The Passionate Reader

This second selective collection of reminiscences by the noted British neurosurgeon details his adventures as he approaches and enters full retirement. As I read both of his books, I conjured up various adjective to describe the complex persona of the author-as he portrays himself. Here, brilliant, skilled, articulate, pioneering, kind, athletic, adventurous, altruistic, sensitive, sentimental; there, short-tempered, cynical, agnostic, impetuous, curmudgeonly, introspective, insecure, adulterous, guilt-ridden.

He chose to continue with limited practice and teaching in Nepal, Ukraine, and Sudan after retiring from British academia. His keen observations of medical practices in Nepal include a fine discussion of the unrealistic family expectations and demands with threats of litigation, combining with practitioners’ pecuniary motives and competition all leading to rampant over-investigation and futile treatments including widespread use of decompression craniectomies (removal of much of the skull to allow the brain to swell) for hopeless stroke victims, and is spot on. When the practitioners’ hubris and reluctance to bear bad news to relatives is thrown into the mix, the result is bad and needlessly expensive health care. His description of the polite but impoverished Nepalese with volatile dispositions and unique customs and culture is a great introduction to a country that was entirely foreign to me.

The title seems to refer equally to the patients admitted to the neurosurgery ward and to his own often fatal errors practising in that rarified field. He refers to one patient as “one of the larger headstones in my inner cemetery.”

Chapter titles seem to have been chosen almost at random and often have little to do with their subject matter. For example, only eight of 31 pages in a chapter titled “An Elephant Ride” even mention elephants. The “Mind-Brain Problem” chapter is mainly a discourse on swimming and exercise. The “Memory” chapter is a combination of his family history and his experiences in a remote Tibetan general medicine clinic. But his plea for wider availability of medical assistance in dying in the last “Neither Sun Nor Death” is eloquent and compelling.

One further quote that I can’t resist passing on: “The best way to deceive others…is to deceive yourself.”

Like him, I chose to retire at age 65, but, unlike him I never continued any practice in a foreign impoverished country. I knew I would not miss the almost daily decisions I had to make that often determined the future of others, but like him, I felt lost for a while. He expresses this feeling superbly as facing “a frightening void, little different from the death preceded by the disability of old age and possibly dementia with which it would conclude.” At this remove, an admission of my own is in order. I can now relate that I became depressed. It was not that I had no hobbies to keep me busy but rather, having spent years growing and nurturing the possibly delusional belief that my work over 40 years was important and beneficial to others, I felt entirely useless and irrelevant. But pigheaded independence ensured that I would never seek help.

Recently, out for breakfast with friends, all of us ranted about our personal experiences with the inefficiencies, absurdities, waste, and inane rules and regulations promulgated by government and hospital bureaucrats and overseers hobnailing the real providers in our health care system. But none of us could match the vehemence and eloquence of Henry Marsh in this task.

This chronicle, much of it about agonizing deaths from brain tumours, is realistic and informative but depressing and not for everyone, although written in easily understood plain English. I have watched two colleagues and my first secretary die slow painful deaths in their forties from brain tumours, and in spite of that, quite enjoyed reading it because of its raw reality.

Thanks,

Goodreads.

A senior British neurosurgeon and the subject of two documentary films relates touching selective anecdotes from his long career. He exhibits unusual empathy and understanding of the fears of all patients undergoing brain surgery. Far from the arrogance of many surgeons in elite fields, he demonstrates remarkable humility, acknowledges his mistakes and the severe limitations of what heroic surgery can accomplish He seemingly reserves his condescension for his junior trainees, but he doles out scathing scorn for bureaucratic hospital and government administrators enforcing rules that usually only benefit themselves and complicate the work of front line caregivers. Of long retained NHS records he notes “The greater part of the notes….consist of nursing charts recording the patient’s passing of bodily fluids on previous admissions…. There must be tons of such notes being toted around NHS hospitals everyday in a strange archival ritual which brings dung beetles to mind, devoted to the history of patients’ excretions.”

The several page description of his tender interactions with his dying mother brought to mind the discussions in Shep Nuland’s memorable book How We Die. Like most neuroscientists he rejects any duality of body and mind-consciousness-soul in line with most modern philosophers. According to his agnostic beliefs, our minds are the natural result of neurochemical reactions and electrical activity in our brains.

The timely description of his altruistic work in Ukraine gives readers a peek into the primitive state of medical facilities and practices there, doubtless worse now. I was a bit disappointed that apparently none of his patients who progressed to brain death were referred for organ donation, which is only mentioned briefly once. It is usually, at least here, the responsibility of other physicians to get consent for that, but it is quite proper for attending neurosurgeons to raise the possibility with the family. How a neurosurgeon who failed in pharmacology got appointed to work with the complex of organizations assessing new drugs is never made clear.

The writing is in plain language that does not require a medical background to understand, although including an anatomical diagram of the human brain would have made that easier for non-medical readers.

The chapter titled Angor Animi, filled with anecdotes from his training as a junior house officer (here we were called residents or housestaff) brought back many memories, some sad, some hilarious. Just one for the record. Often on call from a Friday morning until a Monday evening as a senior resident, I caught what little sleep I could in the attached hospital residence quarters. At one point while reviewing the patients on 5 East at 7 a.m. with the head nurse. I enquired about where terminally ill old Joe had gone as his bed was empty. The nurse roared with laughter and told me that, according to the night nurse, I had gone to the ward at 2 a.m, declared him dead, and filled out the death certificate, a visit sleep-deprived me had no recollection of. Now neither housestaff nor surgeons are allowed to work such gruelling hours, although I learned a lot in such circumstances. Like the author, as a student, I also learned a lot about human relations and medicine working in a longterm psychiatric hospital with demented patients.

Even with almost no experience in neurosurgery, I can readily relate to the stress and challenges of dealing with the critically ill or dying in the midst of uncertainty, looking for that elusive balance between honest realism and leaving some room for hope, and I quite enjoyed this book.

