Author: thepassionatereader

I recently reread this, the best of several books by the late Jewish agnostic Yale surgeon and bioethicist whom I met a few times there. He describes…

How We Die. Sherwin Nuland. 1993. 273 pages.

One of dozens of books about the history and basic nature of war, this newest one by the Toronto-based emeritus professor of history garnered a rave review in The Globe And Mail. In ten dry chapters that flit erratically over several millennia and around the globe, dozens of wars and hundreds of battles, most of which I had never heard of, are analyzed from different perspectives.

Steven Pinker’s contention in The Better Angels of our Nature that we have never had it so good is challenged, the evolution of the nature of war, and the changing definition is discussed, with the blurring of the distinction between combatants and civilians, and the remarkable contributions of modern technology. I was neither impressed nor will I long remember the data enumerating hundreds of casualty numbers at different times, and endless descriptions of battles I never heard or cared about. And I hardly needed to be reminded about the obvious critical importance of mobilizing the public support and of maintaining the supplies of food and resources for the combatants.

The chapter on the role of civilians, including the blurring of distinctions between civilians and combatants in a total war where most civilian workers are contributors to the effort, and the morality of targeting civilians is informative, particularly in detailing the critical fast-changing role of women.

In discussing the ephemeral efforts to develop and enforce international rules for war “Like ants with their nests, we laboriously build up a more or less agreed structure, only to see it kicked apart by the heavy foot of war.” This is the only quote I could find that is in an even vaguely imaginative writing style.

This may be the definitive history of war for military leaders and academic historians to study for years to come, but for ordinary civilians, the eight pages Conclusion is the only part I can recommend.

The Vancouver-based professional social agitator and author uses the analogy of what rapidly changed in our political, cultural and industrial landscape during WWII to argue for what needs to change as we face the climate crisis. And he goes about it in a very persuasive, knowledgeable, and scholarly way. By way of background he is a 1960s U.S. draft-dodger, an adjunct professor at Simon Fraser University, a leading member of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and the brother of the equally well-known agitator- author Naomi Klein. (Having been one, I can assure readers that the title of adjunct professor is almost meaningless with no salary and minimal teaching obligations in exchange for the title.)

The Introduction reads like the enthusiastic sermon of an evangelical preacher building up to a climatic altar call. But it is a call we all need to take seriously, and he leaves no room for counterarguments as he methodically builds the case for massive changes in every aspect of our lives to combat what he calls the climate crisis or emergency, not the less alarming term “climate change.”

Appeasing the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers powerful lobbyists and untrustworthy liars is likened to Anthony Eden’s appeasement of Hitler in1939 with the claim of achieving “peace in our time.” Ads for cars running on fossil fuels are likened to past ads for tobacco products and he reasonably asks why they are not curtailed or even banned in favour of ads for electric vehicles. The results of many public opinion polls, some commissioned by the author, show that the public is far more willing to adopt massive changes to combat this crisis than are our current politicians to institute them. We may be close to a Malcom Gladwell tipping point when the public will demand the changes needed. Objections to the major upheavals necessary based on job security, inequality and social justice issues are answered persuasively.

The establishment of many Crown Corporations, the requisitioning of assets and the social cohesion that developed rapidly to gear up to the challenges of WWII are used as examples of what is needed and likely to happen if we can unite to face this challenge. Besides guaranteeing good jobs for oil patch workers as honouring the rights of aboriginals, his many recommendations would certainly guarantee full employment for all lawyers.

The basic message: “if something that needs to happen isn’t happening through the market, at the scale and speed the emergency requires- then through our governments- we can and should damn we’ll do it ourselves.”

I was surprised that nuclear power as a source of clean energy is barely mentioned, that the major threat posed by melting of Arctic tundra and glacial ice is totally neglected and that the problem of farm ruminants farting huge quantities of methane into the atmosphere is glossed over. (I read somewhere that this latter problem can be almost totally eliminated by incorporating a very small amount of some seaweed component into their diets!)

An epilogue goes some way into demonstrating how the Covid pandemic has massively and quickly shifted attitudes, norms and practices, uniting us in a vital fight in ways analogous to what we also need to deal with the climate crisis.

Minor quibbles. The human spellchecker failed to correct the cyber spellchecker in talking about “Second Would War.” On the same page, the U.S. is said to have variously entered the war in December 1940 and in December, 1941.

A sober message that needs to be taken seriously. Not a fun read but an important one for politicians, economists, social scientists, and academics. And anyone concerned about the future of their grandchildren.

Thanks to a reviewer in The Globe and Mail.

The well-known prolific Scottish author of The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, in discussion with a newsman bemoaned the demise of the novel serialized in a newspaper, then accepted the challenge to resurrect it. The result is this story chopped into 110 short chapters. Readers might anticipate contradictions and inconsistencies since he claimed that he made up the details not far in advance, but this flows beautifully. I have yet to read any of the 14 newer books in this series and I am not sure if any of them were serialized in newsprint. Everyone except me seemed to be well acquainted with this author. This one was selected for an upcoming book club discussion.

