The Passionate Reader

When I saw a review in The New Yorker, the title alone was enough to entice me to put a hold on this book at the Ottawa Public Library where it was still on order.

The China-born Distinguished Research Professor of Biology at Central Washington University provides an extensive scholarly discussion of the universality of lying and deception. Prevalent in the living world from lowly bacteria, viruses, and fungi that mutate to deceive hosts and and their siblings and thereby increase their propagation chances, to Homo sapiens, with a huge number of examples from the study of many species, lying and cheating seems to be universal. Most of the cited examples are erudite but interesting revelations about reptiles, birds and mammals and how they communicate both within species and across species lines. I now understand why some barn swallows I observed as a preteen seemed so protective of their nests and mates.

Two “Laws” of Lying i.e. falsifying honest messages in communication and exploiting other’s cognitive loopholes or blind spots which are biological foundations for lying and cheating respectively, are proposed, although I think the word “laws” would be better called “methods” or “types”

It takes either remarkable foolishness or an admirable dedication to scientific discovery to spend thirteen years studying the pheromones secreted from the anal glands of captive upstate New York beavers as the author did. But that showed that those pheromones were useful to the male beavers to identify kinships and avoid wasting resources on others, even if born to his allegedly monogamous mate.

The handicap hypothesis is applied to explain the existence of moose and deer antlers, peacock tails, and bright colours of male birds i.e an individual who can afford to show off such wasteful displays must be a potentially good mate. And the same handicap principle is applied to humans who signal fitness by, for example, giving nonreturnable expensive engagement rings of no other intrinsic value, or sporting expensive watches or cars, a la Thorsten Veblen.

Emmanuel Kant, and his categorical imperative to always, under all circumstances, tell the truth comes in for some criticism as Sun, in the final chapter waxes philosophical in distinguishing three types of lying and their moral implications, coming down on the side of consequentialist moral philosophers.

There is considerable overlap here with the content of David Livingston Smith’s 2004 book “Why We Lie” which I read years ago and many of the psychological phenomena, some old and some new to me are discussed to explain why we are easily deceived. But this is in the updated context of internet communication and especially AI which greatly facilitates the propagation of lies.

I have encountered my share of pathological liars and cheaters. The most memorable were a devout Anglican couple at whose hobby farm I spent many happy hours in the 1980s. The man was supposedly a foreign-trained pathologist until he was found not to be. Years later, he obtained a part-time job as a pathologist at a teaching hospital until a background check by the department head showed that he had had only one year of medical training.

A quibble: some of the black and white photographs are fuzzy and contribute little to the narrative.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/10

Thanks, The New Yorker.

I was a little reluctant to post a review on my blog of this detailed Donald Trump biography by a longtime New York political journalist, fearful that it may feed into his egotistical hunger for any publicity, whether good or bad-and his litigious nature. However, a need to understand his appeal overcame that reluctance, and, given his aversion to reading, he is very unlikely to ever read or care about anything from a two-bit Canadian book reviewer.

From early childhood, learning from his father, he has always focused on personal wealth, power, and fame. There are more reasons to fear his actions detailed here than there are explanations of what is appealing to him for millions of Americans. His racism, sexual predations, misogyny, nepotism, and egotism are all laid out in detail, but much of that has been revealed before in the daily news, previous biographies and even by his own tweets, books, and statements. The constantly churning of hirings and firings in the Trump White House and the personal conflicts engendered there are emphasized. It seems to me that an analysis of what it is buried in the psyche of Americans that allows millions of his followers to overlook his obvious faults would be more interesting reading than this dry account of those faults.

This book is more revealing, in some ways, about the pervasive corrupt political and bureaucratic manoeuvring in the U.S. than about Trump. Powerful party bosses and leading politicians of all stripes with little interest in what is good for the average citizen wield enormous power is selecting candidates for various public offices.

In my opinion, a grievous omission from this tome is the lack of any mention of Trump’s capricious withdrawal of the U.S. from the multinational Paris Climate Accord, annoying many allied nations. That and Trump’s appointment of Scot Pruitt, a businessman and climate change denier, who had sued the Environmental Protection Agency forty one times, to head that agency has to have had disastrous negative effects on the climate we are all doomed to live in. Likewise, Haberman barely mentions Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the multinational agreement with Iran to limit that country’s nuclear arms development and has thus made everyone’s world more dangerous.

I am still somewhat puzzled by Trump’s appeal even after struggling though this book.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/10

Thanks, The Economist, The New Yorker.

