Set in lawless Manhattan in 1845, shortly after a fire destroyed much of the lower island, this is a carefully researched thriller/murder mystery by a native New Yorker. A cadre of untrained and corrupt rogues is recruited as New York’s first police force. They have poorly defined job descriptions and little oversight, amidst the influx thousands of starving Irish during the potato famine. A 10 year old street vagabond tells the narrator, the newly-minted cop, Timothy Wilde, endless lies about why she was covered in blood when he found her. Multiple murders, dark political intrigue involving the Boss Tweed/Tammany Hall Democratic machinations, brothel owners, child prostitutes, narcotic addicts and animosities between Protestants and drunken Irish Catholic immigrants complicate the very complex plot.
The twisted period dialect and lingo in short meaningless conversations between too many characters to keep track of makes the going difficult for most of the story. Strange names such as Deadeye, Fang, Ninepin, Matchbox, Hammer, Zelenograd the Rat, Bird, Silkie Marsh, Valentine, Moses Dainty, and Hopsrill abound.Young do-gooder Mercy Underhill does not seem to fit in with the other debauched characters until her dark side is exposed in Chapter 21 of 27.
There are some notable quotes. “Riots are farmed, and when they bloom, the farmers get to smash their fists into an entire city.”
“For God to make something young and perfect and then crush him. Why go to the trouble? Stupid people imagine God thinks like they do….but I cannot believe that God is stupid.”
The absence of any virtues in any of the devious lying characters, even the clergymen, seems unrealistic. Many injuries in street brawls that should be fatal appear to never impede the characters’ ability to continue fighting. The bodily reactions to various emotions, except possibly for facial expressions, defy anatomical or physiological explanations.
As in many tales in this genre, oblique hints and false leads will confuse readers until late in the story when the most unlikely characters are revealed as the the mysterious child murderers.
This is the first of three novels featuring Timothy Wilde, clearly modelled after Sherlock Holmes. I have not read any of the sequels, but I can predict that Mercy Underhill will return to New York and hook up with Timothy Wilde in one of them.
Fans of this genre will enjoy this tale. Me, not enough to read the others in the series. Two stars.
I would never have read this novel were it not to be discussed at our book club next month. Narrated in the first person singular by a fictional 18 year old German recruit, it is set on the front line at an unspecified site somewhere in France in 1917-18, as the Allies were slowly overpowering the German forces. It seems, in part, to be based on the author’s real-life experiences in those trenches where he was wounded in 1917.
There is heart-wrenching pathos as the narrator tries to console his comrade, the dying Franz Kemmerich with what they both know to be lies. Discussions of battles with rats and lice and the disadvantages of killing the enemy with bayonets vs spades only covey a small part of the horrors of war. One after another of his compatriots dies a horrible death from wounds, infections or exposure, while almost starving and dreaming of going home and courting girls.
On leave, the narrator discovers that his mother is bedridden with cancer and that he will never see her again after he returns to the front. The observation, first attributed to Aeschylus that “In war, the first casualty is the truth” is borne out in many places, most notably when the narrator swears to the mother of one of his fallen comrades that her son died instantly and painlessly. The observations made by many that surviving soldiers can never discuss with civilians the horrors they have seen and experienced in battle holds true here as the lies about the conditions at the front pile up. Perhaps the biggest lie of all is the German high command report late in the war that the title is based on.
Some of the reflections about war revealed in the narrator’s musings about captured enemy soldiers are truly profound: “A word of command has made these silent figures into our enemies. A word of command might make them into our friends. At some table some person whom none of us knows signs a document and then for years together that very crime on which the world’s most severe condemnation and severest penalty falls, becomes our highest aim….Any noncommissioned officer is more of an enemy to a recruit, any schoolmaster to a student, than they are to us. And yet we would shoot at them again and they at us if they were free.”
The writing flows smoothly in short pithy sentences and phrases. Although written from a German perspective, the narrative is not biased and is loaded with universal truths. Even though the descriptions of the horrors of war are the most graphic of any that I have ever read, I found the story magnetically engaging and enjoyed reading it. I will long remember it. But I have no desire to see the movie adaptation of 1930 or the TV one of 1979.
I have long been interested in neuroscience, so when my dear friend and former colleague at Western, Al Driedger, posted an article about mirror neurones, those clusters of brain tissue that facilitate development of empathy, at least in humans and bonobos, on his Brianworms site, which covers anything and everything scientific, Iasked him if he knew of any studies of them in psychopaths. He referred me to this book by a Georgetown professor of psychology and neuroscience.
After personally experiencing both acts of incredible altruism and of satanic cruelty at the hands of complete strangers, she switched her studies as an undergraduate in medicine to the world of psychology to research these extremes of human behaviour. She reviews ad nauseum the familiar problematic studies of Stanley Milgram at Yale and Philip Zimbaldi at Stanford demonstrating the ease of inducing cruel behaviour in some but not all normal volunteers in experimental situations given some incentives and authorization (and authority in the form of a uniform in the later case). We did not need these studies as real world examples such the unapologetic defence raised by Adolf Eichman at his Jerusalem trial already existed. It is a tribute to the increased oversight by Institutional Review Boards now that no such questionable studies would now be allowed on any campus in Western Europe or North America. Yet such cruelties, and worse, persist with the help of seemingly unsupervised government agencies such as the CIA.
In later reflections on theses and other studies, however, Marsh points out that unlike Eichman, many participants in these studies expressed anxiety and remorse about the doling out of what they thought was torture to strangers. Many volunteers distressed by watching others being tortured even volunteered to take their place. Thus, sadism and altruism are shown to both be alive and well. Generic and environmental factors influencing where people fall in this spectrum are then explored with a review of twin and adoption studies. Distinctions are made between psychopathy and psychosis, and reactive aggression and proactive aggression, the latter being characteristic of psychopaths and much more determined by genetic influences.
After reviewing the arbitrary, often-changing and subjective points-based DSM criteria that are nevertheless necessary for researching psychopathy and for developing research and treatment guidelines, she moves on to the studies showing that teens with psychopathic tendencies lack the ability to experience fear or identify it in others. This is associated with distinctly smaller and less metabolically active deep brain structures called amygdalae that may be the site of those mirror neutrons, on functional magnetic resonance imaging, although she never mentions ‘mirror neurones’ as such. Thus my question to Al was partially answered. And these anatomical abnormalities in turn are largely genetically determined, and not just correlated with psychopathic behaviour, but appear to be causative in that they are absent in those reactive violence-prone sensitive individuals who nevertheless experience fear, identify it in others, and express remorse and guilt.
I seemed to attract psychopaths in my professional past. I vividly recall one very charming rogue who had the courtesy to call to cancel his upcoming appointment without rebooking, only to hear his name the next day in the news-a Canada-wide warrant had been issued for his arrest, for attempted murder if I recall correctly.
