Author: thepassionatereader

On an early dawn walk, I found this wet, dew-soaked book abandoned on the same lakeside park bench where I had found The Moscow Cipher over a year ago. But unlike The Moscow Cipher this one is a well researched, true spy story, and stranger than any novelist could ever dream up. Thomas: Harris’s Hannibal Returns is another book that I found deserted outdoors , although I can’t recall what park bench it was on. A friend whose whole career was as a counterintelligence agent around the world suggested that perhaps that park bench is a ‘drop’ for some local secret agent network. If so, I have interrupted their communications two or three times. More likely someone just likes to read spy stories in the fresh air. But who would leave any deserving book to the elements on a park bench? At least as far as I know, no one followed me home.

Eddie Chapman was a British bank robber, extortionist and philanderer, associating with the criminal gangs around Soho before WWII. After diving out the window of restaurant on Jersey Island where he was entertaining his latest lover to escape from the law officer who showed up, he was imprisoned by the Nazi occupiers. Taken to various mainland sites, he eventually volunteered to work with the Nazi Abwehr secret service. Between 1942 and late 1944, he was variously in England (parachuted in at night twice), occupied France, Quisling’s Norway, neutral Portugal, or at sea. He was trusted by his Nazi handlers and later by the British MI5 and MI6 spooks, providing radio information of apparently great strategic value to both sides. But much of the information was meant to deceive, and he was a master at deception. His handlers were obliged to arrange for prostitutes to satisfy his unbridled libido. He was paid by both those whom he betrayed and those he helped, but money was never a major motivation to him. Rather, he was one of those interesting totally amoral human beings who was also absolutely addicted to taking risks.

The world of double agents, espionage and counterespionage is laid bare in fascinating detail. It is enough to make any reader paranoid and suspicious of the real motives and activities of close friends and casual acquaintances alike. The moral dilemmas faced by wartime leaders, such as feeding the Germans false information about where their V-1 rockets were landing, which would result in an adjustment by them to aim at different population centres, are difficult to resolve.

After the war, when back in his British criminal element, Chapman attempted unsuccessfully to write a book about his role in the war. But like my espionage friend, he was prevented from doing so by the legal and political establishment. (There is no Statue of Limitation in the Official Secrets Act applicable to those holding state secrets) That was probably just as well, because Eddie Chapman, like some current politicians, seemed to be constitutionally unable or unwilling to distinguish truth from fiction.

The detailed Nazi radio codes provided in the Appendix, which I cannot decipher, are enough to make me wonder about why this book was left on a park bench. Perhaps my suspicions are unfounded.

Better than almost any spy or crime novel, this is a fascinating well researched and well written book.

I am not sure how this title got on to my wish list, but I am glad that it did. My Kentucky daughter says that it is mandatory for many school English classes in the southern states. It is told in the first person singular by a young boy who like the author eked out a living with his family in the remote foothills of the Ozark mountains in northern Oklahoma in the 1920s.

The story of Billy Colman’s deep longing for two coonhounds, acquiring them, then the fantastical stories of their hunting adventures is both far fetched and entertaining. The deep understanding and love between a boy and his dogs can probably be best appreciated by a farm boy who loved dogs and hunting as much as I did, but even city folk should be able to understand the deep affection that is tenderly portrayed. In some ways this is reminiscent of the adventures of Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn, in a bit more modern setting. Sex is barely mentioned and women play only minor roles, except for BIlly’s overprotective mother. The outcome of her latest pregnancy is the only dangling item left to the reader’s imagination. Religious beliefs are not a major factor in the story, and are treated as mystical whims.

The very different personalities of the two Redbone hounds, Old Dan and Little Ann, are strikingly different but their loyalty to Billy never wavers. Their adventures and feats of courage are really quite unrealistic, but the reader will get caught up in them and wish them luck. The scenery is described beautifully, and although the family is strikingly poor, the childhood is portrayed as a happy carefree one. The significance of the old Indian myth of the red fern is revealed only in the last chapter but is a great finishing touch to a great story of love, loyalty, connections to nature, and coming of age. A great yarn that took me back to my own coon hunting days, albeit in a very different setting.

The thesis in this thought-provoking book is neatly summed up on page 4 of the Prelude. “….picture a world from which we all suddenly vanished.” Then, ominously, “Say a Homo sapiens specific virus…picks us off but leaves everything else intact.” But it also goes into great detail about what the world was like before we arrived on the scene, and how our existence has altered that.

The author is a science writer whose Harper’s article about life around Chernobyl after the meltdown got me interested in this tome. Packed with obscure, often counterintuitive observations, it is nevertheless highly speculative and full of depressing facts about the harm we have done to our home planet and other life forms that we share space with. This includes the Africa-sized three million tons of plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Dump, the long-lasting effects of petrochemical pollution, climate change, and reduction of biodiversity everywhere.

If we were to suddenly disappear, explosion of petrochemical storage facilities would dump massive amounts of toxic waste into the atmosphere and the oceans, and radioactive waste from unmaintained reactors and storage sites would harm every other species, but mosquitoes and fish might become more plentiful. Our newest buildings would collapse before some ancient structures. Birds would stop killing themselves by the millions in collisions with glass windows and buildings.

The topics discussed include a broad range from archeology to all kinds of biology, ecology, astronomy, physics and chemistry. The writing is largely humourless and dry, and I found some ‘what if’s’ so unlikely as to be hardly worth our speculation. That includes the discussion of a virus that is so specific as to wipe us out without touching any other species. Such a virus cannot logically develop as it would self-annihilate, contrary to everything we understand about evolutionary science. In discussions about crumbling concrete under the influence of freeze-thaw cycles, there is no recognition that there are differing grades of concrete, some designed to specifically counter such effects. And concrete is at times equated with cement. I cannot pretend to understand the engineering jargon used to describe the crumbling of the Panama Canal after we depart nor much of the astrophysics.