Following Jesus. Henri J. M. Nouwen. 2018. 132 pages. (Hardcover.)  

To avoid getting stuck in a “thought silo” reading only books that share my basic outlook on life, I occasionally pick up one that I suspect before I start will be based on a premise that will not gel with mine. That was the case with this short treatise. Such endeavours to understand and appreciate the perspective of others cannot harm if one is secure in your own views. But in this one there was no underlying premise whatsoever. 

It seems peculiar that this book based on six lectures by the author was first published in 2018, although the author died in 1996. The Dutch-borne itinerant, restless, American/Peruvian/Canadian Catholic priest could seemingly not enjoy working at Harvard Theological School for more than four months, returning to pastoral care, charities and writing.

C.S. Lewis, in his “The Problem of Pain” attempts to reconcile the existence an all powerful and all loving God with the universal cruelty, evil and pain of human and animal existence. This requires some fanciful linguistic definitions and gymnastic leaps of logic, but at least some attempts are made to argue rationally. Nouwen simply rejects logic as as valid starting point. Clearly rejecting logical thinking and favouring uninformed irrational actions, there is also an underlying current of anti-intellectualism. 

Even in the lecture on the unconditional love of God, Nouwen uses selective quotes from the Bible, neglecting to mention the inconsistency of an all-loving God who urges us to forgive our enemies, while killing off people who don’t love him in a flood or the fires of hell or Sodom and Gomorrah, in a fit of jealous anger. I don’t know which translation of the Bible Nouwen is using, but some quotes, such as of the Beatitudes seem foreign to me.

“Following Jesus” as the title advocates,  has been used as an excuse for the horrible cruelties in religious wars or lead to Jim Jones’ Jonestown or David Koresh’s  Branch Davidians in Waco. 

This book exceeded my expectations of providing an abundance of meaningless gobbledygook and linguistic licence such as “…there is no human being anywhere in the whole world who is not lifted up on the cross with Jesus.” or  “What you need to hear with your heart…” 

I persisted to the end hoping to find at least one quote worthy of some thought, but was disappointed even in that lowly quest. The best feature of this book is its brevity.

Lest I seem too down on all religions, I must confess to appreciating and even enjoying the works of some religious scholars. But Nouwen was no scholar, but a delusional brainwashed and probably lonely man

0/10

Thanks, but no thanks, Alan.

Part One of this ingenious plot is narrated in the first person singular by Rosie, a 17 year-old suddenly orphaned Sonoma County, California girl who, in 1938 is down on her luck. Her synesthesia (she sees certain sounds as different colours) is mistaken for hallucinations from psychosis and after a single drunken sexual encounter she is pregnant. The father of the child is not revealed to the reader until past page 100 and then is it is a shocking surprise. Sent to a locked home for unwed mothers, the insane, and psychopaths, she plots escape but is delivered of a baby who is immediately taken away from her. Several girls are forced to undergo secret salpingectomies to sterilize them at the peak of the entirely legal eugenics movement. She overhears that she is to be sterilized two days postpartum. I won’t spoil the suspense for the readers by revealing the subsequent turbulent and then very successful fulfilling, happy, married course of her life, but she becomes convinced, for a time, that her unusually severe synesthesia (she sees colours in response to names and places as well as to sounds) is a true disability that makes her unfit to reproduce.

A gift of an amaryllis bulb from the narrator of Part Two, which is discarded by her keepers, features prominently as it comes to aptly symbolize wasted years of her life because it fails to bloom annually, and Amaryllis is the name she requests the adoption agency to give her daughter.

Part Two is narrated by Helen, a single expat American relative of Rosie’s first keepers after she was orphaned. She works as a nannie in various European countries and is the one who gave her the amaryllis bulb. She flees from Nazi-controlled Vienna during the war to Lucerne smuggling disabled children across the border with her, and then she returns to a very different California to the one she left. In Vienna she had witnessed the Nazi eugenics sterilization of “undesirables” that preceded the mass extermination of them, and Jews in particular. Her life story is as complicated as that of Rosie’s but entirely different and, of course, their lives are interconnected.

I have long thought that both synesthesia and eugenics would be great features to build a novel around, and here it is, in imaginative, integrated, glorious detail. Synesthesia, present in 2-4 % of the population is still often confused with mental illness and psychosis in particular. Some synesthetics experience sounds as tastes or smells and some with mild forms of it do not even recognize it as unusual. Others hide it, viewing it as a disability. But it can also be seen as a partially genetically endowed artistic gift that boosts the imagination of artistic types, particularly writers. Readers may reasonably suspect that the author is endowed with it.

