Author: thepassionatereader

This somewhat dated autobiography is really two books meshed into one. The first is a detailed account of Oliver’s encounters with and assessment of many public figures, mostly prominent world politicians as seen by an unapologetic news hound, as the subtitle suggests. The second is an adventure documentary of the life of a risk-loving outdoorsman who enjoyed the challenges of reporting from the front lines of wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and the Middle East and long wilderness treks to shoot dangerous rapids in rivers of the far north in a canoe, often accompanied by well-known Canadian politicians, most notably Pierre Elliot Trudeau.

After a troubled childhood in Prince Rupert, shuffled between homes by alcoholic parents, Craig Oliver landed a job as a part time radio announcer there, then worked his way up to become a full time reporter for CBC. After a falling out with the bloated CBC bureaucracy, he switched to CTV, and became their chief parliamentary correspondent, a job he still performs.

The hard-drinking, lax sexual mores, and cutthroat culture of male-dominant national journalism (and many politicians, though by no means all) is portrayed in detail without apologies. There is a liberal bias to Oliver’s outlook, which he recognizes and acknowledges, but his assessment of the personalities of all the politicos he rubbed shoulders with, from John Diefenbaker to Ronald Reagan to Stephen Harper, seems balanced and fair for the most part.

It seems a pity that this book was written in 2011, and thus does not include any insights into the inner workings of our current crop of politicians. But that is understandable, given that Oliver is now 80, and has been legally blind for several years.

The writing is sparse with no wasted words and there are abundant humorous anecdotes. Jason Kenny is quoted as saying of Stephen Harper’s autocratic style of governing “The communications director for the prime minister does not believe in communicating.”

For anyone interested in the inside story of Canadian history over those 50+ years covered here, this book will be a great companion to the duller standard texts.

I walk every day for a least an hour in all kinds of weather, always varying my route, so I thought this book might be interesting. Of necessity as my French is limited to some common words and phrases, I read the English translation. In France, this book has apparently been on some best-seller list. I am not sure when the French original was published.

Detailing the musings of Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Rousseau, and Thoreau with eloquently expressed but ethereal generalities about the virtues of walking, I found the first half of the book quite pedantic, bordering on boring. These famous walkers would all now be considered extreme eccentrics if not insane. And for some periods of their lives they did nothing but walk daily, every day, and all day. I have never considered walking as a goal in itself, but as a means of getting somewhere, enjoying nature, enjoying an interesting conversation with other walkers or a easy way to avoid distractions and simply think. The chapter on Emanuel Kant’s very regimented daily walks contains his great quote: “It is during that continuous but automatic effort of the body, that the mind is placed at one’s disposal.”

The second half of this book comes alive in places starting with the Pilgrimage chapter. Detailing the symbolism of sacrifice, spiritual development, repentance, atonement, and forgiveness of the pilgrimages of Christians to various holy sites, the history of these pilgrimages is interesting. Perhaps the most famous nomadic walker of all time was Jesus of Nazareth, with his most famous walk being from Herod’s palace to Golgotha. There is, however, no mention of another famous pilgrimage, that obligatory walk for all devout fit Moslems to Mecca, modelled after the journeys of the Prophet, nor that of pious Hindus to the upper Ganges for purification. For nonreligious walkers, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, a modern novel by Rachael Joyce provides a secular version of pilgrimage, full of similar symbolism and more mystique without the overtly religious connotations, and is a delight to read.

The chapter on the ancient cynics is just as confusing, rambling and incoherent as their rants were. The description of Mahatma Gandhi’s protest walks on behalf of Indian farmers in South Africa and his famous salt tax march to the sea in India provides an historical perspective to the modern era’s proliferation of protest marches as political statements. But there is no mention of long walks associated with evil or ambiguous outcomes, such as Mao’s long march.

One striking feature of this book; all of the famous walkers were men, and all of the pronouns are male. Were there no significant female walkers in history? In my walking group at our complex there are 15 women and two men.

Overall, I have mixed feeling about this little book. There are some great aphorisms, and some interesting history lessons from the great walkers of the past, but rather than reading it, I think I might have benefitted more by going for a long walk.

Readers who enjoy murder mysteries with more suspects than one can keep track of, and with surprises in the last chapter, all love Louise Penny’s novels all featuring Chief Inspector Gamache, and all set in Quebec. My wife has read and enjoyed all of her books, and thinks that although they are rather formulaic with the same characters showing up in several stories, each can stand alone. This is the first and only one I have read, and I did so only because it is on for discussion in my book club. The characters all seemed like exaggerated caricatures to me and there are all of the usual requisite lies and false leads- and the apparently upstanding closet gays and derelicts who are not who they seem to be. I will not give away any of the plot with it’s byzantine twists. At least, unlike many of this genre, nothing was predicable far in advance.

There are at least two blatant errors that a copy-editor or the author should have picked up. First, there is the oft-repeated assertion that opioid use causes dilation of pupils. Any pharmacology or medical student knows that they universally cause pupillary constriction. And one character is said to have died by being run over by a combine being used for harvesting hay. As any eight-year old farm kid knows, a combine is used for harvesting grains, not hay.

I have no issue with the use of very foul language in novels, when it is from the mouth of a character who would be expected to use such language. But it seems far less appropriate when the author uses it in the narrative, as occasionally happens here as it seems to indicate a paucity of vocabulary when you cannot think of an alternative adjective that would be appropriate in polite company. That alone ruined several of John Irving’s novels for me.

I did not really enjoy this book, but I can understand why some readers will. Tastes differ.

