The Passionate Reader

Cleverly divided into major sections named Roots, Trunk, Crown, and Seeds this epic pan-psychic allegorical story starts off with eight seemingly unconnected tales of the early lives of unusual or even bizarre disparate American misfits. I was almost ready to give up until I hit page 114, but my daughter had assured me that the seemingly unrelated weird stories all were complementary and conjoined. Then tears of joy blurred the pages as I read the life story of the entirely fictional but fascinating Dr. Patricia Westerford and her laser-focused efforts to understand the secret lives of trees, and their means of communicating to each other, to us, and to the whole living world. Like some of the unusual dedicated scientists and preservationists on PBS’s Nature, her quaint quest is extremely endearing. She is a fictional character, but both her character and the surprising science she relays to the reader seem to come directly from the notable U.B.C. Professor of Forest Ecology, Dr. Suzanne Simard, and her TedTalk about trees.

And, sure enough, in Trunks, the ragbag misfits start to come together in what is made to seem realistic and natural ways, although you may need to go back and reread parts of the Roots section to connect all of the dots. I could not see how the crippled millionaire video-game developer could possibly fit into the story, but late in the Crown section, Powers makes it seem natural to involve him in a major role.

The writing is smoothly poetic with hundreds of stand-alone words and phrases. “High school tries to kill her. Viola, in the orchestra, the maple howling with old hillside memories under her chin.” A hugh number of startling facts are conveyed with nods to the classics in literature, folklore, sciences, mythology, and philosophy. A not-at-all subtle condemnation of unfettered capitalism in the worldwide forestry/logging industry is coupled with a less direct but equally damning critique of legal systems that support it. Dr. Westerford agonizes over the irony of writing and publishing a book promoting forest preservation that will be made from the destruction of forests. As she prepares to address an environmental group called Home Repair she muses “These people need dreams of technological breakthrough. Some new way to pulp poplar into paper while burning slightly fewer hydrocarbons….The home repair they want is just a slightly less wasteful demolition. She could tell them about a simple machine needing no fuel and little maintenance, one that steadily sequesters carbon, enriches the soil, cools the ground, scrubs the air, and scales easily to any size. A tech that copies itself and even drops food for free.”

This is a panoramic, profound, richly interwoven tribute to Gaia, the Greek earth goddess, cautionary, timeless and highly relevant. I cannot think of another novel with such an urgent message. Perhaps Orwell’s Animal Farm allegory comes close, with its very different message for a very different age.

I highly recommend this book. But read the e edition, listen to the audiobook, or borrow the paper one to avoid further destruction of trees.

Thanks, Alana.

I recall reading one of this author’s 12 previous novels featuring the more modern fictional Sherlock Holmes. I remember no details of The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, but enjoyed it, so when my wife borrowed this one from the library, she thought I might like it. Set in 1924-25 on a cruise ship, then in Japan and Oxford, England, the venerable detective pursues international blackmailers and assorted criminals creating a black market in fake works of art.

But the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle creation of Holmes has not aged well and his narrating wife, detective Mary Russell is also no master sleuth here. The plot is predictably convoluted, but very unrealistic with more loose ends than a worn-out hairpiece. It is never made clear why a particular book given to the English monarch by the de facto Japanese emperor is so valuable as to warrant theft, murder, and international scandal, nor is its site at end revealed, unless I missed that in all the revelations about fakes.

The details of the rigid, isolated, and hierarchical Japanese culture of the era are the most interesting depictions. The almost equally rigid world of upper crust England is also well displayed. “He was the sort of aristocrat in whom generations of in-breeding and privilege led to a belief that his ermine robes were not only deserved but proof of the rightness of the universe.”

Not a book that I can recommend to anyone unless you are addicted to the murder mystery genre. Even if you are, there are lots of better tales to choose from.

An alternative title for this autobiography by the globetrotting Swiss/American adventurer and photojournalist could be ‘The Westerners Guide to Japanese History and Culture’. Narrated in the first person singular present tense, she relates her attempts as a 35 year old single foreigner to embed herself in their society and learn about what makes them tick, over 12 months in 2001.

The rigid, hierarchical structure of Japanese society extends to everything, including how one is supposed to present and exchange business cards. The older women seem to accept and revel in their roles as strict matriarchs in the home, and younger women are expected or forced to quit working and marry someone of her parent’s choosing before they turn 30. The mixture of Shinto and Buddhist traditions with painful self-sacrifice on long pilgrimages to dozens of sacred temples is fully embraced by the uniquely adventurous author, sometimes with extremely amusing consequences. By the end of her adventurous year, Muller grants the Japanese a grudging respect for their way of life, even as she is thoroughly defeated in judo by an ancient frail master, even though she has earned a black belt. But she does not gloss over the negatives such as the homelessness, xenophobia, and pervasive alcoholism.