The eugenics movement that began in the 1910s and persisted until at least the 1960s is just a precursor to more radical Nazi-style policies about how to treat the unfortunate among us. The California’s eugenics laws were not repealed until 1979. In Canada, both Alberta and British Columbia had eugenics laws from the 1930s to the 1970s and some view modern fetal screening for genetic diseases and gene editing science as “positive eugenics.” Although now illegal it still informs the outlook of many racist politicians like Donald Trump.

I usually dislike time shift as an artificial literary device to maintain suspense in thrillers, but here it is used appropriately to maintain curiosity about the course of the lives of the two narrators. The other characters are numerous but unforgettable and not hard to keep straight. There is enough heartbreaking tragedy to make the most stoic reader blubber, but also wonderful life-affirming courage and determination to lift the spirits of the depressed. The dramatic ending is worth waiting for and although the general details of that ending are somewhat predicable, how the details unfold to get there are not.

One memorable quote: “People will always distrust what they don’t understand. And what they distrust they cannot love.”

I cannot praise this novel enough. Absolutely unforgettable and highly recommended.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Thanks, Book Browse.

This screed was a loan from my real estate economist professor daughter who is visiting us this week. Often discussed as a source of frustration, parking is seldom the topic of an entire book but Grabar manages to make it interesting and informative. There is an entire history with major consequences for the way we live to accompany the paving over much of the world to “store” (the term Grabar prefers to “park.”) vehicles. The history is peppered with largely forgotten scandals. In 2009, Chicago mayor Richard Daley arranged a 75 year lease of all 36,000 of that city’s curb-side parking meters to Morgan Stanley, partly owned by the emirate of Dubai for $ 1.156 billion, although the value of them was independently estimated to be at least three times that amount. Organized crime syndicates were and still are major players in operating private parking lots in major U.S. cities. Many hours of productivity are lost, and millions of gallons of fuel are converted into atmospheric pollutants as people drive in loops looking for a place to park. Houston was devastated by Hurricane Harvey in 2017, in part or mainly because it had “ paved its way into an unmapped manmade floodplain” with little exposed topsoil to absorb the heavy rains and poorly anchored trees.o

Some progress is being made in certain areas where laws requiring a minimum number of parking spaces for new developments have been dropped, especially those close to adequate public transportation, but “By square footage, there is more housing for each car in the United States than there is for each person.”

I found some of the discussion of needed reforms a bit vague and confusing. ”Cars are a gateway drug to parking.” How can we be sure the relationship isn’t the inverse one – people use cars more where there is plentiful parking. But it is certainly true that “more parking means less housing, especially affordable housing “, the latter being my daughter’s topic for an address to the annual macroeconomics conference of the Bank of Canada as I write this.

One ancient foolish personal anecdote. In 1968, as a poor medical student, I required a car to get from one hospital to another in a timely fashion. But there was no place to park where I was boarding except on the sleepy dead end street, Wallace Avenue. The London inane bylaw prohibited street parking for any three consecutive hours between 12 a.m. and 7 a.m., which meant a patrol had to chalk mark the tires and curb and then return three or more hours later to stick a ticket on the windshield. I got a couple tickets every month, a bargain price for good parking. One night, studying late, I checked at 2 a.m. to find a ticket stating that I had parked from 12 a.m. to 3 a.m. I hopped into the car and handed the ticket to the sleepy clerk at the central police station at 2:30. He called the patrolman to reprimand him and tore up the ticket. Not a good move on my part. For the next month my tires were marked nightly, forcing me to take many nocturnal trips to the street to move the car.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/10

Thanks, Andra.

First, a note about page numbers. I do not include the copyright page, contents list, index, references, notes, author information, or bibliography when I calculate the number of pages I cite in the title of these blogs. But whenever I can, I try to cite the number of pages in different formats, the time it took me to read an ebook or the listed time for an audiobook.

In this historical tome a New York journalist and academic historian provides what is really selective biographies of four past U.S. presidents. She claims they were chosen because she had studied them more than others but she also worked in the Johnson White House and later on his memoirs. To the reader, the choice of who to feature seems arbitrary, and I suspect there were other factors involved, such as their early loses (In Theodore Roosevelt’s case, his wife and his mother died on the same day as he was starting his political career.), the unprecedented crises they faced, and their early shared ambitions. In any case, here they are – Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson.

