Author: thepassionatereader

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.

Thanks,

The New Yorker.

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.

Thanks,

The New Yorker

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.

Thanks,

Jackie.

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.

Thanks,

Floyd.

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.

Thanks,

Andra.

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.

Thanks,

Andra.

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.”

Thanks,

Din.

This is another American novelist’s historical fiction set in France during WWII, this one largely in Saint Malo, off the west coast of Brittany. It is not the only one featuring this port city, but I cannot recall the other one I read set there. The title alludes to the remarkable skills of a young French teen who went blind at age 6. Like many deaf or blind folk, she has greatly heightened abilities in her remaining intact sensory organs, akin to synesthesia, the crossed input signals to the brain by which some people hear colours, see sounds and taste words. “She hears her father smile.” The title may also be taken as a reference to wavelengths used in radio communication.

The writing is lyrical, almost poetic with vivid observations, beautiful metaphors and quaint twists. As a troop truck travels down a road, “The canopies of cherry trees drift overhead, pregnant with blossoms. Werner props open the back door and dangles his feet off the rear bumper, his heels just above the flowing road. A horse rolls on its back in the grass; five white clouds decorate the sky.”

There is not very subtle insight into of the universal practice of military recruiters everywhere offering opportunities for youths to escape from a life of drudgery with the accompanying indoctrination into unquestioning obedience to authority, inuring young minds to cruelty. This typically is presented at a stage in life when one’s moral instincts are not fully developed, their education restricted to mandatory groupthink. In Werner’s case, it is the choice of a life as a radio technician and operator in Hitler’s army vs a life as a coal miner. It is humbling to think that, in an alternate universe, had I been the product of a German farm accident in the 1920s, rather than a Canadian farm accident in 1945, I might well have joined the Hitler Youth, not the Canadian Army Cadet Corps, to escape the hard work of farming.

There are few main characters but the plot is very complex and with thirteen parts subdivided into 117 short titled chapters it can be difficult for the reader to follow the chronology of events. The extensive use of time shifting between chapters does not help. All of the narrative is written in the present tense. Being very technophobic, I cannot attest to the accuracy of the technical details of radio communications in that era.

There are negatives. Adding an element of sci-fi, there is the overworked literary device of a futile search for a mysterious valuable gem that carries a curse, in this case a huge diamond stolen from the Paris Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle. The myth of allergies to goldenrod is perpetuated and yet another novelist describes veins, rather than arteries, pulsating.

Overall, this is an enjoyable read, more for the masterful use of words and appreciation of a remarkable imagination than for the minutiae of the plot. The teaser for the author’s latest book, Cloud Cuckoo Land, included at the end of this ebook edition did not entice me to add that to my list of books to find and read.

Thanks, Barb P.

Early in this new tome,10 years in the writing, two British academics (anthropology and archaeology), promise to point out fundamental flaws in the theses of Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order, Jared Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel, Stephen Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature and Noah Yuval Harari’s Sapiens. Since I have read all those books, enjoyed them, and found their accounts of early human development quite convincing, and since I also have an enduring inexplicable (even to myself) interest in the nature and societal organization of our our very ancient ancestors, I read on. But early on I found that there were barely enough dry morsels of brain food to keep me from starving my noggin, or napping.

Starting with the classic contrasting views of Hobbesian hawks waging a war of everyone against everyone and Rosseauian altruistic doves, the authors trash the very concept of this neat dichotomy. The progression of human societies from bands, to tribes, to chiefdoms to states is shown to be far too simplistic and was interrupted by seasonal migrations as was the common narrative of progression from hunter-gatherers to gardeners to farmers to industrial states.

They question the whole concept of human progression, discuss the philosophical conundrum of ‘human agency’ or free will only very superficially, and note that there may never have been an idyllic society of Edenic equality and leisure, and claim that the collection of surpluses whether of food, other resources, or money, leading to gross inequalities, is limited in nature to the human species, and not even universal in us. Even the concept of equality seems problematic to these iconoclasts.

