have sex with a Shetland pony. One must admire the author’s imagination.

Even though science fiction is not my favourite genre, I quite enjoyed this old classic. But I will not venture into any other Vonnegut books.

“And so it goes.”

4/5

Thanks, Lois

I am not sure what to think of this Scot’s dystopian novel. It is very well written and engaging. The narrator is a mentally ill insecure office worker with a very tragic background, who gets drunk frequently and imagines a life with a rising star singer who is himself a rogue. I won’t give away more of the plot except to reveal that she gets some counselling and towards the end finds some happiness and acceptance of her tragic past.

3/5

Thanks, Valerie H.

In this Irish novel by an Irish writer, a small backward coastal town gradually learns to welcome the advent of electricity. The narrator is an insecure teen at the time, doubtful about the all-pervasive control of the Church, but unsure of his future. There is the dramatic story of a lady deserted at the altar, and a man who seeks her forgiveness more than 50 years later. And the equally all-consuming infatuation of the narrator with the beautiful daughter of the town doctor. Neither romance ends up in the way one would expect in such a novel.

The quirky characters and the universal insights into human nature are what make this novel enjoyable. The plot, such as there is, is of lesser importance. The writing is lyrical in the exteme with some sudden contrived similes and metaphors that make no real sense: « She herself had been unwell all her life, she’d say out loud she could die at any moment; it was a gambit that worked until she was 104,and God caught on. »

I quite enjoyed most of this book, but it’s language is a bit too flowery for my liking in places.

4.0/5

Thanks, June.

In this novel by a Laotian/Canadian, a single day passes as the employees of a small nail salon run by the author in an unspecified city at an unspecified time discuss a wide variety of topics. Narrated by the owner, they speculate about their own lives and that of their clients, including their love lives with some quite profound and some quite amusing observations. Much of this is in a language that their clients can’t understand. The owner is said to be a former boxer, missing one finger, which adds a layer of mystique to the observations.

I read the author’s previous novel How to Pronounce Knife and didn’t particularly enjoy it, but this one is a gem- light but fun. As someone who has never set foot in a nail salon, I suspect that it will be even more popular with most women, who frequent such shops. It justly has won the 2025 Giller prize.

4.8/5

Thanks, Vera.

Followers of The PassionateReader.blog may be wondering if I have abandoned it, but I have just been reading this laudatory door stopper biography of the title American right-wing pol who could nowadays be considered a master «influencer », using any excuse like watching the Canadian curling Olympic trials to take a break.

From his aristocratic birth in 1925, to his death in 2008, the life and influence he wielded is documented in exquisite detail. He used his remarkable oratory skills and writing to maximum benefit to push for the right wing agenda in American political life. The book documents his interactions with a host of friends and enemies alike, with more than a hundred household names. These include in no particular order, McGeorge Bundy, E. Howard Hunt, Sylvia Plath, Wm. Sloan Coffin, Ayn Rand, George McCarthy, Alger Hiss, Dean Acheson, Whittaker Chambers, Henry Kissinger, T.S. Elliot, Robert Penn Warden, Adam Clayton Powell, Booker T. Washington, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger, John Birch, David Niven, Charle Chapman, Ronald Regan, Marshall McLuhan, Dag Hammarskjold, Truman Capote, Spiro Agnew, George Romney, Gore Vidal, John Mitchell, Daniel Ellsberg, Richard Nixon, Ronald Regan and Oliver North.

Self-assured to the point of cockiness, he was a segregationist and racist, and a Red-baiter willing to believe many outlandish conspiracy theories and was willing to overlook the criminal activities of many of his friends, including the Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt.

The homosexuality of some opponents is mocked and used to maximum benefit, with insinuations of sexual deviance sometimes advanced to discredit opponents.

The accomplishments of many Democratic politicians including JFKs handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis (not even mentioned) are given short shift while Carter’s fumbling of the Iranian hostage crisis is criticized, but the illegal intervention of the Iranian Contra affair is not.

This book amply documents the massive influence that one handsome, skilled orator and writer can have on diverse political events and as such should be taken seriously, but not in the way that the author seems to want it to be.

Next, a break for a lighter novel.

3.5/5

Thanks, The Economist.