The author makes a powerful argument to limit the birth rate of Homo sapiens to one child per fertile female to reduce our population to at least nineteenth century levels to reduce the harm to our home planet, but does not discuss the sociological effects of that, as seen in China. And I am bored with speculations about somehow removing ourselves to some other planet after we have destroyed this one, as I will not be around if/when that becomes a possibility.

A depressing read that nevertheless delivers important information for planners and public officials to consider, this book should be consulted before undertaking major projects affecting large populations. But it is of limited use for everyone else, though stuffed with interesting facts that could be used enliven a faltering cocktail party conversation with almost anyone.

Part biographies of billionaires Barry and Honey Sherman, part true double murder mystery story with no definitive conclusion and part insight into the interesting world of Toronto Jewish wealth and philanthropy, this is a fascinating read. The couple were brutally murdered in their mansion in a posh area of North York, on December 13th, 2017.

The author is a Toronto Star investigative reporter. As such, one would expect him to be critical of the police investigations, and he does not disappoint. But in this case, the deficiencies of the police attempts to solve the crime seem to be glaring lapses as they, from the start, developed tunnel vision and only after six weeks admitted that their initial conclusion about the nature of the crime was wrong. That admission was forced by the findings of the private investigators hired by the family.

Barry Sherman was an interesting character, a 77 year old self-assured workaholic, atheist, philanthropist, and risk-taker who parlayed a modest start into a multibillionaire dollar empire, with the generic drug company Apotex responsible for much of his wealth. The vast fortune available to those willing to cut corners in the pharmaceutical industry is well documented in Katherine Eban’s Bottle of Lies and in Gerald Posner’s Pharma. But Sherman also funded many other risky enterprises, won and lost millions in hundreds of court battles, and eschewed conspicuous wealth, driving old cars, travelling in economy class, preferring fast food outlets to fancy dining, and wearing tattered old clothes. Although he is sympathetically portrayed as a highly moral philanthropist, he apparently had no qualms about starting up a Florida plant to produce tons of fentanyl during the opioid addiction epidemic.

Honey was an equally interesting contradictory character. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, she drove a ten year old battered SUV, preferred old clothes to the new designer outfits that she bought and hoarded, pushed herself to physical limits in spite of severe arthritis, and enthusiastically supported many Jewish philanthropies. Their marriage seemed to be a happy one, although Barry at one point joked about hiring a hit man to knock her off. In contrast, the lives of their four children, and Honey’s sister and her children have been marred by addictions and endless conflicts among themselves and between them and the victims.

There is no definitive finger-pointing by the conclusion of this book, published in mid 2019, but it is clear that the author believes that the killer(s) were known to the victims. Conspiracy theorists have weighed in with many unlikely scenarios. Although the Toronto police continue to be tight-lipped about the case, they have acknowledged that they have a theory about the killer(s), but there have been no arrests. I suspect they just haven’t enough evidence to convict. But if you really need to believe in a conspiracy theory, you could do worse than propose that some corrupt senior politician standing to gain financially- there are lots to choose from- has bribed an equally corrupt senior police official to not pursue the investigation or lay any charges. Stay tuned.

Thanks, Floyd.

This seemed like a timely novel for our current situation. In the Algerian port town of Oran, an epidemic of plague results in a huge death toll, mandated lockdown, isolation of the town of 200,000, and social stresses. The parallels are indeed very impressive with the separation of family members, endless debates about what authorities mandate, economic collapse, and individuals introspectively questioning the meaning of their lonely lives. But there are also striking differences that we should appreciate. With personal letters prohibited due to fear of disease transmission, the residents are forced to use limited access to telephones and telegraphs for communication, in the age before email, the internet and FaceTime, and many had no means of communication with separated loved ones at all.

There are other parallels to more recent social history. A priest, in a long sermon, calls the plague God’s punishment for the evil deeds of the townspeople, like evangelicals calling AIDS his punishment for homosexuality in the 1980s. The daily fluctuations of the radio announcements of the number of deaths and corresponding fluctuating moods of the populace seem familiar in the age of Covid, but in 1947 no one had the TV talking heads and self-proclaimed experts on social media mouthing off ad nauseum. The other obvious parallels include anxieties about shortages, hoarding, and some folks’ interpretation of the pestilence as fulfillment of ancient prophesies. Information fatigue sets in as the epidemic drags on, and all emotional responses become blunted. “No one experienced great feelings anymore, but everyone experienced banal feelings.”

Camus inserts much of his absurdist philosophy and a hint of his anarchistic political leanings into the story by discussing his views as the dissident ‘narrator’s opinion’. Only toward the end do we find out who the narrator is.

There is a strong theme throughout the story of the meaning of separation, whether by death or by enforced quarantine. In an undated Afterword by Tony Judt, he makes the case that the whole story is an allegory for the trials of the French during the Nazi occupation, something that was not obvious to me at this chronological and geographic remove.

The writing style is reminiscent of Faulkner- baroque, ornamental, and polished with long esoteric discussions about the nature of good and evil, religion, and the purpose of living by all the characters all of whom are threatened by, and in proximity to, death. Part III consisting of musings about flattening emotional ranges and fading memories of those one is separated from, was a bit confusing, vague and disappointing to me.

An interesting, timely reminder that the challenges that we face with Covid-19, and the varied responses, are far from unique in history. Although this story is fictional, there is nothing unrealistic about it. I quite enjoyed it.

