The Passionate Reader

I only borrowed this book from the OPL because I have been an avid, but mediocre, curler at many different rinks for 40 years and have watched many professional games on TV. I have never been a Jones fan, my favourite teams being Rachael Holman and Brad Gushue.

In this autobiography, the author details her life as a professional curler from Manitoba, winning the Canadian championship many times and the Olympics once. Her life as a corporate lawyer is mentioned but clearly always was of secondary importance. And her children born before she married fellow curler Brent Laing clearly complicated an already complicated schedule.

She provides several contradictions. In the same paragraph she claims “ All I ever wanted to be was a Championship curler then says “I also wanted to be a mum.” She seems to also want to be loved by everyone, a sure impossibility, and is introspective and claims to have dozens of best friends, an absolute contradiction. Is ‘ best’ not a singular adjective?

The platitudes about team work and the psychology of the game become a bit excessive.

There is justified criticism of the inane rules and restrictions of the Canadian Curling Federation, particularly as they apply to women.

There is no discussion at all of her sexuality, political allegiances, or religion, things that could have added spice and some depth to the book.

I am unsure who her target readership is, if she had one in mind. Some non-curlers will be lost in the intricacies of the game; others may appreciate that as I did.

Overall, I was disappointed in this superficial and self centred book.

3/5

This book by the Carlton University white writer without Indigenous roots holds special meaning for me since I spent one long summer at the Camp Ipperwash Army Camp in my teens, very homesick, and completely oblivious to the history of it.

A sketch or several sketches of the area with the Kettle Point and Stony Point reserves shown, the Army base and the Provincial Park outlines would have been very helpful. Even having spent two months there, I had difficulty visualizing some of the roads and the limits of the Army Camp. I was told this morning as I was nearing the end that there are maps included with the book Our Long Struggle for Home, that I should probably have read first, but I probably won’t.

In this book, the author ruminates endlessly about her right to even speak to or for the Aboriginal tribes that were displaced when the colonialist white men displaced the Natives and took over the area for an army cadet camp during WWII, suppposedly on a temporary basis. Even words like Aboriginal, Native and First Nations are fraught with the potential to offend. The walking-on-eggshells narrative becomes a bit excessive as the author lives in fear of offending someone and questions her right to write a book about the ongoing tragedy and the duplicity of her colonial ancestors. She never mentions that the Natives probably do not always agree amongst themselves about what should be done to fully rectify this past and continuing unconscionable injustice.

The tragic treatment of the culture of the Nishenaabe people is clear, but the solution will involve much more than is offered in this book. The relatives of Dudley George, shot and killed by police in 1992, are growing old and time is running out.

I found the writing to be exessively tentative and self deprecating, but I cannot fault her good intentions to try to make amends for past crimes, as that is what it was.

3.5/5

Thanks, Mike.

This prolific American/Portugese author offers a frightening novel about the dumbing down of American society with the Mental Parity dogma becoming all-powerful in 2012 and suppressing any spoken or written comments that might offend, with the all consuming assumption that everyone is equally intelligent. The result is a lowering or abandonment of all standards and exams and the rise of unqualified people to the top in every field from medicine to engineering, teaching law and politics with disastrous consequences. Books such as Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot and many movies are banned because they portray differing levels of intelligence, and cannot even be mentioned.

Then a backlash develops with I.Q. tests reinstated and they are and used to determine who can vote, after a constitutional amendment.

Satire often requires exaggeration, and this book is no exception. Lifelong friendships are shattered because one person mentions something that is taboo, people lose their jobs and families and become homeless, and their children are removed for the same reason.

The writing about growing up in an isolated Jehovah’s Witness family and then being ostracized and disowned by them when she defies their world view is so detailed and insightful that it made me wonder if this was in part autobiographical. “When you are perfectly trapped within a bubble, there is no bubble.”

This is a frightening and grossly exaggerated book that is very well written and touches a sensitive nerve about the very real problem of political correctness.

4.5/5

Thanks, The Economist.

