Author: thepassionatereader

The author of this autobiography, at least in his early career, could be the poster child for the workaholic type A, American capitalist on Wall Street, reliably clueless when it came to social graces. With a Stanford MBA, he defied his family background as leaders of the American Communist Party, and became the prototype capitalist setting up his own hedge fund investing in undervalued Russian assets. His Hermitage Fund became one of the fastest growing profitable investment portfolios in the world, worth more than four billion dollars at one point -until he ran afoul of billionaire crooks in the post-Soviet Russia of Vladimir Putin.

This account of his conversion from a high-flying globetrotting financier to a dedicated human rights activist with connections to prominent politicians and media personnel, following the 2009 arrest, torture and murder of his friend and Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky reads like a fictional international spy thriller, except that the events detailed are real, horrendously cruel, and not even now widely known.

Unable to forget the murder of his friend and the rampant corruption and ludicrous public statements about it in by Russian police, bureaucrats, and media, Browder effectively utilized his worldwide network of contacts and his considerable wealth to expose and reduce the prevalent human rights abuses in Russia.

In spite of his hard-hitting obsessive pursuit of profit early in his career, and of human rights and justice later, there is a very human tender side of the man. He moved Sergei Magnitsky’s widow and son to London, England, and shows great affection for his family, flying from Moscow to London every other weekend to keep contact with his son who is living with his ex-wife, even early in his career. He sobbed uncontrollably when the European Parliament passed a Magnitsky Act while he sat in the balcony with Sergei’s widow.

He admits, in the final chapter, that writing the book is in some respects a countermeasure to the ongoing threats to his life by the Putin oligarchs, well aware of the murders of other defiant truth-tellers. “I have to assume that there is a very real chance that Putin or members of his regime will have me killed some day.,,,,,I can’t mention most of the countermeasures I take, but can mention one: this book. If I am killed, you will know who did it.”

The one undisclosed aspect of his career is what has become of his relationships with his American communist parents and family.

I am in no position to pass judgement on Browder’s character or even all of his actions. Hedge fund manages are usually featured in the news when their greed, misappropriation of investor’s money, and shady tax evasions gets them into trouble with the law-think Bernie Madoff- so it is very refreshing to read about one who morphed into a hard-working effective human rights campaigner. And a man who repeatedly risked his life to find the truth, and expose the crimes of others has to be admired and taken seriously.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Thanks, Beth and Vera.

A very bright and visionary Houston-based vaccine specialist presents a somewhat frightening overview of what he calls Neglected Tropical Diseases and their potential to spread around the world. The factors contributing to this potential disaster include political instability, internal displacement and human migrations, increasing urbanization, anti- science and anti-vaccine movements coupled with rising nationalism, and climate change which is in turn changing the range of various vectors.

The author is a globe-trotting advocate for science in general and specifically vaccine development and what he calls vaccine diplomacy- international cooperation, even among enemies, for vaccine development and distribution. He is the co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and the former U.S. science envoy for the Obama administration. His knowledge of the epidemiology and potential for disastrous spread of those Neglected Tropical Diseases is impressive.

There is little acknowledgment of the vast potential for the rapid deployment of the new mRNA technology to deal with new pandemic disease as they arise, preferring to tout the benefits of the traditionally-developed Covid-19 vaccine that his lab has developed. I doubt that he frequently even visits that lab, given his international visits, writing, speaking, and collaborations around the world.

The writing is interesting and informative from a medical science perspective but humourless and too centred on his own considerable accomplishments, which he does not hesitate to laud. And he seems to believe that his recommendations have the potential to solve most of the world”s current problems. He is certainly not lacking in self-confidence.

This went to press earlier this year, before any of the now deployed Covid- 19 vaccines were being widely distributed, so is already somewhat outdated with respect to the current pandemic.

An informative quick read.

Thanks,

The NewYorker

Neglected bits of history that are not taught in most classes have always been of interest to me-anything to enliven the memorization of politicians names and dates of battles that we were fed in school. The Vermont-based authority on all things Russian here provides a scholarly balanced account of a grossly neglected corner of history that I was completely unaware of.

Exactly one hundred years ago a drought and famine devastated a hugh portion of the fledgling Soviet Russia. The Americans, with the American Relief Administration, run by the future president Herbert Hoover, sent hundreds of workers and hundred of thousands of tons of corn, wheat and flour to save the lives of an estimated six million Russians in the affected provinces along with medical and dental supplies, vaccines, and infrastructure materials.This was funded in part by the U.S. government as they supported the Midwest farmers, and in part by private philanthropy such as the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations and individual Americans. Those workers documented hundreds of cases of cannibalism, some adults murdering and eating their children, others raiding piles of frozen human corpses for meat. An estimated ten million Russian peasants nevertheless died of starvation over the ensuing three years.

The Soviet leaders at first welcomed the aid, but as accolades from the masses for the capitalist Americans grew, their appreciation waned. When, in 1923, the Soviets began exporting 400 thousand tons of grain, even as ten thousand of their own peasants were still starving, the ARA gradually withdrew from Russia. Lenin and later Stalin felt that the program threatened the stability of the Communist regime, and began a propaganda campaign to discredit the massive humanitarian campaign. Later Russian leaders tried to ignore the help they had been given, or characterize it as a disingenuous spy plot to undermine their Communist paradise.

The American workers in Russia almost all formed strong friendships with their hosts and interpreters in the provinces and most longed to go back after the program ended. They had been greeted as heroes working in deplorable conditions there, whereas they were soon forgotten in America. An estimated one in ten of the men married Russian ‘famine brides’, most of whom were former Czarist aristocrats working for the ARA. Inevitably, there were scandals as some Americans tried to smuggle treasures out of Russia and some criminals highjacked trainloads of food for personal gain.