I am not sure why this novel got on to my wish list, but it did and I downloaded it from the OPL when it became available. In a remote cove on the west shore of Newfoundland’s Bonavista Penninsula, (apparently in the late 1700s, although there are no dates discussed) both parents and an infant daughter die in short order, leaving a ten year old boy and an eight year old girl to fend for themselves for at least eight years. They trade furs and fish for provisions from a ship that stops by twice yearly, never sure they will survive until the next visit.

As the pair enter into puberty, their sexual awakening is described in reasonably delicate language at first but then becomes more graphic. Although possibly realistic, considering their ignorance, illiteracy and isolation, many readers will be repulsed by the description of their conflicted and befuddled activities.

Newfie idioms and primitive language is used liberally by the Newfie author, to great effect in conveying their simple unique way of life. There are few characters to keep track of, and as a peek into the early subsistence culture, this is probably an accurate portrayal. The ending is abrupt, leaving the reader with questions about the fate of the protagonists. That may be a good strategy if the author is planning to write a sequel.

I have mixed feelings about this dark and sinister tale. Do not read it if your at all prone to depression. I understand that the author’s earlier novels are more upbeat.

The Seattle mother of a transsexual child relates this engaging fiction about a family with five boys, the youngest of which from age five feels that he is a girl and acts like modern American society expects girls to act. The bedlam of a family with five boisterous boys under ten and the exhaustion and frustrations of the parents is shown with hilarious episodes, very abundant wry humour and double entendres. There is some suspense until close to the end as there is doubt about whether or not the child will complete the transition to being a girl anatomically as well as outwardly and psychologically or revert to being a boy. The settings are realistic, in Madison, Wisconsin, Seattle, and a remote medical clinic in Thailand. Refreshingly, in spite of being set largely in modern America, there is not one word about politics. The author must have spent time in Bangkok to have described the crowds, smells, and makeshift sidewalk markets with vendors of exotic foods as accurately as I recall them from spending one week there.

The father in the family is an aspiring novelist who also imagines unlikely lengthy fairy tales to tell the children as bedtime stories that they listen to together well into their teens. But the fairy tales become an allegory for the trials and troubles of the whole family trying to cope with the trans kid’s problems. There is a none-too-subtle earnest plea for tolerance, acceptance, and understanding of not just LGBTQ children but also of the difficulties that their families inevitably encounter. Gender role stereotyping is thoroughly trashed, while the binary Western attitudes about gender identity are contrasted with the more accepting culture of Buddhist Thailand. There is extensive metaphysical pondering based on Buddhist philosophy in the later chapters that I failed to comprehend completely and I doubt that I am alone in that.

The writing style is eloquent, the characters are easy to keep track of, there are no loose ends, and no plot twists are entirely unrealistic.

This is a timely enjoyable read with a potent message. In spite of dwelling on gender identity, the message is not at all about anatomy or the deployment of various combinations of appendages and orifices to express love or just for erotic satisfaction, but about gender discrimination, tolerance and respect for people with different lifestyles, and ultimately, love.

My wife sent me to get this fictional autobiography from the library for her book club discussion. As I walked home with it and realized that it was a first person singular fictionalized autobiography of the American poet and novelist Joy Davidman and her friendship/romance with Oxford professor C.S. Lewis, I decided to read it too. C.S. Lewis was a staple of my teenage reading- not the Narnia children’s chronicles, but everything he ever wrote in defence of Christianity. Mere Christianity was practically a fifth gospel according to my parents and The Problem of Pain, Miracles, The Screwtape Letters, and Surprised by Joy were required reading. Lewis’ death on November 22, 1963, was mourned in our house more than that of JFK who was killed the same day. Only much later did I find critical flaws in his superficially persuasive eloquent arguments for Christianity.

C.S. Lewis was the quintessential mid-twentieth century insular Oxford academic, buried in books, set in his ways, shunning and fearful of intimacy, brilliant but blinkered to the realities of the rest of the world. Joy Davidson was a troubled abused atheist, who, like Lewis and St. Paul had a sudden conversion experience to Christianity that changed the rest of her life. Relating that mystical experience in a letter to Lewis led to their long friendship/romance and eventual civil and then religiously sanctioned marriage, the latter only after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

As a love story this is unusual, based as it is on mutual interests in classical literature, writing, mysticism and mythology, as well as religious beliefs. Their greatly embellished imagined conversations are filled with platitudes about God’s will and the mysteries of His ways, especially after Joy is diagnosed with terminal cancer. The expressed fear of death seems incongruous with their deep faith in a better life to follow, but this contradiction is integral to almost all religious beliefs. The risible rigid hypocrisy of the Church of England’s refusal to sanction the remarriage of a divorced person fortunately eased before I was remarried in Huron College’s chapel by an Anglican priest.

Neither protagonist was any saint. Lewis was a chain-smoking, heavy drinker, friend to many but fearful of intimacy or commitment to anyone. Davidman was an insecure libidinous divorcee escaping from an abusive marriage who practically begged prudish Lewis to have sex with him (and failed until after her diagnosis of terminal cancer and their belated church- sanctioned wedding). She was always complaining about being broke but still managed to find money for travel, fancy clothes, and endless quantities of whiskey, sherry, and beer. Neither seems to have paid any attention to any issues outside of their white Western culture.

There are some minor discrepancies with the lengthy fawning 1988 biography, Jack. A Like of C.S. Lewis by his friend and fellow-writer George Sayer, which I read years ago. I was surprised that it was not acknowledged by the author in her Suggested Further Reading.

As a reflection of the times in white academic Britain, the real characters of Lewis and Davidman, and the conservative religious views of the era, this is an enlightening read. As a novel of friendship that became a romance, I suspect women will enjoy it more than men will.