Unlike this American novelist’s much lauded American Dirt which followed a rather straight geographic and time line, in the first 30 pages alone of this one, the reader is introduced to several families over three or four generations, in three widely separated sites. Chapters skip backwards and forward in time and sideways in space.

In an 18 page chapter, a 20 year old girl goes through endless debates with her introspective self about which of two boys she should get serious about, complete with «ribs quavering under her skin. » In another place the same girl «could hear their hearts skidding and thudding in an attempt at silence. »

The overt racism of some of the characters causes family animosity, and the idiotic complexity of American health care insurance schemes is discussed in a realistic way. There is the inevitable révélation of an unsuspected paternity, a seeming necesssity in modern novels.

The overarching message is a homage to the simpler lifestyles of the author’s native Peurto Ricans, compared that in New York, New Jersey, St. Louis, Missouri, and even Trinidad.

The excessive emotionality of all the characters and the physiologically impossible reactions to those emotions spoil this book for me. It is much inferior to American Dirt in my estimation.

2.5/5

This interesting scholarly science book was written by an unusual man with an unusual background. Of Israeli/American/Canadian origin, he has been a lifelong magician but is also a PhD psychologist currently working on the neuroscience of hypnosis and deception, including the placebo effect at McGill.

The interaction of suggestion and real physiology is extensively documented with numerous experiments. These include treating effectively the effects of pollens on allergy sufferers, the gastrointestinal upset of lactose intolerance, the intractability of seizure sufferers, the and the phenomenon of mass hysteria. Even false pregnancy is associated with real observable physiological effects such as breast enlargement, amenorrhea, and pigmentary changes. The variable susceptibility to conspiracy theories and fake news is extensively documented. The striking placebo effect is noted in many domains, most notably in the treatment of depression. Standard antidepressant therapy is belittled to some extent. No one is immune to suggestions, but some are more susceptible than others.

This book is well-written and totally engaging. It should not be hard to follow even for non scientists. My only criticism is that there is just a whiff of smug self-congratulation as he emphasizes the powerful potential of suggestion and cites work from his lab extensively.

4/5

Thanks, Bob McDonald of Quirks and Quarks.

This short old illustrated classic by the late American author is listed as a children’s novel, but is an absolute delight for anyone. A young girl saves a runt newborn pig from execution and nurses him to maturity. The talking animals and insects that constitute the fanciful plot include sheep, geese, cows and most importantly a spider named Charlotte, who is vital to the plot, weaving complex messages to humans in her webs.

One quote from Charlotte: “…what is a life anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die…. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.”

I usually don’t like fantasy stories but this one is loaded with deep meaning that can be appreciated by children and adults alike.

5/5

Thanks, The New Yorker.

This is the very dense attempt by a Johns Hopkins classics professor to help the reader understand modern theoretical quantum physics, with all the nonsensical implications of what that entails, such as the deduction that if the moon is not seen, it ceases to exist.

The pages are almost equallly divided between the German existentialist philosopher Immanuel Kant, the Argentinian poet/philosopher /activist Jorge Borge, and the German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg. In spite of reading three of his books, I have to confess to still finding Kant unintelligible, but I did get a little closer to understanding the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. I did not understand much of Borge’s contribution to the field.

The discussion is not confined to those three and includes many others including ancient philosophers such as Plato and Anticus Beothius, contemporaries like Neils Bohr and Erwin Shroedinger. Theology is not neglected with discussion of the nature of the trinity in the Niceane Creed, and of course Albert Einstein contributes in a major way. Free will à la Sam Harris’s is trashed.

The complex density of this book is best illustrated by a couple quotes:

« .. the circumference of a circle first increases with the radius, until the circumference of the universe is reached and it gradually decreases thereafter for increasing value of the radius until it reaches zero.. »

«  To be ultimately responsible for how one is in any mental respect, one must have brought it about that one is the way one is in that respect. One must have consciously and explicitly to be the way one is in that respect and one must have succeeded in bringing it about in that respect. » Confused yet?