There is brief discussion of similar, though smaller, programs of aid to America’s Russian allies during WWII, and after the fall of the U.S.S.R. in1991 when again many peasants in Russia starved to death. No living Russians will remember the ARA, and few will even be aware of its existence as this great humanitarian effort is still unacknowledged by Putin et al.

I detected no overt American bias on the part of the author of this important piece of largely forgotten history. Though it documents incredible human misery and debauchery, I appreciated it and learned a lot.

A note on the format of books. This was my first foray into audiobooks and it was probably not the best one to start with. I am a terrible speller and the hundreds of long foreign place and people names that are hard to keep track of on audio would, I suspect be easier In print. A map of Russia in 1922 would have been helpful but cannot be displayed in an audio book. I like the feel of a paper book in my hands, but I have become fond of the ability to define an unfamiliar word and the ease of flipping to and from a reference in nonfiction in ebooks. And in ebooks, it takes only a few keystrokes to copy a memorable phrase, sentence or whole paragraph into another document. The audiobook format does have the advantage of showing you exactly how long it will take to read through the book. I took 10 hours and thirty-six minutes to read this, what with breaks to search for word meanings and background facts. So what format do you prefer?

The California queen of historical fiction is back with another realistic and enlightening tale of the effects of World War II, this one based mostly in the now-famous top-secret British Bletchley Park where thousands of men and women tried to decode German military communications. As in The Alice Network, in a long author’s note at the back, she discusses what details of the story are real historical events and characters (a lot) and what were products of her vivid imagination. She has done her homework well and many of the events and characters are real and accurately portrayed including the life of the late Prince Philip of Greece as a sailor and philanderer before he snatched the HRH label by marrying Liz, Lord Mountbatten and the traitor who sold Enigma decoded information to the Soviets.

Three young troubled women, Osla, Mab, and Beth, from very different backgrounds, mature, become close friends and then fierce enemies as they work as decoders, cryptographers and translators, competing for the attention and affection of the scarcer male workers, all sworn to absolute secrecy. Their coworkers include Ian Fleming, Alan Turing, and Kate Middleton’s real life grandmother. They interact with royals, admirals, and various politicians, including Sir Winston Churchill.

The devastation and cruelty of wars have been a staple of historical novels since ancient times, but the randomness of the deaths of civilians is seldom presented as vividly as here in the effects of the bombing of London and Coventry.

The plot is complex and the twists are unpredictable. Short chapters detailing events a few days before the 1947 royal wedding are interspersed with longer ones from before and during WW II. Unique British idioms are captured realistically. Seemingly unconnected encounters and events are never abandoned and all fit in toward the end. There is lots of sex, but it is described more discretely than in The Alice Network. The convenient locking away of eccentrics who know too much in an insane asylum, with complicit doctors, and the barbaric treatment in those institutions is a stain on the history of medicine in that era.

My only quibble is that the tracking down and capture of the real traitor of Bletchley Park in the last few pages is embellished in a weak attempt to develop suspense, to the point of being very unrealistic.

One of the better historical novels of World War II of which there are dozens. In my estimation, it is better than The Alice Network, but not as good as Kristan Hanna’s The Nightingale, although perhaps more historically accurate.

Thanks, Yvonne and Vera

This suspense thriller is the first person singular account of Claire Cook’s planned escape into anonymity and the similar escape plans of Eva James. Claire is the abused wife of a prominent philanthropic New York City would-be U.S. senator, and Eva is a frightened single Berkeley, California drug dealer. The writer makes extensive use of critical time shifts, a staple of thriller novels, and readers need to keep track of the dates at the start of each of the 36 named but unnumbered chapters in order to follow the convoluted ingenious plot before and after the two women exchange identities and destinations at JFK airport to escape their past troubles.

The women in this novel have all been manipulated by cruel abusive misogynistic men, whereas the men are, with one exception, amoral ogres. The writing flows smoothly and the distress of the women is easy to relate to. In spite of many very different characters, there are no loose ends.

I am sure that many readers, at times of acute disappointment and stress, perhaps when trapped in abusive marriages or unfulfilling dangerous jobs, have fantasized about escaping into anonymity and starting over with a new identity in a new environment and can thus relate to this tale, but few will have developed the detailed plans related here. There are too many unlikely chance encounters and exaggerated characterizations for my liking, but then I have never been a big fan of this genre. Nevertheless, when I read a review of this story on the Goodreads website, I decided to borrow the ebook from the library, and in spite of my reservations, found it to be a quite enjoyable read. I have not read the California author’s only previous novel, The Ones We Chose, and am not inclined to do so. Small doses of this genre are enough entertainment to last a long time.

I had forgotten how much I enjoyed watching and listening to Rick Mercer on CBC television until I picked up this reprint of 130 rants and five new commentaries when I found it abandoned in the mailroom of our apartment building. Some of his adventures were silly or scary, but the weekly rants delivered in clipped sentences or phrases with biting sarcasm were always barbed and witty. They were also also great lessons in the often-forgotten minutia of recent Canadian history and political shenanigans.

In these carefully chosen rants from between 2004 and 2018, Mercer slings his sharpest arrows at what he seriously perceived to be the undemocratic, devious, and dangerous moves of Stephen Harper and company, but no politician or party escapes unscathed from his pointed criticism. His separate commentaries provide great insights into how the crew of the RMR worked.

This is a great read and an easy way to recall some of the highest and lowest points in recent Canadian politics. For those too young to have appreciated the CBC program, this and his three previous books based on the show or his equally acerbic dialogue in Talking to Americans would make great companion volumes to any course on Canadian history and culture of the era. Keep a copy of this in the rack in the guest loo. I miss his unique satire.