This inappropriately titled, extensively researched new biography of the one-legged Virginia Hall documents her extraordinary feats of bravery and determination as an undercover agent in the French Resistance during World War 2, as an agent of Churchill’s Special Operations Executive and the American Office of Strategic Services. Seemingly addicted to risky endeavours, she worked after the war as an agent of the of Central Intelligence Agency after having done more than any other woman in history to ensure an Allied victory in France. Working in a world dominated by male chauvinists, she never received the recognition that she clearly deserved. Even the awarding to her of the French Legion of Honour, the British Order of the British Empire and the American Distinguished Service Cross were low-key unpublicized events, soon forgotten.

Many of her accomplishments were made possible by refusing to be squeamish about such techniques as using a madam and her girls to deliberately extract information from Nazi soldiers, and to ensure they got syphilis or gonorrhoea, and to get them addicted to heroin. Her own drive to ensure an Allied victory was powered by extensive use of Benzedrine.

For those of us who are geographically challenged Purnell provided a very helpful map of the relevant areas of France. There is also a useful list of some of the various operatives with their aliases and code names. Even so, I had some difficulty in keeping all the people and names straight.

The intrigue and double-crossing of the undercover world is on vivid display- her work was compromised by a mercenary double agent posing as a devout Catholic priest who passed her plans and secrets on to the Nazis. After documenting the savagery of Klaus Barbie, the Nazi ‘butcher of Lyon’ she was dismayed by the CIA’s insistence on providing him with protection and escape to Bolivia after the war. She apparently had no qualms about providing tons of money on behalf of the CIA to influence the outcome of the 1948 Italian election- foreign powers trying to influence sovereign state’s elections is obviously not a new phenomenon.

As must be true of any biography written long after the death of the subject, some speculation is required in attributing motives and emotions, but these all seem to be cohesive and in keeping with the known characteristics of the subject here.

The geographic details and the real horrors of wartime France documented here reminded me of the fictionalized account of similar circumstances in Kristen Hannah’s The Nightingale.

This is a very educational and engaging documentation of a unsung hero that deserves more recognition than she ever got in her lifetime, although she apparently humbly at one point referred to herself as a woman of no importance.

Michelle Dextras suggested this Irish author’s books in response to one of my reviews, and I appreciate such suggestions. Toibin is the author of seven novels, some poetry, and some journalism. In deciding which of his books to start with, I rejected the newest, House of Names, as it was described as akin to science fiction, which I usually do not enjoy. Perhaps I should try to expand my choices, but why would I do that in my dotage?

First, my only negative comment. There are no Acknowledgements in this book. Did no one provide any help with its writing and publication, or was this just an oversight?

This story centres on a youngish Irish widow with four children living in the author’s hometown of Enniscorthy, in Wexford county, south of Dublin, in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Much of the story must be based on recollections of his childhood there, including the experiences of a stuttering boy in a boarding school and being fatherless from age ten. This was at the time when ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland were just beginning. The protests and killings in Northern Ireland and the retaliation in the south are described accurately. Some of the characters are Fianna Fáil sympathizers rooting for the violent IRA; others belong to the liberal Fine Gael party; Toibin reveals no bias in his political treatment, although some of his relatives were members of the IRA.

This story does not rely on the plot to hold the reader’s interest, but on the character development and the masterful use of the language. Where a lesser writer would have inserted a dramatic twist such as finding the dead body of the rebellious teenage daughter who has gone missing for three days during Dublin riots, Toibin has her show up unharmed with a plausible simple explanation. There are no sudden surprises, and, refreshingly, no sex or foul language whatsoever, and no gratuitous violence.

Anyone from or having lived in the south of Ireland will love the detailed lyrical description of the landscape and local culture, and classical music aficionados will love the symbolism and metaphors of the efforts of singers and the different emotions and sensations evoked by different works and interpretations. And anyone who grew up in the late sixties or earlier, even if not Irish, will enjoy recalling the primitive means of communication and navigation in an era with limited black- and-white TV, unreliable public phone booths, manually entered business ledgers, and no internet, cell phones, email, texting or GPS.

As the story develops, the mourning, sensitive, insecure widow and some of her relatives seem to be unable to carry on a normal conversation without taking umbrage at what someone said, finding insults where none were intended, and becoming quite paranoid. But the introspection and self-analysis common in novels emphasizing characters rather than plot is not overdone here. Nora only very gradually develops striking assertiveness and finds the inner strength to fight for justice for her family and her own rights. Only at the very end of the book, three years after his death, when she finally removes her husband’s clothing from the wardrobe, and burns his love letters that she has saved, does she finally overcome her grief, and even then we are left with doubts about her future.

An uplifting sensitive story that I quite enjoyed. I may try his Blackwater Lightship sometime soon although I rarely read more than one book by the same author. Thanks, Michelle.

I checked this book out of the library because I have long had an interest in the interface of neuroscience, philosophy, ethics, and daily decision-making, and it seemed to be relevant.

The founder of the Lab of Misfits, Beau Lotto is a British/American neuroscientist whose research mostly relates to how humans perceive their external world through their five senses. After struggling through this difficult work, I am not sure if he is a genius who is so smart that I can’t possibly understand him or an arrogant elitist who tries hard to impress us lesser beings by using endless disconnected narratives, analogies and linguistic jargon. With either possibility, he failed to impress me. With chapter titles such as “Information is Meaningless”, “The Illusion of Illusions”, “Changing The Future Past”, and “Celebrate Doubt”, it seems the one constant in his message is that we can’t really know anything and everything we think we know is a delusion. Only he and his misfits apparently have the insight to understand this, although he attempts to convince the rest of us that this is true- and fails. And it seems peculiar that this professor who specializes in sensory perceptions and misfits does not even mention synesthesia, the not-rare varied phenomenon of crossed wiring of sensory inputs resulting in people smelling colours, seeing sounds or tasting names. It strikes me that someone with this syndrome (many do not recognize that they are uniquely wired neurologically) would make for a great central figure in a work of fiction. Does anyone know of such a novel?