I do not have the admirable patience and determination of a good friend who, in the last year, completed reading everything that Marcel Proust ever wrote. I have more and more frequently abandoned reading that I am not enjoying. I started reading two different books recently (Anthony Doer’s Cloud Cuckooland and Ann Patchett’s This Precious Life), having read their previous novels, but abandoned both less than half way through when I realized I was neither enjoying the experience nor learning anything useful from them. But this debut novel by a Black woman from Chicago’s poor largely black south side is a gem that I devoured in two days and will long remember. She was inspired to start writing it on election night in 2008 with Obama’s victory

In small town fictional Ganton, Indiana in 1997, a bright but poor black 17 year old gets pregnant and is forced by her dysfunctional family to give the boy up for adoption. She later is the only one of them to prosper, getting a scholarship to Yale and then marrying an equally-ambitious and bright black corporate executive and moving to downtown Chicago. But her marriage is strained in 2008 when he wants to start a family and she finally confesses to him that she already has a son that she misses terribly. I won’t give away more of the complex, twisted plot, which morphs into the thriller genre in the last half, then back to deep pathos in the last few of 40 chapters as all the diverse clues come together and many of the characters are reconciled with each other.

The deeply ingrained cruel systemic racism reminded me of that depicted in Jodi Picott’s great novel Small Great Things.

The plot line is somewhat unpredictable but realistic and complex and the main characters are entirely believable, though most are flawed Many readers may feel that for a poor black girl from the Midwest with a teen pregnancy in her past, receiving a scholarship to Yale is unrealistic, but I can assure everyone, from personal experiences there that it is not. In fact the plot is so realistic that some readers may start to question their own parentage -are they adoptees with nefarious relatives concealing their true origins? I know of at least two acquaintances who were adopted by their grandparents as siblings of their biological mothers, a practice that was and probably still is much more common than acknowledged.

I have only one very minor quibble, an obsession of mine. Veins are described as pulsating in anger, with “blood pumping through veins” -when will novelists realize that arteries but not veins pulsate?

An engaging must-read. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.

In this collection of 50 short essays on a wide variety of topics, the writer and thinker now living in Indianapolis reflects on everything from the banal like Diet Dr. Pepper, teddy bears, and Monopoly, to the profound like the Internet, CNN, smallpox vaccination, and viral meningitis.

All of the diverse topics are rated on a 1-5-star scale in this rambling, very relaxing discourse. His observations of the relationship of modern human beings to each other and to the rest of nature (hence the title) are delivered by the author, in the audiobook edition I listened to, in flowing, lilting sentences with clear enunciation and no accent that I could identify. Hundreds of diverse bits of often obscure background information from history, science, literature, philosophy and many other fields are interspersed with numerous anecdotes from his personal troubled past, including as a bookseller and as a trainee chaplain in a children’s hospital. These expose his own eccentricity, intelligence, brilliance- and vulnerability. His description of the absolute despair and sense of worthlessness during an episode of severe depression, delivered with gravitas in a rich baritone monotone is vivid and heart-wrenching. There is a vague introspective negativity to many of these musings that may turn some readers off, but also a lot of undeniable truth and positive reasons to celebrate the only life any of us have.

There are so many wonderful quotes:

“No bright line between imagination and memory”

“Most promises featuring the word always are false.”

“I am the Vice President of anxiety and the President is missing.”

“Disease only treats people equally where our social systems treat people equally.”

Unlike many writers conveying such vast amounts of information and unique perverse perspectives who can seem arrogant and condescending to their readers, Green comes across as humble and even genuinely self-depreciating, and insecure.

This book was Goodreads pick as the best nonfiction book of 2021. The audiobook edition narrated by the author, including a recording of the call of the now extinct Hawaiian Kawaii bird, is probably the best way to experience this sprawling discourse. The Goodreads choice is richly deserved in my opinion. Highly recommended. To mimic his ending of each essay, I give The Anthropocene five stars.

First a comment about the title. Not the author’s fault, but coupling the word civil with war has always struck me as the ultimate oxymoron. A more precise use of the English language would be to call it civic war?

In this alarmingly pessimistic but timely and perhaps realistic book, the Toronto-based writer and thinker presents five richly documented what-if possibilities, from trends already established, that would lead to civil war and chaos in the nation to our south. These range from presidential assassinations to secession of states from the union, failure to address climate change, increasing political polarization and the outbreak of widespread violence. With a combination of a vivid imagination, dozens of little-known indisputable facts, and interviews with politicians, political scientists, historians, psychologists, academics, military leaders, and radical racist conspiracy theorists like Richard Spencer, the possibilities are made to seem realistic, and the outbreak of civil war to seem almost inevitable. He presents no time line, but makes it clear that he thinks the disintegration of the nation is imminent.

The recent alarming developments in Canada that he could not have foreseen even last month when the book was published clearly show that we are not immune to similar developments.

He claims that although “[the founding fathers] created the greatest democracy and the greatest economy in the world”, their worshipped constitution is now a deeply flawed document that fails them in the modern world and that the most dangerous job in America is to be president. The unnecessarily heavily armed police and the military brass often align with and encourage right wing antigovernment extremist organizations, as some police in Ottawa did recently.

One great quote among many (with respect to potential assassins): “Social alienation comes with anger at their lot in life.”

The last section delivers the hopeful possibility that they can yet avoid all of the dire predictions he presented earlier, but, with what came before, that seems like whistling in the dark past the graveyard.

I have a few quibbles. The writing is largely in short alarmist-toned sentences and phrases. He describes the U.S. as the longest duration democracy in the world (debatable) and the richest country in the world. Perhaps it is the latter by total GDP, but certainly not by GDP per capita. The few maps and diagrams are so small as to be useless. He leaves the (probably unintended) impression that some radioactive material in the hands of antigovernment extremists is equivalent to them possessing nuclear bombs. The pagination in the ebook edition is all off and the book is at least two or three times as long as the page numbers indicate.

A sobering read that I didn’t enjoy at all but an important cautionary warning to anyone who values democracy.

Thanks,

Din

Although this is described as a novel, the two main protagonists, Palestinian Bassim Aramin and Jewish Rami Ehanan are two real men who fought on opposite sides of the Israel-Palestine conflicts but who then formed a real organization called Combatants for Peace. Refusing to assign blame to either side of the eternal conflict, they seem to prefer a two-state solution, but are open to any workable one. They and others also belong to the Parents Circle, a group of Israelis and Palestinians who have had their innocent children killed in the conflicts. Bassim’s 13 year old daughter was shot by a rogue Israeli soldier in 1997; Rami’s 10 year old daughter was blown up by an Islamic suicide bomber ten years later. It is not clear how much of the details of these deaths are real, as the New York author takes a lot of liberties in attributing characteristics and thoughts to the two men although much of the plot, such as the travel of the Palestinian Bassim to Bradford University to study the holocaust seems real.