Perhaps as a way to help the old man develop at least a rudimentary understanding of her chosen field of study, my Professor of Economics daughter sent me this book for my birthday. Or perhaps she just wanted to humble and torment me, knowing that I would read all of any gifted book. She succeeded if the latter was her intention, but not if it was the former.

The arrogant claim in the Preface to be as important as The Wealth of Nations, Das Kapital, The Rise of the Western World, and Guns, Germs, and Steel and the equally self-promoting wording on the author’s website ( “ I am a distinguished Professor..”) is off-putting, as is the very frequent references to his earlier publications in the footnotes.

If I even dimly understand where Clark differs from other economic historians it is in his emphasis on social Darwinism (survival of the richest) accelerating British fertility in leading to the Industrial Revolution, which was also much more gradual than commonly portrayed. And he lays claim to the assertion that it is primarily inherent inefficiencies in labor capital utilization that has lead to the modern great divergence in economies since the 1800s, with the attendant explosion of wealth inequality.

I have never been very adept at mathematics and never studied calculus, nor did I ever gain much understanding of actuarial science. When doing research I usually relied on professional statisticians to calculate statistical significance. But I recognize pseudoscience when I see it. Here I encountered dozens of charts and graphs that are purportedly important yet are unaccompanied by any measures of statistical significance, obviously equate correlation with causation, and were just plain confusing, as the one I chose to reproduce here shows.

What can this obfuscation possibly signify? There are apparently arbitrarily selected bits of sociological data from arbitrary time periods to reinforce what seem like arbitrary forgone conclusions.

Clark heaps scorn on the policies and actions of economists at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, apparently solely able to see the right way forward. And ironically his distain extends to academic economists although he is the Chair of the Department of Economics at USC, Davis. But like almost all economists, the holy grails that he never questions are the imperatives of productivity growth, consumerism, and ever more resource extraction, which is not compatible with our longterm survival in the age of global warming. GDP is apparently the only deity worthy of any worship.

For dedicated students of cultural anthropology, this could be considered a reasonable complementary document to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, Noah Harari’s Sapiens, and Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order, all of which I enjoyed reading, if it were not riddled with personal biases and criticism of previous works.

There are probably some profound insights and truths here that I failed to grasp, and it would be extremely presumptuous of me to dismiss this work entirely or to pretend that I understood most of it. To be fair, the references to other researcher’s findings is vast. The abundance of revelations of interesting, often counterintuitive historical facts was enough to keep me engaged. But I am sure that I flunked if this was my Introduction to Economics course.

By way of background for those youngsters who were not terrified by the newscasts at the time, in October, 1962, in the midst of the Cold War, the Americans discovered that the Soviets were secretly delivering missiles of all kinds, including nuclear ones, and setting them up all across Cuba, 90 miles from the coast of Florida. This frightening historical account by a Harvard professor of history was touted by The Economist book reviewer as the definitive account of that crisis and gives a detailed account of how close we came to being thrust into a world-ending nuclear war between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. as a result. The author’s research is exhaustive, based in part on recently declassified archival material.

The details of how close we came to that mutual assured destruction are truly frightening. Over the course of four weeks, mutual distrust, paranoia, misinterpreted communications through intermediaries, and the blinkered world views of Nikita Khrushchev, JFK, and Fidel Castro all contributed to the dangerous brinkmanship. Some of the details of the eventual trade-offs that averted disaster were concealed for years.

Khrushchev, although verbose, mercurial and indoctrinated with Communist ideology, actually presented a strong case for setting up nuclear weapons in Cuba, pointing out that Americans and NATO allies had long had more powerful weapons of mass destruction poised on or near the USSR’s border in Turkey and Italy. Only the mutual recognition that pushing the nuclear button would destroy both nations and much of the rest of humankind prevented the tragedy, but both leaders came close to losing control of their decision-making to military hawks. At least two planes were shot down contrary to the explicit orders of superior officers.

Modern leaders cancelling the nuclear weapons limitation and test ban treaties seem to have ignored the lessons from this near disaster. The willingness of both superpowers to disregard the sovereignty of smaller nations such as Turkey and Cuba is striking, and has persisted.

I was struck by the vast number of precision weapons available at that time, and the hugh waste of resources in the building up of military forces and weapons. The delays in communication caused by manual translation and telegraphy through embassies don’t apply in the modern era, but instant communication among political hotheads does not necessarily reduce the danger and may increase it if emotions come to take precedence over slow deliberation.

For a civilian scientist, the most interesting story is the inadvertent wandering of an American U2 recognizance plane into Soviet air space in the far north because the pilot got lost. Unable to use usual navigation instruments between the magnetic and true North poles, he relied on old-fashioned sextant and stars but was led astray by a vivid display of the northern lights.

As a striking reflection of the times, no woman’s name appears among the hundreds of senior decision makers in America, Cuba or the Soviet Union. The only women even mentioned by name are JFK’s duped trophy wife, Jacqueline, his 19 year old secret lover Mini Alford (one of many), the wife of John McCone, the Director of the CIA who kept him away from an important meeting because they were on their honeymoon, and the terminally ill wife of a Soviet apparatchik. It may seem out of place for this western male, but I can speculate about what would have happened had half the players in this drama been female. The situation might not have developed into a crisis at all, and it would probably have been resolved more quickly and equitably.

There are hundreds of long, foreign, unpronounceable names of people and places, and military acronyms for fleets of ships and planes- sometimes as many as a dozen introduced on a single page-far too many for any casual reader to keep track of.