Abundant use of silly and annoying switching of fonts, spacing, capitals, italics and bold type in the both text and insets, obscure visual tricks, and meaningless line diagrams may make the message seem erudite and profound to some readers, but not this one. A quote, “At bottom, our lives are in fact nothing more than millions and millions of sequential knee-jerk reflexive responses.” would seem to deny the possibility of us exerting any free will- or of us following his later advice to modify our lives by questioning our every assumption. He never really addresses the conundrum of free will.

What does such gobbledegook as “Understanding reduces the complexity of data by collapsing the dimensionality of information to a lower set of known variables.” mean for those of us whose language skills are average? And there are literally hundreds of such obscure sentences in this book.

Unless you are in need of a humbling education by someone who purports to have insights that you could not possibly understand, I cannot recommend this book. But did I learn anything? Yes- be a bit more cautious when deciding to check a book out of the library, and to ignore the Advanced Praise blurbs of people whose names I do not recognize.

I can envision many henpecked husbands buying this novel just by considering the pleasure suggested by the title. But, like someone releasing a sulphurous colonic emission into a crowded elevator, hoping to never be identified as the source, this wife is secretive-and deadly. But the title is misleading- the wife of note is only selectively silent. Perhaps the author had sales potential in mind when deciding on the title-creative writing gurus always insist that the title should be the last decision made for almost any book.

This is the first and, unfortunately, the only novel by the late Toronto-based author, as she died shortly after it was published. The complicated story is based on the lives of seemingly ordinary people in modern Chicago, although almost all of them are deeply flawed. They are a varied lot, including a waitress in a sleazy restaurant/bar, a entrepreneurial home renovator given to bouts of depressiony with an enormous, indiscriminate libido, his equally lecherous widowed boyhood friend turned salesman with a very immature daughter, who is a social sciences university student, and a psychotherapist. Given the demographics of Chicago, it is perhaps an oversight, but a forgivable one, that there are no blacks and no hispanics even mentioned.

Some of the introspective self-analysis that some characters engage in borders on psychobabble, but there are also keen insights into basic human frailties. In one sense it is a classic love triangle romance, but one side of the triangle becomes a modern day Lady MacBeth with the benefit of training in Adlerian psychotherapy. The ending is far from predicable, with an ingenious twist and a touch of ambiguity. At about page 200, I guessed at a possible ending but was completely wrong.

Having spent a few days in Chicago every year for over twenty years, I have fond memories of several of the iconic landmarks that are featured, most notably the bar at the Drake Hotel, where I spent several evenings with great friends that I only saw once a year.

The writing is engaging and straightforward. For most of the book, the short chapters alternate between “Her” and “Him” narrated by a third person observer, until in Part 2, there no longer is a “Him”.

A very enjoyable light read.

This Was Not The Plan Christina Alger. 2016, 337 pages.

It must be difficult for a young female novelist to narrate a complex story in the first person singular of a 35 year old widower with a five year old son and a highly dysfunctional family, but Alger does this with aplomb and humour. A discontented high powered workaholic litigation lawyer working in a big NYC firm makes a drunken highly inappropriate speech at a company party, and gets fired instead of being promoted to partner. This sets him off on a strange new quest for self discovery and work/life balance. The plot thickens as he gradually sets new priorities, tries to break free of the scripted life he had envisioned having, meets a lot of eccentric characters far removed from his previous circle of New York high society duplicitous acquaintances and friends, and learns to appreciate different values, priorities, and family loyalties. There is little that is entirely predicable in the complex plot, including in the final chapter set more than a year after the main events.

Some of the dialogue seems strained with unrealistic, mushy, sentimental speeches, but the prose flows beautifully laced with startling humour, and all of the character somehow seem realistic. The depiction of New York high society is far from flattering, given their dedication to showing off conspicuous wealth, crass materialism and making the right connections. I hope this is an exaggeration of the shallowness of the upper crust, but I have no way of knowing for sure. Likewise I am not the appropriate person to even comment on the right balance between work and family life, having never found that balance.

The humour shines through; “She raises her eyebrows: no mean feat given her obviously deep commitment to Botox.”

This is a light fun read that I thoroughly enjoyed. No prize-winner, but good relaxation.

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I saw this title at the library, read the back cover, and checked it out. I have always been interested in the mind-brain conundrum and the fascinating lessons learned from the study of various types of brain injury. This is a documentary of the most extensively-studied memory-deficient patient ever, written by the grandson of the neurosurgeon responsible for the damage, but it is much more than that. It is also a documentation of the changing and, by modern standards, primitive state of the art of psychiatric treatment and “psychosurgery” until very recently. The esteem of the Nobel prize in medicine is forever tarnished by the awarding of it to Egas Moniz in 1949 for his development of the frontal lobotomy.

H.M. underwent ablation of part his normal temporal lobes by a pioneering neurosurgeon in 1953 in an effort to treat his epilepsy, in turn the result of previous brain trauma. The resulting complex memory problems were very extensively studied by many researchers over four decades until his death in 2008, resulting in hundreds of papers, and in a complete change in the theories regarding how we process, store and retrieve information and memories.

The list of psychologists, psychiatrists and neurosurgeons involved with H.M. is extensive and include many famous names, including the eccentric flamboyant Dr. William Scofield, who was so convinced of the value of frontal lobotomies that he performed one on his psychotic wife. Their biased attitudes and enthusiasm for their own approaches to problems in the era before controlled trials, and the damage resulting from this is very well documented. Their personality conflicts, eccentricities, unjustified enthusiasm, and ambitions are at times frightening, although I can assure readers that there is no shortage of eccentrics with blind ambition, hypertrophied egos and personality conflicts in modern academic medicine. In this menagerie of egotistical researchers, Wilder Penfield, the founder of the Montreal Neurological Institute stands out as the most cautious ethical, methodical man of the lot. He never did or advocated frontal lobotomies. One psychologist seemed to think of H.M. as her household pet, controlling access to him, and not bothering with such mundane matters as informed consent for the research she and others did on him. Most of the story takes place in Hartford Connecticut or at the Yale New Haven Hospital. I realized that I probably crossed paths with some of the researchers during my three years of training at Yale, but, appropriately for a discussion about memory research, if so, I have forgotten.