I gave up on understanding particle entangelment but sorta , kinda understand the theoretical concept of multiverses. I may have understood 10 % of the rest of this book.

1.5/5

Thanks, The Economist and Goodreads.

« …the circumference of a circle first increases with the radius until the circumference of the universe is reached and then it gradually decreases to zero for increasing values of the radius. »

«  To be ultimately responsible for how one is in any mental aspect, one must have brought it about that one is the way one is in that respect. And it is not merely that one must have caused oneself to be the way one is in that respect. One must have consciously and explicitly have chosen to be the way one is in that respect, and one must also have succeed in bringing it about that one is that way. » Confused yet?

The lives of the principle characters are interesting and I now vhave a partial understanding of the uncertainty principle now, but I would never claim to understand more than ten percent of this book, and entanglement of Particles is away beyond my comprehension.

1.55

Thanks, Goodreads and Kirkus Reviews.

This is a Virginia novelist’s debut tale, all composed of letters composed between friends, family members, strangers and even famous writers over the period between 2012 and early 2022, some of them never sent. The central character is an adopted married and later divorced American law clerk with a troubled past and two living children, one deceased one and one of the living ones is estranged from her. Interpersonal conflicts abound.

The quest for her past leads to an analysis of her DNA with far-reaching consequences, as she connects to her birth mother’s other child. It is vital for the reader to pay close attention to the dates, senders, and recipients of various emails and letters of the characters to keep them straight.

There is a lot of nostalgia and self-flagellation on the part of the main character particularly as she takes undeserved blame for her son’s sudden death, her divorce, and various other sundry other events in her life.

I found nothing very unrealistic in this tale, but the nostalgia and self-examination seemed to me to be a bit overdone. I suspect this novel will be more appreciated by women than by men. But it also gave me many suggestions of books that I have not yet read.

4/5

Thanks, Michelle and Vera.

This duel biography of the pioneer surgeons Wilder Penfield and Wm. Cone by the award winning Montreal journalist is his debut book. He outlines in great detail the Midwest U.S. background and the very different personalities of the two before their later falling out after they had made the Montreal Neurologic Institute world famous for the groundbreaking mapping of the functions of various parts of the brain, largely by stimulating the various areas in conscious patients with epilepsy. The outgoing Penfield and the introspective workaholic almost forgotten Cone could not have been more different, although they were very fond of each other, and shared many goals.

The book also details the unique culture of the 1940s and 50s Montreal with language barriers, extensive political corruption, and church domination of every aspect of life. The Royal Victoria Hospital is described as “A sprawling complex of stone buildings in the Scottish Baronial style… that said ‘I have money and power but nothing so frivolous as taste’. ” The key role of rich anglophone donors to the institute includes mention in several places of Izaak Walton Killam mentioned here only because we live in a Killam apartment complex.

There are a couple of obvious mistakes that proof readers should have caught. The brain does not receive a litre of blood every time the heart beats-perhaps every minute the heart beats.

Cone’s bout of jaundice in 1943 was almost certainly not because of his workload.

The writing is straightforward and easy to understand even as it deals with the extremely complex human brain and questions of whether or not there is a separate soul or mind unconnected to the neurons.

I greatly enjoyed this very informative book.

4.5/5

Thanks, Mike.

A rather silly fictitious syndrome called Portum- Beastie Syndrome makes up part of the background for this American novel about a rich media mogul’s scandalized family, fallen on hard times, whose patriarch decides to run for a U.S. senate seat. His three quirky very different offspring are recruited reluctantly to campaign for him. This involves seeing all kinds of animals in peculiar places. It seems that not only does the one daughter suffer from this syndrome, but others around her also participate in this delusion.

By the time I got near the halfway point, I decided that there was no way I would enjoy reading further, nor would I learn anything from it. Some books are not even an enjoyable waste of time. I will not include this one in the list of books I have read, nor will I assign a rating.

Thanks, but no thanks, Goodreads.