This massive door stopper by the famous New York novelist is set in Prague in modern times and narrates a harried tale of life over barely 48 hours. The hero and heroine Robert Langdon and Elizabeth Solomon are back, but so are a host of of other characters too numerous to easily keep track of.

The plot is extremely complex but involves the intriguing notion of “nonlocalized conciousness” i.e. that it resides outside of the brain which is described as analogous to a radio receiver. The implications for otherwise unexplained phenomena, including the near death experiences, savants, and multiple personality disorder, are profound and it even extends to observed natural events such as the flight of flocks of birds. The clear conclusion is that death of any individual is an illusion.

I got totally lost in places especially when it appears that someone has been killed, but then shows up much later to be revealed as one part of a multiple personality disorder.

I am in awe of the author’s vast knowledge of a host of fields, from history, religion, mythologies, politics, and geology, but some of the deceptions, chase scenes, and tight time lines are so unrealistic as to be just silly attempts to maximize suspense.

3/5

Thanks, Nancy.

No one needed to recommend this book to me as I have read all seven of the Toronto author’s previous books and enjoyed all of them, some more than others.

In this one, there is more suspense with a far more complex plot than the previous ones. Although Angus McClintock, the colourful Scot of previous books is featured briefly, now as Minister of Public Safety, there is much less character development and much less humour, with an emphasis on Hollywood-style dramatic action of an unrealistic nature. It seems that Fallis has succumbed to the appeal of the Hollywood fast-action mystery, ignoring probabilities, perhaps hoping for a movie adaptation.

My favourite quibble: Forehead veins in upright men do not pulsate in response to emotions.

I will not reveal the very complex plot, but in short, this is my least favourite of the Fallis books, although I greatly admire his creative imagination.

3/5

This Philadelphia journalist has made a name for herself investigating and writing about gossip. She is also the podcaster of Normal Gossip and is certainly a champion gossiper herself.

Documented with hundreds of examples, gossip, narrowly defined as someone talking about someone else without their knowledge, is certainly ubiquitous, often damaging and false, but usually self-serving, building up the self-esteem of the gossiper. She distinguishes gossip as distinct from lying or even urban legends. Social networks amplify the power of gossip, particularly when it is posted anonymously and there are endless quotes from sites and people I have never heard of. It can be educational or cruel and malicious.

Much of the content of this book is about the author’s own experiences, her insecurities, and self-doubts and bears little relevance to the purported subject. There is no doubt that gossip is universal and can be useful or very harmful.

This book Is not organized by any obvious plan, and very nebulous. I found little of lasting value in it.

2.5/5

Thanks, Book Browse and The New Yorker.

This could have been a great book. Loaded with information about spiders from around the world, the author, a professor of Animal Behavior at the University of Canterbury, shows an impressive knowledge of her subject. There are colour photographs or sketches of the lifecycle or anatomy of many of the thousands of species of spiders, many of them very confusing, but colourful, along with a miniature map of where they reside. Their predatory habits and their predators and intricate web weaving with many types of silk threads are discussed in great detail. Myths about their dangers are effectively exploded. Their usefulness as harbingers of ecological change and the potential to mimic them in medical sciences and engineering are carefully explored.

What spoils all of this for me is the layout, with much of the text barely readable in very fine and faint print, some of it on a coloured background that made it impossible to read without a magnifying glass. I have recently had my eyes checked ( 20/20, right eye, 20/30 on the left) so I cannot be alone in this complaint. After about 100 pages, I gave up reading the finer print and scanned only the bold bigger writing.

2.5/5

Thanks, The Economist.

In an Oregon institution for the mentally ill, a group of men discuss their problem ad nauseum, as related by one of the Chronics, a half-Indian who seems to be delusional and hallucinates a lot. Their lives are controlled by Nurse Rachett and they get some respite by carefully assessing any new patients admitted as an acute case. The domineering Nurse Ratched tries to control every aspect of the men’s lives, and is in constant conflict with McMurphy, a devious but superbly talented psychopath. The use of punishment, electroshock therapy and even frontal lobotomy as control tools is frighteningly accurate, as I recall them, working as an orderly in a mental hospital in the early 70s.