The author devotes 30 pages to review the evolution of mothering care and alloparenting with the species variability from loggerhead turtles with no maternal behavior whatsoever to some mammalian species with maternal behaviour only for their biologic progeny (sheep) to rats with maternal care for other rat’s offspring, to dogs who adopt and fiercely protect babies of other species, to humans like the author who care deeply about even abandoned baby turtles on a Florida beach. I was reminded of my summer of care and feeding of a young Great Horned owlet that my brother and I had unintentionally scared out of the nest, raising her, feeding her and giving her aviation lessons from greater and greater heights until she took off from the peak of the barn roof, over the horizon, never to be seen again, leaving us saddened.
Evolution and multiple unique functions of oxytocin in modulating behaviour in mammals and the differences in altruistic anonymous kidney donors’ and psychopaths’ brain anatomy and physiology come next. The dedicated altruists, acting on instinctive compassion are shown to have larger and more metabolically active right amygdalae than average. What goes on in the left amygdalae?
The last two chapters largely forsake the detailed scientific brain imaging and chemistry studies doled out earlier to discuss and recommend possible ways of increasing individual and group altruism- no less interesting and with great insights, but more nebulous. She quotes two of my favourite writers and thinkers in this section-Stephen Pinker of The Better Angles of our Nature, and the Australian philosopher Peter Singer.
This is a fascinating well-organized and informative book that I greatly enjoyed reading.
Although I now often abandon books that I am not enjoying reading or learning anything useful from, I occasionally read ones that I know in advance that I will not like. I think it is important to once in a while leave my echo chamber, or as some prefer my ‘thought bubble’, and read books written by people with very different religious, economic, and political viewpoints from my own and with different outlooks on life. In part this is to critique what I may find as faulty logic but more importantly it is to try to understand where they are coming from. Such was the reason for my reading of George Wills’ The Conservative Sensibility which I reviewed on February 20, 2020 and this one- and the Koran, which I have read but will never review, as I still value having my head attached to my body.
The title of this rant by a devout member of the Eastern Orthodox Church after abandoning Catholicism comes from a warning by the exiled Russian dissident Aleksander Solzhenitsyn. In Part 1, Understanding Soft Totalitarianism, other writers, cultural observers, and thinkers whom I admire, such as Eric Blair (better known as George Orwell), Hannah Arendt, Aldous Huxley, Edward Snowden, and Robert Putnam (he of Bowling Alone fame), are quoted extensively to bolster the argument that ‘Soft Totalitarianism’ created by leftists, intolerant agnostics, Social Justice Warriors (SJWs), and the thought police of the ‘woke’ culture, dedicated to the ‘Myth of Progress’, are threatening to our democracies and freedoms. According to the introduction, visionary persecuted ex-Soviet immigrants are uniquely capable of seeing these trends developing in America. There is certainly an element of truth to these assertions and the suppression of free speech on campuses and the dramatic recent increase in political polarization, particularly in the U.S., are frightening trends.
The documentation of the extent of the intrusion of the surveillance state, aided by both corporate and government agencies is truly alarming to those of us who value privacy. However there is no definition provided of either freedom or liberty, and no discussion of the capacity of the conservative right to wield equally abusive power over whole populations. Who has the freedom and right to authorize Texans to spy on their fellow citizens and report those seeking abortions for monetary rewards? Apparently, a right-wing conservative Catholic governor does. There is no mention of the extreme intolerances and cruelty meted out in the name of religion in the past, from the Crusades to the Salem witch trials, even the invasion of Ukraine by a devout Putin, in part to unite the quarrelling Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox churches, and from a different religious zealotry, 9/11. The truckers and anarchists recently occupying downtown Ottawa, desecrating national monuments and denying residents there the basic right to enjoy peace and quiet or even open their shops, invoked ‘freedom’ as the reason for their illegal activities. Whose freedom?
In the six chapter Part 2, which is loaded with dogmatic advice on How to Live in Truth, in one titled Families Are Resistance Cells, the author praises the rigid parental indoctrination of young children in their own one true religion that he observes in a persecuted Czech Catholic family. But this widespread practice is viewed by Richard Dawkins as a form of child abuse, restricting the child’s later capacity for independent thinking, ensuring that they develop a myopic world view. In The Gift of Suffering, the need for suffering as a test of one’s true faith is backed by quotes from Dostoyevsky and one from Soren Kierkegaard that I suspect is used out of context. The stoicism of the author’s flavour of Christianity seems more akin to the dour one adopted by Malcolm Muggeridge late in life than the tolerant, almost cavalier, forgiving Catholicism of Graham Greene. The advise for Western Christians to start forming secret underground cells now seems a little alarmist or at least premature to me. The worst threats in western democracies to religious freedoms that I am aware of are Donald Trump’s failed attempt to prohibit Muslim immigration to America and Quebec’s more successful but deplorable (in my opinion) prohibition of the wearing of religious symbols by public servants.
There is throughout this informative book a vague undertone of paranoia on the part of the author and his apparently beleaguered righteous fellow believers. They seem to feel, and even to welcome and revel in a perverse victim mentality that effectively shuts out any consideration of dissenting opinions as just part of the evil societal trends they are up against with their unique knowledge of The Truth, as revealed only to them by their God. The quoted dissident statement that “when a people become accustomed to living in lies, shunning taboo writers, and conforming to the official story, it deforms their way of thinking” cuts both ways.
I appreciated reading this book more than I thought I would when I chose it and perhaps more than my harsh take on it above would suggest. There is a need to take seriously some of the warnings from persecuted ex-Soviets that he interviews exclusively. (Ironically, he reports on no interviews with American church leaders whom he is claiming to write on behalf of.) But take those warnings with more than a grain of salt. The the lessons I learned were certainly not the ones the author wishes to impart to readers.
This second selective collection of reminiscences by the noted British neurosurgeon details his adventures as he approaches and enters full retirement. As I read both of his books, I conjured up various adjective to describe the complex persona of the author-as he portrays himself. Here, brilliant, skilled, articulate, pioneering, kind, athletic, adventurous, altruistic, sensitive, sentimental; there, short-tempered, cynical, agnostic, impetuous, curmudgeonly, introspective, insecure, adulterous, guilt-ridden.
He chose to continue with limited practice and teaching in Nepal, Ukraine, and Sudan after retiring from British academia. His keen observations of medical practices in Nepal include a fine discussion of the unrealistic family expectations and demands with threats of litigation, combining with practitioners’ pecuniary motives and competition all leading to rampant over-investigation and futile treatments including widespread use of decompression craniectomies (removal of much of the skull to allow the brain to swell) for hopeless stroke victims, and is spot on. When the practitioners’ hubris and reluctance to bear bad news to relatives is thrown into the mix, the result is bad and needlessly expensive health care. His description of the polite but impoverished Nepalese with volatile dispositions and unique customs and culture is a great introduction to a country that was entirely foreign to me.