There are 110 pages comparing and contrasting precolonial Californian societies and those of the Pacific Northwest. Is ‘compare and contrast’ still an imperative order in exams in literature at all levels as it was in my school days? This chapter is followed by 99 pages dividing the the so-called Neolithic Fertile Crescent of the eastern Mediterranean around 8000 B.C. into 12 distinct but often interacting societies of hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists, contradicting Noah Harari’s assertion of wheat cultivation enslaving Homo sapiens, and denying any concept of any smooth ‘Agricultural Revolution’. They question the whole concept of human progress.

After about 600 pages (out of 1734), and heeding advice from an author on CBC’s Q to, during the pandemic, for one’s mental health, only read books that one enjoys, I bailed out and returned this ebook edition to the OPL without reading the rest. Did I miss the best part?

This book may be of value as a reference volume or text for dedicated ethnologists, anthropologists and archeologists, (or perhaps advanced ancient history teachers), but I cannot recommend it for anyone else.

Thanks,

The Atlantic.

The fearless, hyperkinetic, ADHD-suffering, gay, Newfie kid from Middle Cove here outlines his adventures as a sketch comedian, political commentator, and satirist, but only up to the time when he is about to star in his own CBC show, The Rick Mercer Report. That 2004-2018 show celebrating everything that is right about Canada and ranting about everything that is wrong about it, particularly it’s political leadership, was one of the few TV shows I seldom missed. His rants from that show are a fun read in his 2018 book, Final Report.

With unpredictable twists in mid sentence, masterful snappy short sentences and phrases, and great punch lines, his writing is hyperkinetic, humorous and brilliant. On arriving in Kabul to entertain our troops after a hair-raising flight in a beat up Afghani airline plane he says “For the first time, I related to the Pope, with his penchant for kissing the ground he lands on.” On first meeting Preston Manning he commented that “Over the coming the years he would morph into a much slicker politician, lowering his voice, getting contact lenses and experimenting with clothes that actually fit.”

Perhaps the best satire is in the chapter “Talking to Americans” in which he exposed the profound ignorance about all things Canadian of ordinary Americans and even their political leaders and academics by feeding them ludicrous lies about Canada and recording their responses in street interviews. It is hard to believe such prevalent myopic disinterest in the rest of the world unless one has experienced it as I did at Yale in the mid 70’s. In July that year, it took me almost two weeks to find out who had won in the Canadian election that I had voted in the day I left Canada. And I got used to the New Haven weatherman calling winter storms developing in Minnesota and heading our way “cold Canadian air.”

Mercer is generous in his praise for his many coworkers and enablers, self-deprecatory, and humble. The insights into how decisions and collaborations in the world of television are enlightening.

A uniquely Canadian delightful read. I hope there will be a sequel covering his later exploits.

Thanks,

Vera.

First a confession. Before being gifted this book, I had never heard of the famous Chinese author of this memoir. He describes his occupation as artist but defines art loosely, as he plays roles as poet, writer, sculptor, visual artist, photographer, documentary film-maker, architect, musician, political activist and all-round S.D. His father was apparently an equally famous artist (in pre-Revolutionary China), a friend of Mao Zedong and a leading communist fighting the Japanese occupiers and the Nationalists at one point before becoming a disillusioned critical outsider, and was jailed long before Mao’s 1970s Cultural Revolution that killed 550,000.

The first 80 pages is all family history stuffed with unfamiliar names of people and places, as the author’s father moves repeatedly around China and elsewhere in the pre-revolution years, even becoming a friend of the famous Chilean Communist poet Pablo Neruda.

The author was and still is equally itinerant, travelling around the world to art exhibits featuring his work, and making friends everywhere he goes. While living in New York, American friends included Susan Sontag, Andy Warhol, and Allen Ginsberg. There is no doubt that he is talented in many fields, intelligent, sincere, and devoted to championing human rights everywhere. He was the Chinese collaborator with a Swiss architectural company in designing the Bird’s Nest stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. I rarely read poetry, but some included in the book was quite enjoyable. His work and political views are so characterized by antagonism to everything mainstream as to make him seem to be an anarchist.

His subversive artistic themes naturally lead to conflict with the autocratic controlling Communist Party and his fearless criticism finally lead to his incarceration and silencing without a trial for 181 days in 2011, at the same time that my wife and I were touring China for three weeks. His documentation of the cruelty of the state apparatchiks is chilling.

