The Passionate Reader

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.

This is another novel I would never have struggled through if it were not on the list for the book club discussion. Set England in 1908-09, the 42 chapters trace the lives of various individuals and families who interact at Howard’s End, an estate in southern Hertfordshire. There are intriguing marital infidelities related in the delicate language of post-Victorian English prudishness.There are family secrets, conflicts, betrayals, and estrangements brought about by introspective, hypersensitive personalities and a willingness to take offence at any perceived slight. One character seems to experience what is known as synesthesia, a crossing of sensory input signals, as she hears music in the scenes of the Oder River, and sees elephants on listening to Beethoven, but this interesting phenomenon is never developed further.

There are probably many readers who have enjoyed the lyrical prose and the time-set efforts of the characters to bring meaning to their lives, but I am not one of them. To me the endless ethereal conversations with long asides to the reader conveying the author’s perspectives, become boring and confusing. A lot of sentences in quotation marks go on and on without letting the reader in on the secret of who is talking. Admittedly, there is some development of a consistent plot, almost totally absent for the first 200 pages, in the latter chapters.

This is no A Passage To India, Forster’s later most famous novel, which I really enjoyed. I await enlightenment from the book club members about what is so great about this one.

This modern crash course on skin care was discussed in the July/August issue of The Atlantic. I have long been skeptical about the need for a dozen or more products with fancy names lined up on the washroom counter or in the shower, and got this book hoping for confirmation of my skepticism, a form of what psychologists call confirmation bias. The American physician author does not disappoint in this regard, trashing an industry that is largely unregulated and regularly makes ludicrous claims for expensive products.

The focus is largely on the role of the skin biome, the 1.5 trillion bacteria that live on the average human’s skin, feeding on dead skin cells and oils produced by sebaceous and apocrine glands. The author does not take showers or baths, but does cleanse his armpits and groin regularly, and washes his hair and hands frequently. He does not seem to have become a social pariah as a result of neglecting to wash the rest of his skin, travelling extensively and interviewing a variety of experts in dermatology, microbiology and the cosmetics industry, and his girlfriend has apparently not abandoned him. There is also discussion of the later beneficial effects of skin exposure to a wide variety of environments early in life.

There is a lot of compelling information about the harm done by overzealous use of soaps, detergents, shampoos, moisturizers, toners, anti-aging agents, and a variety of other products with enticing names and vague inventive promises thought up by advertising gurus. There is a fundamental difference between soaps (solid products made from lye and animal fats and packaged in paper) and liquid detergents, also commonly but falsely called soaps, made from byproducts in the fossil fuel industry and packaged in plastic from the same industry. We all constantly emit up to 1000 distinctive volatile compounds from our skin, that apparently allow trained dogs to detect Parkinson’s disease and some cancers. I was skeptical of these claims when they first were made several years ago, but the evidence is becoming compelling. This ‘volatolome’ may be as uniquely individual as a fingerprint. Will this some day be used in law enforcement identification of suspects?

The aptly titled ‘Lather’ chapter exposes the 3 billion dollar annual skin care products industry in the U.S. for the fraudulent rip off of gullible consumers that it is. It certainly leads to questions about the wisdom of allowing unfettered capitalism. Admen shamelessly prey on the vanity, fears, hopes, and perceived need to conform to an impossible standard of beauty of everyone who does not like the wrinkles, creases and blemishes they see in the mirror. A host of additives, including stem cells, vitamins, collagen and enzymes do nothing for skin health; some have entirely fictional names made up to sound impressive. Years ago, a friend doing a postoperative shave on the Canadian president of Proctor and Gamble asked for the patient’s shaving cream. The patient claimed that he never used any because of all the chemicals Proctor and Gamble put into it to stimulate hair growth; such is the blatant hypocrisy and cynical manipulation of marketing in much of the industry. It is worthy of a Michael Moore documentary; from his slovenly unwashed appearance, I somehow doubt that Moore patronizes the cosmetics industry.

The writing is straightforward prose sprinkled with bits of wry humour and the subject is well researched. There is no complicated medical or scientific jargon that would be difficult for someone with a limited education to understand. There is no discussion about the major problem of itch associated with systemic diseases that occupied a major portion of my research career in a past life, but that is really only a very minor and personal criticism of this insightful book. A more substantive criticism is the exclusively American focus in discussing legal and regulatory issues.