The title seems to refer equally to the patients admitted to the neurosurgery ward and to his own often fatal errors practising in that rarified field. He refers to one patient as “one of the larger headstones in my inner cemetery.”
Chapter titles seem to have been chosen almost at random and often have little to do with their subject matter. For example, only eight of 31 pages in a chapter titled “An Elephant Ride” even mention elephants. The “Mind-Brain Problem” chapter is mainly a discourse on swimming and exercise. The “Memory” chapter is a combination of his family history and his experiences in a remote Tibetan general medicine clinic. But his plea for wider availability of medical assistance in dying in the last “Neither Sun Nor Death” is eloquent and compelling.
One further quote that I can’t resist passing on: “The best way to deceive others…is to deceive yourself.”
Like him, I chose to retire at age 65, but, unlike him I never continued any practice in a foreign impoverished country. I knew I would not miss the almost daily decisions I had to make that often determined the future of others, but like him, I felt lost for a while. He expresses this feeling superbly as facing “a frightening void, little different from the death preceded by the disability of old age and possibly dementia with which it would conclude.” At this remove, an admission of my own is in order. I can now relate that I became depressed. It was not that I had no hobbies to keep me busy but rather, having spent years growing and nurturing the possibly delusional belief that my work over 40 years was important and beneficial to others, I felt entirely useless and irrelevant. But pigheaded independence ensured that I would never seek help.
Recently, out for breakfast with friends, all of us ranted about our personal experiences with the inefficiencies, absurdities, waste, and inane rules and regulations promulgated by government and hospital bureaucrats and overseers hobnailing the real providers in our health care system. But none of us could match the vehemence and eloquence of Henry Marsh in this task.
This chronicle, much of it about agonizing deaths from brain tumours, is realistic and informative but depressing and not for everyone, although written in easily understood plain English. I have watched two colleagues and my first secretary die slow painful deaths in their forties from brain tumours, and in spite of that, quite enjoyed reading it because of its raw reality.
A senior British neurosurgeon and the subject of two documentary films relates touching selective anecdotes from his long career. He exhibits unusual empathy and understanding of the fears of all patients undergoing brain surgery. Far from the arrogance of many surgeons in elite fields, he demonstrates remarkable humility, acknowledges his mistakes and the severe limitations of what heroic surgery can accomplish He seemingly reserves his condescension for his junior trainees, but he doles out scathing scorn for bureaucratic hospital and government administrators enforcing rules that usually only benefit themselves and complicate the work of front line caregivers. Of long retained NHS records he notes “The greater part of the notes….consist of nursing charts recording the patient’s passing of bodily fluids on previous admissions…. There must be tons of such notes being toted around NHS hospitals everyday in a strange archival ritual which brings dung beetles to mind, devoted to the history of patients’ excretions.”
The several page description of his tender interactions with his dying mother brought to mind the discussions in Shep Nuland’s memorable book How We Die. Like most neuroscientists he rejects any duality of body and mind-consciousness-soul in line with most modern philosophers. According to his agnostic beliefs, our minds are the natural result of neurochemical reactions and electrical activity in our brains.
The timely description of his altruistic work in Ukraine gives readers a peek into the primitive state of medical facilities and practices there, doubtless worse now. I was a bit disappointed that apparently none of his patients who progressed to brain death were referred for organ donation, which is only mentioned briefly once. It is usually, at least here, the responsibility of other physicians to get consent for that, but it is quite proper for attending neurosurgeons to raise the possibility with the family. How a neurosurgeon who failed in pharmacology got appointed to work with the complex of organizations assessing new drugs is never made clear.
The writing is in plain language that does not require a medical background to understand, although including an anatomical diagram of the human brain would have made that easier for non-medical readers.
The chapter titled Angor Animi, filled with anecdotes from his training as a junior house officer (here we were called residents or housestaff) brought back many memories, some sad, some hilarious. Just one for the record. Often on call from a Friday morning until a Monday evening as a senior resident, I caught what little sleep I could in the attached hospital residence quarters. At one point while reviewing the patients on 5 East at 7 a.m. with the head nurse. I enquired about where terminally ill old Joe had gone as his bed was empty. The nurse roared with laughter and told me that, according to the night nurse, I had gone to the ward at 2 a.m, declared him dead, and filled out the death certificate, a visit sleep-deprived me had no recollection of. Now neither housestaff nor surgeons are allowed to work such gruelling hours, although I learned a lot in such circumstances. Like the author, as a student, I also learned a lot about human relations and medicine working in a longterm psychiatric hospital with demented patients.
Even with almost no experience in neurosurgery, I can readily relate to the stress and challenges of dealing with the critically ill or dying in the midst of uncertainty, looking for that elusive balance between honest realism and leaving some room for hope, and I quite enjoyed this book.
I do not have the admirable patience and determination of a good friend who, in the last year, completed reading everything that Marcel Proust ever wrote. I have more and more frequently abandoned reading that I am not enjoying. I started reading two different books recently (Anthony Doer’s Cloud Cuckooland and Ann Patchett’s This Precious Life), having read their previous novels, but abandoned both less than half way through when I realized I was neither enjoying the experience nor learning anything useful from them. But this debut novel by a Black woman from Chicago’s poor largely black south side is a gem that I devoured in two days and will long remember. She was inspired to start writing it on election night in 2008 with Obama’s victory
In small town fictional Ganton, Indiana in 1997, a bright but poor black 17 year old gets pregnant and is forced by her dysfunctional family to give the boy up for adoption. She later is the only one of them to prosper, getting a scholarship to Yale and then marrying an equally-ambitious and bright black corporate executive and moving to downtown Chicago. But her marriage is strained in 2008 when he wants to start a family and she finally confesses to him that she already has a son that she misses terribly. I won’t give away more of the complex, twisted plot, which morphs into the thriller genre in the last half, then back to deep pathos in the last few of 40 chapters as all the diverse clues come together and many of the characters are reconciled with each other.
The deeply ingrained cruel systemic racism reminded me of that depicted in Jodi Picott’s great novel Small Great Things.
The plot line is somewhat unpredictable but realistic and complex and the main characters are entirely believable, though most are flawed Many readers may feel that for a poor black girl from the Midwest with a teen pregnancy in her past, receiving a scholarship to Yale is unrealistic, but I can assure everyone, from personal experiences there that it is not. In fact the plot is so realistic that some readers may start to question their own parentage -are they adoptees with nefarious relatives concealing their true origins? I know of at least two acquaintances who were adopted by their grandparents as siblings of their biological mothers, a practice that was and probably still is much more common than acknowledged.
I have only one very minor quibble, an obsession of mine. Veins are described as pulsating in anger, with “blood pumping through veins” -when will novelists realize that arteries but not veins pulsate?