What has hopefully changed since the 1950s is the societal tolerance for experimentation without proper ethical constraints and review. The use of various forms of frontal lobotomy to treat a wide variety of mental problems, with little regard for informed consent continued until at least the 1980s and at one time it was even used to ‘treat’ homosexuality. The sliding scale of unethical experimentation by doctors ranging from the atrocities of those in Nazi concentration camps to electroshock therapy is discussed, but only superficially. The modern reader may think that electroshock treatment is cruel and condemn those who applied electrodes to non-consenting subjects to induce convulsions but it is still being used occasionally, although it has been subjected to only limited randomized controlled trials, and is being gradually replaced by focused magnetic brain stimulation. I assisted in ECT a few times in the late 1960s. (At that time, I lived in the now defunct London Psychiatric Hospital for two years as an impoverished medical student, getting free room and board in exchange for some questionably appropriate services.) It is easy to forget that there were very limited options for controlling violent psychotic patients in the days before the extensive array of chemical straightjackets now available. And it is very easy to condemn the ethical standards of our forbearers by applying the standards we now use to them. Will our grandchildren condemn our unethical pollution of the environment which we will leave them?

The unseemly fights between various institutions for possession of the brain of H.M. following his death in 2008 dramatizes the blind conviction of those involved that the study of it is going to forever solve the mystery of how Homo sapiens collect, store and retrieve memories. The hyperbole about the important information to be gleaned from the study of one brain is grating. How useful can the study of one brain be, particularly one that came from a man who died after developing severe dementia on top of his pre-existing brain injuries.

The author intersperses stories of his personal eccentricities and adventures, sometimes with a tenuous connection to the theme, such as his bullfighting in Mexico and his illegal climbing of the Great Pyramid. There are some glaring lapses in copy-editing and proof-reading. “…they laid open men whilst alive-criminals received out of prison the king- and while they were still breathing…”.

This book is enlightening for those readers interested in the history of medicine, and particularly the history of psychiatry, but otherwise not a must-read.

Having designed a few randomized controlled trials, participated in others, and sat on a safety review board for another in my previous life, I thought this up-to-date scientific review of the methodology and its applications would be a good exercise for my old brain. I was not disappointed. Starting with the very early crude randomized trial to determine the best treatment for scurvy, Leigh reviews the many applications of randomized controlled trials in medicine, social sciences, public policy implementation, politics, and philanthropy with many surprising results.

I was not surprised to learn that, when subjected to good scientific study, many assumptions we never question are false. Knee surgery for a torn meniscus is no better than a sham operation. Neighbourhood Watch programs do not make neighbourhoods safer, and Scare Straight programs designed to frighten high risk youth out of a life of crime produce more criminals. Providing micro-finance loans to impoverished third world women does not help to lift them out of poverty. But over 1000 randomized controlled trials were used effectively to increase the educational value of Sesame Street programs for toddlers. As I stroll through a drug store, it strikes me that few of the thousands of products on display have been assessed in any meaningful scientific study, let alone the gold standard of a double blind randomized controlled trial. We have a long difficult task ahead of us if we are to replace anecdotes and endorsement by charismatic pushers with vested interests in selling useless or harmful products and treatments. In this regard, highly relevant to recent Ontario debates, I can find no randomized controlled trials of any treatments for autism that have yet reported results, although several are in progress. Why can we not wait for the results that show what, if anything, actually works before participating in street protests about the lack of funding for treatments that may not work at all? And the recently completed Apple Heart Study using Apple watches to diagnose cardiac arrhythmias enrolled 420,000 participants but no controls to determine the health impact if any. My hunch is that it probably just increased the anxiety of participants. This was a wasted opportunity, funded by Apple and Stanford.

It is in the realm of marketing and political persuasion that I have some concerns about the use of randomized controlled trials. When huge corporations with tons of data about all of us can use randomized highly targeted marketing trials to persuade us to buy products we don’t need, and cynical political operatives can use this powerful marketing tool to make us believe their lies, should there not be some controls imposed? But by whom?

Even ardent supporters of randomized controlled trials need to acknowledge some limitations to their use. A recent long insightful essay in The New Yorker bemoaned the lack of evidence of how to best wean patients off of various psychiatric drugs. As most trials of drugs are heavily reliant on funding from the pharmaceutical industry, it is not surprising that there are no randomized trials to determine how to stop taking prescribed drugs. And even in the early days of liver transplantation when the immediate mortality was 50 %, faced with a youth in the iCU in coma from untreatable chronic liver disease, it would have been unethical for me to use a coin toss to determine whether or nor to put her name on a list for transplantation. Some such decisions do not need to be informed by a randomized controlled trial. The real difficulty is to determine which ones do.

This book is a very useful primer for anyone interested in how good science can help inform decision-making in medicine, public policy implementation, education, politics and philanthropy. And an easy enjoyable read.