He must not be poverty-stricken. He describes flying 100 tons of rebar across China to construct a memorial statue to children killed in a poorly constructed state school in the 2008 earthquake. More puzzling is his arranging and funding for 1001 ordinary Chinese to visit an art exhibition in Germany as some kind of symbolic work of art itself. Much of his art, like most of contemporary art, is just confusing to me, Images of a nude man covered in flies, a man chewing on the arm of an aborted human fetus, and of three women and himself standing nude do not inspire awe in me. It seems that if it shocks, it must be art.

The author’s relationship to women can best be described as serial monogamy, with or without the benefits of marriage. It is not clear even in the About The Author blurb, where he is now living-Germany or California? A map showing the major sites of action would have been helpful. His sketches of artwork throughout contributes little to this reader’s appreciation of the book.

A good quote and a prescient warning: “Ideological cleansing….exists not only in totalitarian regimes- it is present also, in a different form, in liberal Western democracies.. Under the influence of politically correct extremism, individual thought and expression are often curbed and replaced by empty political sloganeering…. people saying and doing things they don’t believe in simply to fall in line with the prevailing narrative.”

One error. The chronic subdural hematoma compressing his brain that he suffered from a police beating must have been much more than the stated eleven millilitres volume to threaten his life and require emergency surgery.

A good edifying read by a brave and honest champion for human rights, but I suspect it is of limited appeal to Western readers.

Thanks,

Ian and Sarina

First off, I need to express a pet peeve about the design and layout of the hardcover edition which I was gifted for Christmas. Although there are 351 numbered pages, the short stories all start on a recto page, leaving 42 verso pages blank. This may be an effort to make the book seem bigger than it is, but is a waste of paper, likely initiated by the publisher, perhaps with input from Mansbridge. But some trees were killed needlessly to produce this book.

The high school dropout working as a baggage handler for a small regional airline in Churchill, Manitoba, who became the face of Canadian journalism provides rambling accounts of his coverage of major stories for over 30 years, much of it as anchor of the nightly CBC The National from 1988 until 2017.

Dozens of anecdotes provide interesting peeks into the decision-making processes of media organizations, world leaders personalities and social and cultural changes over his long career. Generally balanced in his portrayal of politicians and public figures, he seems to make an exception for Stephen Harper. He leaves little doubt that their relationship was fraught, and he does not hesitate to condemn Donald Trump and his ilk. He praises most of his fellow journalists and discusses the around-the-clock preparedness necessary to do their job well. There a few sprinkles of self-deprecating humour. He glides over the controversies surrounding our nearby Kanata neighbour, Mike Duffy. (You didn’t think he lives in P.E.I., did you?). There is almost nothing about the author’s personal life, other than description of his childhood in Britain and Malaya. His religious beliefs, if he has any, are never mentioned except to state that he is not Catholic, though he is proud of having the pope personally bless his third marriage (to actress Cynthia Dale), the only wife he even mentions.

There is no doubt that Peter Mansbridge is intelligent and conscientious, caring deeply about his adoptive country. He is spirited in his defence of journalistic independence. “Funny what happens when a party comes to power and realizes that the public broadcaster is there to serve the public, not them. ….it really is a public broadcaster, not a state broadcaster.” His deep concerns for the plight of the indigenous people are refreshing.

In spite of weak efforts to project modesty, there is a noticeable odour of egotistical hubris coming out of this book, and a lot of selective name-dropping to impress readers with his contacts with the rich and powerful. He twice mentions that his previous book, Extraordinary Canadians was an instant bestseller.In the latter part of his journalistic career, and in that previous book, I also noted this tendency to play the role of know-it-all commentator rather than interviewer or reporter, often prefacing questions to those he was supposedly interviewing with his own opinions on the subject at hand. But I can’t fault many of his opinions. The small black-and-white photographs scattered throughout the book contributed nothing to this readers enjoyment of it.