In this collection of 50 short essays on a wide variety of topics, the writer and thinker now living in Indianapolis reflects on everything from the banal like Diet Dr. Pepper, teddy bears, and Monopoly, to the profound like the Internet, CNN, smallpox vaccination, and viral meningitis.
All of the diverse topics are rated on a 1-5-star scale in this rambling, very relaxing discourse. His observations of the relationship of modern human beings to each other and to the rest of nature (hence the title) are delivered by the author, in the audiobook edition I listened to, in flowing, lilting sentences with clear enunciation and no accent that I could identify. Hundreds of diverse bits of often obscure background information from history, science, literature, philosophy and many other fields are interspersed with numerous anecdotes from his personal troubled past, including as a bookseller and as a trainee chaplain in a children’s hospital. These expose his own eccentricity, intelligence, brilliance- and vulnerability. His description of the absolute despair and sense of worthlessness during an episode of severe depression, delivered with gravitas in a rich baritone monotone is vivid and heart-wrenching. There is a vague introspective negativity to many of these musings that may turn some readers off, but also a lot of undeniable truth and positive reasons to celebrate the only life any of us have.
There are so many wonderful quotes:
“No bright line between imagination and memory”
“Most promises featuring the word always are false.”
“I am the Vice President of anxiety and the President is missing.”
“Disease only treats people equally where our social systems treat people equally.”
Unlike many writers conveying such vast amounts of information and unique perverse perspectives who can seem arrogant and condescending to their readers, Green comes across as humble and even genuinely self-depreciating, and insecure.
This book was Goodreads pick as the best nonfiction book of 2021. The audiobook edition narrated by the author, including a recording of the call of the now extinct Hawaiian Kawaii bird, is probably the best way to experience this sprawling discourse. The Goodreads choice is richly deserved in my opinion. Highly recommended. To mimic his ending of each essay, I give The Anthropocene five stars.
First a comment about the title. Not the author’s fault, but coupling the word civil with war has always struck me as the ultimate oxymoron. A more precise use of the English language would be to call it civic war?
In this alarmingly pessimistic but timely and perhaps realistic book, the Toronto-based writer and thinker presents five richly documented what-if possibilities, from trends already established, that would lead to civil war and chaos in the nation to our south. These range from presidential assassinations to secession of states from the union, failure to address climate change, increasing political polarization and the outbreak of widespread violence. With a combination of a vivid imagination, dozens of little-known indisputable facts, and interviews with politicians, political scientists, historians, psychologists, academics, military leaders, and radical racist conspiracy theorists like Richard Spencer, the possibilities are made to seem realistic, and the outbreak of civil war to seem almost inevitable. He presents no time line, but makes it clear that he thinks the disintegration of the nation is imminent.
The recent alarming developments in Canada that he could not have foreseen even last month when the book was published clearly show that we are not immune to similar developments.
He claims that although “[the founding fathers] created the greatest democracy and the greatest economy in the world”, their worshipped constitution is now a deeply flawed document that fails them in the modern world and that the most dangerous job in America is to be president. The unnecessarily heavily armed police and the military brass often align with and encourage right wing antigovernment extremist organizations, as some police in Ottawa did recently.
One great quote among many (with respect to potential assassins): “Social alienation comes with anger at their lot in life.”
The last section delivers the hopeful possibility that they can yet avoid all of the dire predictions he presented earlier, but, with what came before, that seems like whistling in the dark past the graveyard.
I have a few quibbles. The writing is largely in short alarmist-toned sentences and phrases. He describes the U.S. as the longest duration democracy in the world (debatable) and the richest country in the world. Perhaps it is the latter by total GDP, but certainly not by GDP per capita. The few maps and diagrams are so small as to be useless. He leaves the (probably unintended) impression that some radioactive material in the hands of antigovernment extremists is equivalent to them possessing nuclear bombs. The pagination in the ebook edition is all off and the book is at least two or three times as long as the page numbers indicate.
A sobering read that I didn’t enjoy at all but an important cautionary warning to anyone who values democracy.
Although this is described as a novel, the two main protagonists, Palestinian Bassim Aramin and Jewish Rami Ehanan are two real men who fought on opposite sides of the Israel-Palestine conflicts but who then formed a real organization called Combatants for Peace. Refusing to assign blame to either side of the eternal conflict, they seem to prefer a two-state solution, but are open to any workable one. They and others also belong to the Parents Circle, a group of Israelis and Palestinians who have had their innocent children killed in the conflicts. Bassim’s 13 year old daughter was shot by a rogue Israeli soldier in 1997; Rami’s 10 year old daughter was blown up by an Islamic suicide bomber ten years later. It is not clear how much of the details of these deaths are real, as the New York author takes a lot of liberties in attributing characteristics and thoughts to the two men although much of the plot, such as the travel of the Palestinian Bassim to Bradford University to study the holocaust seems real.
The story is divided into no chapters but short sections numbered 1-500 then back down to 1, ranging from one phrase or photo to several pages, with seemingly random interspersed treatises on ornithology, and many other random topics. Many of these disconnected sections contain erudite bits of history from around the world, quotations from ancient or modern poets, philosophers and historians and trivial snitches of supposedly factual scientific data that have little or nothing to do with the main plot. What has the average volume of water in a backyard swimming pool got to do with this story? It is as though the author is trying to showcase his vast knowledge of history, philosophy, science, the arts and mathematics, the discipline from which the title derives. At the very middle are two ten page first-person-singular autobiographic sketches of the two men with heartfelt impassioned pleas for dialogue, understanding, and compassion rather than revenge even for the killers of their compatriots and family members. These sketches are separated by a one page explanation from the author about how they met.
Rami’s gripping account of the horrors of the ‘67 Yom Kippur war in the Sinai Desert emphasize the futility of all wars. The discussion of the spin, rumours, and outright lies that circulate to explain the senseless killing of the innocent presents the timeless truth that ‘The first casualty of war is the truth’.
There are some memorable quotes:
“The only revenge is making peace.”
“The hero makes a friend of his enemy.”
“The greatest jihad …..was the ability to talk”.
I confess that I frequently flipped forward to see how many pages were left. This touching story would have been much more enjoyable if it was half the length.
Before starting into this one, on someone’s recommendation, I read part of Johnathan Franzen’s new novel Crossroads. But after less than 100 pages of 580, I abandoned it and returned it to the library. It is the first of a proposed trilogy and although it flows smoothly, I found what I read a bit unimaginative and could not reconcile myself to reading this, perhaps for the rest of my life, particularly when this little gem was sitting there beside me. Kudos to anyone who wades through Crossroads.
This little book (what distinguishes a book from a booklet?) is also part of a series, the latest by an American astrophysicist and professor at Barnard College, all of them about black holes.