The interesting question this novel address is certainly worth asking: to what extent is someone responsible for the consequences if they know or suspect that a family member, friend or acquaintance is in mental distress, or dangerous, but fails to act on that knowledge or hunch? A loner Maine university student writes a dark and sinister essay for his English Composition course, and four years later walks into the local mall with an AR-15 assault rifle, kills four and then shoots himself. Recriminations and finger-pointing ensue and are massively amplified by social media, resulting in lost friendships and jobs, exacerbation of anxieties and depressions in many members of the university town community. The plot thickens as alliances and friendships are disrupted and realigned. I hope that the vividly described drunken debauchery and casual hookups of university students is exaggerated, but I do not know.places

Elsie Juska is a creative writing teacher in a Pennsylvania university and a lot of the writing is indeed creative, but also obscure, and some of it, to me, seems to be simply silly. In places, it seems as though Juska wishes to impress the literati who write erudite book reviews and may like such descriptions as “The heat crept under her hair.” By the time I got half way through I began to collect some phrases and sentences that seemed to be pure gobbledegook.

“A light snow of panic flurried in her brain.”

“She absorbed the article in fragments, like flashes of an X-Ray machine.”

“Her pulse was tripping in her veins.”

“The sky was purple, soft, foggy.”

” The shadows of the trees yawned across the lawn.”

“A loud sound, a buzzing, climbed into her ears.”

“Bare maples…..looked like naked lungs.”

“She had rivers in her veins.”

” Then she looked at her another beat.”

Where was the copy-editor and proofreader to correct the impossible assertions and nonsense syntax? At one point the words “Two thousand one hundred and seventy one” stand alone in the middle of a paragraph with no reference to anything. A man’s beard is said to need trimming, although at most it is 30 hours since it was trimmed. A girl drinks a 40 calorie vodka and Diet Coke. (A shot of vodka is 96 calories.)

The story is interesting but endless introspective self-analysis by most of the characters, the pretentious writing style and absent proofreading and editing grated on me. A good plot damaged by poor writing. But then, I am not part of the literati.

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Having found myself in Salem one Halloween evening earlier this century with a group of friends, for a re-enactment of one of the witch trials of 1692, when I noticed this documentary in the library I signed it out. On that visit I was a bit surprised that the dark reality of the town’s past was being exploited as a source of amusement and tourist’s dollars.

This exhaustively researched book is the definitive history of the witch trials, but it is far more than that. It is also a vivid portrait of the harsh realities of life for Puritans living in small-town Massachusetts, surrounded by French, Indian, Catholic, Anglican, Quaker, and Baptist enemies. Adhering to strict interpretations of the Bible, with the apocalypse believed to be imminent, they nevertheless were a feuding and dysfunctional, often inbred society with almost no recognized authorities to establish order. The roles of clergy, lawyers, judges, and politicians overlapped with no universally recognized standards. What was universal was acceptance that a very real devious Satan could possess anyone, even without their knowledge, and wreak havoc. With frequent early childhood deaths, starvation and all manner of unexplained natural calamities, it was easy to find Satan responsible for anything that was otherwise inexplicable. Add to this the surprisingly frequent heavy drinking (men only) accepted by the clergy and laity alike, and the drudgery, and deprivation of the subservient women, and and something had to give.

Enter a few teenage girls without any outlet for their frustrations, facing a bleak future, lacking any attention, and the stage is set. Very late in the book, Schiff speculates along Freudian lines that the girls, and a couple of slaves suffered from what was then called hysteria and would now be called conversion reactions. But she seems to be unduly concerned that many of her 21st century readers still believe in a personal devil and never counters that possibility. It is, however, not a great stretch from believing in miracles and angels to believing in devils and witches- Trump frequently claimed that Mueller was on a witch hunt. The accused often confessed to schizophrenic-like hallucinations-“If you could save your life by admitting that you flew through the air on a pole, wouldn’t you?” In any case, the teens level all kinds of accusations of witchcraft and devil devotion, complete with apparently magical signs to prove their allegations. Men accuse their wives and daughters, daughters accuse their parents and no one is immune, not even clergymen. After a panel of judges and jurymen, often with scores to settle with the accused, have completed their deliberations, twenty people, including one clergyman, and only one who confessed to witchcraft were hanged as witches, and another man was trampled to death under planks.

The aftermath has parallels with other similar sad episodes. Some locals apparently still hold grudges and refuse to discuss the trials at all. This sounds very much like the residual effects on the local population of the slaughter of the Black Donnelly’s in Lucan, Ontario in the 1880s.

The prominent players in this sad saga often have modern relevance. Fledgling Harvard University figures prominently. Clergymen Increase Mather, at the time, was the president of Harvard, and his son Cotton Mather and he were both intimately involved and supportive of the judges. The chief prosecutor endowed a considerable sum to Harvard and has a dormitory there named after him. The clergyman who was hanged as a witch was a Harvard grad. Many prominent citizens even into the twentieth century have ancestors that were involved in the trials, or are descendants of the witches, including Oliver Wendell Holmes, Clara Barton, Louisa May Alcott, Walt Disney, and Lucille Ball.

For all the carefully researched erudite analysis in this humourless pedantic book, it is not an easy read although educational and cautionary. Unless you live in Massachusetts, are a dedicated history buff, or suspect that there are witches hiding in your family tree, I cannot recommend it.

A friend loaned me her autographed copy of this Ottawa novelist’s earlier novel after discussing my review of her 2014 novel Tell. I am not sure if my mood changed, the author’s writing skills improved dramatically, or I just didn’t like this story and format as much, but this one was a major disappointment for me.

In 2006, a small town Ontario widow is chosen at random to share in the 80th year birthday celebrations of Queen Elizabeth ll at Buckingham Palace only because they share the same birth date. On the way to the airport her car hits loose gravel and careens over a cliff into a ravine and she is thrown from it and severely injured, landing where she is invisible from the road above. The entire story from page six is her reminisces of her life and relations, as she drifts in and out of delirium and tries to stay alive and focused on possibly being found and rescued, by recalling the names of bones from her previous studies of a 1901 edition of Gray’s Anatomy.