Will I change my skin care routines after reading this? Already, more than twenty years ago, hearing a rant from Danny Finkelman (Finkleman’s 45s, CBC radio)I stopped using shaving cream; he pointed out that there was no basic difference in the effects of shaving cream and soap. I doubt that any shampoo is better than soap for my sparse hair. I will continue to sparingly use insect repellant and sunscreen on my exposed hide as necessary. I may be more careful in checking the labels on soaps and deodorants. I may also experiment a bit, but in the interest of domestic tranquility, I am not going to give up showering.

As a well-written iconoclastic eye-opener of relevance to everyone with an interest in the health of their biggest organ, this is a great read.

An Atlantic review is the stimulus that got me interested in this modern scholarly review of the most ubiquitous drink in the modern world, written by a New York professor. More than you ever needed or wanted to know about your morning cuppa, the book nevertheless leaves out much about the world of coffee. There is no mention of the different decaffeination processes, the different chemical composition of different coffees, nothing about the modern genetics, or the additives in such brands as Swiss or French vanilla.

What there is is a recital of thousands of historical facts in short simple sentences of dry humourless prose. Most of these relate to the historical development of the global coffee trade, the oppression of Salvadoran coffee workers, the duplicity of the United States’ imperialism in Salvadoran politics, and the history of the Hill’s Brothers family enterprise there. The author seems at times to be more interested in the history of El Salvador than the history of coffee.

Weaving in a whole chapter on the first law of thermodynamics as understood in the mid 1800s is a real stretch. There is considerable hyperbole about the importance of coffee in global affairs. “The early United States took shape as a political and economic project around the coffee trade, as commercial interest used coffee to build the national economy and foreign policy makers used it to stabilize and later increase the power of the United States in the world.”

Another sobering quote: “In 1859, the U.S. Department of Agriculture made an investigation into adulterants and dyes in coffee and found lead chromate, barium sulphate and burnt bones.”

Erudite and extensively researched (140 pages of notes, a 78 page bibliography, and a 54 page index in the ebook edition) there is no doubt the the author knows his subject well. But I don’t think he knows his readership. This may become a reference tome for courses on international trade, Latin American history, and agriculture, or industrial relations, but I can’t recommend it for the general public.

This historical novel somehow got on my reading list for reasons I have long since forgotten. The forty five chapters alternate between third person narrative accounts of Eva Gardiner in 1915-1919 and the first person person singular voice of Charlie (Charlotte) St. Claire, in 1947. The former is based on the real life of a lowly English teen recruited to the real life Alice network that provided intelligence about German war activities and plans in occupied European countries. The latter is a purely fictional wealthy American college student drawn into the hunt for a lost childhood cousin who may or may not have survived WWII in France. In an unusually long and detailed eight page Author’s Note, Quinn gives the reader some information about what parts of the story are historically accurate (a surprising amount) and which characters and happenings are fictional.

The themes of female bonding and loyalty in the face of horrendous risks and hardships, separation and estrangement, the cruelties of war and the depravity of some ‘collaborators’ all come through loud and clear. The plot twists are intricate and although there are too many coincidences, readers will not feel lost in the complexities. Lines from Baudelaire’s poems are woven into the story, as are several real historical figures such as Edith Cavell. Fragile psyches of ex-military personnel who have witnessed the unspeakable horrors of war and lead to further violence, addictions, and suicides seem to be universal hangovers from all wars.

There are some unrealistic scenarios such as sudden violent but consensual sex as an outlet for anger directed at the partner, and Evelyn Gardner’s constant guilt and self reproach for betrayal under torture. The melodramatic encounter with Madame Roufanche in the abandoned real life hamlet of Oradur-sur-Glane seems like a weak attempt to instil some suspense into a tale of pathos and unending misery. In most novels, as here, eyebrows seem to always be far too bushy and too mobile.