Time becomes dilated and space is warped as you approach the event horizon on the edge of a black hole then fuse completely as you cross it toward the singularity of nothingness, or into a parallel universe within the black hole. (Astrophysicists debate which of these alternatives scenarios fit the data.)
Comparatives, such as before/after, above/below, heavy/light, and place and dimensions become meaningless words to those steeped in the lingo and mathematics of astrophysicists. Black holes are nothing, yet they have mass, spin, and charge and gobble up stars, galaxies- and visitors. She could have added that they apparently have measurable dimensions. And if you, the intrepid visitor, cross the event horizon where the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light, the information you glean (qubits in astrophysics lingo) may or may not escape in the form of Hawking radiation. Perhaps it is our linguistic limitations that make such paradoxes seem foreign and difficult to understand. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, (which would logically lead to the conclusion that even interstellar space cannot be entirely free of matter) is likened to the difference between a lone musical note and one within a chord.
The existence of black holes was ‘proven’ with the aid of a huge radio telescope on April 9, 2019, although the resulting image is partly white.
The major remaining big efforts in this rarified field are to reconcile relativity with quantum mechanics and Hawking radiation from black holes. And Hawking radiation comes as monogamous entangled quantum pairs (those qubits) that can be separated and then communicate information over vast distances faster than the speed of light because they are complementary like the two parts of a broken wishbone. How black holes which supposedly are nothing and from which nothing can escape transmit Hawking radiation Is a paradox which left me confused; I doubt that I was the only one.
I recall how puzzled I was as a child on first learning that the largest volume within of all atoms is a nothingness, a void. But such facts that challenge our intuitions are the mainstay of most physical and chemical sciences and are exemplified best in astrophysics- and most ably explained in this beautiful little book. Although I have read numerous books on relativity and cosmology, I cannot claim even a rudimentary working understanding of them; reading this book provided a useful upgrade to my understanding. I would also need a major upgrade to my mathematics schooling to clear the fog further.
The author’s infectious enthusiasm for her subject overflows into her writing and off the page on to the reader. And the reader’s imagined attempt to travel to the event horizon and beyond of any one of billions of supermassive black holes in the known universe is like a plot line in a wild sci-fi novel.
I greatly enjoyed reading this book; confusing in places, enlightening in others, and literally otherworldly, it is stuffed with great analogies, paradoxes, and apparent contradictions.
This is a modern memoir of a well known Detroit sports writer who took over management of the Have Faith orphanage in Port Au Prince, Haiti following the 2010 earthquake. Adorable, self-assuredly-cheeky three year old Chika was left there and the childless Albions basically adopted her and subsequently, sparing no money, took her to Detroit and around the world looking for a cure when she enveloped what all the oncologist told them was an incurable brainstem cancer known as a Deep Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DIPG). She nevertheless died at age seven, in 2017. Ingeniously, he uses what appears to be magical delusions or even hallucinations of posthumous interactions and conversations with her to explore what her short life meant to him, and only late in the narrative admits that these postmortem connections were “all in my head.”
It is never made clear which flavour of Christianity he adheres to but the Albions both pray daily, and he never expresses any doubt about his God’s benevolence in spite of the contrary evidence of the cruel fate dealt to Chika. He seems to subscribe to the questionable religious explanation for the cruelties of life proposed by C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain. And with the extraordinary futile measures they undertook to prolong her life including having a feeding tube surgically inserted into her stomach, this book provides support for Ernest Becker’s thesis in his The Denial Of Death that humans are uniquely irrational when it comes to thinking about and dealing with death.
The pathos is extreme. Although it is never easy to know when it is time to give up hope and yield to fate, especially when children are nearing death, I found the measures undertaken by Albion to be irrational and unrealistic. I am well aware of ethical debates about such measures as inserting gastric feeding tubes for individuals who are clearly dying within a few weeks, often having debated such ethics in my career, although I am no longer required to participate in such agonizing decisions.
I will not be reading Albom’s most famous memoir, Tuesdays With Morrie, about his visits to a dying man, anytime soon, as I have read enough about death to last a long time. But I have been thankfully spared the need to care for dying close relative children, and will refrain from judging those who have had to endure this painful experience.
There are a couple of memorable relevant quotes:
“Sometimes life throws a saddle on you before you are ready to run.”
“One of the best things a child can do for an adult is to draw them down, closer to the ground, for better reception of the voices of the earth.”
The next book I read will have nothing to do with dying. This is a well-written easy-to-follow one-day short read, but not a pleasant one.
Had I not read and greatly enjoyed most of the nineteenth century Russian classics by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leon Tolstoy, and Ivan Turgenev, I would not have even looked at this most recent biography of Dostoevsky by a Harvard English lecturer. The son of a military physician murdered by his own serfs, Fyodor, a reckless gambler, and from an early age debt-ridden and phlegmatic, uniquely rejected his inherited status to become a writer when almost all Russian writers were hobbyists with other occupations. And he seemed to be always fascinated with murderers, trying to get into their heads.
In 1848 and 1849, as protests against autocracy rocked European capitals, 28 year old Dostoevsky, as part of a secretive intellectual cabal of liberals, anarchists, and atheists known as the Petrashvsky Circle, who advocated for freeing serfs, democracy, and women’s right to vote, was arrested and imprisoned in St. Petersburg after being betrayed by spies in their midst. After imprisonment and a staged last minute reprieve from execution, he was banished to a Siberian hard labour camp in Omsk for four years and forbidden to write. His fellow prisoners included many murderers but also some whose crimes were nothing more than crossing themselves in a way that the Orthodox Church found objectionable. There he observed many murderers firsthand, secretly scribbled notes, and studied the character of murderers to include in later writings.
Following his release by the new, more liberal reformist tsar Alexander II, successor to Nickolas II, he served five years of compulsory military service. (This would be during the Crimean War, but it is not clear whether or not he served there.) He married a widow suffering from tuberculosis in 1857, but their relationship was never a happy union. He became obsessed with reports of the famous Paris poet cum gruesome murderer Pierre-Francois Lacenaire with his numerous aliases and his horrific senseless 1835 murders, and this polite and charming criminal became the model for Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, in Crime and Punishment. There is no doubt that Lacenaire was a psychopath, long before the term was invented and the condition was accepted as a disease. He showed no remorse and intense distain for all societal moral standards. Now it is known that psychopaths have peculiar anomalies in their brains’ motor neurone networks. Is this the cause or just an effect of their behaviour? But at his trial, Lacenaire’s murders were described as being the result of a disease, of a ‘sick mind’.
The narrative alternates between the events leading up to Lacenaire’s execution and the intermittent destitution, gambling addiction, and affairs of Dostoevsky. His. poverty and threats of debtor’s prison was particularly acute during his three month tour of Western European cities in 1863 when he began planning the plot of Crime and Punishment, and again before it appeared in serialized form in a St. Petersburg magazine in 1866.