My wife got this book from the library because it is on the schedule for her ladies book club. When she decided to abandon it, she suggested that I try as I was running low on readily available new books. If only to prove a point, I read to the end, although if I had not been in lockdown, I would have given up after a few pages.The author was a well-known Pulitzer prize-winning American-Canadian novelist, playwright, poet and feminist who died in 2003.

The first person singular narrator is an aspiring novelist, married to a family physician in Orangetown, north of Toronto (read Orangeville), shaken by a daughter who leaves for university then suddenly and inexplicably takes up the life of a mute street beggar in Toronto, in 2000. So far I have not revealed any of the implausible plot that is not revealed on the jacket.

Fond of angry feminist man-bashing,(while denying being angry) the narrator seems to lump almost all men except her husband into one evil cohort of misogynistic beasts. There are abundant reasons for women as a group to rail against the oppression and unequal treatment they have suffered throughout history, but feminists do themselves no favour by denying that there are many decent men in the world. To be fair, she does a good job of pointing out the many discriminations women experience that are not obvious to most men, such as a (male) literary reviewer selecting only male writer’s works to review. And she has an editor of her novel insisting on making a man, rather than a woman the hero of the story. It is easy to see the appeal of this writing to large numbers of downtrodden, systemically-disadvantaged women, but ‘the lady doth protest methinks.’ As a good friend (a lady) said when discussing this writing, “Stop the whining.”

The rabid feminism is only a minor part of why I did not like this book. There is endless nostalgic, melodramatic, self-pitying, introspective self-analyses. And I am really tired of fiction writers writing about other fiction writers writing about writing. The mostly one-word chapter headings, all conjunctions, made no sense to me, even when I tried to unscramble them, even though they are apparently in some profound way, the very essence of life. Most of a chapter is devoted to the seemingly very difficult but (to me) banal task of picking out a scarf in a row of boutiques in Washington, D.C. The attempts to seem erudite fall flat. “Whenever, and for whatever reason, these words fall into my vision, I feel my breath stuck in my chest like an eel I’ve swallowed whole.” “This thought pulsed in my throat.” My understanding of basic human anatomy and physiology is insulted.

I simply cannot recommend this novel.

A longtime Washington Post syndicated columnist delivers more than any commoner would ever need to know about America’s Supreme Court. She also reveals more than any one would ever need to know about the devious, power-hungry, back-stabbing maneuvering of most people inside the D.C. beltway. That is true unless you are a member of that peculiar oxymoronic species, Scientifica politico, better known as the common wonk, or the closely related species that the author belongs to, the Papyrus novus scriptor. Both species are widely distributed, but tend to migrate to capital cities.

There are far too many assistants, associates, deputies, chairs, undersecretaries, and chiefs and combinations of those titles for most readers to keep track of, perhaps inevitably in a town full of big egos with a fondness for fancy titles. There are also too many agencies, boards, bureaus, committees, commissions, institutes, offices, departments and secretariats some of which are identified only by acronyms even the first time they appear, as though the reader should be familiar with hundreds of them. This is a very inside-the-capital expectation, as I discovered on moving to Ottawa.

This is an exhaustively researched endeavour without any obvious author biases or judgments. In the final chapter she provides her personal thoughts about the characters, including Kavanaugh and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who, along with at least two other women, accused him of sexual assault, with no definitive conclusion. I believe Ford’s account as she had nothing to gain except loss of privacy, vulgar insults, and death threats, by speaking up. Is it possible that both witnesses were truthful- only if he committed the assaults in an alcoholic blackout, which seems almost certain to me. But he also had ample reason to be disingenuous and evasive as he had maneuvered to become a Supreme Court Justice since his days as a drunk, privileged high school jock and Eli. Yale University provided me with a great educational experience, but it’s Law School seems to excel in producing unscrupulous, ambitious lawyers and politicians.

None of the politicians come out of this looking morally untainted, except two or three female senators who obviously agonized over how to vote. That ultimate partisan control freak, Mitch McConnell, created the vacancy by blocking consideration of Obama’s nominee before the 2016 election. Well past her senatorial best-before date, California Democrat Dianne Feinstein withheld vital information from both sides in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, to the detriment of getting at the facts. Most senators seemed more concerned about being re-elected than about making a decent moral choice. The frightening White House restraint on the FBI investigation, imposed by Don McGahn, counsel to Trump, made their investigation into Dr. Ford’s allegations a complete farce that Trump then touted as vindication of Kavanaugh’s innocence.

The amoral viciousness of Washington partisan politics was tragically and succinctly stated by Vincent Foster who, mercilessly hounded by Clinton opponents, wrote “Here ruining people is considered sport” shortly before shooting himself in the head. Then the ever-hovering lawyers and conspiracy theorists started debating the cause of his death, blaming the Clintons.

The liberals’ prediction of dire consequences of Kavanaugh’s appointment may be overblown. There is a long history of judges disappointing the politicians who appoint them, as both Gorsuch and Kavanaugh have already done. But there is no doubt that the image of high court justices acting impartially, like umpires calling balls and strikes, is a myth. Judges are human, with faults and sometimes extreme biases like the rest of us. And there has to be a better way of picking fairer umpires without destroying so many trees; the papers for review by the senate judiciary committee alone ran to 780,000 pages. And no one should trust octogenarian umpires.

It is easy to be critical, biased, and smug from this distance, but I really do believe that our system of governance, for all its faults, is better that theirs.

My interest in U.S. politics derives in part from having two daughters and two grandchildren living there. If nothing else, this book shatters any delusions that they are living in a democracy. I would recommend this read only if you have some similar interest in the chaos theory in action called American politics.