The story, set in Edinburgh in modern times, features a diverse cast of hilarious characters, all vividly described. Comical mishaps and personality clashes reminded me of the dry humour of Terry Phallus especially in his The Best Laid Plans, but is more exaggerated and lacking the thick Scottish brogue. The preternatural five year old Ashbergeresque saxophone player and his overbearing, pushy, opinionated mother are barely realistic, but nevertheless very funny. Some of the characterizations border on caricatures. The subtle but witty lampooning of Freudian psychoanalysis and the world of snobbish wine connoisseurs makes for delightful reading.

One quote will relay the flavour of the writing. On a first date that is obviously not going well: “After a small amount of rather stiff conversation, Chris looked at his watch and remembered another commitment, just seconds before Pat had been planning to recover from a similar lapse in memory.”

It is easy to keep track of the characters which include an indecisive art store owner with what seems to be attention deficit disorder, a narcissistic playboy, a beer swilling winking collie owned by an eccentric portrait artist, a lost young woman flitting between jobs, and a philosophical older widow quoting Proust, Descartes and Kant and musing about the problem of free will. There is nothing here that should not be read by a ten year old.

This is just the perfect light story for anyone becoming bored and depressed during Covid-19 lockdown.

Thanks, Barb.

I listened to Shelagh Rogers interviewing the Laotian author of these 14 short stories on CBC’s The Next Chapter, and decided to borrow it from the library. Several of the stories were published previously, and this collection garnered the author, now living in Toronto, the 2020 Scotiabank Giller prize for fiction.

The stories are narrated in limpid prose by various young offspring of Laotian immigrants to an unspecified North American city at an unspecified time. There are valiant attempts at character development, but the stories are generally too short for me to be able to develop an emotional bond with or a picture of the characters. The extensive unnecessary use of very foul language and obsession with crude sexual encounters totally devoid of emotion did not thrill this old curmudgeon.

The description of the very limited opportunities for the immigrant family members and the cultural and language barriers they face is probably a very realistic reflection of real difficulties of most immigrants.

The best feature of this book is its brevity. (I got confused about the pagination in the CloudLibrary ebook edition, but it can easily be read in six hours or less.) It may have been prudent and politically correct for the judges choosing the Giller to pick a book by a female disadvantaged immigrant, but if they are trying to encourage Canadians to read important or entertaining Canadian literature, this was a poor choice. I simply cannot recommend it.

A young French-German journalist offers a thought-provoking analysis of the problems of dealing with war crimes and crimes against humanity- of individuals, groups, and entire nations. Born long after WWII, she delves into her family history only to discover Nazis, Nazi collaborators and fellow travellers, then expands from this perspective to explore how various individuals and nations have come to terms with their dark past. This book thus joins a host of others analyzing the factors leading to the Nazi atrocities, and the consequences, but from a rather unique angle.

The historical facts laid out in this context are far more detailed and interesting than anything taught in my youth, and Schwarz emphasizes the importance of accuracy and honesty in history teaching in the process of healing of nations. The more than half-century of Germany’s collective retrospective self-examination stumbled many times but lead to a modern democratic state, though now threatened again by neo-Nazism and extremists.

A friend once commented to me that Germany has satisfactorily acknowledged and atoned for its dark past of war crimes and crimes against humanity, whereas Japan has not. But that reflects a slanted view (and teaching) of 20th century history. Swartz points out that almost no nation that engaged in war in that century is free of justified accusations of atrocities and war crimes. Britain selectively bombed civilian areas of German cities; the United States dropped atomic bombs on innocent Japanese; Austria, Italy, Vichy France, Poland and Czechoslovakia all cooperated with Nazis to round up Jews for the gas chambers; Stalin sent millions to their deaths in Siberia. After WWII, almost every Eastern European state engaged in some form of ethnic cleansing. International norms of decency were flaunted by Britain in India and Egypt, by France in Algeria, and by Japan in Korea, and all have thrived in cultures of denial.

I smugly noted that Canada is barely mentioned-until I reflected on our criminal treatment of aboriginals in an earlier era, and the more recent but less lethal shameful treatment of natives in residential schools. Those troubling aspects of Canadian history were nowhere to be found in my high school history texts.

The writing is straightforward humourless prose as befits the subject matter, with many quotes from the author’s interviews. She paraphrases Norbert Frei to remind readers that “if we cannot know what we would have done, it does not mean that we do not know how we should have behaved. And should behave if it ever happens again.” I read the 2020 translation that must have been updated from the original 2017 German edition as there is discussion of a 2019 U.N. vote.

This is at once a more personal and more global assessment of the psychology of justifying evil actions than is Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem. I rather appreciated its fresh account of many aspects of history that are often still totally ignored.

A former McKinsey consultant and New York Times journalist provides this damming exposure of the duplicity and hypocrisy of his fellow elite American thought leaders and multimillionaires as they claim that their philanthropic generosity is a needed altruistic effort to improve the the lot of those people they shamelessly exploit.