The story is divided into no chapters but short sections numbered 1-500 then back down to 1, ranging from one phrase or photo to several pages, with seemingly random interspersed treatises on ornithology, and many other random topics. Many of these disconnected sections contain erudite bits of history from around the world, quotations from ancient or modern poets, philosophers and historians and trivial snitches of supposedly factual scientific data that have little or nothing to do with the main plot. What has the average volume of water in a backyard swimming pool got to do with this story? It is as though the author is trying to showcase his vast knowledge of history, philosophy, science, the arts and mathematics, the discipline from which the title derives. At the very middle are two ten page first-person-singular autobiographic sketches of the two men with heartfelt impassioned pleas for dialogue, understanding, and compassion rather than revenge even for the killers of their compatriots and family members. These sketches are separated by a one page explanation from the author about how they met.

Rami’s gripping account of the horrors of the ‘67 Yom Kippur war in the Sinai Desert emphasize the futility of all wars. The discussion of the spin, rumours, and outright lies that circulate to explain the senseless killing of the innocent presents the timeless truth that ‘The first casualty of war is the truth’.

There are some memorable quotes:

“The only revenge is making peace.”

“The hero makes a friend of his enemy.”

“The greatest jihad …..was the ability to talk”.

I confess that I frequently flipped forward to see how many pages were left. This touching story would have been much more enjoyable if it was half the length.

Thanks,

Jeannie

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I

Before starting into this one, on someone’s recommendation, I read part of Johnathan Franzen’s new novel Crossroads. But after less than 100 pages of 580, I abandoned it and returned it to the library. It is the first of a proposed trilogy and although it flows smoothly, I found what I read a bit unimaginative and could not reconcile myself to reading this, perhaps for the rest of my life, particularly when this little gem was sitting there beside me. Kudos to anyone who wades through Crossroads.

This little book (what distinguishes a book from a booklet?) is also part of a series, the latest by an American astrophysicist and professor at Barnard College, all of them about black holes.

Time becomes dilated and space is warped as you approach the event horizon on the edge of a black hole then fuse completely as you cross it toward the singularity of nothingness, or into a parallel universe within the black hole. (Astrophysicists debate which of these alternatives scenarios fit the data.)

Comparatives, such as before/after, above/below, heavy/light, and place and dimensions become meaningless words to those steeped in the lingo and mathematics of astrophysicists. Black holes are nothing, yet they have mass, spin, and charge and gobble up stars, galaxies- and visitors. She could have added that they apparently have measurable dimensions. And if you, the intrepid visitor, cross the event horizon where the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light, the information you glean (qubits in astrophysics lingo) may or may not escape in the form of Hawking radiation. Perhaps it is our linguistic limitations that make such paradoxes seem foreign and difficult to understand. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, (which would logically lead to the conclusion that even interstellar space cannot be entirely free of matter) is likened to the difference between a lone musical note and one within a chord.

The existence of black holes was ‘proven’ with the aid of a huge radio telescope on April 9, 2019, although the resulting image is partly white.

The major remaining big efforts in this rarified field are to reconcile relativity with quantum mechanics and Hawking radiation from black holes. And Hawking radiation comes as monogamous entangled quantum pairs (those qubits) that can be separated and then communicate information over vast distances faster than the speed of light because they are complementary like the two parts of a broken wishbone. How black holes which supposedly are nothing and from which nothing can escape transmit Hawking radiation Is a paradox which left me confused; I doubt that I was the only one.

I recall how puzzled I was as a child on first learning that the largest volume within of all atoms is a nothingness, a void. But such facts that challenge our intuitions are the mainstay of most physical and chemical sciences and are exemplified best in astrophysics- and most ably explained in this beautiful little book. Although I have read numerous books on relativity and cosmology, I cannot claim even a rudimentary working understanding of them; reading this book provided a useful upgrade to my understanding. I would also need a major upgrade to my mathematics schooling to clear the fog further.

The author’s infectious enthusiasm for her subject overflows into her writing and off the page on to the reader. And the reader’s imagined attempt to travel to the event horizon and beyond of any one of billions of supermassive black holes in the known universe is like a plot line in a wild sci-fi novel.

I greatly enjoyed reading this book; confusing in places, enlightening in others, and literally otherworldly, it is stuffed with great analogies, paradoxes, and apparent contradictions.

Thanks,

Andra, via Cratejoy.

This is a modern memoir of a well known Detroit sports writer who took over management of the Have Faith orphanage in Port Au Prince, Haiti following the 2010 earthquake. Adorable, self-assuredly-cheeky three year old Chika was left there and the childless Albions basically adopted her and subsequently, sparing no money, took her to Detroit and around the world looking for a cure when she enveloped what all the oncologist told them was an incurable brainstem cancer known as a Deep Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DIPG). She nevertheless died at age seven, in 2017. Ingeniously, he uses what appears to be magical delusions or even hallucinations of posthumous interactions and conversations with her to explore what her short life meant to him, and only late in the narrative admits that these postmortem connections were “all in my head.”

It is never made clear which flavour of Christianity he adheres to but the Albions both pray daily, and he never expresses any doubt about his God’s benevolence in spite of the contrary evidence of the cruel fate dealt to Chika. He seems to subscribe to the questionable religious explanation for the cruelties of life proposed by C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain. And with the extraordinary futile measures they undertook to prolong her life including having a feeding tube surgically inserted into her stomach, this book provides support for Ernest Becker’s thesis in his The Denial Of Death that humans are uniquely irrational when it comes to thinking about and dealing with death.

The pathos is extreme. Although it is never easy to know when it is time to give up hope and yield to fate, especially when children are nearing death, I found the measures undertaken by Albion to be irrational and unrealistic. I am well aware of ethical debates about such measures as inserting gastric feeding tubes for individuals who are clearly dying within a few weeks, often having debated such ethics in my career, although I am no longer required to participate in such agonizing decisions.

I will not be reading Albom’s most famous memoir, Tuesdays With Morrie, about his visits to a dying man, anytime soon, as I have read enough about death to last a long time. But I have been thankfully spared the need to care for dying close relative children, and will refrain from judging those who have had to endure this painful experience.

There are a couple of memorable relevant quotes:

“Sometimes life throws a saddle on you before you are ready to run.”

“One of the best things a child can do for an adult is to draw them down, closer to the ground, for better reception of the voices of the earth.”

The next book I read will have nothing to do with dying. This is a well-written easy-to-follow one-day short read, but not a pleasant one.