The book is also divided logically into four parts- “Ambition and the Recognition of Leadership”, “Adversity and Growth”, The Leader and The Times: How they Led”, and a less concrete section titled “Transformational Leadership, “ largely on their respective legacies.

Theodore Roosevelt’s cagey solution to the 1902 coal strike was hardly on a par with Abe’s dealing with secessionists and civil war, nor FDR’s with the depression and WWII. Of 70 pages on the FDR presidency, all but two discuss his efforts with the new Deal,

There are scattered throughout the text dozens of trite directives, supposedly guides for potential leaders in any field, such as “ Find Time and Space in Which to Think,” and “Shield Colleagues from Blame” or “Know When To Hold Back, When To Move Forward.” Somehow I doubt that these will ever make it into a text for a course in developing leadership skills in any M.B.A. program.

I learned a huge amount about American history and the personalities of it’s leaders, from this very dry pedantic document, e.g. FDR was an auditory learner, Lincoln a visual one. This book provides more details of specific eras of U.S. politics than 99% of readers will want or ever need to know. There are other numerous biographies of every president and I am not sure how much of this one is based on original research. There are an unusual number of quotation marks and 178 pages of “Notes” that are really references, perhaps because the author was accused of plagiarism in relation to a previous book. (Her non-explanation was that she had neglected to use enough quotation marks.) There is almost no discussion of the rest of the world except as it relates to the U.S.A., and Canada is never even mentioned. I also learned little about the characteristics it takes to become a leader in any field.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/10

Thanks, Cal.

Two Solitudes. Hugh MacLellan. 1945. (878 pages as Ebook, 480 as Paperback, 23 hours, 23 minutes as Audiobook))

This was, for me, a reread of a classic Canadian novel, written by a McGill professor of English, that I had first read perhaps 50 years ago. Set initially in a small village outside of Montreal in 1917, it spans the interwar years to September, 1939. The Two Solitudes of the title is usually interpreted as referring to the French Catholics and the English Protestants, but could equally refer to men and women, Americans and Canadians, the rich and the depression- era poor, or the exploited and the exploiters. Each fails to even try very hard to understand the other. Little has changed 83 years later.

The powerful controlling influence of the Catholic Church over every aspect of the lives of the quebecois is dramatically displayed, even in business deals, where they frequently clashed with the rich English Protestants from Ontario. (I recall an evangelical Baptist preacher in the late1950s condemning them from the pulpit, comparing them to despotic African dictators.) The 1917 conscription controversy and attitudes toward the war drove a deep wedge between the English Canadians and the francophone Quebeckers and even between members of families of the few Quebec French who supported it, including that of the federal MP Athanase Tallard. Some veterans provide dramatic descriptions of the horrors of Vimy Ridge and Passenchdaele.

The characters, clothing, geography, and weather are all described in intricate detail. There is no graphic sex, as befits the era, but lots of inuendo and expressions of lust. There are many delicious metaphors and pithy aphorisms like “Perhaps the basis of all conservatism was the tendency to identify the familiar with the excellent.”

Three other memorable quotations:

“His old face carried the expression of a man who never found it necessary to be intelligent but knew right from wrong.”

“What was love anyway but knowledge that you were not alone, with desire added?”

“His round head was balanced like a dome on his shoulders, his frizzy hair a horseshoe around his skull.”

I found that the endless rumination of characters about their lives, feelings, and strained relationships became a bit tiresome. The pages and pages of the conversations of a newlywed couple trying to outdo each other with ever more elaborate superlative praise for the other seemed quite soppy to me perhaps because in the family of my youth any public expression of affection or even more than mild praise was frowned upon.

Thanks, Vera.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/10.

This is only one of several books discussing the opioid crisis in the United States but is undoubtedly the most detailed with a laser focus on the Sackler family and their Perdue Pharma. The extensively researched documentation begins with Dr. Arthur Sackler Sr. in the 1930’s, 40’s and 50’s. A New York physician and researcher in psychiatry at an asylum, he was also an astute adman and entrepreneur, amassing a fortune, largely by making false claims for the value and safety of chlorpromazine (Thorazine), chlordiazepoxide (Librium), and diazepam (Valium) by his ad agency on behalf of Roche Pharmaceuticals. These were among the first drugs to be promoted directly to the public at large, with a focus for the latter two on anxious or depressed housewives. (“Mother’s little helper.”). He published a medical news magazine without being identified with it, promoting products that benefited him financially. He was also the first of the many Sackler’s to become a major philanthropist donating Chinese antique treasures to Columbia University and to museums, currying goodwill. He was sly, and secretive founding many corporations to hide his self-dealing and evade prosecution. Many more unflattering adjectives are applicable to him including dishonest, driven, egotistical, philandering, ruthless, scheming and misogynistic.