Her many social faux pas are detailed with hilarious self-deprecating humour that pervades the whole book. Her willingness to take risks especially on the arduous quasi-religious pilgrimages is sometimes hard to believe. After a meal of fresh raw seafood on a freezing beach and before a ceremonial naked midnight dip in the frigid sea: “There is a riot going on in my intestinal tract. That overly fresh dinner is clawing it’s way out. The slugs are dragging bags of sea urchin eggs like Santa Claus, and the oysters are slithering around in search of their shells. Even the squid is squirting up the aftertaste of six-week-old fermented ink.”

I am left to wonder how much Japanese society has changed in the 19 years since this adventure was undertaken, but it seems so deeply rooted in peculiar traditions that change will only come about slowly, and some changes may be for the worse.

I found a couple of clear grammar and spelling errors that the proof readers should have corrected.

As an introduction to a unique very ancient rigid society that is very different to anything in the west, this is a great enjoyable read.

Thanks, Linda.

I accidentally deleted my review of this from a few weeks ago, so I am redoing it from memory. This Irish father of two muses about when and how the world of human beings will end as end it certainly will. Whether we disappear suddenly due to a nuclear war, a massive unforeseen natural disaster or more slowly because of something like climate change, is unknown, as is the timeline. This could be considered as a real downer or as a call to action to at least delay the inevitable. He frets about the ethics of bringing future generations into an uncertain world and acknowledges his own guilt in contributing to the demise by flying around the world and using up scarce resources in a wasteful capitalist consumer-oriented society.

He visits and mocks the residents of the huge bunkers in North Dakota occupied by preppers who think only of their own survival, with their paranoid misogynist, anti-Semitic selfish ideology, aligned with libertarian political ideology. Then he visits a California Mars Society convention organized by equally selfish individuals who plan to escape any earthly apocalypse by colonizing the red planet. He notes that the survival from natural disasters in the past has always depended on collective selfless community actions, and that the environment of Mars is and always will be less hospitable to humans than that of Earth, even in the worst case scenarios. He visits the equally selfish huge estate that Peter Thiel of PayPal fame has purchased in New Zealand along with his purchase of New Zealand citizenship. Lastly he visits the devastated Chernobyl Exclusion Zone to see what the world without us would look like forty years on a la Alan Weisman’s “The World Without Us.

The message in this is that we can collectively help to mitigate and delay the apocalypse if we each do our part, and his humorous tender interactions with his small children make it seem imperative that we do so. I, for one, even with a dwindling reservoir of altruism, would prefer to go down with Mothership Earth, than to live with the guilt of knowing that I could have helped some non swimmers to safety, and didn’t. Like Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, this is a surprisingly upbeat message about enjoying the simple things in life, and a call to do what we can to preserve what we have. I really enjoyed it.

I guess that I am WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic), as defined by this Harvard social scientist who spans ethnography, psychology, and anthropology. I certainly belong to a WEIRD society, although I am only one generation removed from a partially kin-based patriarchal society in which six or seven closely related nuclear families bonded and worked together in a loose, non-monetary, informal, agricultural society, and never kept score, paying farm helpers only if they were unrelated, more like an early medieval society than a WEIRD one.

The influences of a host of factors including genes, environments, religions, climate, and geography over millennia are explored in an attempt to explain how we became the minority WEIRD society in the world. An encyclopedic range of facts is cited and what seems like a few thousand observations and experiments from all of the social sciences. In many ways, this dense tome extends the work of Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs and Steel, and builds on the theses of Francis Fukuyama in The Origins Of Political Order, as it relates to the development of modern institutions and legal processes.

Chapter 6 on the role of the self-serving edicts of the Church in promoting individualism, universalism and critical thinking by restricting marriage options is very perceptive and well worth reading. And Chapter 13 (of 14) presenting the reasons in cultural evolution for the late explosion of inventiveness has some fascinating insights. But some of the dozens of maps, scattergrams, and histograms, all in impossibly small print, scattered throughout the book and appendices are problematic for anyone schooled in data manipulation and statistical analysis. Although Henrich cautions the reader early on about the non-generalizability of studies of unrepresentative Western university undergrads and the hazards of equating correlation with causation, he uses such studies liberally to come to conclusions based solely on correlations, some of which may not even reach statistical significance. He uses artificial constructs such as the Kinship Identity Index and the Generalized Trust Question to derive those correlations. Mark Twain, among others, popularized the cynical observation that ‘there are three kinds of lies; lies, damn lies, and statistics’. How seriously should we take conclusions based on convoluted experiments on remote jungle tribespeople dreamed up by social scientists ‘over a few pints’ in a Vancouver pub? And I for one am not very interested in distinctions between the meaning of the words clan, chiefdom, tribe, fiefdom, stratified chiefdoms, state, and kingdom, given the problems of different nuances of these words translated into dozens of languages.

Henrich has reviewed a massive amount of data and is undoubtedly brilliant. The 190 pages of appendices, notes, bibliography, and index attest to the amount of work that has gone in to producing this humourless, dry, and wordy treatise. After reading this and Rutgers Bregmans Humankind, I dreamed up a recipe for a feast of optimism about the future of our species: take the overriding message here that human psychology is very malleable, stir in a generous dose of Bregman’s positive vibes about human nature, and add a dash of aged common sense.