Dedicated historians, military planners, political leaders, and senior government bureaucrats may enjoy and benefit from reading this dry , account, but for ordinary citizens, it is best used as a bedtime sedative taken in small doses, although it might induce nightmares. But the relevance to our current situation with the risk of accidentally triggering a devastating nuclear war is undeniable as political leaders still deal with biased world views, missing or erroneous information, and irrational reliance on military might.

This beautiful novel can be interpreted in two ways. In one, it is a passionate, desperate plea from the author to every reader to take the climate crisis seriously and to do whatever one individual can do to reduce the effects of global warming. On another level, it is a charming fictional account of the life of a simple, impoverished, uneducated southern Appalachian Kentucky farmer and mother thrust into the world of ecological disasters by factors beyond her control as she discovers a huge collection of endangered Monarch butterflies who have gone astray because of global man-made changes to their migration routines.

Along the way there are important insights into the conflicts between commercial developments and ecological preservation and between a world view based on religious beliefs and that of a secular humanistic outlook. The turbulent family dynamics of the impoverished Turnbow clan, struggling to survive in the hollers of Appalachian Kentucky are typical of those in many disadvantaged southern states. The quirky characters are realistic and believable. The innate reproductive instincts of sheep, butterflies and humans are described in language appropriate for any ten year old.

The writing is lyrical (an overused word, but nothing describes it better) with hundreds of apt metaphors, similes and vivid descriptions of scenery, dialogues and interesting diverse characters.

One very nit-picky criticism. “ ….this was a living flow, like a pulse through veins”. Why do novelists insist on pulses in veins, rather than in arteries?.

I had previously read and reviewed Kingsolver’s Unsheltered, which is probably why my daughter sent me this one for my birthday. Although I enjoyed Unsheltered, this earlier nuanced fiction is a far better story. Highly recommended.

Thanks,

Alana

Canada’s foremost deep thinker about global issues offers his unique take on the climate crisis, geopolitical instability, inequality, and our psychological adaptation to current threats, from his perch as a professor of Environmental Science at the University of Waterloo. He provides wide-ranging references to historical events, classic literature (his discussion of and analogies to J.R.R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings are delightful), social science’s insights, and politics as well as environmental threats.The interspersed personal revelations about his past working in the oil patch and travelling throughout Europe, Asia and Africa and the sometimes profound questions of his young children are welcome diversions from the heady discussions. With collaborators, he has developed ‘tools’ such as the Worldview-Institutions-Technology loop, the ideological state-space concept, Mindscape, and the Cognitive-Affective Map to analyze our responses to various threats and what we can do as we face an uncertain future. Some of these concept tools required rereading for me to get my head around, as they seem like arbitrarily derived insubstantial dissection and reassembly of personalities and outlooks on first reading. It is easy to get lost in the deep philosophical discussions about the nature of time and the boundaries of moral honesty.

The almost universal assumption of economists about the necessity and desirability of growth is brought into question and the prevalent consumer society culture with the view of humans as ‘little more than walking appetites’ with a need for more of everything, is trashed. The need to claim agency as citizens of the world to unite for needed changes in spite of our vast political, cultural, religious and philosophical differences is emphasized.

Referring obliquely without names to Peter Theil’s plan to escape from climate disasters to a vast safe estate in New Zealand and Elon Musk’s equally selfish hopes of escaping to Mars, Homer-Dixon writes: “Being at the end of the lifeboat furthest from the leaks doesn’t mean winning the game; it just means having more time to observe the horrible process of loss before one is engulfed in turn.”

What Malcolm Gladwell calls tipping points, Homer-Dixon calls multipliers or ‘social earthquakes’. He holds out little hope for any rescue from our plight by Silicon Valley types with their blind faith in technology.

I am slightly more optimistic than him about the abilities of techno-optimists to at least go some way to mitigate some of the most challenging problems we face. I have a recurring fantasy of mass-producing, with an international crew of bright biologists, engineers, and materials scientists, some genetically-engineered chlorophyll-like organic compounds that will snag gigatons of carbon dioxide out of the air and, using only the sun’s energy, convert it into potable water, usable energy in the form of glucose, and oxygen. I imagine these being deployed on rooftops around the world and on the surface of vast arid deserts. Or sometimes in my dreams we are using huge vats of cultured chlorophyll-containing Cyanobacteria to do the same thing. My son suggests that using drones to precision-drop billions of weighted tree saplings on to clear-cut forests would do the same thing more naturally, albeit with more delay.

With a much more scholarly approach and rigorous analysis, the message from this book is similar to that from Seth Klein’s A Good War. They make good companion reads. Although this is a sobering, important and challenging message, it is somehow an upbeat optimistic assessment of possibilities for united action. Highly recommended.

Thanks, Pat.

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This short story is even shorter than the number of pages would suggest, being divided into seventy four chapters, some consisting of just a few words or an image. The title is based on the real Bell Gardia Wind phone booth on a hillside near Otsuchi on the Pacific shore of northern Japan. Survivors of the March 11, 2011 typhoon and tsunami from all over the nation come to converse on the phone with their dead or missing loved ones who were washed out to sea, their conversations being carried on the high winds. The symbolism of the “edge of the World” as the end of life on earth is hard to miss.

Each of the few characters grieves in their own way, but they all seek relief from deep nostalgic longing as they yearn for a connection to the dead by talking into the unconnected phone. The transition into acceptance and getting on with their lives is painful but touching.

A traumatized preschool girl who lost her mother in the tsunami is mute until she visits the phone booth; a young radio talk show host takes a long time to recover from the loss of her mother and daughter in the sea, visits the phone booth regularly, and eventually screws up the courage to talk on the phone; details of exactly what she hears from her dead mother and daughter remain unrevealed, but she gradually comes to terms with her loss thereafter.