Thanks,

Andra

Had I not read and greatly enjoyed most of the nineteenth century Russian classics by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leon Tolstoy, and Ivan Turgenev, I would not have even looked at this most recent biography of Dostoevsky by a Harvard English lecturer. The son of a military physician murdered by his own serfs, Fyodor, a reckless gambler, and from an early age debt-ridden and phlegmatic, uniquely rejected his inherited status to become a writer when almost all Russian writers were hobbyists with other occupations. And he seemed to be always fascinated with murderers, trying to get into their heads.

In 1848 and 1849, as protests against autocracy rocked European capitals, 28 year old Dostoevsky, as part of a secretive intellectual cabal of liberals, anarchists, and atheists known as the Petrashvsky Circle, who advocated for freeing serfs, democracy, and women’s right to vote, was arrested and imprisoned in St. Petersburg after being betrayed by spies in their midst. After imprisonment and a staged last minute reprieve from execution, he was banished to a Siberian hard labour camp in Omsk for four years and forbidden to write. His fellow prisoners included many murderers but also some whose crimes were nothing more than crossing themselves in a way that the Orthodox Church found objectionable. There he observed many murderers firsthand, secretly scribbled notes, and studied the character of murderers to include in later writings.

Following his release by the new, more liberal reformist tsar Alexander II, successor to Nickolas II, he served five years of compulsory military service. (This would be during the Crimean War, but it is not clear whether or not he served there.) He married a widow suffering from tuberculosis in 1857, but their relationship was never a happy union. He became obsessed with reports of the famous Paris poet cum gruesome murderer Pierre-Francois Lacenaire with his numerous aliases and his horrific senseless 1835 murders, and this polite and charming criminal became the model for Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, in Crime and Punishment. There is no doubt that Lacenaire was a psychopath, long before the term was invented and the condition was accepted as a disease. He showed no remorse and intense distain for all societal moral standards. Now it is known that psychopaths have peculiar anomalies in their brains’ motor neurone networks. Is this the cause or just an effect of their behaviour? But at his trial, Lacenaire’s murders were described as being the result of a disease, of a ‘sick mind’.

The narrative alternates between the events leading up to Lacenaire’s execution and the intermittent destitution, gambling addiction, and affairs of Dostoevsky. His. poverty and threats of debtor’s prison was particularly acute during his three month tour of Western European cities in 1863 when he began planning the plot of Crime and Punishment, and again before it appeared in serialized form in a St. Petersburg magazine in 1866.

Dostoevsky’s outlook and beliefs varied from atheism and nihilism to materialism and Epicureanism at different times but he was never happy for long and was often profoundly depressed. His musings about the impossibility of free will and predestination are given scant attention in this tome.

The frequent premature deaths from infectious diseases including those of his first wife, his brother, and his nephew weighted heavily on him. The quackery of phrenology is described in detail and the unpopular but lucrative Russian pawn broker industry is also given great attention. It is no accident that they were the victims in both real and fictional murders.

The description of Dostoevsky’s frequent temporal lobe seizures with their religious epiphanies, similar to those of St. Paul and the Prophet Mohammed, is graphic although how Birmingham determined that they originated in his left temporal insular cortex is not clear. But they are also featured in his later The Idiot, one of his best short books, in my opinion.

This is not just a biography, but a primer of 19th century Russian history, societal norms, politics, and geography. The horrible conditions Dostoevsky describes in the Siberian prisoner labour camp in Omsk reminded me of those described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago and his One Day in The life of Ivan Denisovich, a century later. Russian rulers have a long history of treating their citizens horribly to this day.

This biography ends at his marriage to his much younger stenographer in 1867, long before he wrote the masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov, in 1880, featuring more murders.

For dedicated Dostoevsky fans, this provides interesting reading. But it is also windy and needlessly long, including a lot of irrelevant detail. Birmingham lacks the word smithing skills of his subject, even though I could only read the latter in translation. In addition the hard copy library edition is written in a small font with fainter than usual print on off-white paper. If you want to delve into it, get the available audiobook- the absence of the unhelpful jumbled index will be no great loss. The audiobook has the additional advantage of helping with pronunciation of the difficult Russian patronymics.

Thanks,

The New Yorker.

This coming of age novel, written in 1797-98, revised in 1803, and only published in 1818, a year after the authors death, was chosen by someone in our book club for our occasional foray into old classics. The first half is set in the English spa town of Bath, and most of the second in fictional Northanger Abbey in Gloucestershire, a repurposed run down Reformation-era nun’s convent, sometime in the late 1700s.

The most important task of middle-aged women of the era seemed to be matchmaking for their daughters and young maidens in their charge. With rigid rituals of courtship, the girls need to find suitable young men of good breeding and integrity and with means of support. The men likewise carefully direct their sons in their choice of a wife of suitable means and societal standing. Fathers, but not mothers of both sides were required to consent to any marriage, emphasizing the rigid paternalism of the society. The young women were not expected to be smart, educated or articulate. “The natural advantages of folly in a beautiful girl have already been set forth by another author….imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms.” The precursors of the dumb blond stereotype?

When the 17 year old main protagonist, Catherine Moreland is a guest of one family first at Bath and then of an aristocratic one at Northanger Abbey with its out-of-bounds dark mysterious rooms and halls, described in great detail, she seems to fit the above description of a beautiful dumb girl by imagining the latter site to be an old crime scene, based on her past reading of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mystery Of Udolpho.

There is at least some semblance of a plot and the inevitable happy ending in the second half of the story. The characters can be a bit difficult to keep straight, and are very properly British in their demeanour and outlooks to the point of making the novel seem like a mocking satire. The conversations are wordy and circumlocutory with flowery language and no one directly states what they really think. Some sentences are more than a half a page long, and everyone seems quick to be offended by the smallest perceived slight. Everyone keeps a journal and writes long windy letters in elaborate language.There are painfully long detailed descriptions of people’s clothing, conversations and of public spaces.

Austen engages readers in aside disquisitions to the reader about the art of novel writing, literacy in general, history and politics, and bemoans the poor esteem of novelists.

I actually enjoyed this book much more than I thought I would when I started in to it, particularly the latter half. But I will not be tempted into trying Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensbility.

This is a well-researched (34 pages of Notes, a 28 page Bibliography, and a 13 page Index) antiestablishment polemic screed by a Brooklyn-based Indian expat. It provides many nuggets of interesting information and a rare perspective on the perils facing our species and our planet. The title is a reference to the world’s only source of nutmeg in the 1600s, the remote Banda or Lonthor island in what is now called Indonesia, where, in 1621, the capitalists of the Dutch East Indian Company slaughtered the natives to take control of the spice trade. By extrapolation, all of earth’s resources are seen as cursed objects if exploited, to be avoided or at least carefully preserved and replenished. Renaming of cities and countries is seen as colonial linguistic means of burying meaning and reinventing history, supporting imperial European exploitation of resources in the broadest sense including that of human labour.