I found one factual error. He perpetuates the myth that Jack Layton died of prostate cancer. He died of a cancer of some type, but I vividly recall a skeletal Layton on TV in 2011 emphatically stating that he was cured of prostate cancer and that he had developed a new malignancy of unspecified origin. Where it originated is still a secret ten years later.

Nothing very profound here, but a good read with lots of Canadian and world history, and some interesting stories.

Thanks,

Alana

In an interesting coincidence, within a couple hours yesterday, I encountered two references to Occam’s Razor, the principle of parsimony first enunciated by the 14th century Franciscan friar, William of Occam. There are several wordings of it, but the most popular is that to explain any phenomenon, the hypothesis requiring the fewest assumptions should be chosen, as it is most likely to be correct. My brilliant friend, Al Dreidger used it in his ‘brain droppings’ to explain the phenomenon of dimorphism in birds and humans. I think Al may have introduced me to it, and I have used it in my problem-solving and writing as well. Then the author of this erudite treatise used it in discussing a strange astronomical phenomenon observed in October, 2017. Both authors have also quoted the Sherlock Holmes’s observation that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable must be the truth.

All of the above is a roundabout way of introducing the thinking of the eminent Harvard astronomy professor and author of this scholarly book.

For several days in October, 2017, astronomers tracked a strange object subsequently named the ‘oumuamua, that entered our solar system, carved a smooth arc within it, rotating and tumbling systematically and disobeying the laws governing movement of all known natural objects in space, then sped off back into interstellar space. Most astronomers were confused, but eventually generally agreed that it was not a comet, an asteroid, or a man made piece of space debris. Using Occam’s Razor to cut away the seemingly impossible explanations for it that all need a huge number of assumptions, Loeb gathered evidence for the only other possibility, i.e. that it was, however unlikely, the product of some form of extraterrestrial intelligence. He posits that it was a solar-powered lightsail used to power an alien rocket ship.

His hypothesis and the whole small SETI (Search For ExtraTerrestial Intelligence) community of astronomers has been met with either silence or scorn by most mainstream astronomers. He addresses the issues of fads and blinkered thinking within science generally, and laments that funding is often directed to those studying string theory, extra-spatial dimensions and supersymmetry for which he says there is no evidence, rather than for SETI. He alleges that there are approximately a zeta (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) habitable planets in the observable universe. “The scientific truth is not determined by the number of likes on Twitter, rather by evidence.”

Later in the book, Loeb discusses the panspermia hypothesis of the origin of life on earth coming from other planets, and posits Oumuamua’s wager, modelled after Blaise Pascal’s famous wager about God. “Live as if there is, or has been intelligent life in the universe other than our own, and we redefine some of the missions of humanity.”

Loeb has been accused of arrogance and cites a lot of his own discoveries. But he also is careful to include his collaborators and comes across, at least to me, as the inquisitive Israeli farm boy he once was, simply trying to figure out how the world-no, the whole universe- works using all the tools at his disposal.

I cannot claim to understand all of the mathematics and rarified language of astrophysics in spite of Loeb’s frequent use of plain language, thought experiments, and analogies. But I really enjoyed getting his perspective on an important scientific issue, and generally enjoy reading the works of iconoclastic thinkers. I do believe we must have company.

In this largely question-and-answer discourse with an obviously admiring Douglas Abrams, the 87-year-old world-famous conservationist’s intelligence, charisma, and optimism shine through. The format of the book is discussion of Dr. Goodall’s four reasons for hope, sandwiched between a somewhat pedantic thirty-three page discussion of the meaning of the word hope, and a forty-six page selective biography of her life, her work and her beliefs. These in turn are bookended by her brief and personal “An Invitation To Hope”, and “A Message Of Hope from Jane” addressed to the reader.

Her four reasons for hope that we can survive and prosper in spite of formidable problems that she does not shy away from, are: The Amazing Human Intellect, The Resilience of Nature, The Power Of Young People, and The Indomitable Human Spirit. Of these, the documentation of the dramatic effects of the power of mobilized, motivated, and energetic young people working through her thirty year old, international Roots and Shoots program gave this reader the most convincing reasons to hope for a better or at least a survivable future for Homo sapiens. In the Amazing Human Intellect, she makes a careful distinction between intelligence and wisdom. In The Resilience of Nature, she gives readers numerous examples of how plants and animals have overcome near-extinction, often with some help from humans. In The Indomitable Human Spirit, a smattering of history is reviewed to demonstrate howwe have overcome seemingly impossible obstacles in the past.