Another Father’s Day gift, this one, appropriately, is from my theatre arts teacher/daughter. The Harvard English professor certainly knows his Shakespeare, and is selective here in discussing his plays about tyrants. He notes that all the tyrants are well before Shakespeare’s time since he would risk his life if he criticized more current tyrants. The included tyrants are in Henry VI (parts I-III), Richard III, Macbeth, King Lear, Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, Julius Caesar, and Coriolanus, in the order in which they were written.The ruthless pursuit of power for power’s sake is depicted in all of these with brutal realism.

Shakespeare’s insights into the masochistic, and narcissistic personalities of tyrants developed over his lifetime and are still highly relevant and cautionary. “A tyrant does not traffic in facts or supply evidence. He expects his accusations to be enough.” “What he actually wants is loyalty and by loyalty he does not mean integrity, honour or responsibility. He means an immediate, unreserved confirmation of his own views and a willingness to carry out his orders without hesitation. When an autocratic, paranoid narcissistic ruler sits down with a civil servant and asks for his loyalty, the state is in danger.” This is as close as Greenblatt comes to criticizing current leaders, but it is not hard to see the relevance to Trumpland.

Much of this discussion could be viewed as an expanded Playbill for the tragedies discussed.There is absolutely no humour in this dry treatise. There is also no “About the Author” as though he thinks he must be so well known that everyone in the English world knows all about him.

This will be a valuable book for dedicated Shakespeare buffs. If you are going to see any of the plays discussed, it would be useful to read the relevant parts in advance.

Thanks, Alana.

This bizarre modern novel is narrated by various characters, and covers a time span from the recent past to far into the future. A fifteen-year-old New Yorker leaves on her own to find the Iowan father she has never met. He is less than welcoming but she stays and gradually falls in with a ragtag group of radicals, criminals, and animal rights activists. When she is the narrator, she resorts to comparing her real life with that which she imagines she would have had if she had stayed in New York.

A plot to free hundreds of thousands of layer hens housed in horrible conditions is slowly developed and deployed lead by ostensibly public inspectors and auditors of the massive factory farms, along with secret inside informers. Let’s just say that not everything goes as planned, all because of what happens in Barn 8. Conflicts between the conspirators and conflicts within farming families forms much of the story line.

There is an undercurrent of condemnation of amoral unfettered capitalism and selfish greed and the seemingly inevitable decline of the of the human race. Far into the future, the hens are doing fine while we have become extinct.

I have fond memories of dozens of free-range White Leghorns (neighbours raised Rhode Island Reds that lay brown eggs which we thought, perhaps with a subconscious racial bias, to be inferior). Ours were usually penned most of the year and climbed or flew into wooden nests lined with straw to lay their eggs. We went to gather eggs from these twice a day, 24/7. When she stopped laying eggs, the axe as guillotine awaited. Still I find it as easy as Unferth to believe that White Leghorns have individual personalities and communication skills and deserve better lives than they are ever afforded on modern factory farms.

The writing is precise and scenes are described vividly. The writer’s imagination is ingenious. One quote to illustrate this: “… outside the barn, insects were rubbing their instruments, tuning up, playing the preludes to millions of songs that sound to the human ear like the author-less plainchants, a chorus of Dark Age petitioners, though each cricket song contains variations that make it unique.”

In places, there appear some apparently disconnected bits that must have some deep literary significance that totally escapes me, such as the long question and answer section towards the end.

I can’t recall where I read the review that persuaded me to borrow this book, but I quite enjoyed it. I am quite sure my nephew, the owner of a huge chicken farm operation would not.

My son must think I am failing or need help in the difficult task of aging successfully, and he is probably right. I usually carefully avoid any self-help books, especially those with “How to…” in the title, but since this was a gift from him, I tried to struggle through it without being too closed-minded.

There are hundreds of facts transmitted in this tome, many of which are counterintuitive. The author is a sixty-something neuroscientist (and musician) who has worked in several universities and has extensive knowledge and experience in the field of changing brain functions with aging.

The COACH acronym standing for Curiosity, Openness, Associations, Conscientiousness, and Healthy practices recurs throughout the book, as does the theme of the interactions of culture, genes and opportunity. In places Levitin seems to come close to endorsing the philosophical doctrine of determinism, with its denial of free will, but then emphasizes that we are in control of much of what we do. Laced with personal anecdotes and observations as well as interviews with a wide variety of elderly notables, there are bits of good advice scattered throughout, along with a sprinkling of humour.

Chapters on diet document the abysmal state of dietary sciences with almost all epidemiological studies using surrogate markers for risks arising from dietary habits, such as blood levels of LDL cholesterol as a surrogate for atherosclerosis. There are dubiously useful recommendations to be routinely screened for low sex hormone levels in blood and to use hormone replacement therapy liberally. Screening healthy subjects for almost any disease has been shown by thoughtful physicians like H. Gilbert Welsh in Less Medicine, More Health, to usually cause more harm than benefit. As a general comment, I would add that blood is a tissue that is too easy to biopsy, and the findings often do not reflect what is going on elsewhere. Recommendations to make frequent visits to physicians is equally questionable.

You can skip the chapters on sleep if you have read Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep, as those just largely reiterate Walker’s conclusions and recommendations.

The careful analysis of the huge commercial industry selling ‘brain exercises’ to stave off cognitive decline concludes that it is largely a scam, but pharmacological means of doing the same are still mostly of unproven benefit. Playing competitive bridge may improve my ability to win master points in bridge, but will not help me mount a wall TV., or calm an agitated friend.

This is not an easy read. The details of neuronal pathways and brain anatomy were difficult for me to keep straight, even though I have studied them and read extensively about neuroscience developments. There are hundreds of statements of ‘associated with’ and ‘linked to’ that imply causation without further evidence such as a dose-response relationship or a plausible physiological mechanism. “Other drugs associated with depression include estrogens, blood pressure medication, statins, and opioids.” But to be fair, Levitin, at least occasionally, acknowledges that the direction of causation is not clear.