I persisted to the end, so now you can talk about it intelligently without reading it, but I did so only by taking frequent breaks to read a chapter of an easier book, and I skipped the middle parts of a few windy long paragraphs. But I admit that I learned a lot in spite of my reservations, and probably have had new circuitry wired in my noggin. E.g. What is the origin of the word anathema? Why is my son’s wife known as my daughter-in law? And being Protestant increases your risk for suicide- not just a correlation.

Given the rave reviews this book has received in The Atlantic, The NewYorker, The Economist, and The New York Times, its spine displayed prominently on a bookshelf behind a T.V. talking head would be viewed as an asset. But it will not be on my bookshelf, even though it is a great reference source for academic social scientists-it is back in the library for someone else to struggle through. But maybe that’s because I am not just WEIRD, which is after all just a clever catchy play on words and only meaningful in one language, but also weird.

I enjoyed reading Philip Zimardo’s The Lucifer Effect, Yuval Noah Harai’s Sapiens, Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, Hannah Arendt’s The Banality of Evil, Richard Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene, and Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. But none of these scholarly academic works escapes unscathed from the exposure and critical dissection in this Dutchman’s reassessment of the basics of human nature. His iconoclastic takedowns extend also to Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, William Golding (Lord of The Flies), most modern gurus in business, journalism, entertainment, economics, education and politics, and even Winston Churchill to a limited extent. Who does he not denigrate? His hero, Bertrand Russell.

Yet it is hard to defend any of these given the extensively researched (over 800 source references) arguments presented. The basic dichotomy discussed is between Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan’s view of humans as intrinsically selfish and evil, leading ‘solitary, poor, nasty, and short’ lives and Jean Jacques Rousseau’s social contracting, kind, altruistic man. Which is the more natural one? The former has the backing of many religions promulgating the doctrine of original sin, and is seemingly taken for granted in most of the works cited above. The issue is of great practical importance since our behaviour as social animals is predicated on our expectations of the outcome of encounters with others. If we expect others to act cruelly and selfishly, our actions will probably be self-fulfilling and make them do so. This he dubs the nocebo effect, the opposite of the placebo effect. This word should become an official dictionary-defined English word.

Bregman compares the news to a drug that is “super-addictive, causes,… ‘a misperception of risk, anxiety, lower mood levels, learned helplessness, contempt and hostility towards others, [and] desensitization.”

Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment comes in for particular scorn, being described as a hoax and a ‘staged fake.’ Likewise, Malcolm Gladwell’s supposed documentation of the bystander effect, which left out or altered important details which would have completely destroyed his assertions about passive unhelpful bystanders. To be fair to him, his media sources also slanted the story to fit with the more sensational narrative of the intrinsically uncaring nature of humankind; that sells far better than any story about the kindness of strangers. Bregman strongly encourages us to meet and greet people from very different backgrounds, people my staff secretly dubbed ‘NOSP-not our sort of people’, to increase mutual understanding and develop compassion, which he distinguishes from empathy. Maybe some nuance was lost in translation here.

Bregman is no starry-eyed socialist dreamer. Focusing in on results of experiments on prison reforms in Norway, school reforms in Holland, police reform in NewYork City, citizen budgets in Venezuela, business management reform in France, and government fiscal reform in Alaska, all based on the principle that everyone should be thought of as kind and considerate until proven otherwise, he documents surprising improvement in a variety of outcome measures.

There is just a sprinkling of clever humour-“All too often, the sharing economy turns out to be more like a shearing economy–we all get fleeced.”

But there are so many counterintuitive insights in this book that I can’t think of anyone who would not enjoy and benefit from at least parts of it. It is a very upbeat but realistic educational gem. I will be buying this one as Christmas gifts. It is the most enjoyable nonfiction book I have read in several years, and strikes a very positive note at a time when we all need one.

Thanks, Pat.

The narrator of this peculiar novel addresses most of her comments to her dead male writer friend who has taken his own life. The disjointed story with hundreds of quotes from writers, most of whom I have never heard of, and mostly quotes about writing, is set, with a simple plot, at an indeterminate recent time in New York City, in the eclectic writers community of which she is a part. The link between the narrator and her dead friend, besides their writing careers, is a massive abandoned Great Dame named Apollo, adopted by the friend and then handed off to the narrator by his widow, Wife #3.

Part Six composed of musings about the miseries, jealousies and insecurities of novelists and particularly the ‘creative writing’ crowd seems, at first reading, to have only a tenuous connection to the rest of the story. The sensitivity with which she describes the devastating effects of suicides of a loved one indicates to me that she must have experience this, something which I, fortunately, have not. Her bleak assessment of the value of works of fiction on the broader community seem a bit exaggerated.