It would be remarkably arrogant, inappropriate and silly of me to criticize someone of Jane Goodall’s stature, intelligence and integrity. Nevertheless I can take issue with, or at least discuss, some controversial points. Her reliance on aboriginal medicine men and shamans to cure physical ailments seems unscientific, almost anti-scientific as does her nebulous reliance on connecting with a “Great Spiritual Power” outside of herself for strength and courage. In A Lifelong Journey, she abandons science completely in acknowledging a belief in some kind of vague life after death, and perhaps even reincarnation. Her philosophy seems to include a strong belief in human free will, a tenet that many science-minded modern philosophers reject. But, admirably, she refuses to expect others to adopt her nebulous spiritual outlook on life. There are some hints of hyperbole in discussion of climate change and loss of biodiversity. I got no clues as to why Gail Hudson’s name is present on the cover.

The discussion is often unfocused and rambling but is so loaded with keen insights and little-known facts about the remarkable world of nature as to keep the reader fully engaged.

A good read and an interesting biographic sketch of a remarkable primate.

Thanks,

The New Yorker

This book is on several online lists of recommended 2021 reads, including The New Yorker, and is the Goodreads fiction choice of the year. In it, the young controversial Marxist Irish novelist’s latest, she seems to enjoy writing about the lives of writers and their relationship to their works. A confusing group of young single Irish characters from various backgrounds, all apparently addicted to cell phone communication, write long email letters to each other musing about their lives and experiences.

In Chapter Six, in a letter to a friend, one novelist muses about the fraught relationship of writers to their writing and to unwanted fame, and about readers delving in to the private lives of authors. The seeking of fame is equated to a form of mental illness as she yearns for anonymity, while obliged to lead a public life to promote her books. This may be the only chapter with any redeeming value.

Other characters include a self-loathing, bisexual, communist novelist who devotes a lot of space in her letters to a childhood friend to an ethereal and ephemeral discourse about the meaning of sex, the polarization of political beliefs, and the absurdity of all forms of religion. The treatment of both politics and religion is superficial and stale.

I seldom start reading a novel without reading to the end, but I made an exception for this one. After reading vivid multi-page descriptions of the pornographic deployment of various combinations of appendages and orifices for the umpteenth time, after twenty of thirty chapters, I gave up and returned this trashy novel to the library. A friend once told me that he never read novels written by women, because they are all obsessed with sex. I am beginning to believe him. And I am becoming less and less trusting of recommendations by literary critics and reviewers.

This book by a L.A. novelist has been announced as the 2021 winner of a Goodreads online poll in the category of historical fiction, although both the history connection, and how the polling was conducted is obscure to me. This may be the result of nothing more than a triumph of self-promotion by the author and/or aggressive marketing by the publisher.

The Riva family is the focus with Mick Riva possibly being loosely modelled after Mick Jagger. The four Riva children all seem to be obsessed with superficial appearances, wealth, sex, and fame. All of their friends and acquaintances- young aspiring actors, producers, surfers and other athletes, musicians, screen-writers and assorted pop culture celebrities- seem to make all major life decisions with their gonads rather than their brains.

The depiction of the superficiality, sex-obsession and self-absorption of Hollywood denizens seems straight out of People Magazine or some trashy paparazzi tabloid, but even those outlets can’t match the exaggerated sensationalism and pathos here. The focus in Part II is on the huge annual Nina Revi party, fuelled by prodigious amounts of alcohol, pot, LSD, and cocaine, leading to sexual excesses, while many longstanding conflicts come to a head at the all-night debauchery. The plot does get more complicated than the endless indiscriminate copulation that makes up much of the first part. The ending is unpredictable, ingeniously imaginative and appropriate.

There are descriptions of graphic sexual exploits, and abundant coarse language. The best narrative in the book, in my estimation, is the pathos of four young children adjusting to the life-threatening problems created by their single mother’s descent into terminal alcoholism.