It is also needlessly wordy. Does any reasonably educated reader need to be told that “The further you are from the equator, the more extreme will be the difference in light between summer and winter months.”? Like many scientists writing to educate non-scientists, Levitin seems to forget to aim for a targeted readership.

There are also factual errors. The Symbiosis program of McMaster University is in Hamilton, Ontario, not London, as a McGill professor should know. Citing Jeanne Calment’s as the longest documented life is almost certainly wrong; her daughter is thought to have stolen her identity after her death thus extending her apparent lifespan by twenty years. The extensively studied life-extending properties of resveratrol in red wine was debunked in a 2006 Danish analysis of 100,000 grocery store receipts. It seems that red wine drinkers live longer than beer drinkers simply because they also eat healthier foods.

Although some of the advice here was new to me, most of it falls into the category of common sense, an uncommon commodity. I am not about to change much in the way I age after absorbing this advice. I maybe should switch from curling to tennis, bridge to poker, and crosswords to chess to challenge myself with new skills , but there are some pleasures in life not worth giving up for the chance to live an extra few years in diapers in a locked ward. And Levitin is adamant that no one should ever retire, but if I persisted in medicine beyond my ability to be competent, some poor patient would likely die needlessly. The trick is to find something after retiring that still gives you a sense of being useful.

I do not intend to go quietly into that good night, but to slide into the grave sideways, hollering “what a hell of a ride”.

A difficult read that will appeal to a selective readership, perhaps worth scanning by most oldsters for a few suggestions.

Thanks, Ian.

There is, within this passionate plea for better understanding of all manner of living creatures constantly on the move, a plethora of keen insights and sobering thoughts. Shah points out and documents that mass migrations are not a recent phenomenon, but have always been an integral part of the adaptation of all living things to a constantly changing environment. The extent to which humans have moved about in the past was not well known until recently. The personal stories of people risking their lives to cross the Mediterranean Sea or the Mexico-Texas border are heart wrenching. We easily forget that national borders with rigid restrictions on crossing them are a relatively recent feature of human history and have never existed for other forms of life, whether flora or fauna. The message that integration of migrants into western cultures generally benefits everyone including the longtime residents of the host nations, needs to be emphasized, especially in this time of xenophobic nationalism.

A chapter on the baseless, overtly racist politics, with scientists being complicit in the eugenics policies then applied, of the early 20th century is timely given the current U.S. and European treatment of migrants. A superb discussion of the artificial distinctions between native and (exotic) invasive species shows the futility of turning back the clock to allow for only the growth of so-called native species. The estimates are that 99 % of ‘invasive species’ actually increase the biodiversity in their new environments. It could be argued that we are one of the few truly dangerous invaders and perhaps the worst of all invasive species, destroying vast swaths of biodiversity to grow monoculture crops, driving many other species to extinction, and doing irreparable damage to the climate.

Along the way, Shah heaps scorn on Linnaeus, Malthus and a host of other revered scientists for their artificial distinctions and wild predictions based on armchair science with no field experience. The story of lemmings undergoing mass suicide, now a stand-in for blindly following the leader, was created by such scientists and popularized by the special effects team of Disney Films. It is a complete fabrication.

I found the writing to be a jumble of interesting facts thrown together haphazardly, with constant switching back and forth from discussion of the history of migration of plants and animals to that of humans at different times. And like many reports in social sciences, there are dozens of studies where correlation is uncritically equated with causation. That misinterpretation of data led to such atrocities as widespread forced sterilization of the poor as being ‘feeble-minded’ and unfit to reproduce. They were feeble-minded because they were poor and were denied access to good education- a vicious cruel circular argument. There are also a few biologic impossibilities asserted (e.g. living at high altitudes does not make the blood thinner) and some minor spelling and grammar errors. The complex maps meant to clarify points in the text just confused me.

I have mixed feelings about recommending this book, but learned a lot from it.

Thanks, Andra.

I rescued this psychological thriller from a lonely life on a coffee table in the front lobby of our apartment building after walking past it for several days. The author apparently has written a book a year for more than a decade, but I was not familiar with her work. Set in the recent past in Miami, the story is told in the first person singular present tense and only covers a few months following the brutal assault and rape of the narrator by an unknown assailant.

It cannot be easy to make a story about a rape into an enjoyable read, but Fielding has done just that. The reader follows the victim into a world of increasingly bizarre panic attacks and wallowing in pathetic self-pity, and then a state of paranoid psychosis, unable to distinguish reality from fantasy, nightmare from dreams. She sees characteristics of her assailant in almost every man she encounters, and becomes a recluse. There is the usual clutch of feuding, estranged, and weird family members that seem to make regular appearances in the such novels, and these are indeed colourful and entertaining, even if also scheming, unreliable and unhelpful. The cast of characters is not very extensive and they are easy to distinguish from one another. It seems that the search for the rapist has been fruitless and abandoned until three pages from the end when he is captured wherein all of the false leads and loose ends are wrapped up and suddenly it all makes sense. Readers who keep looking ahead to the last lines will be convinced that the author cannot wrap it up satisfactorily in the space left.

There are some exaggerated and impossible descriptions of actions (the rapist must have four hands to do what’s described at the scene of the attack). The the physiological accompaniments of panic and anxiety attacks as described occur only in novels. Arm veins do not swell and pulsate in response to anxiety, for example. And Fielding perpetuates the popular myth that rape is all about power and has nothing to do with sex. But, as men all know, rape without sexual arousal is impossible, so this is at best only a half truth.