Giridharadas reserves his most withering scorn for the Sackler family, the Carnegie Foundation, tobacco executives, New York bankers and the denizens of Silicon Valley whose mantra is that they can do well by doing good.But none of the attendees at gala conference sites and corporate boardrooms, including the Clinton Global Initiative, escape unscathed. He notes that those CEOs attending meetings at posh resorts including Davos and Aspen, and in Wall Street corporate boardrooms to address the world’s problems never include representatives of the class of people whose problems they are pretending to fix. Poverty is a proper topic to address, but inequality is carefully avoided. Some have taken to “Pinkering” pointing to Steven Pinker’s book, The Better Angels Of Our Nature documenting that we have never had it better, as an excuse to do nothing for the less fortunate.

“It can be disturbing that the most influential power centre ( SiliconValley) of our age is in the habit of denying its power and of promoting a vision of change that changes nothing meaningful while enriching itself.”

Entrusting the solution of the world’s myriad problems to the capitalist free-marketers who have created many of the problems through their greed, rather than to democratically elected governments is like putting the criminal suspects in charge of the court system. “The only thing better than being a fox is being a fox asked to watch over hens.”

Sanford Weill of Citigroup is singled out for his hypocrisy in bemoaning the fact that the U.S. government did not have the money to ensure social change, leaving that to the private sector; this after Citigroup received a $45 billion government bailout , having contributed to the problem in the first place by their reckless lending in the subprime mortgage market.

I was surprised that the significant philanthropic contributions of religious organizations is never mentioned. It is not clear to me that private and corporate philanthropy, even if self-serving, should relinquish responsibility for social change to tax-based government action. Many philanthropists and volunteers want to believe that they are making a difference in the world even if it is based largely on self-deception. My wife and I have established a charitable foundation, convincing ourselves that our favourite charity, Doctors Without Borders, is likely to use our money to benefit more people than are our feds.

There is little in the way of concrete suggestions for alternatives to private sector philanthropy here, other than a plea for higher taxes on the rich and more government restrictions to rein in the excesses of the unfettered free market economy. The age-old debate about the proper roles of government and private enterprise in a democratic society is far from resolved here.

This is a well-written carefully researched, enlightening book that will be of most interest to economists and politicians, but should be widely discussed. I enjoyed reading it.

I read a rave review of this documentary of Columbia’s Magdalena River in The Economist and decided it was worth a peek. I rarely start in on a book without reading to the end, but I was sorely tempted to abandon this one. Yet, unwilling to admit to any snobbish sense of cultural superiority, I persisted to the end.

This book provides more than most English bibliophiles would ever want or need to know about the bloody history, culture and geography of Columbia. There are parts that are fascinating and memorable. Early on the British Columbia-based author discusses the drug culture and the role of the U.S. in stoking the market for cocaine, carefully distinguishing the latter from the mild stimulant coca leaf from which it is derived. The account of the mysterious megaliths of St. Agustin, rivalling those of Easter Island, the history of the rise and fall of Simon Bolivar, and the devastation and cruelty wrought by Pablo Escobar’s and other drug cartels are all interesting. The devastation of the 1984 eruption of the Nevado de Ruis volcano burying the town of Amero should not be forgotten.

The river itself is described as a sentient intelligent being desperate to tell it’s story. Davis appears to accept the prevalent beliefs in an afterlife and the myths propagated by the Catholic Church and praises the local profiteers of magic who fish thousand of bodies and body parts from the river and give them the last rites. They then adopt the unknown bodies to speed their souls out of purgatory to heaven. The references to religion throughout document an amalgam of many native and African nature- worshipping systems and a very flexible accommodating Catholicism. Anything to do with the natural world, whether animal, vegetable or mineral is a mystical object of worship. The magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquis, who also set some of his stories along the Magdelena, most notably Love In The Age Of Cholera, begins to almost make sense in light of this prevalent belief in magic among his compatriots.

The author freely admits to loving almost everything Colombian. As he travels along the course of it’s famous river, the geography is described in detail, and the history and culture is related in part by the natives he encounters and befriends and in part by the author himself in long scholarly diversions.

The writing flows like the river. On the dramatic rebuilding of Medellin after the peace accord with the FARC warriors: “On a mission to save their city, they embraced and remained loyal to three articles of faith: Pessimism is an indulgence, orthodoxy the enemy of invention, despair an insult to the imagination.” But most of it is also dry and humourless. There are far too many sweeping effusive generalizations and superlatives. Cartagena is described as ‘the most coveted jewel in the Spanish Indies.’ Alexander von Humbolt is described as ‘the greatest mind of the age.’ (What happened to his contemporary, Charles Darwin?) The music of Carlos Vives ‘electrified the world.’ The imported Brahman Zebus are described as ‘the finest cattle in the world.’ Long lists of names of people, places, and organizations, all in Spanish, will be promptly forgotten by most readers. Davis names twenty-eight African tribal names where slaves were bought, all in one paragraph. I was totally lost in the distinctions made in various forms of semi-sacred popular Colombian music. Extensive use of the word ‘literally’ will irk some linguistic purists.

I was very disappointed in this book. Maybe my Latin American friends would appreciate it more than I did. Perhaps my disappointment is in part because of the vast cultural gap between my experience and outlook and that of the author and his subjects. But I don’t think that explains all of it.