An interesting premise for a novel from an Aussie. On a long delayed Hobart to Sydney, flight, an elderly self-appointed clairvoyant, stands in the isle and one by one proceeds to predict the timing and cause of death of each of the passengers, to the consternation of the flight crew and many passengers. When four of her predictions seem to come true, in the indeterminant future, many passengers connect on a social media page in veiled anxiety about what she predicted for them, and work hard to ensure that more do not, sometimes dramatically changing their life trajectories as a result, while denying any connection to her predictions. This is interspersed by the musings of “The Death Lady” and philosophical implications of “hard determinism” a la Baruch Spinosa, (the complete absence of free will), and probability theory. Then she introduces actuarial science, and Euler’s identity and Kronecker’s symbol, both famous in advanced mathematics.

There are a plethora of characters. It behooves the reader to keep track of them, their occupations, their ages and the lady’s predictions about their mode of death, perhaps writing them down as you read, as there are no times cited for any of the 126 short chapters.

When I found the left anterior descending coronary artery referred to as “the widow maker”, the second time in as many weeks, I began to doubt my previous assertion, and sure enough, according to Wikipedia, I was wrong, in asserting that that label belonged to the left main stem artery.

The writing is enticingly lilting and yet in some ways deeply philosophical.

The Death Lady notes that “ I enjoyed the sensation of being small and insignificant.”

4/5

Thanks, Kirkus Reviews

Best known as the Australian/American author of Horse, the author and her late husband, Tony Horwitz, travelled the globe as reporters and writers of several non-fiction books. Tony was a hard-working, risk-taking Type A personality who dropped dead at age sixty. Much of the book is about the author’s deep grief and about the various rituals surrounding grief, and about sudden death generally.

She is hardly alone in finding herself incompetent in dealing with such tasks as directing investments, taxes, probate of the will, navigating the dysfunctional American health care system and other accounts after the sudden death of a spouse. I don’t know what makes writers feel that they must write a whole book about their experiences with such a common occurrence as sudden death even if such a death is very often the focal point of their fictions. It seems to me to be at least partly a self-promotional device and a means of advertising the various books they have written. It does not instantly qualify them as expert grief councillors. Much of the book reads like a poor-me whine of self pity with a little in the way of common sense advice in dealing with grief.

Two obvious errors. The left anterior descending coronary artery is certainly not the body’s biggest artery, nor is it known as the widow-maker. That label belongs to the left main coronary artery. And there is something really bizarre about the Transplant Team’s call asking for consent for organ donation long after he died, and his heart had stopped.w

I greatly enjoyed reading this author’s Horse, and to a lesser extent, Nine Parts of Desire, but I was very disappointed in this book.

I hope to die suddenly, but only when I have lived long enough that no one will be upset at my funeral. The difficulty is to detect when that point in time has arrived- it may have already passed.

2.5/5

Thanks, The Economist and Goodreads.

I am probably in a minority of people of my era who had not read this American classic many years ago. It is not as long as the page number would suggest, as the 2008 edition I got includes a wordy but enlightening 70 page introduction by Robert Demott and I somehow got the large print edition. Most versions are 420- 620 pages. My education in classics has finally been updated. The Introduction puts the novel into context and carefully dissects the controversies surrounding it.

The interesting technique of alternating short almost entirely narrative chapters with long ones that contain a lot of dialogue greatly enhances the story. In the short chapters the author offers generic commentary about the plight of the dispossessed starving farmers like the Oklahoma Joads during the Dust Bowl year of 1939, and their desperate decision to go to California, with false promises of utopia. This is interspersed with biting commentary about the capitalistic factory farmers, and the possibilities of what might have been. In the long chapters, he details in granular detail what actually happens to the fictitious Joads as they, and thousands of others pursue their false dreams of jobs, homes, security and wealth in California, only to find the same capitalistic factory farmers offering them nothing. There is no doubt about the far left leanings of the author leading some to call him a communist.