The whole story is suffused with the rites and customs peculiar to Japanese society and the Shinto religion with vague hints of a belief in an afterlife. There are far too many names of unfamiliar Japanese foods and customs for this unilingual anglophone.The author is an Italian, now living with her Japanese husband in Tokyo and the book was originally written in Italian.

The writing is engaging and poetic, rich in symbolism and mysticism. Perhaps the most concrete statement in the book is “Tsunamis had to exist for a reason too. They stirred up the cosmos, just like earthquakes, floods, landslides and avalanches. All that was a disaster for mankind, all that killed, burned, drowned, or displaced, protected the earth’s equilibrium.”

A short great story.

Thanks, Book Browse (the online site where I first read about this story)

Set largely in sparsely populated rural Nebraska in 2002 and 2003, this epic tale is centred on the life of a young single meat-packing plant worker who is severely brain damaged in a car accident. But the undercurrent of the harm that humankind is doing to the environment, in particular that of the Platte River wetlands and the migratory route of the Sandhill cranes is never far from the surface.

When the accident victim emerges from a coma, he has developed the rare Capgras syndrome, refusing to recognize his beloved visiting worried sister, believing her to be a planted substitute sent by evil forces to harm him. This morphs into Fregoli syndrome and then Cotard’s syndrome in which he insists that he is dead. He develops very elaborate explanations, believing that the caring distraught sister is an imposter, and expansive paranoid delusional conspiracy theories for everything that is going on around him. The contradictions and cognitive dissonance of these absurd beliefs mimic those of many apparently otherwise sane individuals and fringe religious cultists in our present society.

When the distraught sister persuades a famous New York neuroscientist (clearly modelled after the late Dr. Oliver Sacks) to assess her brother, he gets too involved, doubts the value of his previous popularization of modern neuroscience discoveries and sinks into depression and self-doubt. The mishmash of rare brain disorders readers are introduced to via his musings and lectures include hemispatial neglect, agnosia, prosopagnosia, asomatognosia, hypnopomia, Fregoli syndrome, Anton’s syndrome, reduplicative paramnesia, Charles Bonnet syndrome, pain asymbolia, ideomoter apraxia, and Cotard”s syndrome. I was aware of some of these, but not all, having researched aphasia, neologistic jargon, and echolalia in stroke patients early on in my medical residency. I was a bit surprised that the misphonia that one of my granddaughters has and that affected Winston Churchill was not included. And it seems to me that the not-very-rare synesthesia, wherein people see sounds, hear colours and taste shapes would be a great tool for any imaginative novelist to use.

The eternal conflicts between nature conservation and urban development are artfully exposed and explored as romantic entanglements develop between various individuals on different sides of the conflict. Deep philosophical questions about the nature of consciousness and what the word self means are discussed peripherally but, per force, remain unanswered.

The writing is engaging with vivid imagery, (“quivering like a Parkinson’s guy on stilts in an earthquake”), although the scattered nonsense neologistic jargon words in the opening paragraphs of early chapters, (seemingly designed to mimic the chaotic thought processes of the brain-damaged victim) may just be confusing to some readers.

When the Sandhill cranes are descending to the river at dusk. “ Another thread floats down on the still air. Then another. The fibre of birds catch and join, an unravelled cloth coming back together.”

The deceptive “By the author of The Overstory” on the cover invites a comparison. This is a shorter good read, but neither the plot nor the characters are as realistic as in that later (2019) opus magnum, one of my all-time favourite novels.

Thanks, Alana.

Delineating intimate connections between a great variety of arts and sciences, and the often neglected or forgotten luminaries in diverse fields from poetry to astronomy, the best description of this scholarly book is exquisitely erudite. Cosmic in scale, timelessly relevant information is related from deep research into the lives of lesser known leaders in a great variety of fields, many of them being eccentric misfits not remembered by the mainstream writers of what is considered to be history. “History is not what happened but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance.”

It would help immensely to enjoy this book to be thoroughly familiar with the biographies and works of, in no particular order, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Lord Byron, Henry David Thoreau, Alexander von Humboldt, Mary Somerville, Elizabeth and Sophia Peabody, Horace Greeley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Walt Whitman, George Sands, William Channing, Mary Wollstonecraft, Florence Nightingale, Henry Fox Talbot, John Herschel, Samuel Clements (a.k.a. Mark Twain), Harriet Hosmer, Hans Christian Andersen, Emily Dickinson, Oscar Wilde, Rachael Carson, and Maria Mitchell, she of ‘Battle Hymn Of The Republic’ fame, among others. I suspect that I completely missed much of the buried symbolism, including that of the title.

A question that I cannot answer but someone no doubt can, is why, even allowing for a possible selection bias on the part of the lesbian author, there are a disproportionate number of gay men, bisexuals, and lesbians among the leading lights in all the arts and sciences. At least she spares readers the details of their bodily expression of passions. But the inclusion of dozens of all-consuming gushing poetic love letters between such couples as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson and polyamorous Margaret Fuller, Emily Dickinson and Susan Gilbert and her husband Stan, and Rachael Carson and Dorothy Freeman becomes a bit boring for those of us who are strict heterosexuals. The tangled romantic relationships of the Emile Dickinson household particularly defy and make a mockery of the conventional models of heterosexual monogamy and marriage. It seems that the binary nature of gender was questioned by many long before the modern discussion of it. And it seems to me that there is a little-acknowledged vast difference between limerence, a word coined by Dorothy Tennov to denote the psychological state of being ‘in love’ regardless of the gender of the loved one, often without reciprocal passion, and the purely biologic and selfish innate urge to copulate.