Dostoevsky’s outlook and beliefs varied from atheism and nihilism to materialism and Epicureanism at different times but he was never happy for long and was often profoundly depressed. His musings about the impossibility of free will and predestination are given scant attention in this tome.
The frequent premature deaths from infectious diseases including those of his first wife, his brother, and his nephew weighted heavily on him. The quackery of phrenology is described in detail and the unpopular but lucrative Russian pawn broker industry is also given great attention. It is no accident that they were the victims in both real and fictional murders.
The description of Dostoevsky’s frequent temporal lobe seizures with their religious epiphanies, similar to those of St. Paul and the Prophet Mohammed, is graphic although how Birmingham determined that they originated in his left temporal insular cortex is not clear. But they are also featured in his later The Idiot, one of his best short books, in my opinion.
This is not just a biography, but a primer of 19th century Russian history, societal norms, politics, and geography. The horrible conditions Dostoevsky describes in the Siberian prisoner labour camp in Omsk reminded me of those described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago and his One Day in The life of Ivan Denisovich, a century later. Russian rulers have a long history of treating their citizens horribly to this day.
This biography ends at his marriage to his much younger stenographer in 1867, long before he wrote the masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov, in 1880, featuring more murders.
For dedicated Dostoevsky fans, this provides interesting reading. But it is also windy and needlessly long, including a lot of irrelevant detail. Birmingham lacks the word smithing skills of his subject, even though I could only read the latter in translation. In addition the hard copy library edition is written in a small font with fainter than usual print on off-white paper. If you want to delve into it, get the available audiobook- the absence of the unhelpful jumbled index will be no great loss. The audiobook has the additional advantage of helping with pronunciation of the difficult Russian patronymics.
This coming of age novel, written in 1797-98, revised in 1803, and only published in 1818, a year after the authors death, was chosen by someone in our book club for our occasional foray into old classics. The first half is set in the English spa town of Bath, and most of the second in fictional Northanger Abbey in Gloucestershire, a repurposed run down Reformation-era nun’s convent, sometime in the late 1700s.
The most important task of middle-aged women of the era seemed to be matchmaking for their daughters and young maidens in their charge. With rigid rituals of courtship, the girls need to find suitable young men of good breeding and integrity and with means of support. The men likewise carefully direct their sons in their choice of a wife of suitable means and societal standing. Fathers, but not mothers of both sides were required to consent to any marriage, emphasizing the rigid paternalism of the society. The young women were not expected to be smart, educated or articulate. “The natural advantages of folly in a beautiful girl have already been set forth by another author….imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms.” The precursors of the dumb blond stereotype?
When the 17 year old main protagonist, Catherine Moreland is a guest of one family first at Bath and then of an aristocratic one at Northanger Abbey with its out-of-bounds dark mysterious rooms and halls, described in great detail, she seems to fit the above description of a beautiful dumb girl by imagining the latter site to be an old crime scene, based on her past reading of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mystery Of Udolpho.
There is at least some semblance of a plot and the inevitable happy ending in the second half of the story. The characters can be a bit difficult to keep straight, and are very properly British in their demeanour and outlooks to the point of making the novel seem like a mocking satire. The conversations are wordy and circumlocutory with flowery language and no one directly states what they really think. Some sentences are more than a half a page long, and everyone seems quick to be offended by the smallest perceived slight. Everyone keeps a journal and writes long windy letters in elaborate language.There are painfully long detailed descriptions of people’s clothing, conversations and of public spaces.
Austen engages readers in aside disquisitions to the reader about the art of novel writing, literacy in general, history and politics, and bemoans the poor esteem of novelists.
I actually enjoyed this book much more than I thought I would when I started in to it, particularly the latter half. But I will not be tempted into trying Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensbility.
This is a well-researched (34 pages of Notes, a 28 page Bibliography, and a 13 page Index) antiestablishment polemic screed by a Brooklyn-based Indian expat. It provides many nuggets of interesting information and a rare perspective on the perils facing our species and our planet. The title is a reference to the world’s only source of nutmeg in the 1600s, the remote Banda or Lonthor island in what is now called Indonesia, where, in 1621, the capitalists of the Dutch East Indian Company slaughtered the natives to take control of the spice trade. By extrapolation, all of earth’s resources are seen as cursed objects if exploited, to be avoided or at least carefully preserved and replenished. Renaming of cities and countries is seen as colonial linguistic means of burying meaning and reinventing history, supporting imperial European exploitation of resources in the broadest sense including that of human labour.
The nineteen chapters are largely separate essays that can each be read and understood without reference to others, and some are much more interesting and informative than others. In Monstrous Gaia, James Lovelock’s view of earth as an active vital force imbued with purpose, communication skills, and even sentience is explored fully, and contrasted with the capitalist extractive view of earth as a resource to be exploited by a uniquely privileged species.
In Father of All Things, the role of the military, particularly that of the U.S., in perpetuating the status quo and contributing to the climate crisis is exposed with startling troublesome data. He claims that the U.S. military consumed approximately 25 billion tons of fuel per year in the 1990s, undoubtedly higher now-while being deployed largely to protect the sources and shipping lanes of fossil fuel tankers. This does not include fossil fuel use in the production of military hardware. And the military use of fossil fuels is specifically excluded from calculations of reductions of carbon emissions promised in climate agreements. “The predicament of the U.S. Department of Defence is a refraction of the quandary that now confronts the world’s status quo powers…. How do you reduce the fossil fuel consumption of a gargantuan military machine that exists largely to act as a ‘delivery service’ for hydrocarbons?”
In “The Falling Sky” Ghosh expands on the connectedness view of earth in Monstrous Gaia, and the views of aboriginals everywhere of earth as a living vital force needing preservation and protection. He embraces the mysticism of stones, rivers, and flora and fauna as entities that are endowed with independent volition, can be related to, communicating with us, holding the spirits of ancestors, etc. He notes that “It is perhaps impossible to regain an intuitive feeling for the Earth’s vitality once it has been lost; or if it has been suppressed through education and indoctrination.” With western indoctrination and education as a scientist, I can attest to the truth of that statement as I tried and failed to understand the bizarre, psychedelic-powered visions of the world of the Brazilian shaman Davi Kopenawa and other shamans around the world whom Ghosh admires. I seldom talk to rivers, rocks or trees, even those I love.
The tone of this book is entirely negative as the author heaps equal scorn on almost all isms, including capitalism, Marxism, imperialism, colonialism, consumerism, and even some environmentalism- and all religious isms except worship of Mother Earth, which he calls vitalism and shamanism. While I learned a lot and generally appreciate iconoclastic attacks on what the late John Kenneth Galbraith dubbed ‘conventional wisdom’ I cannot recommend this humourless book with its pessimistic outlook for our future for the general public.