The nineteen chapters are largely separate essays that can each be read and understood without reference to others, and some are much more interesting and informative than others. In Monstrous Gaia, James Lovelock’s view of earth as an active vital force imbued with purpose, communication skills, and even sentience is explored fully, and contrasted with the capitalist extractive view of earth as a resource to be exploited by a uniquely privileged species.

In Father of All Things, the role of the military, particularly that of the U.S., in perpetuating the status quo and contributing to the climate crisis is exposed with startling troublesome data. He claims that the U.S. military consumed approximately 25 billion tons of fuel per year in the 1990s, undoubtedly higher now-while being deployed largely to protect the sources and shipping lanes of fossil fuel tankers. This does not include fossil fuel use in the production of military hardware. And the military use of fossil fuels is specifically excluded from calculations of reductions of carbon emissions promised in climate agreements. “The predicament of the U.S. Department of Defence is a refraction of the quandary that now confronts the world’s status quo powers…. How do you reduce the fossil fuel consumption of a gargantuan military machine that exists largely to act as a ‘delivery service’ for hydrocarbons?”

In “The Falling Sky” Ghosh expands on the connectedness view of earth in Monstrous Gaia, and the views of aboriginals everywhere of earth as a living vital force needing preservation and protection. He embraces the mysticism of stones, rivers, and flora and fauna as entities that are endowed with independent volition, can be related to, communicating with us, holding the spirits of ancestors, etc. He notes that “It is perhaps impossible to regain an intuitive feeling for the Earth’s vitality once it has been lost; or if it has been suppressed through education and indoctrination.” With western indoctrination and education as a scientist, I can attest to the truth of that statement as I tried and failed to understand the bizarre, psychedelic-powered visions of the world of the Brazilian shaman Davi Kopenawa and other shamans around the world whom Ghosh admires. I seldom talk to rivers, rocks or trees, even those I love.

The tone of this book is entirely negative as the author heaps equal scorn on almost all isms, including capitalism, Marxism, imperialism, colonialism, consumerism, and even some environmentalism- and all religious isms except worship of Mother Earth, which he calls vitalism and shamanism. While I learned a lot and generally appreciate iconoclastic attacks on what the late John Kenneth Galbraith dubbed ‘conventional wisdom’ I cannot recommend this humourless book with its pessimistic outlook for our future for the general public.

Thanks,

The New Yorker

This memoir by the former food critic, restaurant reviewer, and editor of Gourmet magazine provides unique insights into the inner workings of the elitist, competitive corporate world of magazine publishing in an America of the past. Conde Nast, publisher of many magazines, including The New Yorker, GQ, Vogue, House and Garden, and Vanity Fair lured the unassuming, common-sense author and food writer away from the LA Times to the posh offices of Gourmet magazine overlooking New York’s Times Square in 1999.

Unaccustomed to the world of seemingly unlimited budgets for personnel, travel, and wardrobes, she outlines many battles with the staid conservative old guard billionaire owner and a succession of resistant personnel in the upper echelons of the corporate world, revitalizing the magazine with daring content. This included a controversial long piece by David Foster Wallace questioning the ethics of dropping live Maine lobsters into boiling water. Along the way, she interrupted her hectic New York life to go on month-long book tours to promote her own and Gourmet’s books.

The book is replete with descriptions of famous quirky chefs, executives, and writers, including a few names I recognized from their writing in The New Yorker, or from their books that I have read. However most were unfamiliar to me as I am basically a food agnostic and seldom dine anywhere with a Michelin rating. The recipes included are, with one exception, far too complicated for me to attempt or to even understand. The high brow social scene of the New York celebrities with jumbo egos where your seating at a gala dinner is a hint as to whether you are about to be promoted or fired is likewise very foreign to me, but interesting to read about. I cannot imagine living among people who don’t think twice about buying a Paris dress on sale for only $6,500.00.

The pandemonium and fear gripping New York following 9/11 is described in detail as the chefs and staff at Gourmet magazine prepare and deliver food to exhausted firefighters at Ground Zero. As an aside, the author’s description of her mother’s irresponsible actions in the manic phase of her bipolar disorder, buying a house, a boat, and a mink coat that they cannot afford, is a rare accurate depiction of the difficulties in dealing with that phase of a devastating illness, seldom featured in literary works.

On a low-budget 2009 tour of Paris, staying at dingy outer arrondissement hotels and eating at cheap diners, she met an old chef friend who had a profound effect on her, pointing out that riches, fame, servants, limousines, and celebrity status are not necessary for a meaningful life, and should not be major goals in her life. “I had forgotten how money becomes a barrier, insulating you from ordinary life.” When she is ordered back to New York from a book tour later that year, she is sure she is about to be fired, but instead hears that the magazine is being inexplicably abruptly cancelled, including the next month’s issue that was ready to be printed. She seems somehow to not be very disappointed, taking the Paris friends advice to heart.

I am an indiscriminate eater, willing to try almost anything on offer (except liver), and a terrible cook, but I found this book engaging and an enjoyable read, in one sense only peripherally about food at all. I suspect that more dedicated foodies would enjoy it even more than I did.

Thanks,

Jackie.

One metric of how much I am or am not enjoying reading or listening to a book in any format is how often I flip to the end to see how much I have yet to read. Another that my wife often notices is how often I find excuses to stop reading and do something else. With this book of 14 short true biographical sketches by the Calgary travel writer, I seldom checked how much I had left to read and found nothing more important to do as I read on, enthralled as Canadian cabbies told stories about their backgrounds, struggles and work experiences. It could have entertained me for longer if the author had found more cabbies willing to chat with him.

The author does not claim that the cabbies he interviewed are a representative or scientific sample, but were the only ones willing to talk to a journalist on the record. And he fills in their stories with notable background information and data. For example, he claims that a taxi driver in Canada is more likely to be murdered than is a police officer. A Pandemic Postscript documents the devastating effect of the early part of the Covid-19 pandemic on the lives of several cabbies he interviewed earlier.