There are touching recollections of what life was like in the small towns of Ontario in the whole of the 20th century, all very vivid, many of which I can relate to. The characters in her family and acquaintances are realistic if sometimes pathetic, funny, eccentric or sad. But for me the emphasis on nostalgia and the introspective sentimentality of the recollections became overwhelming and led me to hope that she would soon be rescued, still make her flight to London and dine with Her Royal Highness. She never does. Too bad.

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Any reader’s assessment of the 49 short essays in this memoir from our longtime parliamentarian and former prime minister will be tainted by his or her political position, especially in these days of extreme political polarization and rigid party loyalty. But no one who has paid any attention at all to Canadian politics over the last half century can dispute that “the little guy from Shawinigan ” was and is a colourful, loquacious, humorous and talented raconteur.

Like most political autobiography, much space is taken up here with self-congratulatory justification for the considerable accomplishments in his forty year life in politics, and there is scant mention of the more questionable and controversial decisions made or problematic personalities within the Liberal establishment. The invoking of the War Measures ACT during the FLQ crisis of 1972 is never mentioned, the name Margaret Trudeau does not appear even once, and Chretien’s Liberal nemesis and successor, Paul Martin is mentioned once-in a list of cabinet ministers. But there are great insights into the personalities and quirks of numerous world leaders and public figures, as seen by a close observer with a keen sense of humour. Inevitably there are biases but the reader will become nostalgic when reading about politicians of a forgotten era from different parties with very different objectives and political philosophies who could nevertheless work together and even become good friends. Joe Clark wrote the Foreword with kind words of praise for the author.

Chretien’s wry sense of humour comes through in numerous anecdotes he relates. A Quebec cop stopped him for speeding on his way to John Diefenbaker’s funeral in August, 1979. Jean explained that he wanted to get there on time to see for himself that Diefenbaker was truly dead, and the cop let him off without a ticket!

This is an enlightening, light, selective, insider’s history lesson, and a contrast to the boring or sensationalized current events stories we were fed at the time of the related events. A fun read.

My daughter in Kentucky recently gave me this hilarious novel. As she is a university teacher and formerly a program chair whose program has been cut by a severe reduction in state funding, I can understand why she recommended it. The theme is eerily similar, although the setting is in a fictitious small university town in Pennsylvania. The English Department, already severely dysfunctional with faculty that all seem to hate each other, is driven to extremes by rivalries, personality conflicts and unfulfilled ambitions- and by looming cuts in funding to the whole university. There are no straight men, (in the dramatic sense, not the sexual one) although the narrator, the cartoonish Wm. Henry Devereau Jr., seems, by the title, to regard himself as the only sane person in the whole university. This is in spite of the fact that he has an uncanny proclivity for making enemies and is a dedicated hypochondriac who could easily satisfy all the criteria for a number of mental disorders. In the course of one week he gets his nose smashed and pierced by an angry colleague, suspects his wife of infidelity with the Dean, threatens on public TV to kill a goose a day until he gets his budget, and exposes the eccentricities of the faculty, students and staff alike.

This is a great mockery of professorial stuffiness. A dog named Occam sniffs the crotch or humps the leg of anyone who comes near him and seems to be the only creature to understand and apply the principle of Occam’s Razor. There are drunkards, womanizers, and deadbeat tenured professors who happily bed down their graduate students in exchange for passing grades, and openly covet their colleagues’ wives. But this was written in the mid 1990s before the #Me-Too movement, and it comes across as both sad and funny. Everyone&, it seems, has ambitions to become a famous author, but no two of them can agree on what constitutes good writing.

I was not familiar with Richard Russo’s previous writing but this one is a light fun read and a great sendup to the pretensions of academic life in the arts. Some day when I need something light, I may try Nobody’s Fool or the more recent Everybody’s Fool.

I have to start this review with an embarrassing confession. I picked this one up at the library but it was only when I got to the description of William’s Syndrome on page 65 that I realized that I had read it before, and even now I am not sure how long ago that was. But there is enough intriguing information that I read to the finish again, and even so I would fail an exam on some of the neuroanatomical, neurotransmitter and genetic information.

Dr. Jordan Smoller is a Harvard psychiatrist and research scientist with broad-ranging knowledge about the brain/mind mechanisms behind both normal and abnormal human behaviour. His argument that there is no sharp demarcation between normal and abnormal seems intuitive, and belies the ever-expanding arbitrary criteria for mental illnesses. The false nature/nurture dichotomy is compellingly exploded by many examples of interaction between the two. This book is just modern enough to provide some examples from the exploding field of epigenetics i.e. the influence of (often random) environmental factors on the expression of various genes, leading to the intriguing suggestion that we may not only inherit some of our grandparents genes but also some of the environmental influences on their behaviour.

There is extensive discussion of many neural pathways involved in a variety of conditions ranging from autism to psychopathy to ‘reactive attachment disorder’ and PTSD. Most of these pathways and the various neurotransmitters involved will be less than memorable to most readers, including this one. Some of the evidence for differences in neuroanatomy and connections leading to specific psychological and psychiatric effects are convincing and backed by animal experiments; others are mere correlations that may not indicate causation. It is encouraging though, that treatments such as dopamine for autism, or propanol for PTSD, are being developed based on some theories that have been formulated from animal studies.

There is, as in most social sciences writing for the general public, some meaningless psychobabble that can be annoying and distracting. “Mothers create a sense of trust in their children by that kind of administration which in its quality combines sensitive care of the baby’s individual needs and a firm sense of trustworthiness within the trusted framework of their community’s lifestyle.”