His now deceased sons, Arthur Jr., Mortimer, and Raymond, all doctors as well, are portrayed as equally evil with the development of the slow-release opioid pain-killers, MS Contin (morphine) and OxyContin (oxycodone). They knowingly marketed them aggressively to practitioners as non-addictive and lasting 12 hours, thereby avoiding the craving between doses. But their effects usually lasted only eight hours, inducing the craving that leads to abuse. With OxyContin that craving led many users to crush it to snort or inject and then switch to street heroin or fentanyl. When the patent was about to expire they reformulated it to extend the patent and beat out generic competitors and later secretly under the name Rhodes Pharmaceutical marketed their own generic oxycodone under the name RP-10 oxycodone. They deceived some regulators at the FDA, bribed others, and hired still others, in the well-known Washington revolving door phenomenon that includes politicians, businessmen, doctors, consultants, and most notably, lawyers. The more independent CDC has done more to alert the public about the opioid epidemic than has the FDA.

The next generation of Sacklers, lead by Richard, adamantly refused to acknowledge any blame for the opioid overdose epidemic that has killed more than one million Americans- until 2019, when they faced hundreds of lawsuits brought by the feds, states attorneys-generals, and the families of victims. They tried to blame the victims as morally weak, and play the victim role themselves-victims of a biased liberal media, comparing themselves to gun manufacturers, pointing out that guns do not kill people, people do. There is certainly a tendency for greedy, hypocritical, self-righteous libertarians to look down on addicts as morally inferior beings rather than as victims of a powerful system that prey on and benefit from their weakness.

The Sackler’s continued to enjoy high society esteem as generous philanthropists donating to at least 20 institutions and attaching their names to a whole wing of the Met, a library at Harvard and a medical school in Tel Aviv.

As revelations of the main source of their billions were uncovered, and lawsuits and legal fees mounted, a confusing mix of deals were agreed to. Charges against everyone except the Sackler’s were pursued, with state attorney’s-general often striking deals over the head of lead prosecutors. Finally in 2019 founding company Perdue Frederick, but not Perdue Pharma, was allowed to declare bankruptcy, but no Sackler was charged and they and Perdue Pharma escaped with many billion dollars. They continue selling OxyCodone through their Rhodes Pharmaceutical generic company and expanded their market of it internationally in 2015 with another company named MundiPharma, using the same dubious marketing strategy.

To be fair, Sackler doctors are not the only unscrupulous medics in this sordid business, as many others in so-called pill mills prescribe OxyContin on request and are rewarded by Sacklers who seldom report this obvious criminal activity. And other pharmaceuticals are far from blameless in this business. Jansen, a Johnson and Johnson subsidiary, expanded their 100,000 acre Tasmanian poppy operation to ensure a steady supply of opioids, as the market expanded. It seems that the Arthur Jr. wing of the Sackler dynasty has largely distanced itself from the opioid business and are feuding with the others. And most institutions have refused donations from them and removed their names from the donated wings. But they must have significant control over the internet information about their continuing sources of billions. There was nothing negative about Perdue in most search engine initial returns when I searched MundiPharma and Rhodes Pharmaceuticals.

During my days as a medical practitioner, I treated many narcotic addicts, but never prescribed OxyContin and, perhaps in error, like to think my prescription of narcotics was always appropriate. I did once have a prescription pad stolen from my office.

A simplified family tree of three generations of Sackler’s would have been a useful reference aid for readers like me who often have difficulty keeping characters straight.

This dismal documentary about wealth and greed is more detailed than most readers could possibly need or appreciate. A simplified account of these nefarious deeds is a part of the equally lengthy work in Gerald Posner’s book, Pharma.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/10.

Thanks, Stuck in a Book.

I don’t know how I missed this gem earlier, as Dan Needles is one of my favourite humour authors. I, my wife, and my parents all enjoyed his earlier books and plays featuring the fictional Wingfield Farm, and the town of Larkspur, in the equally fictitious Persephone Township. These were based, he reveals here, on his memories of spending summers on a farm in Nottawasaga Township while schooling in Toronto. I recall asking for one of his books in a London bookstore and being told that it would be in the Agriculture section! 