With about 60 pages to go, I went to bed and had a deep REMS dream about how it would end and how the author would tie up all of the loose ends. But today, finishing the book, I realized that it doesn’t end- it just stops as the young lady just delivered of a stillborn, offers her breast milk to a starving man.

At least four times as long as “Of Mice and Men, the authour’s second most famous novel of the same era, which I also enjoyed, this one provides much more detail of the strife of the Americans during the Great Depression.

5/5

If you believe this self-appointed American influencer and motivational speaker trained as a lawyer, she has has helped many millions of people lead more fulfilling and happier lives using a few simple rules to incorporate into their worlds. And she claims to have the most popular podcast in the world, with 60 million followers. With a thin false veneer of modesty, she delineates those rules in this book. I am not one of the people who has benefited much, nor do I believe everything she writes, but I downloaded her book out of pure curiosity.

The central thesis of the book is to stop blaming others for whatever problems one experiences, stop trying to change the behaviour of others, and take responsibility for your own life- a kind of personal lazziase faire attitude, with a dash of stoicism.

Nebulous pop psychology is all pervasive, with quotes from more so-called world experts that she claims to know from her TED talks and world tours than I could keep track of.

None of the author’s immediate family, as she relates stories of their problems with numerous personal anecdotes, could be considered entirely mentally healthy, which may help explain why she got into this modernized Ann Landers field, instead of practicing law.

Two words hardly make a philosophy for how to live ones life, even if they do convey a profound truth. And in the world of relationship advice, this, in many ways is simply common sense, something that seems to be an uncommon commodity, at least in the world of the advice column gurus. In many ways the message of this book is synonymous with the AA Serenity Prayer: God grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

I have been very critical of this book, but nevertheless acknowledge that there is an abundance of good advice and some keen insights into basic human nature.

3/5

This Dutch historian relates the stories of many forgotten altruistic individuals and some that are well-known. They include a Dutch resistance fighter in WWII, August Landmaster, Ralph Nader, Rosa Parks, the Quakers, suffragettes, and abolitionists like, Oludah Equiano, Martin Luther King Jr., and Wilberforce, Rob Mather of The World against Malaria Foundation, and Peter Singer the famous Princeton philosopher. What they seem to usually, but not always have in common is some sacrifice of lustrous careers to pursue altruistic goals that have had a greater impact with recruitment of others to multiply their effect. The author implores others to do likewise.

Those goals include fighting climate change, (Ronald Reagan had the solar panels on the White House roof, installed by Jimmy Carter, removed) ensuring food security, abolishing slavery, reducing racism, allowing women to vote. Also included is increasing protection from bioweapons, and reducing the risk of nuclear war. Beatrice Finn won the Nobel prize for her efforts against nuclear weapons, while Andy Weaver documented disassembly of nuclear weapons in a former Soviet republic.

Developing nuclear fusion and alternative energy sources, and guarding against runaway AI are also mentioned.

The emphasis in health care is on prevention rather than care with things like new vaccines and antimalarial nets. To that end, Doctors Without Borders, my favourite charity, is downplayed, but it seems to me that both prevention and treatment are desperately needed.

I was surprised that Bill Gates is not mentioned and that Peter Thiel is included. I don’t think there is anything remotely admirable or altruistic about the latter. Some of the projects mentioned seem off the wall, such as space ladders and colonizing Mars, -too far out of the box for me.

The author alludes to some PDF files that of course are not included in the audio version.

A good read with lots of readily understandable information and an interesting perspective.

4/5

At an unspecified modern time, a female film photographer/carpenter from the southern Korean island of Jeju and an artist from Seoul work together and become fast friends. With a shared interest in a past massacre that is kept secret, they plan to memorialize it.

Snow becomes a symbol of burial and forgetting and everything about snowflakes is discussed in great detail from their intricate geometry, their chemistry, their gravity and their ethereal and ephemeral nature as they hit the earth and melt. Other white objects also feature prominently, including two talking parakeets, one of which dies, is buried, and then magically reappears.

It gets very confusing and difficult to distinguish reality from the tortuous dreams and nightmares of the principal characters.