I think that women who have been sexually assaulted will be able to relate to the psychological devastation described here better than any man, but whether or not they could enjoy reading this is a different matter. Perhaps the thrill of the hunt for the criminal and the surprising twists are what makes this whole genre appealing to many readers, with the nature of the offence being largely irrelevant. But I only like thrillers in small doses and will not be hunting for more from this author.

One of the world’s best known modern philosophers, the Australian-born Princeton professor here collects “82 brief essays on things that matter”, mostly written for news outlets and scholarly journals between 2001 and 2015. The selection of topics is very wide-ranging and, and unlike most output from philosophers, is easy to understand for anyone with a grade 10 education and an ability to reason. Singer is that rare philosopher who makes the subject interesting, understandable and relevant to everyday life. Presumably the selection is from those that he could get permission to reprint.

His enlightened views about raising animals for food, charity, and the risk of ignoring science generally and that of climate change in particular, are well known to his followers and clearly reiterated in these essays. Some other brilliant suggestions to improve ones personal ethical behaviour were new to me and very controversial. His stance on abortion and euthanasia are predictable and carefully reasoned out. His arguments on limitations to free speech, and about doping in professional sports are innovative and controversial. Some suggestions seem only marginally connected to ethics (at least to personal ethics), such as recommending that airlines charge travellers based on the combined weight of their bodies and their luggage since that relates best to their actual cost for moving that person.

His passion for ethical treatment of all animals shows up again and again, and is almost enough to make me swear off meat, not only for the sake of the animals, but also as a contribution to the effort to combat climate change. But when he condemns all forms of fishing because of the distress it causes the fish, I become uneasy. I like to think that the enjoyment that I get out of being able to deceive a trout or bass with a fly of my own design counts for more than the minor discomfort of a small puncture in the mouth of a fish. And as I invariably practice catch and release, I am free to imagine the pleasure and relief a fish may experience as it swims back to safety. He fails to address the cruelty of animal deaths in the natural course of events as an alternative to us killingly them quickly and painlessly. And leaving an animal to die after being mauled and maimed by a predator is not being kind; nature can be as cruel as keeping a disabled human being who wants to die alive by artificial means. The difference is that we can’t determine the wishes of an inarticulate animal with no concept of the finality of death (as far as we can tell).

A great collection of essays from my favourite philosopher, this book can be read selectively for topics that interest you. Most essays are only two to three pages in length.

Thanks, Andra.

This chronological account of explorers, adventurers, empires, and sciences is a very broad and incredibly detailed history of civilization from our origins in the Rift Valley to the space age. Rader has sensitive antennae for the quirky, little known details that make history seem relevant, not at all like the dry memorization of dates and facts I had to learn in high school. In some ways it is similar to Yuval Noel Harari’s Sapiens and Jacob Bronowskl’s The Ascent Of Man but with more details about daredevil explorers and scientists breakthroughs. The book is packed with colourful characters and details of many cultures.

There are hundreds of minute surprising details about people, places and events that were completely new to me, not the least of which is the obscure derivations of many words and place names in the English language. For example the Lacine Rapids at Montreal were so named because Jacques Cartier thought they were the only obstacle to his reaching China when sailing up the St. Lawrence River.

Only one great quote among many: “ If earth’s history were a day, life appeared at 4:00 a.m,, fish at 10:24 p.m., dinosaurs at 11:45 p.m., and humans at 11:59 p.m. All recorded history took place within the last quarter second, and Columbus sailed at 1/100th of a second to midnight.”

It is not hard to predict the buildup to the last few chapter’s boosterism for space exploration and eventual colonization of other planets as Rader leads the reader to compare today’s space explorers to past adventurers and leaders. After all, he is a manager at SpaceX, Elon Musk’s private enterprise to promote space exploration. But I am amazed that a rocket scientist also knows and relates more interesting historical details than most academic historians. And he seems to uncritically equate continuous technical progress with moral progress, a common but not easy position to defend. His other questionable assumption is that human life on earth is doomed in the near future, rather than millions of years from now when our descendants will be fried by the sun. His infectious enthusiasm for space exploration and colonization with the details of possibilities almost, but not quite, convinced me that my grandchildren or great grandchildren might some day decamp to Mars. But it seems likely that some black swans will arise and dampen the enthusiasm, as they have for almost all explorers.

The writing style is prosaic with mostly short two-line definitive sentences, like the clipped stucco speech of the author on his podcasts. The few attempts at humour generally fall flat. One real criticism is that in a long chapter about the rise and fall of China as a world power, there is no mention of the Great Wall. Perhaps it is just too insignificant in such an epic account of mankind.

This book is not for everyone but there are so many interesting little facts that it kept me engaged.

Thanks, Ian.

This new and extensively-documented expose of the dangers of generic drugs is alarming enough to make anyone who reads it reluctant to take any medication, not just the generic versions. Almost no one in the industry escapes the analysis with their integrity untarnished, except for a few frustrated obsessive-compulsive FDA inspectors. Their documentation of pervasive fraud, lies, bribery, deceit, and unsafe manufacturing processes are almost routinely ignored or downgraded by higher-up bureaucrats insensitive to their mandated need to protect the public and responsive only to political pressures and the public perception of the need for cheaper drugs.

The first half of the book deals almost exclusively with the criminally flawed manufacture and distribution of hundreds of generic drugs by the now defunct Indian company Ranbaxy, whose bosses reaped huge financial rewards by promoting fraudulent unsafe practices and remain free of criminal charges. But the problems are not limited to foreign companies, given the complex worldwide supply chains that all pharmaceutical companies are obliged to use. The brand name companies that research and develop new drugs are not above using dirty tricks either, often tweaking their formulations to extend patents, using suppliers of dubious integrity, and questionable manufacturing practices in their own laboratories.