This debut novel was made into a movie that I have not watched, but the reviews of it leave little doubt that the book is far better than the movie

The character development is superb and the fine line between sanity and insanity becomes blurred to the point of extinction. It can be very confusing to distinguish when the narrator is describing reality or a delusion or hallucination, but that is obviously intentional. The fishing expedition story is exceptionally entertaining.

4.5/5

It is difficult to slot this Ottawa lawyer and researcher’s commentary into the political spectrum. He goes to some length in the beginning to argue that he is not opposed to the small c conservative agenda, but argues throughout the book against the agenda of all politicians with almost equally cynical biting invective. If I had to guess, I would place him in centre left field.

However, he pours particular scorn on Pierre Polievre, the « Ripper » of the title, as he abundantly documents his lightweight opportunistic, self-contradictory, Trumpian, style of speaking, writing and living. Published just before the 2025 election upset, some of the content now seems quaintly irrelevant, and one wonders why he was not willing to wait until the results of that could be taken into account.

He goes to great lengths to discuss the dumbing down of the media, as they blindly accept the many lies that angry politicians spout.

The overall tone is very negative with so many problems and so few solutions. But the author has profound knowledge of 20th and 21st centuary Canadian political history and I learned a lot (or recalled events that I had long forgotten.)

One problem: the author seems to accept that Jack Layton died of prostate cancer, although Jack himself made it clear that, although he had prostate cancer, he was dying of an unrelated cancer of undisclosed origin.

A sobering lesson in Canadian history.

4/5

Thanks, Din

This historical documentary is more like a booklet than a book, with colour photos on most pages. For all that it is a great lesson in Canadian history, outlining the fate of the long lost Franklin expedition seeking a path through the Northwest Passage in 1845. When the Erubus and the Terror were eventually found in 2015, sunk in Arctic ice, the crew was also partly found far from where the ships were, with evidence of starvation, scurvy, tuberculosis and cannibalism. This was facilitated in part by Inuit oral folklore passed down through many generations. Reproduced letters to relatives in England vividly depict the lives of these brave men

An interesting quick read, but when I finished it I checked and the one Tony recommended is totally different « Death On the Ice » by Casey Brown.

4/5

Thanks, Tony.

It is hard to assign a genre to this book or even a primary author. Although Douglas Abrams organized it, much of the text is just conversations between the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and the Dalhi Lama, the leaders he, an American Jewish journalist and film maker, brought together over a week, in a remote part of India.

There are endless, aphorisms and self -evident common sense truths about suffering, compassion, looking beyond oneself and generosity, and development of mental immunity to suffering. The commonalities of Buddhism and at least parts of Christianity are emphasized. The remarkable Anthony Ray Hinton, who wrote The Sun Does Shine, a wonderful story about forgiveness after spending 39 years on death row for a crime he did not commit is quoted at some length.

I greatly admire both men for their intelligence, altruism and idealism. But I have some criticisms as well. Popular psychology and neuroscience is detailed when it strengthens their argument, but ignored in other places, such as when they perpetuate the myth that stomach ulcers are caused by stress. There is no acknowegement that at least 95 % of adult worldwide religious beliefs originate in childhood indoctrination, not in universal truths. Richard Dawkins has called this the worst form of child abuse. And there seems to be the tacit assumption that the mind is separate from the brain, and enters some kind of nirvana or heaven at the time of bodily death, with no evidence.

Much as I would like to believe in the power of prayer, and the benefits of Buddhist meditation, I am skeptical of both.

This book is unnecessarily long, ethereal, nebulous and idealistic.

3/5

Thanks, Din.

Thanks, Din.

This history covers the fraught multidimensional relationships between the British, French, and Dutch colonists, the many and constantly changing Indigenous nations of what is now mostly Ontario and New York State, and the fraught battle to convert the Natives to Catholic Christianity between 1620 and 1650, with peak success, and then utter failure.

The central character in much of the story is the lauded Father St. Jean de Brebeuf, a dedicated but highly controversial priest, now a saint, but also a delusional hallucinating individual who might be considered a schizophrenic. His weird visual hallucinations were only outdone by the even weirder beliefs and visions of the native Hurons of southern Georgian Bay and Saint Mary’s.