This memoir by the former food critic, restaurant reviewer, and editor of Gourmet magazine provides unique insights into the inner workings of the elitist, competitive corporate world of magazine publishing in an America of the past. Conde Nast, publisher of many magazines, including The New Yorker, GQ, Vogue, House and Garden, and Vanity Fair lured the unassuming, common-sense author and food writer away from the LA Times to the posh offices of Gourmet magazine overlooking New York’s Times Square in 1999.
Unaccustomed to the world of seemingly unlimited budgets for personnel, travel, and wardrobes, she outlines many battles with the staid conservative old guard billionaire owner and a succession of resistant personnel in the upper echelons of the corporate world, revitalizing the magazine with daring content. This included a controversial long piece by David Foster Wallace questioning the ethics of dropping live Maine lobsters into boiling water. Along the way, she interrupted her hectic New York life to go on month-long book tours to promote her own and Gourmet’s books.
The book is replete with descriptions of famous quirky chefs, executives, and writers, including a few names I recognized from their writing in The New Yorker, or from their books that I have read. However most were unfamiliar to me as I am basically a food agnostic and seldom dine anywhere with a Michelin rating. The recipes included are, with one exception, far too complicated for me to attempt or to even understand. The high brow social scene of the New York celebrities with jumbo egos where your seating at a gala dinner is a hint as to whether you are about to be promoted or fired is likewise very foreign to me, but interesting to read about. I cannot imagine living among people who don’t think twice about buying a Paris dress on sale for only $6,500.00.
The pandemonium and fear gripping New York following 9/11 is described in detail as the chefs and staff at Gourmet magazine prepare and deliver food to exhausted firefighters at Ground Zero. As an aside, the author’s description of her mother’s irresponsible actions in the manic phase of her bipolar disorder, buying a house, a boat, and a mink coat that they cannot afford, is a rare accurate depiction of the difficulties in dealing with that phase of a devastating illness, seldom featured in literary works.
On a low-budget 2009 tour of Paris, staying at dingy outer arrondissement hotels and eating at cheap diners, she met an old chef friend who had a profound effect on her, pointing out that riches, fame, servants, limousines, and celebrity status are not necessary for a meaningful life, and should not be major goals in her life. “I had forgotten how money becomes a barrier, insulating you from ordinary life.” When she is ordered back to New York from a book tour later that year, she is sure she is about to be fired, but instead hears that the magazine is being inexplicably abruptly cancelled, including the next month’s issue that was ready to be printed. She seems somehow to not be very disappointed, taking the Paris friends advice to heart.
I am an indiscriminate eater, willing to try almost anything on offer (except liver), and a terrible cook, but I found this book engaging and an enjoyable read, in one sense only peripherally about food at all. I suspect that more dedicated foodies would enjoy it even more than I did.
One metric of how much I am or am not enjoying reading or listening to a book in any format is how often I flip to the end to see how much I have yet to read. Another that my wife often notices is how often I find excuses to stop reading and do something else. With this book of 14 short true biographical sketches by the Calgary travel writer, I seldom checked how much I had left to read and found nothing more important to do as I read on, enthralled as Canadian cabbies told stories about their backgrounds, struggles and work experiences. It could have entertained me for longer if the author had found more cabbies willing to chat with him.
The author does not claim that the cabbies he interviewed are a representative or scientific sample, but were the only ones willing to talk to a journalist on the record. And he fills in their stories with notable background information and data. For example, he claims that a taxi driver in Canada is more likely to be murdered than is a police officer. A Pandemic Postscript documents the devastating effect of the early part of the Covid-19 pandemic on the lives of several cabbies he interviewed earlier.
The interviews feature no one who was born in Canada except for one aboriginal man in the far North.They were mostly a diverse group of immigrants from war-torn or impoverished third world countries with harrowing stories of their past experiences. From Halifax to Vancouver to Yellowknife, there are none who started out in adulthood with a goal of becoming a taxi driver, but most expressed gratitude for the opportunities the job provided them.The title has a triple meaning as they are usually driven into the business by severe poverty, and are driven by ambition to succeed and provide a better life for their families as their better-healed customers are driven to and from airports, brothels, casinos, house parties, and shopping malls. Some befriend the prostitutes they supply with customers, or become customers themselves, and some are frustrated poets, writers, engineers or social workers. A joke in Montreal is that the safest place to have a heart attack is in a cab as your driver is likely to be a cardiologist.
The story of how Nathan Phelps escaped from the notorious Kansan Westboro Baptist Church cult to become a Calgary cabbie, public speaker, and minor philosopher is particularly touching and made me cringe to think that I was once a duly-dunked Baptist. But Baptists come in many different flavours and all of my Baptist relatives and friends would be as appalled by the cruelty and extremism of the Werboro Baptists as I am. He muses about the impossibility of an afterlife: “It suddenly becomes that much more important for my life to have some relevance, because this is it.” The author succinctly adds: “ If nothing comes afterwards, everything matters more.”
Dominated by Punjabi immigrants, no member of the Winnipeg taxi cabal, whose members have a bad reputation for abuse and assault, agreed to be interviewed, but the volunteer Ikwe women that he did interview, dedicated to providing safe rides for vulnerable poor and indigenous women of that city stepped in to provide a safe and necessary service and talked proudly about their work. They are to be admired.
Some of the interviewed drivers are more interesting than others. Iranian Mo in Halifax seems to be a charismatic entrepreneurial psychopath with PTSD and an ambition to live a life like the rich businessmen he ferries around in his fancy BMW limo. The Danish Edmonton cabbie is forever finding dubious hidden connections between Shakespearean characters and Bob Dylan song characters and writes poetry and novels. I do not know enough about the industry to take take sides in the taxi vs Uber wars in Toronto and Montreal, but found the tactics of the “Taxi Sheriff” of Montreal thwarting would-be Uber drivers to be ingenious and entertaining.
As I was nearing the epilogue, purely by chance, I listened to a CBC story on the car radio about the billions of dollars that several companies are pouring into the development of flying taxis, some of them driverless, and became concerned for the future of the interesting real drivers in this book.
A very Canadian and very enjoyable good read. Highly recommended.
What a peculiar title for a debut work of fiction; enigmatic, but as the story unfolds, obliquely relevant. Greta, aged 16 and June, aged 14, daughters of tax accountants in Westchester county, New York in the spring of1987 are very different. June is the narrator throughout, and is insecure, introspective, lacking friends and completely obsessed with everything connected to her maternal uncle Finn, a gay artist in New York City who dies of AIDS. Greta is popular, confident in herself, and rebellious. After Finn’s death, his partner, Tobe, a British ex-con also harbouring AIDS, becomes the object of June’s obsession, dividing the family, who inflict guilt trips on each other, displaying betrayals, deceptions, and lies as the sisters increasingly become estranged before (inevitably) reconciling.