There must be some reality to the largely forgotten random mass killings and torture of up to 100,000 citizens of Korea just before, during and for thirty years following the Korean War, under a dictatorship, for suspected communist leanings, with mass graves in a deep cobalt mine and under the runway of an airport.

There may be reluctance to pan the book of a Nobel prize writer and critics have described this one with such meaningless adjectives as ‘astounding’ and ‘profound’ but my adjectives to describe it are ‘confusing’ and ‘disjointed’.

2/5

Thanks, The Economist.

The girl on the train in a London suburb in July 5th to September 10th, 2013, certainly has a vivid imagination. At a momentary stop every day as she goes to work, she sees into the yards and houses of adjacent rowhouses, and conjures up complex life stories to fit the people she sees there. none of whom are faithful to their spouses.

There are endless twists and turns and multiple murders as she actually gets to meet those same people, none of whom could remotely be considered normal.

The intermittent relapses into alcoholism with blackouts and hangovers is very well discribed. A foreign-borne psychotherapist becomes a target of the psychological phenomenon of transference and succumbs to a sexual relationship with a patient.

It makes no sense to test the paternity of an early pregnancy of a deceased woman when the illicit relationship had begun less than two months prior to her murder.

There are some other inconsistencies as well, such as: «…you can taste the carbon monoxide rising from the street below. » Carbon monoxide is odourless and tasteless.

Readers, to have any hope of keeping the characters straight, need to pay close attention to the dates, times and characters of each of the short chapters as there are frequent time shifts, but only three narrators, always talking in the first person singular tense.

Not my favourite genre, but very well written.

3/5

Thanks, Vera.

Two American historians combine their research to provide intricate details of the three-way (four-way if you count the lesser influences of the French), multiple conflicts between the 1730s and 1780s that led to the United States Declaration of Independence. With borders and names of both states and countries that kept changing, it can be challenging to keep track of the geology. However, I did recall a few names of some well-known sites such as Tate’s Creek in Lexington, Ky, the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachian Mountains, Big Bone Lick and a few others. And many individuals such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington are featured.

The legendary Daniel Boone who never missed an opportunity to fight an Indian and survived many harrowing encounters with a confusing array of different tribes with unpronoucible names, is central to the story. There is excruciating detail of cruel punishments meted out on all sides, with a scalping a common practice. The numerous treaties signed between white men and Indians were relatively meaningless as no Indian chief spoke for more than a small fraction of the native population and the white men broke promises with impunity, taking over more and more Indian territory.

Some of the detailed punishments must be embellished. As a medical professional, I find it impossible to believe that one man is said to be still breathing after both hands were severed, and then both legs were amputated and he was scalped before « breathing his last » as he was thrown into a fire.

The misogyny of the era is striking with women confined to producing large families, even when the men were out on months-long hunting tours or raiding Native encampments.

This is an exhaustively detailed account that provides much more informaton than most readers could possibly need to know; a professional historian could use it as a reference work. But is also a reminder of the cruel treatment of our native brothers that continues.

3/5

Thanks, The Economist.

I borrowed this ebook novel when I had nothing better to do. It is set in the 1970s Arkansas, although written by a Brit. By 20 pages in, I was thoroughly confused- there are several children missing including a one-eyed boy named Patches, who thinks he is a pirate. A school photographer becomes a prime suspect and several graves are eventually found. Then suddenly Patches is driving with a girl to the photographer’s home which has been burned down.

This is written entirely in short sentences which seem like follow no logical sequence, with what to me seem to be numerous spelling and grammatical errors. There is no time sequence given for the disjointed bits of dialogue.

After 74 chapters and only 200 pages, I gave up trying to follow a plot if there is one. For me this book reads like the too vivid imagination of a schizophrenic. It seems that everyone who has reviewed it disagrees, but so be it.

I am not counting this book as one I read nor will I give it a rating as I only read less than 1/3 of it.

Thanks, but no thanks, Kirkus Reviews.