The touching relationship between the narrator and the dog, Apollo, is perhaps the most poignant part of the story as she asks the reader endless questions about what dogs understand and what they try to communicate. Dog lovers will relate well to at least parts of this story. And in the end she addresses her endless questions about life to Apollo, rather than to her dead friend. Less pleasant is the theme of the meaning of death by suicide, known to be at least twice as common among writers, particularly novelists.

Enigmatic observations about the complexities of life abound. “In the end, writing and photography probably destroy more of the past than they preserve of it.” About our relationship to dogs: “They do us the honour of treating us like gods and we respond by treating them like things.”

This is an interesting and insightful, unusual story in an unusual format, which most readers will probably either love or hate. A good book guaranteed to generate a lively discussion in any book club.

Thanks, Andra.

True stories about what happened to ordinary and not so ordinary Americans over the day of Sunday, December 28, 1986 are related in gripping prose in this interesting book by the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter. The date was chosen at random by two children and a waitress in a D.C. diner where the author and his publisher dined as they planned the outline. With the only restriction being that it had to be between 1969 and 1989, they had agreed to accept the date and find interesting people to relate what had happened to them on that date, often interviewing surviving friends, family members, coworkers and acquaintances.

From the gripping detailed story of a pioneering heart transplant, (with an interview with the recipient) at a Virginia hospital after a murder-suicide to the more mundane, most of the stories involve tragedies or heart-wrenching decisions by tormented individual Americans. Yes, all the stories are from the U.S.A. Only one does not feature the main event in the subject’s lives as occurring on December 28, 1986- it seems as though the author felt obliged to include one story about gender switching. Several relate the experiences of different individuals in different parts of the country, on themes such as AIDS, racism, crime, immigration, politics, and the strange background of the troubled former Ottawa Senator’s forward Bobby Ryan aka Bobby Stevenson. How the nineteen main stories were chosen is a bit of a mystery that Weingarten does not divulge. He may have enough material for a sequel using a different date as a focus.

The writing is straightforward prose loaded with humorous small details, in spite of the horror of some of the events, and a keen eye for the quirky twists of the real character’s lives, some famous, but many not well known. It is well researched with over 500 interviews, and extensive searches of archival material. In the Acknowledgments Weingarten realizes that there will inevitably be errors in any work based on people’s recall of distant events.

From the last story: “We are all serving time on death row; only the length of our stay is indeterminate.” From the Acknowledgments: “ He has the sensitivity of a corduroy condom.”

A great peek into the complexity of American culture in a bygone era.

A peculiar novel by an Aboriginal native man of the Ojibwa tribe in northern Ontario, this is a gem of native literature. The resourcefulness of the Anishinaabe residents on a remote northern Ontario reservation is tested when all connections to the outside world are suddenly severed by a widespread and enduring unexplained power failure along with loss of phone and internet connections.

The past injustices that natives have endured at the hands of the white man, including resettlement to remote reserves and removal of children to abusive residential schools are all here, as is the uniqueness of the native cultures and beliefs with their peculiar intimate relationship to Mother Earth. But this is neither a finger-pointing rant about past abuse nor a sentimental nostalgic plea to restore a past that cannot be relived. That native culture is not depicted as an ideal, and the problems of alcoholism, suicides, and violence are not glossed over. Rather, this is a story of survival in the face of extreme adversity, the very individual responses to that adversity and the inevitable interpersonal conflicts that arise. As the tensions escalate and the corpses pile up, rogue white men arriving on snowmobiles, escaping the chaos in the south, create further tension and add to the body count. But this narrative presupposes the popular Hobbesian myth that our natural reaction to threats to our existence is to resort to cruel individualism rather than to cooperation.

The cause of a widespread, enduring, perhaps global, power failure is never explained and, to me, this is the weak point in the story. But the characters are realistic and the diverse reactions to unexpected adversity are insightful. There are few surprises and there should be no difficulty in remembering who is who.

A good short read with keen insights into a unique culture, and a reminder of the fragility of human existence, always subject to the unpredictable whims of Mother Earth and multiple human errors.

Thanks, Michelle.

I picked up this murder mystery novel from Vivian’s lending library to make room in the little box on her front lawn for One Hundred Years of Solitude. Only later did I realize that this is #21 (of 23) in a series featuring Inspector John Rebus. It seems there are more murders in fictional Edinburgh, than in the real city, with four in this story alone.

By the midpoint, I was totally confused by the complicated plot twists and the multiple shady characters. (I read through to the end, but it didn’t improve.) There is some great dialogue and one-liner quips, along with dry Scottish witticisms, but these hardly make up for a very unrealistic story line and dark characters. Like the characters in Peggy Blair’s and Louise Penny’s series, the real murderers are always portrayed as the least likely suspects until late in the story. And there are always flawed crocked cops who compete with each other and keep information secret rather than cooperate. Therefore is usually a brilliant, single, eccentric investigator or retired detective modelled after Hercule Poirot who solves multiple mysteries. In Louise Penny’s series that is Quebec’s Chief Inspector Armand Gamache; here it is Scotland’s Inspector Rebus; in Peggy Blair novels it is Cuba’s Inspector Ramirez. Can you spell ‘formulaic’?