The interviews feature no one who was born in Canada except for one aboriginal man in the far North.They were mostly a diverse group of immigrants from war-torn or impoverished third world countries with harrowing stories of their past experiences. From Halifax to Vancouver to Yellowknife, there are none who started out in adulthood with a goal of becoming a taxi driver, but most expressed gratitude for the opportunities the job provided them.The title has a triple meaning as they are usually driven into the business by severe poverty, and are driven by ambition to succeed and provide a better life for their families as their better-healed customers are driven to and from airports, brothels, casinos, house parties, and shopping malls. Some befriend the prostitutes they supply with customers, or become customers themselves, and some are frustrated poets, writers, engineers or social workers. A joke in Montreal is that the safest place to have a heart attack is in a cab as your driver is likely to be a cardiologist.

The story of how Nathan Phelps escaped from the notorious Kansan Westboro Baptist Church cult to become a Calgary cabbie, public speaker, and minor philosopher is particularly touching and made me cringe to think that I was once a duly-dunked Baptist. But Baptists come in many different flavours and all of my Baptist relatives and friends would be as appalled by the cruelty and extremism of the Werboro Baptists as I am. He muses about the impossibility of an afterlife: “It suddenly becomes that much more important for my life to have some relevance, because this is it.” The author succinctly adds: “ If nothing comes afterwards, everything matters more.”

Dominated by Punjabi immigrants, no member of the Winnipeg taxi cabal, whose members have a bad reputation for abuse and assault, agreed to be interviewed, but the volunteer Ikwe women that he did interview, dedicated to providing safe rides for vulnerable poor and indigenous women of that city stepped in to provide a safe and necessary service and talked proudly about their work. They are to be admired.

Some of the interviewed drivers are more interesting than others. Iranian Mo in Halifax seems to be a charismatic entrepreneurial psychopath with PTSD and an ambition to live a life like the rich businessmen he ferries around in his fancy BMW limo. The Danish Edmonton cabbie is forever finding dubious hidden connections between Shakespearean characters and Bob Dylan song characters and writes poetry and novels. I do not know enough about the industry to take take sides in the taxi vs Uber wars in Toronto and Montreal, but found the tactics of the “Taxi Sheriff” of Montreal thwarting would-be Uber drivers to be ingenious and entertaining.

As I was nearing the epilogue, purely by chance, I listened to a CBC story on the car radio about the billions of dollars that several companies are pouring into the development of flying taxis, some of them driverless, and became concerned for the future of the interesting real drivers in this book.

A very Canadian and very enjoyable good read. Highly recommended.

Thanks,

Floyd.

What a peculiar title for a debut work of fiction; enigmatic, but as the story unfolds, obliquely relevant. Greta, aged 16 and June, aged 14, daughters of tax accountants in Westchester county, New York in the spring of1987 are very different. June is the narrator throughout, and is insecure, introspective, lacking friends and completely obsessed with everything connected to her maternal uncle Finn, a gay artist in New York City who dies of AIDS. Greta is popular, confident in herself, and rebellious. After Finn’s death, his partner, Tobe, a British ex-con also harbouring AIDS, becomes the object of June’s obsession, dividing the family, who inflict guilt trips on each other, displaying betrayals, deceptions, and lies as the sisters increasingly become estranged before (inevitably) reconciling.

The fear, stigma and misunderstanding of AIDS in the mid 1980s before any effective treatment is realistically portrayed. The elitist world of modern art in New York in that era with an obsession with authenticity and widely inflated prices is likewise very realistically described.

The plot flows smoothly chronologically, with only June’s perspective and only becomes at all complex in the last 50 or so pages when loose ends are tied up. I found that the never-ending self-analysis, doubts, and ethereal musings of June became tiresome. The father is a rather colourless, bland, peripheral character that few readers will relate to- probably because he is too sane and normal- fatal characteristics for a fictional being.

This is a coming of age novel that some young readers may enjoy, but I cannot recommend it for old curmudgeons like me.

Thanks,

Andra.

I have not included in the pages count the very helpful ten pages Cast of Characters that the author provided to guide the reader through this detailed documentation of an interesting aspect of American history. The title refers to the team headed by the indomitable chemist, Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, the Chief of the chemistry division at the U.S. Department of Agriculture for many years, starting in 1883. His uncompromising efforts to document, expose, and pass laws to eliminate rampant adulteration of all kinds of foods, with toxic additives made him enemies within all sectors of the corrupt food and beverage industry. Spoiled beef was embalmed with formaldehyde, gypsum and rock dust was added to flour, arsenic, copper sulphate, and Borax was used to disguise rotten foods, ground up insects with coal tar dyes containing benzene were sold as jams and corn sugars and toxic dyes were sold as maple syrup or honey. Lab ethanol with colouring agents was sold as bourbon. “Coffee” even as beans was sold without any ingredients from coffee plants, with unknown plant ingredients carefully made to look like coffee beans. Thousands of children died from drinking spoiled milk preserved with formaldehyde. Copper sulphate was added to make vegetables look greener and copper sulphites to disguise rotting vegetables. First generation CocaCola contained cocaine, alcohol, and salicylic acid.

The bureaucratic infighting, lobbying, backstabbing and Congressional gridlock that Wiley encountered meant that the first flawed Pure Food and Drug Act was only passed in 1906 and was only sporadically enforced. Dirty tricks such as anonymous letters to editors containing ad hominem slurs and lies abounded. But Wiley also wrote prolifically and spoke to the public eloquently and frequently, engaged with some allies in the food industry such as H.J. Heinz, and groups such as the suffragettes, and conducted what must have been one of the first double blind controlled trials using volunteer civil servants to assess the safety of various additives, first testing Borax. And his cause was boosted by Upton Sinclair’s graphic description of filthy conditions in Chicago meat packing plants in his novel The Jungle.

The cosmetics and patent medicine industries were virtually free of regulation in that era and their ingredients and marketing ploys in many ways are even now akin to those used earlier by the food industry. The latter used patented meaningless alluring names such as Freezine and Preserverine to disguise what they were promoting. We are exposed to Genacol’s Aminolock and Olay’s Regeneris hand rejuvenation instead. Some marketing gimmicks never change.

The much improved Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act leading to the creation of the FDA was only passed in 1938, after Wiley had died. I note here that two food additives that he was concerned about, sodium benzoate used as a preservative and in pickling and saccharin an artificial sweetener are still extensively used. Have they been proven to be safe or does the old Scottish verdict ‘Guilt not proven still apply. At least the labelling improvements will tell you when they are there. And we can be sure what it is if it is called bourbon.