The long-lost habits of keeping diaries, self-directed journals and writing long love letters, extensively quoted here, allow the reader a peek into inner lives of these leaders. “The stories we tell about our own lives, to others but especially to ourselves, we tell in order to make our lives liveable.” The difficulty of truly knowing the inner life of another, related in endless introspective musings by both the author and the subjects, filled with allegories and metaphors is extensively explored.

One needs a broader and deeper education in history, sciences and literature than I ever attained to fully appreciate this tome. And it is not one to read while being distracted by any other activity, such as listening to music; full concentration is needed. But, part history, part science, part art, this is still an enjoyable and educational read.

Thanks, Pat.

No fan of country music or Dolly Parton, I read this biography by an admiring Kansas contemporary from a similar background, hoping to enlarge my horizons and maybe revise my low opinion of Dolly. It had a great review in the New Yorker. My objectives were not fulfilled. The author liberally intersperses distracting autobiography, and references to hundreds of music pieces that I never encountered or enjoyed.

Unabashedly laudatory of Dolly, the disjointed account of her career is loaded with attempts to justify her many contradictions and inconsistencies. They do not quite work.

One needs to admire anyone who rises from abject rural poverty to become a very wealthy cultural icon and a generous philanthropist dedicated to helping those who are trapped in the circumstances of her youth, and there is no doubt that Dolly Parton is kind, altruistic and sincere. But there is little depth to her intellectual rationalization and an overriding need for public adulation and monetary gain let her simultaneously flaunt herself as a sex object and a promoter of women’s causes. And her abundant use of plastic surgery speaks of a vanity and refusal to accept the natural effects of aging, not justified by her assertion that she needs it for her work. Her superficial understanding of her Christian faith apparently does not include any need for modesty.

I did gain more respect for some of the positives of Parton’s efforts on behalf of others, but I am a bit concerned that philanthropy and advocacy at the hands of poorly educated cultural icons and pop stars has more potential for abuse and negative consequences than that provided by the likes of Bill and Melinda Gates.

The writing is rambling and inconsistent in both chronology and topics covered. The author is adept at man-bashing and seems keen to take offence at any criticism of herself, Parton, or country music, implying that criticism or expressing dislike of country music is unacceptable discrimination, and rude. I would prefer to be thought of as discriminating in my music tastes.

The best feature of this book is its brevity.

This novel by a Scottish writer who now lives in London blurs the artificial distinctions of genres of fiction. Presented in the first person singular voice of a Scottish Catholic priest assigned to the small town of Dalgarnoch, after spending most of his life in England, at an unspecified time around 2000, it is chock full of disconnected ethereal musings about his faith, the purpose of his life, and the trials he endures as he seeks to be accepted by his parochial parishioners.

None of the characters are innocent except for the dying housekeeper, and the priest’s engagement with two teenagers into thievery, illicit drugs, drunkenness and heavy smoking is a bit of a stretch. Romance and sexuality is presented mainly by oblique inferences, not explicit description, but foul language is pervasive. The priest says Mass and hears confessions without any deep sense that any of the rituals matter.

The plot is quite simple and the characters are few in number but some seem like caricatures.The writing style is expressive, with many allusions to British history and classical literature that I found to be confusing, as the author seems to take for granted that all readers know the details of Oxford history and the writings of Marcel Proust. That doesn’t describe me.

Two quotes will suffice to give a taste of the style. Bishop Gerard “…sat at the table, using his hand, as usual, to weigh the words he spoke, fondling the air in front of him, shaping their rhyme and reason.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Poole appeared to live together in a state of settled resentment.”

I kinda, sorta, enjoyed this story, but it is not very memorable.

Thanks, Din.

This is a most peculiar book by the well-known now retired CBC journalist and newscaster. Written in the first person singular, in the form of seventeen brief autobiographical snippets, the monotonously uniform writing style indicates that the words were actually written by the author. He must have used a lot of liberties to then create extensive questionable dialogue and present the perspectives of the subjects as accurate self-revelations.

The “extraordinary Canadians” featured are certainly an accomplished lot, whose contributions to our culture should not to be overlooked, ranging through the modern day politically correct fields of advocacy for Aboriginals, minorities, and mental health services to animal rights, social services, and unusual political leaders. But how they were chosen from among the thousands of “extraordinary Canadians” who could have been featured is never discussed. In many of Mansbridge’s later interviews as a journalist, I noted a tendency for him to preface his questions with long expressions of his own opinions on the subject, leaving the interviewee with only one acceptable answer. The same process may have entered his choice of subjects to interview for this book.

Some of the self-revelations are cloaked in false modesty and assertions of altruistic motives that are easily seen through as really just reputation polishing. The only bio that I really enjoyed was that of the remarkable selfless Rabbi Rueven Bullard who at one point granted me an hour-long interview on his radio talk show. The Saskatchewan politician Pat Atkinson’s assertions of enjoying political life hide an overgrown ego and need for public praise; the vegan fashion designer Manny Kohli assertions of no monetary motives disguise boosterism for his multimillion dollar company and the animal rehabilitation worker Hope Swinimer overemphasizes the ultimate importance of her work simply because she enjoys it. The featured Nadine Caron, the first Canadian Aboriginal general surgeon, for all her wonderful accomplishments, seems to think, like many surgeons, that only surgeons are worthy of accolades among medical professionals. “I didn’t just want to be a doctor; I wanted to be a surgeon.” Or was it Peter Mansbridge that has the subconscious bias to worship surgeons? As a retired sub-specialist in Internal Medicine, I could take that choice as the kind of insult she decries in others, if I chose to, but I do not. Most of us lesser minions in the medical hierarchy are used to the haughty attitudes of many surgeons who disparage their colleagues in other specialties. But why not feature the equally accomplished Dr. Marilyn Cook, who earlier was the first Aboriginal family physician in Canada?