In the Prologue, Dr. Smoller states emphatically that ‘it would be absurd to claim that we can explain or describe every mental phenomenon in material terms.’ Throughout the book he carefully avoids any suggestion that the mind exists only as a product of physical phenomenon, while simultaneously documenting more and more of those physical explanations for mental activities. This blind faith in Cartesian dualism is somewhat akin to the clerics who invoke a deity to explain the gaps in our knowledge- the ‘God Of The Gaps’, an ever diminishing role for a diety. And many serious scientists and respectable philosophers do assert that there is no such thing as a mind outside of the physical brain. But the author’s designated specialty of psychiatry depends on the belief that the mind is separate from the brain, even as modern imaging makes that distinction hazy. Will psychiatry some day become a subspecialty of neurology, such as movement disorders are now?

Not a must-read, unless you are a neuroscientist, a mental health worker or a worker in early childhood development.

I have to start this review with an embarrassing confession. I picked this one up at the library but it was only when I got to the description of William’s Syndrome on page 65 that I realized that I had read it before, and even now I am not sure how long ago that was. But there is enough intriguing information that I read to the finish again, and even so I would fail an exam on some of the neuroanatomical, neurotransmitter and genetic information.

Dr. Jordan Smoller is a Harvard psychiatrist and research scientist with broad-ranging knowledge about the brain/mind mechanisms behind both normal and abnormal human behaviour. His argument that there is no sharp demarcation between normal and abnormal seems intuitive, and belies the ever-expanding arbitrary criteria for mental illnesses. The false nature/nurture dichotomy is compellingly exploded by many examples of interaction between the two. This book is just modern enough to provide some examples from the exploding field of epigenetics i.e. the influence of (often random) environmental factors on the expression of various genes, leading to the intriguing suggestion that we may not only inherit some of our grandparents genes but also some of the environmental influences on their behaviour.

There is extensive discussion of many neural pathways involved in a variety of conditions ranging from autism to psychopathy to ‘reactive attachment disorder’ and PTSD. Most of these pathways and the various neurotransmitters involved will be less than memorable to most readers, including this one. Some of the evidence for differences in neuroanatomy and connections leading to specific psychological and psychiatric effects are convincing and backed by animal experiments; others are mere correlations that may not indicate causation. It is encouraging though, that treatments such as dopamine for autism, or propanol for PTSD, are being developed based on some theories that have been formulated from animal studies.

There is, as in most social sciences writing for the general public, some meaningless psychobabble that can be annoying and distracting. “Mothers create a sense of trust in their children by that kind of administration which in its quality combines sensitive care of the baby’s individual needs and a firm sense of trustworthiness within the trusted framework of their community’s lifestyle.”

In the Prologue, Dr. Smoller states emphatically that ‘it would be absurd to claim that we can explain or describe every mental phenomenon in material terms.’ Throughout the book he carefully avoids any suggestion that the mind exists only as a product of physical phenomenon, while simultaneously documenting more and more of those physical explanations for mental activities. This blind faith in Cartesian dualism is somewhat akin to the clerics who invoke a deity to explain the gaps in our knowledge- the ‘God Of The Gaps’, an ever diminishing role for a diety. And many serious scientists and respectable philosophers do assert that there is no such thing as a mind outside of the physical brain. But the author’s designated specialty of psychiatry depends on the belief that the mind is separate from the brain, even as modern imaging makes that distinction hazy. Will psychiatry some day become a subspecialty of neurology, such as movement disorders are now?

Not a must-read, unless you are a neuroscientist, a mental health worker or a worker in early childhood development.

Applying any adjectives or descriptive nouns to the late Mr. Hitchens while he was alive would run the risk of receiving a sharp sarcastic rebuke from him. He complains in this autobiography about even good friends shortening his first name to Chris. He rejects the labels of contrarian, dissident, gadfly, and rebel being applied to himself although it seems to me that all of those were accurate description of his character.

Before picking up this memoir, I was most familiar with his name as one of the “four horsemen” of modern atheism and the author of the sentinel polemic God is not Great. However, he was a also a witty and erudite journalist, a deep thinker and a fearless adventurer. Terrified of becoming bored, he sought adventure around the world, thrilling to hearing a bullet whizz past his ear in northern Iraq, and illegally entering and exploring North Korea. My great fear, in contrast is being stranded somewhere with nothing to read.

The list of people that he had contact with is impressively long and included many heads of state, prominent poets and writers, diplomats and luminaries. He managed to get his butt slapped with the parliamentary order paper by an annoyed Margaret Thatcher. His distain for Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Mother Theresa, Jimmy Carter, Pope Benedict, Gore Vidal, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. contrasts with his loyal friendship and support for Salman Rushdie, Paul Wolfowitz, and George W. Bush along with many socialists, Marxists and Trotskyites. In his early career as a journalist he was a Trotskyite, a founding member of International Socialists, and a frequent contributor to The New Statesman. To say that he held his political convictions firmly would be a gross understatement. But to say that they were consistent would seem to be a lie. To be fair, he recognized and worried about his tendency to want to ‘have it both ways.’ For evidence of this duplicity, he reveals that when he was told that he was a Jew, in 1987, he was a ‘non believing member of two churches.’

This brings me to one of the major problems with this memoir. There is no consistent linear time line as one reads through it. He jumps back and forth from his days as an Oxford undergrad to his later adventures and writing.There is scant mention of his two marriages and no mention whatsoever of their beginnings or endings, nor do either of his wives warrant being named or even acknowledged in the text or the acknowledgements, nor are his son and daughter. One is left with the inescapable conclusion that none of them were important to him. He clearly was a womanizer although he never reveals much about his sexual proclivities. He took pride in his enjoyment of sensual pleasures including smoking for most of his life and regular overindulgence in alcohol. (These proclivities may have contributed to his death in 2011 from complications of esophageal cancer, although it would be cruel to ‘blame the victim.’)