The documentation is extensive and scholarly, but dry and very American-centric. Other country’s regulation of their food industries is mentioned only as it impacted trade with the U.S. All countries have undoubtedly come a long way in improving the safety of their food supplies in the last century or more, but have we gone far enough or gone to far? I can’t answer that question.

This book may be of most value to nutritionists and those working in the food industry, and perhaps cautious grocery shoppers. If I learned anything from it, it is to be ever more skeptical of marketing ploys and to read labels carefully.

Thanks,

Andra.

First a comment about our William’s Court Book Club 2. We are democratic and ecumenical. We never vote but arrive at a consensus about what books we will discuss, careful to include a variety of genres, and some new as well as some old classics. We do not limit our choices by the length of a book, but we do usually limit them to books available in some library. This one was chosen for us to discuss next month

In this early novel from a prodigious Californian, three daughters of a surly demanding and cruel widower farmer are the main characters, along with their husbands, children and a few neighbouring farmers and townsfolk. The habitually miscarrying childless daughter is the narrator. None want to continue the farming business but have no choice as their increasingly demented father bequeaths the farm to them. A restless, hippie pacifist military deserter, the son from an adjacent farm, returns to the community after an extended sojourn in Vancouver as a draft dodger to avoid serving in Vietnam, and stirs up rivalries and discord, serially seducing the unhappy frustrated farm wives. The sex is described tastefully.

The dark side of this story is the extreme hostility that divides the family to the point of plotting murders, and the allegations of sexual abuse. Rosie bitterly recalls repeated incestuous raping of both herself and her sister, Ginny, in their teens, while Ginny has apparently completely suppressed all memories of that trauma. Modern psychology papers are rife with studies of suppressed memories, but also of recall of memories of events that never happened. I suspect these phenomena, at least in their extreme forms, are more often discussed than experienced. Which woman here is to believed? The description of the man involved leaves little doubt about which the author expects the reader to believe.

The plot is imaginative but realistic and unpredictable, echoing some features of a mad King Lear and his three daughters.

The first part of this story, set in rural Iowa in the 1960s and 70s brought back so many memories of my farm childhood in Ontario that I thoroughly enjoyed it, even though some of those memories were not enjoyable. The strict gender role delineations with the women expected to clean house, garden, sew clothes, cook, serve meals on a rigid schedule, (and produce babies). The Farmall, International Harvester and John Deere tractors, plows, manure spreaders. The subtle and sometimes not so subtle competition between neighbouring farmers to outdo each other with better crops, bigger machinery, and larger herds. The competitive late evening Monopoly games at the kitchen table with cousins and siblings. The trips to town to the rented cold storage locker, the Farmer’s Co-op store for feed and seed, and the grocery store. The corporal punishment doled out liberally. The tile drainage of wet fields. (My father decided to put clay tile drains into much of the 200 acre farm in October, 1954, just as the remnants of Hurricane Hazel dumped prodigious amounts of rain on the fields. The hired ditching machine and tractors were mired in the mud for weeks. I was blissfully naive and never was aware of the precarious farm finances, the hushed-up illicit trysts, the resentments, and the sometimes bitter rivalries but they were undoubtedly there, even among close relatives. I never had to deal with alcoholic relatives, and was only vaguely aware of blatant favouritism in parents. The evolution from impoverished family farms to huge corporate factory farms described late in this tale (at a time after had I escaped to city life) is made to seem like a tragic loss of a way of life. Of their cantankerous father, one daughter remarks to another: “He’s a farmer, Caroline. That is a personality structure that supersedes every childhood influence.”

Thanks,

Din.

This is another American novelist’s historical fiction set in France during WWII, this one largely in Saint Malo, off the west coast of Brittany. It is not the only one featuring this port city, but I cannot recall the other one I read set there. The title alludes to the remarkable skills of a young French teen who went blind at age 6. Like many deaf or blind folk, she has greatly heightened abilities in her remaining intact sensory organs, akin to synesthesia, the crossed input signals to the brain by which some people hear colours, see sounds and taste words. “She hears her father smile.” The title may also be taken as a reference to wavelengths used in radio communication.

The writing is lyrical, almost poetic with vivid observations, beautiful metaphors and quaint twists. As a troop truck travels down a road, “The canopies of cherry trees drift overhead, pregnant with blossoms. Werner props open the back door and dangles his feet off the rear bumper, his heels just above the flowing road. A horse rolls on its back in the grass; five white clouds decorate the sky.”

There is not very subtle insight into of the universal practice of military recruiters everywhere offering opportunities for youths to escape from a life of drudgery with the accompanying indoctrination into unquestioning obedience to authority, inuring young minds to cruelty. This typically is presented at a stage in life when one’s moral instincts are not fully developed, their education restricted to mandatory groupthink. In Werner’s case, it is the choice of a life as a radio technician and operator in Hitler’s army vs a life as a coal miner. It is humbling to think that, in an alternate universe, had I been the product of a German farm accident in the 1920s, rather than a Canadian farm accident in 1945, I might well have joined the Hitler Youth, not the Canadian Army Cadet Corps, to escape the hard work of farming.

There are few main characters but the plot is very complex and with thirteen parts subdivided into 117 short titled chapters it can be difficult for the reader to follow the chronology of events. The extensive use of time shifting between chapters does not help. All of the narrative is written in the present tense. Being very technophobic, I cannot attest to the accuracy of the technical details of radio communications in that era.

There are negatives. Adding an element of sci-fi, there is the overworked literary device of a futile search for a mysterious valuable gem that carries a curse, in this case a huge diamond stolen from the Paris Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle. The myth of allergies to goldenrod is perpetuated and yet another novelist describes veins, rather than arteries, pulsating.

Overall, this is an enjoyable read, more for the masterful use of words and appreciation of a remarkable imagination than for the minutiae of the plot. The teaser for the author’s latest book, Cloud Cuckoo Land, included at the end of this ebook edition did not entice me to add that to my list of books to find and read.

Thanks, Barb P.

Early in this new tome,10 years in the writing, two British academics (anthropology and archaeology), promise to point out fundamental flaws in the theses of Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order, Jared Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel, Stephen Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature and Noah Yuval Harari’s Sapiens. Since I have read all those books, enjoyed them, and found their accounts of early human development quite convincing, and since I also have an enduring inexplicable (even to myself) interest in the nature and societal organization of our our very ancient ancestors, I read on. But early on I found that there were barely enough dry morsels of brain food to keep me from starving my noggin, or napping.