Perhaps I would have been less confused and disappointed if I started with the first Rankin novel featuring John Rebus and read them in order, as apparently they all feature many of the same characters. But I am not about to waste that much time on this genre.

This short very recent autobiography by the dying long term host of Jeopardy! could easily be taken as an instruction manual for whoever succeeds him in that role. There are revelations about the show’s production schedules, many famous contestants, and the processes of production interspersed with personal anecdotes, homespun Trebek wisdom, and a sprinkling of humour. What is lacking is any significant self-pity although it is clear that the metastatic pancreatic cancer is progressing and causing a lot of mental and physical anguish.

The Trebek families relationships are described as loving and supportive in spite of apparently amicable divorces; there is no mention of marital infidelities, or family scandals, if there were any. And the charitable work around the world from their affiliation with World Vision is admirable. From the writing, it seems clear that, in spite of his wealth and celebrity status, his public persona matches that of his private life- generous, enjoying simple pleasures, and kind to everyone. The same can be said for few celebrities. Alex describes himself as neither a Republican nor a Democrat, but, without naming any politicians, criticizes those who aim to divide, ignore climate change, and spread misinformation.

One advantage of reading this as a ebook is the ability to change the print size to more clearly scan the many pictures.

An interesting, undoubtedly biased, but nevertheless enjoyable inside peek into the life of one of Canada’s favourite exported talents. Can we stop exporting such talent?

The author of The Kite Runner returns with another dark tale of the turmoil and destruction in Afghanistan in the thirty years to the early 2000s. In this one, there is even more graphic cruelty, misogyny, and domestic violence (to the point of murder) than in his former story. The pervasive hypocrisy of male Muslim sexual morality (that seems like an oxymoron) is exposed with men allowed to marry and rape children, deny paternity and banish their illegitimate offspring while women cannot even show their faces in public.

The story loosely traces the life of one such banished girl as only one of many threads, as she is married off against her will, abused, and then executed by the Taliban for killing her cruel husband as he is attempting to kill a younger rival wife in their Kabul home. That younger wife with an illegitimate son of her own, descends into sentimental nostalgia as she seeks to find some meaning in her life of deprivations and fear in the last few chapters. I won’t give away more of the complex dark plot, but none of the characters are saints, and everyone recites the Koran and observes their prayer routines as they go about killing each other. They pay lip service to the seventh commandment while ignoring all the others, not unlike many other religions which tend to equate morality with sexual restraint while killing, coveting and stealing with abandon. But Muslims here take this one step further, applying the prohibitions surrounding sex only to women. No one escapes from the author’s scathing mockery, except the originators and propagators of different branches of the Islamic faith who should bear a lot of blame for the unchecked violence.

The lunacy of Taliban orthodoxy is beautifully displayed by one episode where they demanded that an artist modify his painting of flamingos because their legs were inappropriately exposed.

The geography and the local culture of Afghanistan are well described and the liberal sprinkling of Urdu and Pasto words provide local colour while it does not interfere much with the understanding of the story.

This is an extremely bleak, depressing, but enlightening story that I did not enjoy nearly as much as The Kite Runner.

My wife insists that this novel that I recently found unread on the bookshelf, written by the late famous peripatetic Colombian Nobel laureate, was given to me by my daughter to try to broaden my interest in fiction. If so, it only partially succeeded. It relates a bizarre story of the rise and fall of the fictional isolated town of Maconda somewhere on the Caribbean coast of Columbia and of seven generations of the Buendía family. There are no firm time or place anchors, although my best guess would be that the events span the last half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th.

There is seamless mixing of magic realism in which the dead return to haunt the living, flying carpets and sheets carry people off to their deaths, a priest demonstrates levitation, there are plagues of infectious insomnia and floods, and telepathic surgeries leave scars, with realistic characters and family tragedies. A family tree at the start does little to clarify who is who, given the overlapping multiple foreign names of most of the characters, some of whom become invisible talking mirages.

There are flowery vivid descriptions of people. “She was a large black woman with solid bones, the hips of a mare, teats like live melons, and a perfect head armoured with a hard surface of wiry hair which looked like a medieval warrior’s mail headdress.” One man is described as “…. for whom wisdom was not worth anything if it could not be used to invent a new way of preparing chickpeas.” But there are also run-on nonsensical sentences going on for two pages with multiple conjunctions, a feature I also recall in the author’s much more realistic Love in the Age of Cholera, which I quite enjoyed reading.

To really nitpick, I noted that the translator throughout uses the word ‘cement’ when the proper word should be ‘concrete’.

There is a whole literary genre of magic realism that appeals to a large readership (and apparently to Nobel committees). More than twenty million copies of this novel have been sold. But I am such a realist or concrete thinker that I can only tolerate it in small doses. My copy is being relegated to my ten year old granddaughter’s small lending library on her front lawn.