It may be a bit of a stretch to call this novel accurate historical fiction, but there Is a lot of dark Quebec history from the 1950s to 2001, including the October Crisis of 1970 and the sad plight of the “Duplessis orphans.”

The plot is complex, with deeply flawed characters and interesting geographic and cultural details of the Montreal area of the era. The surprisingly sudden eruption of violent confrontations between separatists and federalists is realistic at least as it was presented in the English Canada media that I followed at the time. Irrational religious fervour combined with historical grudges has, throughout history, led to atrocities.

The writing is fluid and engaging with dynamic dialogue. There are, however, weak points. To make the story work, there are a few very unlikely chance meetings, and portrayal of unrealistic guilt and self-incrimination over what-if situations that never happened. I found the time line of Elodie’s troubled life a bit difficult to follow, having not read the earlier Home For Unwanted Girls, that my wife says features her in detail. The length of time the politically opposite young lovers stayed together seems to be a stretch, based, as it seems to be, entirely on animalistic lust.

The Catholic church’s cruel unapologetic grip on every aspect of Quebec society of that era as presented here may be realistic but will not endear the book to devout Catholics. The physicians and politicians who were complicit in condemning the Duplessis orphans to a cruel childhood in mental institutions do not get off much better. Carlton University is described as “a utopian pit stop on the road to the real world” an apt description for all universities.

To be nit-picky, I found one obvious error-“..Bernard’s neck vein pulsing.” Why can novelists seemingly never understand the difference between veins and arteries?

Goodman portrays all of the separatist zealots as poorly educated, chain-smoking, angry, drunk or high on pot and willing to break
laws by smuggling tobacco, booze and drugs across the border.They express strong opinions about subjects they know nothing about. (My late separatist brother-in-law would mostly fit in with them, although not a criminal.) Many of their federalist opponents are not much better, but they are generally a more law-abiding lot. Her bias as an anglophone Quebecker who escaped to Toronto thus seems obvious.

One great quote among many memorable lines: “Love doesn’t use or discriminate against conflicting opinions or ambitions; it does not divide or bully.” This should have been the last sentence in the book, but there are only two more pages.

This is a powerful portrait of a dark aspect of Quebec and Canadian history in fictional form. We need to be reminded of it lest it be repeated.

Thanks, Vera

The late Kamloops Native novelist and poet tells a grim story of a Native teen orphan as he attempts to learn about and come to grips with the tragedies of his family’s past, first in bits and pieces from the old farmer who became his surrogate father and later as he reconnects with his dying alcoholic itinerant biological father.

The description of the hard lives of manual labourers in mines, mills and lumber camps and hardscrabble farmers are vivid, and the legendary native skills acquired by living off the land, hunting and fishing, are described in great details that will be hard for urbanites to believe (even though the details of fly casting are a bit off). The ravages of prevalent alcoholism in the mining and logging camps and the pulp-and-paper town’s boarding houses are described in realistic and horrid detail, as are the horrors of the front line action in the Korean War. The extensive dialogue and repartee in the clipped street slang of the illiterate is delightful.

As the youth takes his dying father out into the mountainous B.C.wilderness with the express purpose of reestablishing a father-son relationship before burying him there, the details of the father’s tragic past gradually come out. Nostalgic sentimentality becomes cloying and a vague but nonspecific typically Native spirituality pervades the whole story. The reader is asked to believe that a man who is rapidly deteriorating and intermittently comatose is nevertheless able to recall and relate his past history in hours-long narrative But the author got the details of dying of cirrhosis largely right with intermittent confusion, extreme anorexia and wasting, jaundice, vomiting of blood, and a pervasive disgusting odour (fetor hepaticus), even though it is usually less predictable in timing than as portrayed here. It is not clear how much of the tragic details in this story are based on the author’s first-hand experience, but in the Acknowledgements, he writes of an “ inward journey”, “braving darkness and shadows”, and “long nights of soul searching.”

The end is largely predictable far in advance, and the characters are mostly likeable realistic rogues, but the morbid details become a bit depressing. Enough of sentimental self-examination and guilt- I am looking for something lighter and uplifting as we enter the start of the second year of living with Covid-19.

Thanks, Michèle

This short novel about a Trinidadian boy growing up in Scarborough with his mentally ill, hard working mother and older brother paints a vivid picture of the poverty and squalor of the area around Lawrence Avenue and the Rouge River valley, in Toronto in the 1980s. It was populated largely by first generation immigrants, gangs of street youth, and broken families trying to eke out a living, largely ignored and despised by their more more affluent neighbours.

The writing is a bit disjointed, as the story is told by the younger brother, in part before and in part after the older brother is shot and killed by the police, with time shifts that can be confusing.There is nothing very profound here although the plight of thousands of underprivileged children growing up in profound poverty in our midst is a stark reminder that we live in a very unequal and unjust world.

A light easy read.

Thanks, Rhynda.