Another major difficulty I had with this book also involves his wide-ranging friendships and familiarity with a vast amount of literature. Unless you are familiar with the poems of Kingsley Amis and many others and the writings and views of dozens of others, you are likely to get confused. He takes as a given that the reader will be familiar with the views and writings of Peter Ackrod, Theodore Adorno, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Rashid Ali, Perry Anderson, and Anne Applebaum- I took these names from the first page of his 11 page index, as an example. Perhaps it is my relative illiteracy that is a problem.

There are some memorable quotes of a philosophical nature. Among my favourites is this: It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live ones everyday life as if this were so.

Overall this book is an erudite educational commentary on many facets of late twentieth century social and political events from a keen observer with a contrarian bent, more than a memoir of that observer’s life in spite of the subtitle.

This Duke University psychology professor has made a distinguished career out of analyzing irrationality, deceptions and quirks of human behaviour. This book, a layman’s guide to much of his work, is notable for a few surprise research conclusions, the main one being the apparent propensity of all of us to cheat just a little, but not a lot, thereby being able to maintain a self-image as totally honest, via self deception. The factors that seem to determine the boundaries of our dishonesty are carefully teased out.

There seem to me to be some major caveats before accepting his sometimes sweeping conclusions. First, most of the research studies have been done with university students as the research subjects in highly artificial laboratory settings- their psychic makeup may deviate significantly from that of the broader population. If nothing else the probably narrow age range (he never mentions the age ranges of his research subjects) make generalization from the studies problematic. I doubt that the boundaries of my propensity to lie, cheat and deceive others and myself now are the same as I had when I was 25. Secondly, I am well aware of the very major problem, particularly in social sciences, of non-reproducibility of research studies. I found the design of the studies at times to be quite ingenious, though bright young suspicious university psychology students might well be on to the subterfuge of some of them and be quite pleased to lie and thereby sabotage their professor’s research.

The writing style is fluid and keeps the reader interested, with some very personal anecdotes and some wry humour. In the latter category, before giving the obvious answer, he speculates about what makes the period just before deadlines for term papers and final exams so lethal for the grandmothers of university students, particularly those students who are doing poorly.

One caveat of my own. I have not reviewed the extensive original research publications in the scientific literature that he summarizes in this book and uses to draw his conclusions, and can’t comment on the statistical validity of those findings.

Are we as a society becoming more or less honest? I don’t see any answers to that question in this book, and realistically, it would require longitudinal studies over decades to answer that.

question. With the Liar-in-Chief now in the White House, my hunch is that western society as a whole may be less honest than in past generations. A blurb in the March Atlantic claims that minor workplace theft by employees has doubled in the last two decades. Most of the research discussed in this book concerns being dishonest in social and monetary interactions rather than in the verbal realm. The examples of dishonesty usually relate to what most of us would consider to be minor lapses such as not correcting a retail clerk who gives you too much change, reporting dubious work-related expenses, or claiming to have finished the crossword without peeking at the upside-down answers. And if a border guard in a booth asked me what I thought of Donald Trump, (it happens), I would be tempted to lie to avoid being indefinitely barred from visiting my daughters in the U.S. But I would probably say that he is a dangerous, racist, egotistical, incompetent idiot and then point out that some in his inner circle have used far worse adjectives to describe him

A recent debate in The New Yorker about care for demented people makes a strong case for compassionate ‘therapeutic lying.’ I would not want any man to be repeatedly reminded of the death of his wife if he could not retain that truth and kept asking where she was. Would it not be better for his caregivers to simply agree with him that she must have gone shopping? And when I was leaving a dear friend whom I knew was slowly dying of cancer, not sure if she knew her grim prognosis, she whispered to me as we hugged at the airport “You don’t need to pretend that you will see me again.” “Of course I will” I lied. Was that dishonesty justified?

This engaging novel is a companion to the British author’s earlier novel, Life After Life, about the tragicomic lives of the Todd family from 1925 to 2012. Some of the characters are extremely eccentric and others, such as Teddy, the wartime pilot of a Halifax bomber, are damaged by what would now be labelled post-traumatic stress disorder.

The unnumbered but dated chapters start with 30 March 1944, then proceed to 1925, 1980, 1947, 1939, 1993, 1951, 1942-43, 1982, 1943, 1960, 2012, 30 March, 1944, 2012, 2012, and 1947. The jumbled order seems to be a characteristic of her writing; it is as though she wrote a linear account of events, then scrambled them randomly, with frequent use of flashbacks and insertion of snippets of the future, some of which the reader will have already encountered in earlier chapters. I am sure that many readers enjoy this age-old time-shift literary device, but others, including me will find it confusing and frustrating. Perhaps I am at fault in just thinking of time as being too linear, even though I accept that space-time is warped.

There is a lot of abstract but eloquent discussion of the ultimate meaning of time and of death. The impending death of one character dying of a brain tumour is described as being “…..subtracted from time altogether.” The insight into the horrors of war are graphic and in keeping with why surviving fighters, including some of my oldest relatives and friends who fought in Europe in WW2, never talked about what they had experienced. How could anyone ever forget or describe adequately the horror of seeing a young member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, while bicycling around the perimeter of an airfield, being decapitated by the broken propeller flung from a returning damaged Halifax bomber? When Teddy reached her “….the wheel of her bicycle was still spinning.” Or the final farewell to a comrade who could not be pulled out of the rough waters of the North Sea when a downed Halifax was sinking in it, and the dingy with the other crew members was already dangerously overloaded.

The writing style is fluid with abundant startling metaphors and sometimes obvious and sometimes obscure references to classics of English literature, many of which were lost on me- several characters become aspiring novelists and one becomes a very successful writer.

I have not read any of this author’s other books. Perhaps I should, but I am not sure that I will. This one was good in small doses, but paradoxically needs to be read over a short period of time to avoid losing the thread in the fog of one’s own memory.