Thanks, Andra.

I have read other biographies of Churchill, but never any so detailed, focused, and extensively researched as this one. Larson hones in on the period from May, 1940 to Churchill’s historic December, 1941 meeting with FDR; an epilogue gives the reader a synopsis of the future lives of many of the players in that critical time.

The 101 chapters detail the interactions and intrigues of the main power brokers during the Nazi bombardment of all of England, with a natural focus on the death and destruction rained down on the British capital. But Larson also vividly describes the personal lives, quirks, and animosities of all the characters, including those in the dysfunctional Churchill family. In an introductory Note To Readers, he claims that all of the quotes are accurate and he apparently had access to and reviewed extensive archives and the diaries of most of the featured characters, including top level Nazis. The lost habit of almost everyone in that era, keeping diaries, as the thousands of Mass-Observation Diarists were required to do, must have been a rich source of detail. Nevertheless, it is a stretch to take at face value the hundreds of exact numbers Larson cites- of casualties with each of dozens of raids, planes used and planes lost in each raid, and tonnage of different types of bombs used in each raid.

Generally laudatory of Churchill, Larson does not shy away from detailing his faults and foibles, nor those of his close associates, advisors and family members. Rivalries and intrigue were rife, as were secret and not so secret liaisons of many, including Winston’s rogue son, Randolph, Randolph’s wife Pamela, (with Averill Harriman, whom she married after a 35 year interlude, and Edward R. Morrow among others) and the scheming Lord Beaverbrook. The forever partying daughter, Mary Churchill, is portrayed as an immature and insensitive teenager.

The devastation of war is graphically described, with indiscriminate bombing of civilians on both sides. For this, there is no better quote than the effects of one such bombing: “Two parachute mines blew up a cemetery, scattering old bones and fragments of monuments over the landscape and launching a coffin lid into the bedroom of a nearby house.”

A sketch of London and the surrounding area with major landmarks labelled would have been more helpful than the small unreadable map on page 13.

A personal note- it appears the Winston Churchill may have suffered from misophonia, experiencing a pathological panic reaction to hearing anyone whistling. I have become aware of this unusual, recently recognized neuropsychiatric disorder, related to, but different than synesthesia, of uncontrollable panicky emotional reactions to certain common sounds, because my ten year old granddaughter Leela has it quite severely. She was intrigued to hear that a very famous, successful politician may also have had this affliction, and was quite happy to let me publicize this private burden.

As a graphic reminder of the horrors of war, the debt of gratitude we all owe to the uncompromising Winston Spencer Churchill, and the need to safeguard what thousands of brave people fought and died for, this is a timely well written history lesson.

Thanks, Wallie.

Full disclosure. I heard of this little book by listening to the podcasts of the author’s husband, Sam Harris, whom I used to support financially, before tiring of his promotion of his particular kind of mindfulness and meditation and his endorsement of the use of psychedelic drugs. As someone who enjoys keeping up with modern neuroscience developments, much of the information concisely reviewed here was not new to me. The findings that our brains ‘decide’ a full second before we ‘decide’ on an action, that Toxoplasma gondii infection makes rats fatally fond of cats and that one side of the brain of people with a severed corpus callosum will tell elaborate lies to explain what the other side of it is doing are hardly new. The awareness of surroundings of people with the locked in syndrome is more expansively analyzed in Adrian Owen’s Into The Gray Zone.

But there is also documentation of new (to me) fascinating observations. The Venus fly trap has memory and recall so as to decide when to snap shut. The Doulas fir mother tree selectively nourishes its own seedlings and nearby birches over those of competitors, implying some kind of conscious planning. Such observations have revived the age-old philosophical theory of panpsychism- the belief that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe like time, light, and energy. Although counterintuitive, such a theory leads to the conclusion that stones, thermostats and electrons have consciousness. Harris explores the implications of this with thoughtful musings that clearly show how faulty our intuitions can be. Much of this esoteric philosophic discussion is well beyond my comprehension but may be important as we enter an era of human-like machines.

Following the 14th century principle of Occam’s Razor, some form of panpsychism may be the best explanation for the phenomenon we call consciousness, although such an untestable hypothesis is never going to sit well with modern scientists. But at some point, isn’t arguing about the nature of consciousness, using our reasoning powers and consciousness, a form of circular reductio ad absurdum?

A quick enjoyable read for what is probably a very limited readership.

I can’t recall who recommended this coming-of-age novel to me, but I am sure I would not have picked such a long story (according to Libby, I took 38 hours to read it) without a friend’s recommendation, even though it won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. It is narrated throughout in the first person singular voice of Theo Decker, a deeply flawed teen whose father had abandoned him and whose mother had been killed in a terrorist attack at the New York museum where he, amidst the chaos of the explosion, stole the precious 1654 Carel Fabritius painting called The Goldfinch. The complex plot loosely follows the course of that lost painting through the murky underworld of New York City art and antique dealers, the criminal gangs of Las Vegas and European capitals, then back to New York, over the course of more than a decade in the early twenty first century. (There are no anchoring dates in the story at all.)