The setting for this strange story is the town of Van, Turkey, and later Istanbul. A young girl born in 1947 to the teenaged second wife of an alcoholic Muslim flees from a sexual predator as a teen, working in the street of legal Istanbul brothels next to a mosque, a church and a synagogue. The silly premise of the title is her recollections of her life as her brain dies in the ten minutes and thirty-eight seconds after her heart stops when she is murdered and thrown into a dumpster. But her recollections take up the bulk of the book, requiring several hours to read.

The schizophrenic surrealism of Istanbul, with its multiple contradictions is well represented as the prostitute is befriended by a transsexual woman, a gay man, a devout female Muslim dwarf, and a female nightclub singer/dancer. The blending of different religious beliefs and superstitions entwines all the characters with no sense of any contradiction.

After the protagonist’s death and burial in the real Cemetery of the Companionless outside of the city, the ragtag group of friends attempt to retrieve her body to give her a proper burial, in what turns out to be hair-brained hilarious plot that does not go exactly as planned. This is the best part of the whole tale.

As an introduction to the culture of the city that can’t decide if it is Asian or European, Christian or Muslim, cosmopolitan or parochial, this is a good read.

Thanks, Rhynda.

This old classic is on the list for our book club discussion next week, my wife having already discussed it in her book club. It seems everyone except me was intimately familiar with it. It is set largely in western England in the 1920s or 30s and narrated entirely in the first person singular by the insecure, young, shy, second wife of Maxim, who becomes the matron in the rigid hierarchal British aristocrat’s mansion, Manderlay. The detailed character development of the diverse aristocrats and the servants, including the very bossy stern hateful Mrs. Danvers and the no-filter embarrassing sister Beatrice is bound to remind readers of someone they know. The overriding memories of the drowned too-good-to-be-true first wife, Rebecca, pervade every aspect of the daily routine of the mansion. The strict class distinctions, the proscribed gender roles, and the superficiality of the British aristocracy that the author belonged to is subtly mocked in the first half of the story. The narrator who feels like someone with the latter-described imposter syndrome coming from a lower class, struggles to adjust to the expectations, with many challenges from those loyal to and zealously protecting memory of the first wife. There are small hints that the past was not as idyllic as presented and by the halfway mark, the story quite suddenly twists into a mystery with reality intruding into the presentation of what had seemed like a tragic drowning in an otherwise idyllic existence in the Garden of Eden. Suddenly, nothing is as it seemed to be on the surface. I will not give away more of the plot that becomes a complex who-dun-it mystery.

The writing is very British with no explicit description of sexual activities and very Victorian sensibilities, but the sensuality of the characters is a pervading undercurrent. There is little overt humour, but the depiction of the conversation with a demented old lady in the person of Maxim’s grandmother is so timelessly accurate that anyone who has tired to converse with an elderly demented relative will be able to relate to it.

As the second half develops, the plot thickens appreciably and nothing presented in the first half survives unscathed. The tensions between the truth and the fiction are heightened and the interpersonal relations deteriorate as the powers that be come close to disclosing the true story of Rebecca’s death and her continuing influence on the lives of the living.

This is a gem of a story with a vivid depiction of the era in the lives of British aristocrats and a timeless reminder that nothing is as it seems to be on first glance. Although it seemed to drag in places, I enjoyed it immensely.

Thanks, Beth and Vera.

This peculiar novel starts off as a fairly typical thriller/detective mystery involving the the disappearance of a small girl from a family campground park in Oregon. Suddenly, in a Pauline road-to-Damascus kind of experience, after four chapters, it suddenly veers off into mysticism and magical realism as the protagonist, on a secret visit to ‘the shack’ encounters God the Father as a cheery, chubby black woman with a southern accent, Jesus, as a Middle Eastern man, and the Holy Spirit as a wispy small oriental woman. Over two days this trinity work to enlighten him on the mysteries of the universe, and relieve the lingering burden of his grief from losing his daughter. Mystical allegory, trite aphorisms, magic realism (he walks on water with Jesus), plain magic (resurrection of the dead) and surprising theological lessons based loosely on early Christian teachings is mixed into a theological/philosophical discourse that could fill a whole semester in a theology or philosophy course. Most of these lessons would fit better into a Unitarian discourse than the sermons of dogmatic evangelical Christian clergy. Jesus reveals that he is not religious and not a Christian. The life outlook of the protagonist is forever changed for the better.

Much of the teaching from the Trinity on that weekend is an attempt to reconcile the notion of a loving omnipotent, omniscient deity with the universal human experience of physical and mental suffering. Like C.S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain or Rabbi Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen To Good People, this attempt does not quite succeed, in my opinion. There seems to be no questioning of the existence of human free will, or of the problematic doctrine of original sin.

An ingenious twist just a few pages from the end kinda, sorta explains the earlier journey into fantasyland and at least brings the story back to earth. The story has been adapted to a 2016 movie starring Sam Worthington, Octavia Spencer, and Tim McGraw that I have not watched but it might be worth a peek.

There is far too much ethereal spirituality with unquestioning acceptance of the existence of a benign deity that interacts with us here for this secular humanist. But just as reading the political works of those whose outlook is opposite of your own is sometimes useful, I gained a new understanding of how deeply religious folk think from reading this book. It is better to engage and try to understand than to blindly oppose. I am sure that many even semi-religious folk would enjoy it more than I did.