I listened to the CloudLibrary audiobook edition. This has two advantages for absorbing such a book. First, the extensive dialogue, narrated superbly by Julie Whalen, is much more expressive with volume and intonation variations that cannot be captured in print. Secondly, it does not preclude multitasking such as snacking or watching the TV news while at least half listening to the story. And my wife insists that my multitasking in this instance included a couple of short naps while ‘listening’ to this book. At least not a complete waste of 11 hours and six minutes. To the author’s credit, there is just enough suspense that I listened to the end, though tempted to abandon it earlier, just to find out what happens when the police arrive at the party. But if this novel is ever made into a movie, as is rumoured, they would need to hire a large cast of porn stars to make it realistic.

Some voyeuristic readers may enjoy this book but I did not.

This detailed and exhaustively researched history lesson from a Washington, D.C. historian specializing in WWII focuses on the roles of various European royals and expats who fled to England at the start of that war. These include feisty Queen Wilhelmina of Holland, King Haakon of Norway, President Edvard Benes of Czechoslovakia, and Poland’s President in exile Wladyslaw Raczkiewicz and his Prime Minister Wladyslaw Sikorski. King Leopold III of Belgium was not among them as he never managed to reach England. Prickly General Charles De Gaulle was the self-appointed leader of the French expats, but was distrusted by the Brits and detested by FDR.

There are hundreds of names of individual heroes and villains that I had never heard of, and Olson weaves into the story the experiences of familiar nonmilitary characters, including Audrey Hepburn, Madeline Albright, and the British journalist, Malcom Muggeridge, who was also a MI6 mole.

No military or political leader escapes from the documentation of duplicity, deviousness, betrayals, and blatant errors of military planning. King Leopold was scapegoated for the disaster at Dunkirk, as was Polish General Stanislaw for the slaughter at Arnhem late in the war. The haughty Brits distrusted and downplayed the major role of Polish airforce pilots and resistance fighters everywhere on the continent and in the end the Brits and Americans sacrificed Poland and the Czechs to appease Stalin. No one has ever adequately acknowledged the major role of heroic women escorting downed pilots out of occupied France to safety via Spain, nor the thousands of women who sheltered, fed, and hid servicemen and spies behind enemy lines. The rivalry and distrust between MI6 operatives and the Special Operations Executive foiling Nazi plans lead to disastrous planning and thousands of civilian deaths.

Of the many revelations that contradict the history we were taught in the 50s and 60s, none is more remarkable than the fact that Polish expats did most of the groundwork to decode the German communications system Enigma, popularly credited to Brits at Bletchley Park, as detailed by Kate Quinn in The Rose Code. The world’s major stock of heavy water, critical for the development of atomic bombs, was snatched from under Nazi noses from a remote Norwegian factory and smuggled to the U.S. The surprising assertion that 95% of the casualties of the BigThree allies (America, Britain and Russia) were Russians, is confined to a footnote. There is continuing debate among historians about the importance of SOE sabotage of Nazi operations in France after the D-Day invasion, even 75 years later.

One of many memorable quotes: “The worst thing a subordinate [in the military] can do is to question orders and to be proved right.” Some such truth-tellers were subjected to court-martial or executed. It is no accident that the word ‘snafu’ was first applied to the military.

There are some surprising omissions. The Italian fascists are barely mentioned and the role of religious leaders such as Pope Pious XII (see Hitler’s Pope, by John Cornwell) is totally missing, perhaps because these facets had little to do with the last hope island. A few maps of major sites of action would have helped this geographically-challenged reader.

This book will be of most interest and use to dedicated historians, military planners and teachers, and perhaps those in the espionage world. And there are still many Canadians of European origin alive who will remember some of their experiences there as children, particularly those who survived the starvation in Dutch cities brought on by the refusal of the Allies to help them, choosing instead a mad rush to enter Germany prematurely. My mother must have had mixed emotions on May 9, 1945 as Victory in Europe was announced (VE Day is May 8th). The war that had killed her younger brother in Belgium a few months earlier was over, but she suddenly had to deal with a screaming, helpless newcomer- me.