The fear, stigma and misunderstanding of AIDS in the mid 1980s before any effective treatment is realistically portrayed. The elitist world of modern art in New York in that era with an obsession with authenticity and widely inflated prices is likewise very realistically described.
The plot flows smoothly chronologically, with only June’s perspective and only becomes at all complex in the last 50 or so pages when loose ends are tied up. I found that the never-ending self-analysis, doubts, and ethereal musings of June became tiresome. The father is a rather colourless, bland, peripheral character that few readers will relate to- probably because he is too sane and normal- fatal characteristics for a fictional being.
This is a coming of age novel that some young readers may enjoy, but I cannot recommend it for old curmudgeons like me.
I have not included in the pages count the very helpful ten pages Cast of Characters that the author provided to guide the reader through this detailed documentation of an interesting aspect of American history. The title refers to the team headed by the indomitable chemist, Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, the Chief of the chemistry division at the U.S. Department of Agriculture for many years, starting in 1883. His uncompromising efforts to document, expose, and pass laws to eliminate rampant adulteration of all kinds of foods, with toxic additives made him enemies within all sectors of the corrupt food and beverage industry. Spoiled beef was embalmed with formaldehyde, gypsum and rock dust was added to flour, arsenic, copper sulphate, and Borax was used to disguise rotten foods, ground up insects with coal tar dyes containing benzene were sold as jams and corn sugars and toxic dyes were sold as maple syrup or honey. Lab ethanol with colouring agents was sold as bourbon. “Coffee” even as beans was sold without any ingredients from coffee plants, with unknown plant ingredients carefully made to look like coffee beans. Thousands of children died from drinking spoiled milk preserved with formaldehyde. Copper sulphate was added to make vegetables look greener and copper sulphites to disguise rotting vegetables. First generation CocaCola contained cocaine, alcohol, and salicylic acid.
The bureaucratic infighting, lobbying, backstabbing and Congressional gridlock that Wiley encountered meant that the first flawed Pure Food and Drug Act was only passed in 1906 and was only sporadically enforced. Dirty tricks such as anonymous letters to editors containing ad hominem slurs and lies abounded. But Wiley also wrote prolifically and spoke to the public eloquently and frequently, engaged with some allies in the food industry such as H.J. Heinz, and groups such as the suffragettes, and conducted what must have been one of the first double blind controlled trials using volunteer civil servants to assess the safety of various additives, first testing Borax. And his cause was boosted by Upton Sinclair’s graphic description of filthy conditions in Chicago meat packing plants in his novel The Jungle.
The cosmetics and patent medicine industries were virtually free of regulation in that era and their ingredients and marketing ploys in many ways are even now akin to those used earlier by the food industry. The latter used patented meaningless alluring names such as Freezine and Preserverine to disguise what they were promoting. We are exposed to Genacol’s Aminolock and Olay’s Regeneris hand rejuvenation instead. Some marketing gimmicks never change.
The much improved Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act leading to the creation of the FDA was only passed in 1938, after Wiley had died. I note here that two food additives that he was concerned about, sodium benzoate used as a preservative and in pickling and saccharin an artificial sweetener are still extensively used. Have they been proven to be safe or does the old Scottish verdict ‘Guilt not proven still apply. At least the labelling improvements will tell you when they are there. And we can be sure what it is if it is called bourbon.
The documentation is extensive and scholarly, but dry and very American-centric. Other country’s regulation of their food industries is mentioned only as it impacted trade with the U.S. All countries have undoubtedly come a long way in improving the safety of their food supplies in the last century or more, but have we gone far enough or gone to far? I can’t answer that question.
This book may be of most value to nutritionists and those working in the food industry, and perhaps cautious grocery shoppers. If I learned anything from it, it is to be ever more skeptical of marketing ploys and to read labels carefully.
First a comment about our William’s Court Book Club 2. We are democratic and ecumenical. We never vote but arrive at a consensus about what books we will discuss, careful to include a variety of genres, and some new as well as some old classics. We do not limit our choices by the length of a book, but we do usually limit them to books available in some library. This one was chosen for us to discuss next month
In this early novel from a prodigious Californian, three daughters of a surly demanding and cruel widower farmer are the main characters, along with their husbands, children and a few neighbouring farmers and townsfolk. The habitually miscarrying childless daughter is the narrator. None want to continue the farming business but have no choice as their increasingly demented father bequeaths the farm to them. A restless, hippie pacifist military deserter, the son from an adjacent farm, returns to the community after an extended sojourn in Vancouver as a draft dodger to avoid serving in Vietnam, and stirs up rivalries and discord, serially seducing the unhappy frustrated farm wives. The sex is described tastefully.
The dark side of this story is the extreme hostility that divides the family to the point of plotting murders, and the allegations of sexual abuse. Rosie bitterly recalls repeated incestuous raping of both herself and her sister, Ginny, in their teens, while Ginny has apparently completely suppressed all memories of that trauma. Modern psychology papers are rife with studies of suppressed memories, but also of recall of memories of events that never happened. I suspect these phenomena, at least in their extreme forms, are more often discussed than experienced. Which woman here is to believed? The description of the man involved leaves little doubt about which the author expects the reader to believe.
The plot is imaginative but realistic and unpredictable, echoing some features of a mad King Lear and his three daughters.
The first part of this story, set in rural Iowa in the 1960s and 70s brought back so many memories of my farm childhood in Ontario that I thoroughly enjoyed it, even though some of those memories were not enjoyable. The strict gender role delineations with the women expected to clean house, garden, sew clothes, cook, serve meals on a rigid schedule, (and produce babies). The Farmall, International Harvester and John Deere tractors, plows, manure spreaders. The subtle and sometimes not so subtle competition between neighbouring farmers to outdo each other with better crops, bigger machinery, and larger herds. The competitive late evening Monopoly games at the kitchen table with cousins and siblings. The trips to town to the rented cold storage locker, the Farmer’s Co-op store for feed and seed, and the grocery store. The corporal punishment doled out liberally. The tile drainage of wet fields. (My father decided to put clay tile drains into much of the 200 acre farm in October, 1954, just as the remnants of Hurricane Hazel dumped prodigious amounts of rain on the fields. The hired ditching machine and tractors were mired in the mud for weeks. I was blissfully naive and never was aware of the precarious farm finances, the hushed-up illicit trysts, the resentments, and the sometimes bitter rivalries but they were undoubtedly there, even among close relatives. I never had to deal with alcoholic relatives, and was only vaguely aware of blatant favouritism in parents. The evolution from impoverished family farms to huge corporate factory farms described late in this tale (at a time after had I escaped to city life) is made to seem like a tragic loss of a way of life. Of their cantankerous father, one daughter remarks to another: “He’s a farmer, Caroline. That is a personality structure that supersedes every childhood influence.”
The Passionate Reader 