Thanks, Joanne.

The late Swedish WHO public health physician toured the world giving lectures and quizzes to executives, intellectual leaders, professional associations, educators, Nobel laureates and politicians, including the elite at the Davos World Economic Forum. He uses the responses to his multiple choice quizzes to analyze why these highly educated individuals systemically provide the wrong answers, usually doing worse than chimpanzees that pick answers at random. The correct answers are usually not disputable, being derived from large UN and WHO databases.

Of the 12 fact questions about common important problems that he starts off with, no country’s highly educated respondents on average did better than chance in their answers to any, and most did worse than chimpanzees pushing one of three buttons at random. I was quite proud of my correct response to 8, at least better than the chimps.

In the bulk of the book, a systematic analysis of ten common instincts that lead most of us away from factual realities are exposed and suggestions are made to counteract them. Although the media with their bias toward the sensational but unusual comes in for early blame, he acknowledges that journalists are just providing what sells. “I cannot see even the highest-quality news outlets conveying a neutral and non dramatic representative picture of the world… it would be correct but just too boring.” But I have a suggestion. It may be beyond government power, but news organizations could require or at least request that their outlets balance their bad news stories such as natural disasters, wars and the spread of pandemics with an equal number of good news stories, many of which could come from the upbeat data in this book. e.g. “Today, the world set a new record low for the number of people living in extreme poverty.” Or “1.6 million people flew on 145,000 commercial flights today and they all landed safely.” A great New Year’s resolution for any reporter.

The overall message, like that of Rutgers Bregman in Humankind and Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature is that the world is getting better, and of the three, this provides the best proof and is by far the easiest read. The writing is well organized, delivered with acknowledgment of the authors failings, and humorous self-deprecating anecdotes. It is little wonder that both Barack Obama and Melinda Gates have lavished praise on this work.

Brilliant, timeless, loaded with counterintuitive flawless insights and sage advice, reading this book will forever drastically change your wold view regardless of your background.

Thanks, Andra.

This thick volume starts off with a discussion of the rates and reasons for violence in our ancestors from the time of our divergence from other primates to Biblical times and then on to the Middle Ages, and the 20th century, including the prominent role that religious institutions and beliefs played in promoting violence and genocides. “Whether or not the Israelites actually engaged in genocide, they certainly thought it was a good idea.” The author is a Canadian-born atheist of Jewish background at Harvard.

The Humanitarian Revolution chapter veers a bit off course into long quotes from Voltaire, Samuel Johnson, Blaise Pascal, Denis Diderot, Shakespeare, Emanuel Kant, Thomas Payne, George Washington, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Adam Smith, Rene Descartes, Edmund Burke, Baruch Spinoza, and Charles Montesquieu in what seems to me to be an unnecessary effort to show off knowledge. But the conclusion that literacy, particularly the reading of novels, together with urbanization, led to abhorrence of previously sanctioned violence seems valid. Enlightenment humanism, (which I embrace as opposed to religious dogmatism), slowly evolved to emphasize our commonalities.

In trying to explain the (relatively) Long Peace following WWII, Pinker utilizes statistical modelling including Poisson distribution, power-law modelling and multiple logistic regression applied to the magnitude of wars. Statistical manipulation of derivatives of derivatives with arbitrary time frames seem at times to be designed to convince readers of a dubious conclusion. Nevertheless his conclusions that the rise of democracy, increasing international trade and organizations, urbanization, and education about other countries and peoples are potent anti-war weapons seem valid. The same statistical modelling of extensive data lead to the conclusion that civil wars, terrorism, and mass killing of political and ethnic groups (genocides), dependent on exclusionary ideologies have also dramatically declined in the last 40 years, contrary to what we usually hear from doom and gloom talking heads and politicians who oblige the terrorists by trying to scare us. In the long chapter documenting the rise of individual rights and the resultant decrease in rape, assault, domestic, child, and animal abuse, there is a superb snide discussion of the evil unanticipated consequences of efforts to ensure childhood safety.

The Inner Demons chapter is like thick molasses-far too heavy on neuroanatomy (and psychologists interpreting brain images) for most readers to digest or even wade through. And I am really tired of reading endless descriptions of experiments on social science undergrads paid beer money to participate in complicated and devious manipulations dreamed up by their professors. The division of reasons for evil into five arbitrary categories, and discussion of them is nevertheless interesting. But the fifteen pages devoted to Ideology is just an expansive documentation that peer pressure is powerful.

In The Better Angels, Pinker lays out several trends that go some way to explain why every parameter of life has, on average, never been better in the history of Homo sapiens, than at present.The Flynn effect documenting a world-wide increase in intelligence of average human beings was news to me. And the thirty-fold decrease in the risk of dying a violent death in the last millennium is striking.

After the book was written, Russia and Syria disproved his claim that no country would ever again use violence to change borders of a neighbouring one or deploy chemical weapons. And the Trump-era rise of white supremists has reversed the downward trend in racial violence documented for the previous half century. He could not have easily foreseen the rise of asymmetric warfare with drones that create moral dilemmas and inevitably will increase the temptation to start wars. Perhaps he addresses these in his 2018 Enlightenment Now that I have not read (nor am I likely to).