In many ways, this book is a deceptive way for Mansbridge to present his own slant on the discussions of our social, cultural and political life. Don’t waste your time on it.

This richly documented influential environmental science screed has never been out of print since its publication 59 years ago. I recently read the 1992 edition, with a long introduction by Linda Lear, in my attempt to make up for my neglect of classics in my previous life.

Rachael Carson was an American-trained marine biologist who never had a long-lasting institutional affiliation; her earlier writing earned her enough to allow her to pursue her broad interests in sciences independently. Her knowledge of entomology, chemistry, physiology, radiation science, and ecology was astounding and is presented in well-organized, logical segments, (but sometimes with biting sarcasm when discussing the then-burgeoning powerful chemical industry producing tons of toxic insecticides and herbicides). She had contact with leading environmental scientists, biologists, and entomologists from around the world and quotes them liberally.

The cozy relationship described between lobbyists for the chemical companies and the U.S. Department of Agriculture seems analogous to that described between Big Pharma lobbyists and the FDA in Gerald Pozen’s Pharma in more recent times.

Emphasizing the delicate balances in nature, the case for using natural products for control of both vegetable and animal pests seems compelling. The examples of the law of unintended consequences are numerous. The cited examples of toxic and at times fatal effects of synthetic pesticides, in many species, including Homo sapiens, are shocking. Carson’s documentation of these ultimately kickstarted the environmental movement that lead to actions such as the banning of DDT and the delayed establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in the U.S. Yet almost 60 years later, the defoliant in Agent Orange is still readily available to spray, wherever you please, as Killex. It seems we are all slow learners when it comes to sharing nature with other species.

The introduction of foreign species to control native pests, which Carson advocates with some caveats, has a long history of problematic unintended results, witness the devastation wrought by rabbits and cane toads deliberately introduced into Australia. The whole concept of foreign invasive species is a bit problematic- in many places Homo americanus is the main foreign invasive species and from a broad Gaia perspective, Homo sapiens is the most destructive invasive foreign species on earth.

The discussion of cellular respiration and the effect of toxins on cellular respiration took me back more than 50 years to the painful introduction to the Krebs cycle in biochemistry class.

It seems that no one ever refuted any of the hundreds of science claims presented here, although the book was scorned by those in the powerful chemical industry.

Two quotes will suffice to demonstrate Carson’s wisdom as well as her vast knowledge. “By their very nature, chemical controls are self-defeating, for they have been devised and applied without taking into account the complex biological systems against which they have been blindly hurled.”

“The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.”

This is a great educational read, as relevant today as it was 60 years ago. Unfortunately, Carson died shortly after this book was published, denying her the accolades she deserved and us of more of her brilliant insights.

The sparsely populated eastern Kentucky Appalachian mountains and valleys in 1936 is the setting for this engaging novel by a native Appalachian Kentuckian.

The single dirt-poor daughter of an ailing coal miner suffers from the prevalent discrimination and misogyny of white folk because her rare inherited methemoeglobunemia makes her skin blue. Eking out a living by joining the Pack Horse library program of the Works Progress administration to deliver library services to the colourful backward independent hill people, she meets and befriends a diverse mixture of misfits, delivering library books, magazines and newspapers on her ornery mule Junia.

Encountering lawlessness, corruption, illiteracy, inbreeding, misogyny racism, and starvation was part of the everyday life for the very real Kentucky Pack Horse librarians. But there are also acts of generosity and heroism. The poignant symbolism of the semiliterate starving school boy, Henry, who nevertheless gives Cussy Mary his single Lifesaver candy in gratitude for her delivery of children’s books is very touching. The decision of Cussy Mary to discontinue the new treatment that makes her a beautiful white woman speaks to the importance of acceptance of who one really is, and not yielding to conformity. The abusive lawlessness of the anti union coal company is startling but realistic. The backward starving hill folk who refuse to accept any aid simply because it came from the government via Roosevelt’s WPA program reminded me of modern day Republican states’ refusal of federal aid because it was part of Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

The complex plot unfolds slowly but, for the most part, unpredictably and the first person singular narrative is loaded with southern idioms and figures of speech. There are no loose ends and the reader is left to guess the fate of ‘Cussy Mary’, the narrator, until close to the end.

A couple quibbles. The need for a wedding and a traumatic death to round out the story becomes predicable well before they happen in the last few of the 47 short chapters. And one incongruity: it is said to be pouring rain on a “cloudless day”, probably a computer spellchecker typo not corrected by a human one.

Having visited my daughter who lives and works in eastern Kentucky (at one time in Hazard), I can just begin to understand the uniqueness of the regional culture although it is no longer as backward as it once was.

This is a beautiful well written story. Highly recommended.

Thanks.

Vera and Alana.

Because of a chance 1996 meeting of the prolific novelist with a scientist exploring ancient ruins, he joined a 2015 motley crew of archaeologists , anthropologists, photographers, film artists, and adventurers to explore the ancient buried city rumoured to be the home of an extinct Honduran people deep in the jungle of the Mosquito region. His previous writings include articles for The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Harper’s, as well as dozens of novels, most featuring the FBI agent Sargent Prendergas.