The plot is very complex, but the shady characters are not hard to follow. They are elaborately Dickensian and none are without major flaws except the idealized and idolized dead mother of the narrator. There are vivid realistic descriptions, not just of characters, but of their experiences, such as the narrator’s rambling thoughts just after hitting up pure heroin: “ …in whatever wink of consciousness remained to me, I felt I understood the secret grandeur of dying, all the knowledge held back from humankind until the very end; no pain, no fear, magnificent detachment,…. freed from all the human pettiness of love and fear and grief and death.”

But there are problems. Tartt introduces the reader to a word salad smorgasbord of neologistic jargon like that uttered by stroke patients with expressive aphasia. One advantage of reading ebooks is that it is easy to to look up definitions but I found neither definition nor translation for such words as fubsiness, parceltongue, poofter, am-scraped, pappadums, antiquairies, antieckhandels, phantasmagorica, and fableheft. Is the insertion of such nonsense into a text the secret password into the elitist society of creative writers? And the last 25 pages reads like philosophical nihilistic musings of the author directly addressed to the reader, almost totally disconnected from the rest of the story, a sermon delivering her take on the meaning of life.

When I discussed this novel with two friends, one said she hated it, and the other said he loved it. I am somewhere in between. I admire the author’s ability to weave such a complicated plot into a unified whole, but it did not restore any faith in those semi-anonymous individuals who choose books for major awards.

With none of my wish list books available at the local library, and Covid lockdown again in effect, I resorted to browsing in the small lending library at William’s Court and came away with this novel. At least it is by a Canadian, modern, set in the Quebec’s Eastern Townships, and favourably reviewed.

In 2018, five siblings gather at the children’s summer camp that their parents and grandparents had run for generations for the reading of the will of their father. This trite plot ploy is accompanied by flashbacks to the assault on a teenage girl at the camp twenty years earlier, leaving her in a permanent vegetative state. Leads and inevitable false leads as to who assaulted her is dribbled out in flashbacks that also uncover multiple family secrets, animosities, and suspicions. The mandatory illegitimate child, secret gay relationships and casual graphically-described sex that seems obligatory in such mystery thrillers are all here. There are more teenage one-time hookups than would realistically ever be tolerated at any summer camp. There are also many false leads as the real culprit in the assault is carefully portrayed as being least likely until the last few pages.

A helpful graphic map of the fictional camp layout is provided and after some initial confusion, I had little difficulty in keeping the characters distinguished from one another.

To be fair, this is a light and entertaining read that will appeal to a certain demographic, as the author must know-this is her ninth mystery novel. But it is neither edifying nor humorous, and I thought the characters were a bit unrealistic and the plot a bit formulaic. I think the author should stick to her day job in a Montreal law practice.

This is a very current analysis of the pathological relationship between the Trump administration and the Fox News empire of Rupert Murdock by the CNN media reporter and host of it’s weekend show Reliable Sources. It covers the period from before Trump’s election up to August of this year.

The revolving door between the Trump inner circle of appointments and the sycophantic talking heads at Fox News is hardly news, but the extent to which individuals are willing to lie and deceive to further the relationship is alarming. The backstabbing and intrigue within the Fox News empire makes most office politics look like child’s play. The few true reporters who maintain some integrity and sense of a need to stick to facts, such as Shep Smith are all gradually abandoning Fox, where the journalistic firewall between news and opinion has ceased to exist.

Both Fox News bosses and Trump are dedicated to maximizing ratings and earnings without regard to any adherence to facts and the two-way mutual admiration society makes a mockery of any suggestion that there is such a thing as objective truth in modern reporting. Stelter documents that Trump has been a guest on Fox News shows on average at least once every two weeks and calls Fox anchors even more often. It is a two way street with Trump obsessively watching Fox and Fox News people obsessively checking to see if Trump is watching their shows and approving of their rants. All the while, both are checking to see what tweets, outrageous comments, and lies most appeal to the dedicated Fox viewers who constitute the Trump base. Stelter shows that more of the Tump policy decisions are made by Fox News personnel or former Fox personnel than by his few expert cabinet members whom he largely ignores. Who wants a country run by Fox News?

The pervasive hypocrisy and misogyny at Fox while under the control of the late disgraced Roger Ailes is described in detail, with female on-camera personnel instructed to show “tits up, hair back” at desks that were designed with glass tops to show off their legs while wardrobe and makeup artists dictated the length of their skirts.