If the reader can get through the long catalogue of nauseating common atrocities in every stage of life, accepted as normal by our ancestors, the overall lesson from this tome is that we have never had it so good, an upbeat message that compliments the much more concise conclusion in Rutgers Bergman’s Humankind.

Scholarly and erudite, the writing is dry and humourless. There are almost 300 pages of Notes, Bibliography, and Index, along with sixty graphs. But I am in awe of the vast amount of information the professor conveys and his ability to grasp the connections from studies in diverse disciplines, and come to counterintuitive conclusions. For example, early on he is trashes Stephen Levitt and Steven Dobner’s Roe vs Wade explanation in Freakenomics for the late 1980’s crime decrease in the U.S.A., and discusses alternative, if inadequate, explanations. “The world has far to much morality….The human moral sense can excuse any atrocity in the minds of those who commit it.”

Who should read this book, which Bill Gates says is one of the most important books he has ever read? (My cynical nature makes me question how much of it he has actually read.) Certainly any social science researcher, professional negotiator or university-level historian. It will stay on my bookshelf as a reference volume, although I cannot say that it was a pleasant read.

Thanks, Andra.

This is not an easy book to review, much less to criticize. The 43rd president of the United States documents his path from an impoverished childhood to the May, 2011 successful military raid that killed Osama Bin Laden in this Volume I. (In spite of his moral integrity, he never addresses the criticism that Bin Laden should have been captured alive to face Justice in a court of law, which would have raised all kinds of jurisdictional disputes.) Along the way, dozens of high profile politicians, and world leaders who are household names come to life as he describes his interactions with them, from the flamboyant Nicholas Sarkozy to the two-faced opportunistic ultra-partisan Mitch McConnell.

Predictably, the controversial decisions he was forced to make are defended with careful reasoning that is hard to argue with, based as they almost all were on the advise of the brightest and most dedicated advisors that he recruited to work with him. Unlike his successor, he is introspective and self-questioning, agonizing over the effects of his policy decisions, not only on Americans but on other citizens of the world. He rejected a proposal to kill Osama with a drone strike on his villa because several women and children would inevitably also be killed. His hospital visits to wounded military personnel and his insistence on being present when the bodies of fallen soldiers are returned home reveal a compassionate conscientiousness that is rare in modern politicians. His efforts to provide a normal childhood for his daughters are a stark contrast to the disregard for the welfare of other family members of the current president. He is generous in his praise of others who show an ability to follow their consciences regardless of their party affiliation and scornful of those whose actions are entirely based on self interest, particularly Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, and Donald Trump. His grasp of the background history leading to current world political dilemmas is quite profound. This book, although long, could serve as a primer on modern world history from the 1960s up to 2011. He recognizes his tendency to wordiness and it shows in the book. “If every argument had two sides, I would usually come up with four.”

On his past ability to connect with ordinary citizens: “ I wondered if any of that was still possible, now that I lived behind gates and guardsmen, my image filtered through Fox News and other media outlets whose entire sorry business model depended on making their audience angry and fearful.”

On leadership. “Looking back, I sometimes ponder the age-old question of how much difference the peculiar characteristics of individual leaders makes in the sweep of history- whether those of us who rise to power are merely conduits for the deep relentless currents of the times, or whether we’re at least partly the authors of what’s to come.”

There are hundreds of verbatim quotes, some of which I suspect must be paraphrased, unless he has had a tape recorder strapped to his body continuously since he was a teen. I am in no position to argue with his decisions on banking reform, health care reform, immigration reform, or climate change mitigation, but there is no doubt about his sincerity and willingness to sacrifice political popularity in pursuing goals in these areas.

This is a great educational tome from a rare humble man of integrity who deserves much more recognition and praise than he has received in the last few years. I am sure that he made many errors, and he would not deny that, but can anyone seriously imagine his successor writing such an honest eloquent treatise? Can he even write a grammatically correct sentence?

Thanks, Din.

Apart from the understandable but dubious claim that the United States is the greatest nation on earth, which is not true by any meaningful metric that I have encountered, I cannot find any fault with this enlightening book. I am looking forward to Volume II.

I recently found this old classic on our bookshelf, complete with a faded St. Petersburg postcard, which indicates that I previously read it over thirty years ago. With no recollection of the details, I reread this 1966 Rosemary Edmonds translation.

Prince Dmitri Ivanovich Nekhlyudov, an aristocratic landowner seduces and impregnates the charming Katerina Maslova, a.k.a. Katusha, then abandons her. Later he spends years trying to assuage his guilt as she descends into a life of prostitution and crime. She is sentenced to hard labour in Siberia for a murder she unwittingly contributed to. I won’t give away more of the complex plot except to say that Tolstoy uses the extensive moral self-examination of Nekhlyudov to covey his late-life blistering socialist condemnation of the stratified Tsarist Russian society of the 1880s, the hypocrisy of the Orthodox Church, and the cruel criminal justice system that punishes poverty and maintains the elevated status of the real criminals in the aristocracy. If he had been born slightly later, Tolstoy would probably have been a prominent Marxist Bolshevik.