There are so many historical novels centred on wars that it seems like a literary genre of its own. This is one of the better ones, but not as good in my estimation as Kristen Hannah’s The Nightingale. Even if they tend to exaggerate the despicable acts of cruelty, they serve to remind readers of the horrors of all war. And it seems to me that an historical novel set in peacetime would be difficult to write and likely boring to read.

I have no idea where I read the review that made me decide to download this novel from the library but I wonder if the reviewer was a paid relative of the author or the publisher.

The glass hotel is a fictional luxury establishment on a remote inlet in northern Vancouver Island, owned by a criminal New York financial guru modelled after Bernie Madoff. The action spans the globe with billionaires and their lifestyles described in rich detail, along with the down and out itinerant addicts who try to make a living writing music scores, producing music videos, and performing in seedy bars and hotel lounges.

There are more time shifts and minor characters than I could possibly keep track of. Whimsical musings of many characters include ‘shadow world’ what-ifs, and several seem to live in their own fantasy worlds and hallucinations. To be fair, the self-justifying denials of those involved in a sixty five billion dollar Ponzi scheme and their later lives in various prisons are entertaining and realistic- what we have come to expect from white collar criminals. But the description of the downfall of Alkaitis, the doppelgänger of Bernie Madoff, is no better than that of the real Bernie Madoff as carefully documented in Erin Arverdlund’s book, Too Good To Be True. (I have not seen the 2017 TV movie adaptation, The Wizard of Lies.)

To illustrate how unrealistic some of this story is, at the end, the cook on a container ship reminiscences about her life for eight pages after she falls off into the Atlantic and promptly drowns.

I cannot seriously recommend this book to anyone.

First a note about the length of books. I downloaded this one from the library on CloudLibrary. It shows it as 420 pages. My wife downloaded it using the library Libby ap, which shows it as being 609 pages. I have no idea how many pages there are in the paper edition, but it seems to me to be an average length novel- probably a little over 300 pages, depending on font and page sizes, and the layout. Perhaps the time it takes the average reader to get through a book is a better metric- in this case, I would guess about ten hours.

In 2015, the neonatal son of a neo-Nazi white supremist couple dies after being cared for by an experienced black labor and delivery nurse. I won’t give away the details of the intricate supremely well-designed plot, but the unrecognized and unacknowledged biases of all of the characters will force the reader to consider their own biases. The suspense of not knowing the fate of the black nurse and the white supremist thug is maintained until the very end. If you can anticipate the surprising but realistic twists in the last few chapters, you should be writing mystery novels, not just reading them.

The action is set in New Haven, giving me the extra pleasure of recalling my three years there, including at Yale-New Haven and West Haven hospitals, (but not the fictional West Haven Mercy Hospital.) The details of the hospital routines, the actions of the medical and nursing staff, and the stresses of dealing with unexpected emergencies, especially in obstetrics and paediatrics, are all spot on. I hesitate to relate my own disastrous experience in obstetrics but here it is. My first delivery, as a third year medical student, was a term stillborn to a haemorrhaging lady who had been trying to get pregnant for six years, the same night as her husband died suddenly of a pulmonary embolus. No wonder I still hate obstetrics fifty two years later.

The story is narrated in the voices of the main characters, with abundant dry humour, provided principally in the character and observations of the white female public defender of the black nurse. The legal maneuvering and intricacies are equal to anything from John Grisham. The paranoid conspiracy theories preached by the white supremists are no less absurd than those promulgated by some Trump supporters. Much of the dialogue is politically incorrect and jarring but fits the characters.

So many great quotes and astute observations. From the labor and delivery nurse: “Babies are such blank slates. They don’t come into this world with the assumptions their parents have made, or the promises their church will give, or the ability to sort people into groups they like and don’t like. They don’t come into this world with anything, really, except a need for comfort. And they will take it from anyone, without judging the giver.I wonder how long it takes before the polish given by nature gets worn off by nurture.”

From the public defender: “When you start to see the seedy underbelly of America,…..it makes you want to live in Canada.”

And just what does “flesh coloured” advertising of Bandaids or panty hose say to a black person?

Once there is widespread recognition that there is no biological basis for the existence of different races of Homo sapiens, a day may come when even use of the words ‘racist’ and ‘racism’and the plural of the word ‘race’ in relation to humans will come to be regarded as quaintly anachronistic based on misconceptions, like the 17th century word ‘miasma’ once used to explain epidemics. I can dream.