In contrast, these 80 allegedly true short stories relate anecdotes from the author’s observations about rural life after he moved, at age thirty to an old farm house outside of Duntroon, not far from Collingwood, in 1977. This is only a short drive northeast from the farm where I grew up, and many towns, villages and townships he discusses are well known to me. This includes the Mount Forest Fur and Feather Show five miles from the Ghent farm, the Keady Livestock Market auction my father often took us to and Proton township where we visited my maternal relatives.

These musings about rural life were previously published in Harrowsmith or later ones in three other farm magazines. Although arranged in chronological order from June 1997 to March 2016, there is no need to read them in order, as each stands alone as a short fun read. They include discussion of a wide variety of topics, some serious and some hilarious. The menagerie of farm animals are attributed distinct endearing personalities that any farm youth could readily relate to: likewise the neighbours and the often antiquated farm equipment.

 A couple of quotes will convey  the quirky humour so unique to rural folks everywhere. After admitting that he could not predict weather very accurately: “Because I studied economics, I do have formal training into how to make incorrect predictions.” 

“Pigs are a lot like teenagers. If something doesn’t suit them, they fight and kick and yell their heads off.”

The world of rural Ontario as described here now exists only in isolated small pockets, as big factory farms take over most of the arable land. Our loss, but we can and should preserve some of the helping community culture. Unfortunately, as Needles notes, they also tend to leave a hugely disproportionate carbon footprint. They also are almost exclusively white Christians of European descent and wary of other races and cultures. I never met an African American, Asian, Latino, or aboriginal Canadian until I moved to the city. Even Catholics were accepted somewhat reluctantly.

Perhaps in part because this revived so many wonderful nostalgic memories of my rural upbringing, I have to rate this book as

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/10

Cam

The New York author details the disastrous, unique, and growing consequences of a minority of American’s love of guns in this short pithy essay/book. The pagination cited above includes 10 completely blank pages and 33 pages of grainy black-and-white photographs that contribute no useful information.

After discussing his own relationship to guns in his youth in marksmanship, skeet shooting, and the secret shooting of his grandfather by his grandmother, he launches into the bigger picture. Much of the essential information is contained in the front cover blurb continued on the back cover. He delves into the history of the second amendment and asserts that the original meaning of the “right to bear arms” was clearly meant to apply to a government-controlled militia, contrary to the NRA, firearms industry and modern supreme court’s interpretation. He points out that much could be accomplished by enforcing existing regulations such as those that apply to interstate commerce, rather than trying to introduce new restrictions in a deeply divided Congress.

After comparing gun ownership to driving a car or smoking cigarettes, he notes: “…not every gun owner will use his gun to maim or kill himself or someone else. But people shoot other people because they have guns, and people commit suicide with guns because they have guns, and the more guns there are to be bought and the more people there are to buy them, the more people will kill themselves and others with guns. This is not a moral or political statement- it is a question of pure mathematics.” But that cannot be entirely true as it does not take into account multiple mitigating factors.

As a smug Canadian ex-hunter and marksman, I see no workable solution to our neighbour’s major ongoing folly, and am grateful that it has not spilled over the border.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/10.

Thanks, The New Yorker.

One of several novels about the shameful history of the treatment of aboriginal children in Canada’s residential schools, this one by a Saskatchewan Cree lawyer is easily confused with Sherman Alexie’s Ten Little Indians. But they are very different and this one is the darker one. (I only read reviews of Ten Little Indians.) This concerns the messed up lives of children escaping or released from a northern Vancouver Island residential school for aboriginals run by abusive Catholic staff. This is in what I take to be the 1960s although throughout the story, there is no date mentioned to anchor the tale to any era. One escapee working as a maid in notorious East Hastings Street in Vancouver leads a secret double life as a hooker and drug addict, and eventually commits suicide. Another serves a long sentence for beating up one of the cruel abusive priests.

I found it hard to keep track of the five characters in the title as there are many more little Indians that make an appearance. They all seem to be psychologically crippled by the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse at the hands of the priests and nuns running the school with the white legal authorities and RCMP providing support for the system. Stereotypically, no priests, nuns or teachers in the school are portrayed as showing any compassion or empathy, or any effort to understand the native culture.