There are many great timeless observations, highly relevant today. On peer pressure: “At first Nekhlyudov made a fight for his principles but the struggle was too hard, since everything he considered right when he put his faith in his own conscience, was wrong according to other people and vice versa…”.

On human nature: ..”whatever a man’s position may be, he is bound to take that view of human life in general that will make his own activity seem important and good.”

On the organization of (Russian) society: “a society where the suffering borne by millions of people in their efforts to ensure the convenience and comfort of a small minority was so carefully concealed that those who benefitted neither saw nor could see this suffering and the consequent cruelty and wickedness of their own lives.”

Many observation such as the prisoner Simonson’s religious beliefs in panpsychism are ahead of their times and are echoed in later philosophical writings. The dangers of blindly following orders ‘from above’ are exposed long before Nazism. Although all religious dogmas are dissed, Tolstoy seems to accept as a given that some vague deity dictates rules for human behaviour, as demonstrated in the last few pages when Nekhlyudov finally finds peace and joy in rediscovering the message of Jesus in Matthew, chapter xviii, and in the Ten Commandments.

As in all Russian literature, the long unpronounceable names with multiple patronymics can be confusing to western readers, but there are fewer main characters here than in War and Peace.

In some ways this is similar and complementary to Dostoyevsky’s earlier Crime And Punishment, but I found this a more enjoyable read. Most critics rate War and Peace and Anna Karenina as Tolstoy’s best novels, but to me this later one is vintage Tolstoy at his very best.

F

Part memoir, part scientific inquiry into the origins and destinations of all the components of her implanted defibrillator, the young author with a genetic heart rhythm defect visits the California assembly plant of St. Jude’s Medical, nickel, cobalt, zircon and ilmenite-titanium dioxide mines in Madagascar, Busaro, Rwanda and the remnants of a Johannesburg gold mine. The Rwanda site is the source of rare ‘conflict minerals’ smuggled in from Congo and sold on into global supply chains ending up in various electronic devices and the aerospace industry. Nevertheless she concludes that small artisan Rwandan mines are less problematic than large international operations in spite of the latter’s cosmetic, negotiated remediation, restoration and mitigation projects that often ignore the priorities of the local residents.

Perhaps the most interesting sub-story for a Canadian reader is the lunacy of the American misnamed health care system. The author is constantly worried about the costs of her care, has to move across state lines and lie about he employment status, and finally gets insurance that only covers her care for specific conditions, in specific places, by specific providers and for specific time periods. “The system is not built to deliver care. It is built to maximize profit….of pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers and ‘not-for-profit’ hospitals that set high prices to pay their executives millions.” In discussing the system’s obsession with codes for specific services that may or may not be insured, she notes “Never mind that Jesus himself did not, to my knowledge, present Lazarus with an itemized bill.”

Along the way, the author unwittingly reveals her major character faults to her readers, without any acknowledgement or acceptance of them. Yes, she has been dealt a bad genetic hand, and on that basis deserves some empathy, but her whining self-pity becomes cloying, and she seems to have developed what social scientists call learned helplessness. She refuses, against medical advice, to even slightly modify her addiction to extreme exercises in order to reduce her risk of sudden death, and stops taking prescribed medication without discussion. I always tried to understand the patient’s perspective and priorities, but if she were were my patient, I would have, after discussion, politely wished her good luck, and terminated the relationship.

The writing is disjointed temporally and geographically with time shifts that just do not work. She describes her first impressions on seeing the Mayo Clinic complex before discussing the phone call from that facility while driving to it. Morsels of philosophical musings are scattered throughout the book but never ripen into anything chewable. Echos of Ernest Becker in Denial Of Death appear: “To live is to forget death long enough to move into the everyday acts of living, to believe them meaningful.”

There are glaring factual errors. The pericardium is described as “the outer muscle of the heart”. A catheter in the femoral artery is fed up the inferior vena cava! A chest tube insertion is said to be able to prevent cardiac tamponade! As she is flying from Tucson to Chicago she describes looking down on islands in Lake Erie.

In spite of the interesting thesis and the medical details that will interest lay readers, I cannot seriously recommend this book to anyone.

This is a silly, impossibly unrealistic tale of a group of idiots who cannot do anything right, including robbing a bank. None of the characters are at all like the faces they present to the world. But it is told with such wry mockery of their incompetence, biting wit, and keen insights into foibles we all share that it is an engaging and fun light read. And the plot has many twists that seem impossible until they suddenly don’t. Some of the author’s comments about behavioural quirks that we all share are quite profound. “When you’re a child, you long to be an adult and decide everything for yourself, but when you’re an adult you realize that’s the worst part of it.”

Like the characters in Tyler Keevil’s No Good Brother, no one here is entirely despicable, and they can all elicit some sympathy. In my estimation, this novel is far better than Blackman’s Beartown, but not as good as his A Man Called Ove, which I loved. Those are the only other books by Blackman that I have read. But this is still a fun light read if you need some diversionary cheering up in the age of Covid.

Thanks, Alana