Starting with the classic contrasting views of Hobbesian hawks waging a war of everyone against everyone and Rosseauian altruistic doves, the authors trash the very concept of this neat dichotomy. The progression of human societies from bands, to tribes, to chiefdoms to states is shown to be far too simplistic and was interrupted by seasonal migrations as was the common narrative of progression from hunter-gatherers to gardeners to farmers to industrial states.

They question the whole concept of human progression, discuss the philosophical conundrum of ‘human agency’ or free will only very superficially, and note that there may never have been an idyllic society of Edenic equality and leisure, and claim that the collection of surpluses whether of food, other resources, or money, leading to gross inequalities, is limited in nature to the human species, and not even universal in us. Even the concept of equality seems problematic to these iconoclasts.

There are 110 pages comparing and contrasting precolonial Californian societies and those of the Pacific Northwest. Is ‘compare and contrast’ still an imperative order in exams in literature at all levels as it was in my school days? This chapter is followed by 99 pages dividing the the so-called Neolithic Fertile Crescent of the eastern Mediterranean around 8000 B.C. into 12 distinct but often interacting societies of hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists, contradicting Noah Harari’s assertion of wheat cultivation enslaving Homo sapiens, and denying any concept of any smooth ‘Agricultural Revolution’. They question the whole concept of human progress.

After about 600 pages (out of 1734), and heeding advice from an author on CBC’s Q to, during the pandemic, for one’s mental health, only read books that one enjoys, I bailed out and returned this ebook edition to the OPL without reading the rest. Did I miss the best part?

This book may be of value as a reference volume or text for dedicated ethnologists, anthropologists and archeologists, (or perhaps advanced ancient history teachers), but I cannot recommend it for anyone else.

Thanks,

The Atlantic.

The fearless, hyperkinetic, ADHD-suffering, gay, Newfie kid from Middle Cove here outlines his adventures as a sketch comedian, political commentator, and satirist, but only up to the time when he is about to star in his own CBC show, The Rick Mercer Report. That 2004-2018 show celebrating everything that is right about Canada and ranting about everything that is wrong about it, particularly it’s political leadership, was one of the few TV shows I seldom missed. His rants from that show are a fun read in his 2018 book, Final Report.

With unpredictable twists in mid sentence, masterful snappy short sentences and phrases, and great punch lines, his writing is hyperkinetic, humorous and brilliant. On arriving in Kabul to entertain our troops after a hair-raising flight in a beat up Afghani airline plane he says “For the first time, I related to the Pope, with his penchant for kissing the ground he lands on.” On first meeting Preston Manning he commented that “Over the coming the years he would morph into a much slicker politician, lowering his voice, getting contact lenses and experimenting with clothes that actually fit.”

Perhaps the best satire is in the chapter “Talking to Americans” in which he exposed the profound ignorance about all things Canadian of ordinary Americans and even their political leaders and academics by feeding them ludicrous lies about Canada and recording their responses in street interviews. It is hard to believe such prevalent myopic disinterest in the rest of the world unless one has experienced it as I did at Yale in the mid 70’s. In July that year, it took me almost two weeks to find out who had won in the Canadian election that I had voted in the day I left Canada. And I got used to the New Haven weatherman calling winter storms developing in Minnesota and heading our way “cold Canadian air.”

Mercer is generous in his praise for his many coworkers and enablers, self-deprecatory, and humble. The insights into how decisions and collaborations in the world of television are enlightening.

A uniquely Canadian delightful read. I hope there will be a sequel covering his later exploits.

Thanks,

Vera.

First a confession. Before being gifted this book, I had never heard of the famous Chinese author of this memoir. He describes his occupation as artist but defines art loosely, as he plays roles as poet, writer, sculptor, visual artist, photographer, documentary film-maker, architect, musician, political activist and all-round S.D. His father was apparently an equally famous artist (in pre-Revolutionary China), a friend of Mao Zedong and a leading communist fighting the Japanese occupiers and the Nationalists at one point before becoming a disillusioned critical outsider, and was jailed long before Mao’s 1970s Cultural Revolution that killed 550,000.

The first 80 pages is all family history stuffed with unfamiliar names of people and places, as the author’s father moves repeatedly around China and elsewhere in the pre-revolution years, even becoming a friend of the famous Chilean Communist poet Pablo Neruda.

The author was and still is equally itinerant, travelling around the world to art exhibits featuring his work, and making friends everywhere he goes. While living in New York, American friends included Susan Sontag, Andy Warhol, and Allen Ginsberg. There is no doubt that he is talented in many fields, intelligent, sincere, and devoted to championing human rights everywhere. He was the Chinese collaborator with a Swiss architectural company in designing the Bird’s Nest stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. I rarely read poetry, but some included in the book was quite enjoyable. His work and political views are so characterized by antagonism to everything mainstream as to make him seem to be an anarchist.

His subversive artistic themes naturally lead to conflict with the autocratic controlling Communist Party and his fearless criticism finally lead to his incarceration and silencing without a trial for 181 days in 2011, at the same time that my wife and I were touring China for three weeks. His documentation of the cruelty of the state apparatchiks is chilling.

He must not be poverty-stricken. He describes flying 100 tons of rebar across China to construct a memorial statue to children killed in a poorly constructed state school in the 2008 earthquake. More puzzling is his arranging and funding for 1001 ordinary Chinese to visit an art exhibition in Germany as some kind of symbolic work of art itself. Much of his art, like most of contemporary art, is just confusing to me, Images of a nude man covered in flies, a man chewing on the arm of an aborted human fetus, and of three women and himself standing nude do not inspire awe in me. It seems that if it shocks, it must be art.

The author’s relationship to women can best be described as serial monogamy, with or without the benefits of marriage. It is not clear even in the About The Author blurb, where he is now living-Germany or California? A map showing the major sites of action would have been helpful. His sketches of artwork throughout contributes little to this reader’s appreciation of the book.

A good quote and a prescient warning: “Ideological cleansing….exists not only in totalitarian regimes- it is present also, in a different form, in liberal Western democracies.. Under the influence of politically correct extremism, individual thought and expression are often curbed and replaced by empty political sloganeering…. people saying and doing things they don’t believe in simply to fall in line with the prevailing narrative.”

One error. The chronic subdural hematoma compressing his brain that he suffered from a police beating must have been much more than the stated eleven millilitres volume to threaten his life and require emergency surgery.

A good edifying read by a brave and honest champion for human rights, but I suspect it is of limited appeal to Western readers.

Thanks,

Ian and Sarina