There is one area where Stelter falters. In a book about U.S. politics and journalism, it may be appropriate to ignore the rest of the world. But Stelter quotes Jay Rosen, the professor and chair of the Department of Journalism at New York University, (who it seems is not a Reliable Source), when he calls the U.S, ”….the country that is known for having the freest press in the world.” According to the Reporters Without Borders’ Index of Press Freedom, an allegedly objective web analysis site, the United States ranks #25 in press freedom, below such countries as Canada (#16) Costa Rica (#7) and Norway (#1). Although the journalism professor should stick to facts, a member of the press who is writing a book about truth in the media, should also be on to this lie and correct it. Such ingrained Yankee boosterism is an annoying common feature of American writers of all stripes.

This is an insider’s analysis of a phenomenon that deserves our attention. Entering into and understanding the alternate fantasy world that Trump and his fans live in is frightening and sobering.

Ben Macintyre has made a career out of telling true spy stories, including one about the traitorous Kim Philby (A Spy Among Friends), Eddie Chapman (Agent Zig Zag) and this book detailing the life of Oleg Gordievsky, a Russian KGB agent who secretly worked for the British MI6. The real world feats of spies as detailed is usually far more fascinating than that of James Bond or any fictional spook, although I loved Somerset Maugham’s The Third Man.

The motivation of people who make a career out of betraying their country varies, sometimes being pure greed as was the case with the American traitor Aldrich Ames, to the seeking of thrills, to idealism, as was what apparently motivated Eddie Chapman and Oleg Gordievsky. The latter was enormously influential in shaping the course of the Cold War in the 1970s and 80s. The sacrifices his work entailed led to a broken marriage, estrangement from close friends, and a harrowing escape from Russia via Finland and Norway to safety in Britain after he was outed to the KGB by the American counterespionage agent Aldrich Ames.

An Afterword written after the first edition of this work was published details the reaction of many of the characters involved to its revelations. The most significant controversy seems to be the involvement of the late British Labour Party leader Michael Foote who contested a 1983 election against Margaret Thatcher, while secretly accepting money from the KUB. The attempts of foreign powers to influence the outcome of elections is nothing new-the U.S. C.I.A. has engaged in this practice for much of its existence.

I recognized one factual error, relating to the use of paid blood donors.

There are several great quotes.

“The problem with buttering up the boss is that bosses tend to move on, which can mean a lot of wasted butter.”

“The Finnish cartoonist Kari Suomalainen once described his country’s uncomfortable position as ‘the art of bowing to the East without mooning the West.’”

Whether we recognize it or not, we owe deep gratitude to this humble Russian now living a lonely life in some British suburb under an assumed name, and with 24/7 protection, for his major role in preventing a nuclear confrontation in the 1980s, among his other accomplishments. Meanwhile his betrayer languishes in an Indiana federal prison.

A thrilling peak into the strange world of espionage and counterespionage and a great read.

Thanks, Vera.

I borrowed this very modern memoir from the library as an ebook after reading a review of Solnit’s earlier book A Paradise Built in Hell in The Atlantic, and her Wanderlust in The New Yorker. The first part is a collection of random musings about the author’s past troubled life as a single white student in ever-changing poor San Francisco neighbourhoods in the 1980s. Later chapters deal with her intermittent interactions with fellow feminists, activists, essayists and artists of widely varying backgrounds, (my least favourite part). In the last few chapters, she strikes a slightly more upbeat note, acknowledging that some limited progress has been made in the fight for gender, ethnic and cultural equality, while continuing to push for reform. It is peculiar that a feminist writing in 2020 never mentions the misogynist currently in the White House.

Her background as the grandchild of a holocaust survivor, and the child of an abusive father, as well a being repeatedly abused by men in her teens undoubtedly contributes to her dim assessment of men, whom she considers to be generally misogynistic and domineering. But unlike more radical feminists, she acknowledges that there are good men in the world and describes, in discrete terms, her heterosexual yearnings and relationships with long term boyfriends. She eloquently points out the pervasive vulnerability of women in literature, mythology, comics, movies, video games, and theatre over millennia. She relates that her dreams include being able to fly to escape from street attacks, but dreams of levitation are common and are thought by some mystics to have religious connotations. (Mine are just as a shortcut to get to some place I need to be quickly.) In some places she seems to border on paranoia, noting that she recently gave up a very peculiar habit she claims to love, of walking alone for hours in dark inner city streets. I have to question whether that habit was formed in part to feed her apparent peculiar need for insecurity and existential angst. What came first?

A quote in relation to her experiences of childhood and early adulthood abuse: “All this menace made it difficult to stop and trust long enough to connect, but it made it difficult to keep moving too, and it seemed it was all meant to wall me up at home alone, like a person prematurely in her coffin.” The title reference to nonexistence refers to how she feels about most of her early life that she rates as being so meaningless as to equal nonexistence in a male-dominated world.

Her earlier essay “Men explain things to me,” written in the course of one morning, is the origin of the now officially accepted English word ‘mansplaining’.

This book will undoubtedly become a sort of feminist gospel. But even this old, white, somewhat privileged male quite enjoyed it, and gained a new perspective on several issues. I have requested a hold on her Wanderlust (all about walking) from the library.