One of the most disappointing revelations is the complicity of the FDA bureaucracy. Whistleblowers are silenced or ignored and given no encouragement or legal protection. The practice of giving foreign manufacturers advance notice of inspections ensures that they can clean up the books and the plants, deceive the inspectors, and escape censorship. Eban documents that there were at one point at least 180 manufacturing plants using “dual-tract” production practices, one for first world countries with some degree of oversight, and a second hidden production line for drugs destined for third world counties, mainly in Africa. They knew where no one would detect the defective, inactive or contaminated drugs, not the least of which were AIDS drugs.

I recognized many of the drugs discussed as ones I frequently prescribed. And I can relate to the annoying but essential practice of unannounced public health inspections. We were obliged to buy a second office refrigerator exclusively for the vaccines we used and to keep a detailed log of the temperatures in it 24/7, with regular reporting and a backup battery pack.

For some drugs, the requirement for generic companies to show “bioequivalence” the brand name drug is meaningless. The demonstration of similar blood levels to that of the brand name drug does not take into account the pharmacodynamics of timed release nor the bodily distribution. One of the drugs I prescribed a lot (ursodeoxycholic acid, at one point extracted and supplied from gallbladder bile in Canada Packers slaughterhouses) is absorbed from the gut and acts in the liver and bile ducts but never enters the systemic blood in any significant amounts. Whenever I had suspicions that a generic drug was not as effective as the brand name one, it was my practice to write “no substitution” on the prescription for the brand name version. Does this still work? But sometimes it was impossible to know if either or both versions were defective.

Thanks, Kathy.

This book is a valuable consumer’s guide to the pharmaceutical industry, as valuable for medical practitioners and pharmacists as it is for the public. I anticipate that it will be deemed alarmist by many in the industry, but it is so extensively documented that only willful blindness could lead to denial of its importance. It largely overlooks the ethical lapses of the brand name pharmaceutical companies but these are equally disturbing, as amply documented by Gerald Posner’s Pharma, which is a natural companion work to this one. To be informed in this area is to become a sceptic about any claims on any bottle of any medicine.

The stories related by the Vancouver author are connected only by her experience, research and insight into how we are all connected in one way or another to salt water. The seven chapters involve, in order: underwater filming for Hollywood films, sailing for fun around the world, refugees crossing of the Mediterranean to Europe, life in a makeshift house boating community threatened by municipal bylaws, cleaning up ocean plastic debris, the cruise ship culture of exploitation of workers, and the efforts to save the Fraser River sturgeon from extinction.

The Epilogue updates the stories in reverse order until about 2018.

Although the date of publication is 2020, no episodes relate events past 2018. The author could not have foreseen the effects of Covid-19 when predicting “As more people in the developing world enter the middle class ……. cruise ship profits will soar.”

This is aa easy, interesting and sobering read that deserves wide acknowledgement as a seminal environmental warning.

Thanks, Ian.

The life of the late Montreal-born poet, novelist, and singer/songwriter is detailed in this thoroughly researched biography. The author had extensive access to her subject as well as many of his friends, coworkers, paramours and associates and gives readers a quite fawning laudatory account of his troubled life, excluding his last four years. She was apparently blind to, or willing to overlook, the seamier features of his character, as were most women whom he charmed.

His almost insatiable, indiscriminate sexual appetite lead to relationships with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of women, but few long term relationships, none of which were even remotely monogamous. But he had the unique ability, the envy of all philanderers, to maintain friendships with almost all of his ex-lovers, perhaps because most of them were in the same bohemian counterculture and expected nothing permanent. The exception was the mother of his two children who, years after their relationship ended, sued him for support.

His New York friends in the late 50s and 60s, when he was an aspiring poet and novelist, included a who’s-who list of the famous from the world of the arts, including Janis Joplin, Andy Warhol, Joni Mitchell, Simon and Garfunkel, Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, Allan Ginsberg, Frank Zappa, Tiny Tim, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Joan Baez, and Jimmy Hendrix.

His quest for meaning in his life was never fully satisfied, as he pursued various belief systems, including indulging in Christian Scientism, Hinduism, and Zen Buddhism while always observing Jewish traditions. He spent five years in a spartan Buddhist monastery, becoming an ordained monk and practicing austere meditation, all while continuing his indulgence in heavy drinking, although he apparently eased up on his use of other drugs in his later years. Troubled by intermittent depression, some of his poetry and songs show his gloomy fatalism.

My wife had a similar experience to that related by guests arriving at his shack in Tennessee who were greeted at the door by a stark naked host, having had the same experience when, on a date as a naïve young nurse, (B.C.-Before Cam), she was invited to Gordon Lightfoot’s mansion in Toronto.

The details of the process of making music, well described here, was an eye-opener for me. The number of rewrites of some poems and lyrics run into the hundreds with some never used for anything and others purloined or stolen by other artists without regard for intellectual property rights. The mixing and matching of different lyrics with different musician combinations is a very complicated process that must be confusing, even to those involved. He was so naive that his finances were ruined when his financial manager (and one time lover) scammed him out of an estimated 7-10 million dollars in the 1990s.

Being a concrete thinker, I seldom enjoy reading modern poetry with lines that I find to be generally enigmatic, confusing, or even nonsensical, and have read little of Cohen’s prose or poetry, much of which is apparently graphic pornography-except those that made their way into song- but what gorgeous songs!

There are so many sides to Cohen that a dozen adjectives will not adequately describe the whole of him but here are some: shy, self-effacing, humble, perplexed, sex-obsessed, gentle, naive, troubled, charming, generous, kind, and above all, extremely talented as a singer-songwriter.

Although I enjoyed reading this interesting biography, books can be enjoyed only once or twice but music can be appreciated forever.

Thanks Michelle.