The freed children, whether in Vancouver, Seattle, or Bigger, Saskatchewan are uniformly poor, working in menial and temporary jobs, and often breaking the law in order to survive or evade capture. There is little humour and the most admirable character is Clara’s huge adorable rescue cur.

There are allusions to late government efforts to provide compensation and restitution but nothing definitive is discussed.

Kenny, one of the escapees experiences pain in his liver from heavy drinking in spite of the fact that the human liver has no connections to the sensory nervous system. He also reminisces about his life while lying dead in a casket.

The merciful ending to this story is abrupt, without any warning to the reader.

The sad and continuing abusive treatment of our aboriginal kin deserves better characterization than this disjointed story provides.

⭐️⭐️⭐️/10

Things We Do In The Dark. Jennifer Hiller. 2022. 342 pages. (Paperback.)

Murder mysteries are not in the top tier of my favourite genres of novels. But when I read the opening line of this one from an Oakville-based Filipino-Canadian, I thought I would enjoy it. “There’s a time and place for erect nipples, but the back of a Seattle police car definitely isn’t it.” The title is from the very popular fictional podcast of a black Toronto investigative journalist.

All the usual standard devices of the genre are here, including many time shifts, false leads, sexual violence, gangs, booze, drugs, nosy self-appointed investigators, multiple murders and deaths that appear to be accidental and unconnected but aren’t, false identities and clueless police. The author makes good use of her Filipino identity and knowledge of that culture to star two down-on-their-luck Filipino teenage girls working in a sleazy strip tease joint/bordello in Toronto, and the Filipino trophy fourth wife of an aging TV star comedian in Seattle, accused of his murder. The eight years the author lived in Seattle helps enlighten that connection. Novelists naturally tend to set their stories in places they are familiar with, though possibly less so since it became so easy to research unfamiliar sites online. It is not hard for readers to deduce the connection between the Toronto and Seattle murders by about page 115, only to be proven wrong 60 pages later.

There are no likeable characters except for a very caring social worker, an efficient crown attorney, and a female detective. The main characters are all violent pedophiles, criminals, psychopaths or serial killers. None are as gruesomely evil as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs but there are more of them than in that Thomas Harris classic.

The plot is exceedingly complex with as many unpredictable sudden twists and turns as the flight path of an outhouse fly.

There is one unexplained occurrence that readers are apparently not supposed to pick up on. How did a Seattle woman on bail for suspected murder, wearing an unremovable GPS-tracking ankle bracelet, even with fake ID, manage to cross the border to Vancouver for a round trip to Ontario to retrieve the ashes of her doppelgänger?

One enigmatic quote: “Polite rudeness is a difficult skill to master.”

The number of highly unlikely coincidences and twists dampened the enjoyment of the story for this realist, although I give the author top marks for her creative imagination that ties all of the loose ends together by the end.

Enough murder mystery for the year for me.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/10

Thanks, Alana.

Of several recent books documenting the fiasco at Waco in 1993, I chose this one for no particular reason. The first 56 pages is an education of readers about the history of the Branch Davidians, best known for the lethal confrontations with federal law enforcement agencies at their compound, Mount Carmel, outside of Waco, Texas. A worldwide offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventists, started in 1935, there were 144,000 members twenty years later. Over the ensuing years there were numerous internal conflicts, some of them violent, as various leaders tried to claim authority to set rules and to interpret biblical prophesies, particularly from the Book Of Revelation. The enigmatic Seven Seals in Revelations figures prominently in subsequent story. Constants included leaders who indulged in polygamy and pedophilia, a belief in the imminent second coming of Christ, and licentious indulgent lifestyles for the self-appointed prophetic bosses. David Koresh, the last undisputed prophet/leader married preteens, nullified marriages of Davidian couples, and copulated indiscriminately and openly with the ex-wives, fathering at least a dozen children. He indulged freely in booze and tobacco while prohibiting their use by his followers. During the initial firefight on February 28th, five or six Davidians and four federal agents were killed.

One of the followers explained their actions: “What if you lived two thousand years ago. Your’e a fisherman. Jesus walks up to you and says ‘Follow me’. That’s who we were.” They were also heavily armed with illegal military-grade automatic weapons and had Alaskan malamute dogs guarding the compound.