Thanks,

Siobhan

I am not sure what led to my interest in this book other than a general hope to learn more about climate change and the factors that are driving it. And I generally enjoy reading the works of contrarian, iconoclastic writers who challenge what John Kenneth Galbraith called ‘conventional wisdom’ and Steven Koonin certainly does that. He is a theoretical physicist, currently a professor at New York University. In the past he has worked for British Petroleum in their renewable energy division and was a government science advisor in Barrack Obama’s first term, but not in his second term. He never mentions why he left that job, but my guess is that he was fired.

Early on, Koonin makes clear that, at least for him, science is all about the pursuit of factual knowledge, and should be completely divorced from advocacy and persuasion. But surely scientists do have some ethical obligation to advocate for the truths they discover and the implications of those truths as they relate to the lives of others. And he breaks his own rule in Chapter 13 in making suggestions to deal with global warming; specifically, he advocates for funding research into geoengineering and solar radiation management, a strategy that even alarmists about global warming shy away from, because of the unknowable consequences.

In the first few pages, an old aphorism about the distinction between weather and climate is invoked to make the distinction clear. “Climate is what you expect. Weather is what you get.” A trite but important distinction.

There are a lot of indisputable and surprising facts about the limitations of the science of climatology that I found interesting; these contradict the popular narrative, and he emphasizes the changes that are natural and unrelated to human activities. The uncertainty that is integral to the various models used to predict trends and guide policy decisions is documented and bemoaned but seems to lead directly to advocacy for inaction, or at least delay of any meaningful action.

The writing is loaded with acronyms and technically detailed science that many readers will have trouble following and the accompanying graphs seem to sometimes make distinctions of questionable significance. The cherry picking of arbitrary time periods to make comparisons is lamented but is also used to reinforce his arguments.

The author’s undisputed intelligence and self-confidence spills over into annoying arrogance as he seems to think that he, and he alone, has all of the answers to the climate problems that 8 billion others face, none of whom have solved the problem as well as he has. He takes great pleasure in showing that predictions of such luminaries as Mark Carney and WHO experts have been proven wrong with the passage of time, but never acknowledges any doubt about his own predictions. He never fails to mention the positions of considerable influence that he has occupied and name-drops his famous contacts liberally, including a dinner at Buckingham Palace with the late Prince Phillip. Even the About the Author blurb reads like the introduction of a VIP at an awards ceremony, listing his many important appointments.

The valid bottom-line message of this book is advice to be skeptical about how the data on global climate change is presented in the popular media. It is also a good reference work, particularly the 74 graphs that provide valuable data, although some statisticians could probably find fault with some of them.

I cannot recommend this dense, dry book for the general public..

Bizarre may be the best one word description of this novel by a Chapel Hill, North Carolina emergency room physician. After a multiple murder at a kids play date, the one surviving six year old boy is admitted to a psychiatric ward. The lives of the boy, an emergency room physician and a 99 year old reclusive woman, all living in the same Rhode Island community, become entwined in complex ways.

The work-related stories told by the female E.R. physician are very realistic (probably based at least in part on the author’s real life experiences) and brought back vivid memories of my days as a physician often dealing with sudden unpredictable emergencies. I suspect that for non-physicians, her description of her work life would be enlightening and enjoyable. She tells a trainee: “Medicine will take everything you have to give, and some days you will have to give it everything. …. no matter how much you love it, medicine will never love you back.”

The writing flows naturally like a slow river, but one with swirling eddies in the time flow. Themes of loneliness, endurance, hope, and even futility prevail. The characters all seem to abandon their deep Catholic belief in any better life hereafter as they accumulate many cruel losses in this one.

But-and it is a big but- I found it impossible to follow any reasonable time line to the story, which seems to extend from about the 1930s to at least 2018, but in jumbled disorder. Appropriately, the chapters in which the elderly hermit relates bits and pieces of her life history are much longer than those relating to other characters. Like the Muriel Parkinson character in a Terry Fallis novel, she is witty and sprightly.

This book, gifted to me, is going to the Willam’s Court lending library, as it is not one to take up any of the limited space on our shelves.

Thanks,

Andra via Cratejoy.