The various Native nations seemed to compete with each other to invent ever more ingenious methods off torturing their opponents, mainly with axes and fire, but also by scalding with boling water that mocked the baptisms that priests insisted were essential to avoid eternal hellfire, and were widely applied to dying children. The plagues of smallpox and influenza that was blamed on the priests decimated the native populations. The widespread pracice of cannibalism of tortured enemy bodies was never condemned even by the Christians.

There are hints that some writing was assisted with AI with such nonsensical sentences as «  If he leaned backwards, he his chest was scorched, » and. « ….the Neutrals appeared to be taller and better proportioned that the Hurons. »

Some of the description of torture defies logic with exaggeration. How could anyone still be alive after having been scalped, both hands and feet cut off, and still crawling and shouting at his tormentors?

In our high school history classes, the very simplistic teaching was that the Hurons, the Chippewas, Senecas, and the Oneidas were friendly pleasant people while the Iroquois and Mohawk were hostile, primitive cruel warriors. There was no discussion of the shifting alliances and ever changing names of umbrella organizations that continue to confuse me, nor any detailed revelations of the territories they occupied.

I found the maps confusing and unhelpful in spite of being reasonably familiar with most of the

territory. And the hundreds of foreign long names of natives were equally confusing.

Only dedicated scholars of the history of Ontario ill find this book even remotely useful.

2.5/5

Thanks, Tom.

The native professor at SUNY who wrote the delightful 2015 book Braiding Sweetgrass, is back with this short rambling book about the Gift economies, in part based on her experience with Serviceberries, otherwise known as Saskatoon berries. She contrasts the extractive unsustainable selfish economics of Adam Smith and his so-called rational man with the giving economy in which communities share whatever they need with each other and with nature as a part of a whole community.

« Continued fealty to economics based on competition for manufactured scarcity, rather than cooperation around natural abundance is now causing us to face the danger of producingreal scarcity, evident in growing shortages of food and clean water, breathable air and fertile soil. »

There is little here that is not duplicated in more detail in Braiding Sweetgrass, which I think overall is a better read, but both seem hopelessly idealistic to this pessimist. But this one is also interesting and has the added benefit of brevity.

4/5

Thanks, Goodreads.

This British author visits river systems in Ecuador, India, England and Quebec, tracing the movement to grant natural systems like rivers and mountains legal status as living beings with rights. As such, this is in some sense an autobiography. The Rights of Nature movement has become a powerful force with some remarkable successes as an antidote to extractive exploitation and pollution, as he documents.

There are many references to native cultures with the tacit assumption that Natives always protect the environment because they believe their ancestors become a part of it in some ethereal manner. This is certainly non-science if not nonsense, and it is not at all clear that the natives always knew or could know what to prioritize in a constantly changing environment. The damming of rivers for hydroelectric projects is repeatedly condemned, but no alternative realistic plans for electricity production are offered.

It takes considerable linguistic gymnastics to accept rivers as living beings in the usual sense of the word ´living’ without any nucleotides or cell structures.

A long quote may give readers a sense of some of the vagueness of parts of this book: «Rivers flow through Rita’s poetry…. She is both water-thought… and water bodied, (free to feel the water in my veins). She speaks of the sky as her father, the river as her mother. She figures poetry itself as a river. There is a powerful sense throughout her work that she is speaking with- being flowed through by- natural forces greater than her individual self: indeed the sense that the idea of the individual as an island or singular unit is irrelevant, even deceitful. In Rita’s poetry, humans are part land (my heart is made of pine branches) and subject to sudden transformation; to skin -slipping and shape shifting (I will become salmon). … the rivers, the land and their beings speak. Caribou listen and addressed the reader. A bear is a grandfather, and wolves are great-uncles. Streams whisper, the sky utters, and rivers murmur the name of an Elder who has passed away. »

My all time favourite singer and song is Paul Robson’s rendition of of Old Man River, with its emphasis on the almost complete irrelevance of an individual human life in the grand scheme of the universe. I do value conservation and preservation, but as a scientist I believe it needs to be done in a careful and at least semi scientific manner, not by blindly following some creed of dubious value.

3/5

Thanks, The Economist.