Australian Peter Gent, one of the group shot by the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents on the first day, Feb 28, may have been a remote relative of mine, as the h in Ghent was a recent addition, and there are relatives in Australia. After the cease fire and stalemate of that first day when five Davidians and four ATF agents were killed, the FBI took over the government side of the conflict and a wounded David Koresh pleaded and preached on national media outlets from within the compound. A deal to end the standoff by agreeing to let Koresh address the nation on radio, in return for surrender, failed when Koresh, after his message had been aired, reneged, citing a direct command from God to wait. He thereby lost a lot of good PR he had gained with his talk. He did, however, release some children, one or two at a time and in later negotiations some adults also surrendered to authorities. On April 19th, after a fifty one day siege, the final conflagration began with tanks ramming the building and throwing tear gas canisters in and a few Davidians escaping. Seventy six of them died as the tinderbox building went up in flames. The fire was almost certainly set by the Davidians as a suicidal fulfillment of what they believed was prophesies from the Bible. Several Davidians inside committed murder-suicide, including Koresh.

The government agencies were rightly criticized retrospectively for their fatal excessive use of force, finally assaulting the compound with tanks and grenades when they could have arrested Koresh any time he left the compound unarmed to go to Waco’s Walmart or went walking or jogging around it. The several subsequent later investigations were widely criticized as a coverup. In some respects they probably were.

Although most radical cult followers are thought of by educated sceptics like me as gullible, poorly educated people looking for some meaning in their lives, education was seemingly no protection from the allure of this radical group. Davidians included at least two Harvard law school graduates, a university professor, a man with a Ph.D. in comparative religion from the University of Hawaii, a physicist from Australia and other university graduates from around the world. The man with the Ph.D. in religion later became Koresh’s negotiator with FBI agents.

The author concentrates on the ineptitude of the FBI handling of the crisis and the consequences leading directly to Tim McVeigh’s bombing in Oklahoma City, and the modern rise of radical right wing conspiracy theorists such as Alex Jones of now defunct Info Wars infamy, and the prophet Q of QAnon. And he points out the danger of increasingly militarized law enforcement and of the also heavily armed conspiracy theorists. The connections of the Branch Davidian cult mentality to the Proud Boys, The Three Percenters, survivalists, and the January 6th 2021 Capital rioters are hard to ignore and the remaining Branch Davidians remain active in Waco. It would be very risky to smugly think that such groups could not survive in Canada- just consider Jordan Peterson’s admirers.

For me, an equally important lesson in this sad tale is the ease with which even well educated otherwise rational people can be duped into believing really whacky doctrines when they are dressed up as religious dogma. As scientific rationality gradually highjacked my brain in middle life, I began to doubt the Billy Graham-style Christian evangelism I had been taught as a youth. To reduce the resulting cognitive dissonance, out went the myths of creation, the virgin birth, the resurrection, the Second Coming of Christ, and heaven and hell. (I never did believe the cannibalistic Doctrine of Transubstantiation in which fresh bread and red wine become 2000 year old stale flesh and blood.) In came a vague sense of an obligation to enjoy life and to be useful here on earth, freedom to explore any and all new ideas, and the peace of mind of expecting to go nowhere- neither heaven nor hell.

This is not a fun read, but an incredibly important commentary on the scary times we live in and a warning that we all need to heed.

9/10.

Thanks, The New Yorker.

Another old classic that I had not read is coming up for discussion at our book club. This very short novel is set in deep depression era central California. The false promise of good jobs in agriculture there sets the stage for Steinbeck’s later classic The Grapes of Wrath, that I have read. There are no dates but it is obviously in the depths of the Great Depression. George and his mentally challenged constant companion, Lennie, whom he cares for, seek serial menial labor jobs harvesting crops. George, Lennie and a loner named Candy, also an itinerant day labourer meet in the bunkhouse at one of the camps, and dream of buying their own ranch to raise rabbits for Lennie to pet, chickens, and a cow or pig or two. Lennie is mentally probably an imbecile in what we were taught in psychiatry as the spectrum of mental deficiencies from idiot to imbecile to moron, based on measured IQ. (This is now a discredited classification that I still think of as useful shorthand.) He is huge and strong, capable of hard manual labour, but obsessed with petting anything soft, like a mouse. But he does not know his own strength and kills his pets by stroking them and caressing them, including the mice in the title, which obviously derives from Robbie Burns poem “To A Mouse.” I will not divulge his ultimate fate that this obsession leads to.

A graphic depiction of the poverty and chaos of the Great Depression with the colourful illiterate itinerants and their clipped lingo, this is a beautifully written tragedy and a joy to read.

Thanks, Din.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️