The harrowing adventure, working with the changing unstable Honduran political regime eventually lead to what they claim to be the long-lost City of The Monkey God in the world of narcotic traffickers, infested with killer snakes, poisonous vegetation and deadly insects. Their discovery, the exact location of which they try to keep secret to prevent looting of priceless ancient artifacts lead to controversy and scorn from parts of the academic archaeology word, some of it no doubt driven by professional jealousies and shifting political allegiances in the unstable corrupt world of Honduran politics.

The science of mapping the vast area aided by helicopter-mounted Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) technology is interesting. The explorers almost all got infected with some form of the potentially lethal protozoan, Leishmania, from sand-flea bites, requiring treatment with the toxic drug Amphotericin B. But this did not stop some of them from returning for more artifact recovery.

Although the civilization uncovered may have rivalled that of the Mayan prior to 1500 A.D., it quite suddenly disappeared shortly thereafter, likely largely because of smallpox introduced by Spanish explorers.

The speculations about the meaning of the suddenly destroyed ornate artifacts, and the religious rites of the people, including human sacrifices, are confusing even to expert archaeologists, and will be of little interest to most English bibliophiles. And there is far too much hype in the description of the findings as the author gets caught up in his own enthusiasm. Incredible, outstanding, of supreme importance, astoundingly, staggering, breathtaking, and spectacular, are just a few of the overworked descriptors. The maps and photos at the back are far to small to be of much use. The description of the vastly overgrown city reminded me of what Alan Weinstein described in The World Without Us, and in many ways vindicates his predictions in that book.

By far the most interesting and immediately relevant part of this account is Preston’s thoughtful prescient analysis of the eternal risks to humankind from pandemics, written before the outbreak of COVID-19. He is particularly concerned that the combination of increasing population density, travel, and global warming has lead to deadly variants of leishmania spreading around the world in both humans and animals. And there is no prospect for a vaccine for this deadly infection.

This is an interesting travelogue by a dedicated adventurer that is also a good history lesson and a stark prediction about the future of our battles with dangerous infections.

Thanks, Isla

This very modern treatise on dying was reviewed in the March 20th issue of The Economist. As a physician who has seen too many people die, I was anxious to read what modern experts had to say about the process. The young British/American journalist travelled the globe over several years to interview dying adults of all ages, their caregivers, and both proponents and opponents of laws governing medical assistance in dying. Divided into chapters titled Modern Medicine, Age, Body, Mind, Freedom, and The End, she provides multiple interesting philosophical, ethical and societal perspectives on the ultimate fate of all human beings.

The mishmash of laws concerning medical aid in dying around the world are all far too liberal for many religiously-oriented people, but far to restrictive for many frontline healthcare workers and many of the enlightened public, some philosophers and even a few liberal religious leaders. The most liberal laws are in Holland, Belgium and Switzerland and those few enacted in some of the states are vague and very restrictive. In the U.S., the decisions of the terminally ill are very frequently determined by financial considerations because of their ridiculously dysfunctional restrictive health care system. The limitations in the treatment of the mentally ill are discussed with great sensitivity.

The concept of a completed life, originating in Holland, can lead to the belief that it is perfectly reasonable for an elderly but not terminally ill individual to request medical assistance to die. But widespread acceptance of suicide as a rational end to a completed life is also problematic as most suicides are impulsive acts that should be discouraged in the interests of individuals and society at large. The concept of rational suicide is rejected by most self-serving psychiatrists who insist that anyone committing suicide must be mentally ill. But psychiatrists in the Covid era are now hardly underemployed.

Medical assistance in dying has been practiced for centuries, although usually covertly. In the 1980s, Dutch prosecutors quietly stopped pursuing charges against doctors who openly obeyed terminally ill patient’s requests for assistance in shortening their miserable lives. Such practices were always widespread, with the charade of treating pain with prescriptions of enough narcotics to be fatal if taken as one dose. But there was always lingering concern about possible prosecution for murder. In my Exits chapter in Medicine Outside The Box, (2011), I acknowledged having hastened patient’s demise in the process of relieving their pain, as have many other honest physicians treating the terminally ill. But the charade did feel dishonest and at times was shattered as both I and the patient knew what was really happening.

“If I give you enough pain-killers to relieve your pain, you will die.”

“I know that.That is what I want.”

This was always in hospitalized patients with at most few days to live, unlike those poor souls who potentially face months or years of torture if not provided with help to exit. Nevertheless I was chastised in print by a freelance journalist who questioned my motives. Can anyone fully determine their own motives for such actions, let alone those of others?

In Being Mortal, Atul Gawande expresses concerns about relying on laws as an alternative to improving palliative and hospice care and this seems quite a legitimate concern to me. “Death with dignity laws codify the ‘better dead than disabled’ mindset and may make the disabled feel guilty about hanging around.”

In discussion of dementia, Englehart writes – “ …why should we privilege the critical judgements of a being who effectively no longer exists over the expressed desires of a person who is with us here, now? Why not instead think of the person with dementia as a new person, unconstrained by the choices of a past self?” At first glance this seems like a profound insight but it is problematic. With the insidious, unpredictable progression of dementia, when does the old me cease to exist and the new befuddled me become the one to express valid wishes? And who should determine the time of the switch? Certainly not politicians, lawyers, philosophers, ethicists or doctors. And family members may well have a financial conflict of interest. I personally think that dying with a loved one holding one’s hand is overrated. Given a choice, I would prefer to take my last breath all alone or in the care of a dispassionate capable caregiver.

Organ donation is barely mentioned and the accepted practice of organ donation after cardiac death, in which a patient who does not fulfill criteria for brain death becomes a donor immediately after the heart stops beating when life-support is withdrawn, is not mentioned at all.

This is a well-written (with a few grammatical errors) balanced discussion of profound enigmas. But be forewarned, the personal stories related are generally tragic, and there are no easy answers.