Such prolific novelists as Picoult seldom produce anything that gives the reader much food for thought, but there is lots of that here. Like Jeanine Cummins for American Dirt she has been criticized for “cultural misappropriation” but her keen insights into the complexities of relations between people of different skin colours are quite rare and laudatory. We are endlessly bombarded with media stories about supposedly racist incidents and racism accusations are at times unwarranted or overblown. But the issues as of today are real and need to be addressed urgently.

A great read that I will recommend to my book club.

Thanks, Andra.

I like to read books without paying any attention to the reviews of others, although with paper editions the laudatory praise on the jackets are hard to ignore. I got this one as a library ebook, and have not read any reviews of it, reading it only because it is to be discussed in our book club in two weeks.

In Elkins Park in eastern Pennsylvania, a grand old house changes hands four times in the time that the male narrator grows from being a toddler to his mid fifties, in the latter half of the twentieth century.The members of the blended families and the servants all relate their memories of the good times and the conflicts that developed over the years around the house.

There is a combination of mystery, drama, romance and coming of age all related in straightforward prose. Some of the developments seem quite unrealistic such as a mother abandoning her children to just disappear by travelling to India. Some characters are almost caricatures, such as the cold, distant real estate developer, the extremely self-centred, cruel step-mother, and several characters whose social skills seem to be limited to inflicting guilt trips. There are also more introspective self-analyses and doubts, contrived personality conflicts, and flashbacks to childhoods idealized by faulty memories than can be reasonably expected in one small set of characters. Everyone seems to be insecure, willing and even anxious to take offence at the slightest perceived negative comment. The time shifts back and forth in different chapters can be confusing.

The writing is fluent and sometimes almost poetic. Insights into mental processes at different stages of a life and responses to circumstances are realistic. A good quote: “There are a few times in life when you leap up and the past that you’d been standing on falls away behind you, and the future you mean to land on is not yet in place, and for a moment you’re suspended, knowing nothing and no one, not even yourself.”

I found this book to neither convey anything profound nor to be particularly realistic and enjoyable. I will await the insights of the book club members.

In the 1970s, a cannibalistic serial killer psychiatrist treats patients in the Baltimore Asylum for the Criminally Insane. If your taste in crime fiction is for something even darker, maybe you will be satisfied with the lad who drops the severed head of his mother on the collection plate at church, or the serial killer who skins (“harvest the hide”) his large female victims to make costumes and clothing. This cult classic is the first of five such books by Thomas Harris featuring the now infamous psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter, whose name has become synonymous with ultimate evil in popular parlance and in cinematic circles.

But there are also very vivid lovable characters including the junior FBI student Clarice Starling and her mentor and Sectional Head at Behavioural Sciences, Jack Crawford. The fast-paced story in sixty-one short chapters is filled with plot twists guaranteed to keep readers engaged. Those twists are so complex that it is difficult to believe that even the author could keep it consistent. But he ties them all up neatly and leaves no threads unravelled at the end. That such monster serial killers as depicted here exist is easy to forget as most of them are fortunately locked securely away in such institutions as Ontario’s Waypoint Centre for Mental Health Care in Penetanguishene, formerly known as the Ontario Hospital for the Criminally Insane. But they are out there and thrive on attention – think Karla Homolka, Paul Bernardo, Michael Rafferty, Robert Picton or Colonel Russell Williams.

Jurisdictional disputes between the FBI, the Justice Department, various other federal bureaucracies, and the various levels of state and local law enforcement agencies are shown in details that are probably very realistic, but inevitably impede investigations. But if I, with limited expertise in anything, know that the assertion that bilirubin is the main colouring agent in stool is completely wrong, I wonder how many factual impossibilities other more knowledgeable individuals will detect in relation to moth entomology, haberdashery, cooking, basic criminology and psychology, and police procedures .

I was drawn into the chase, hoping for the success of Clarise Starling, in spite of the revolting subject matter. I have not watched the Hollywood adaptation nor will I read the further novels featuring Hannibal Lecter. A small dose of darkness is enough to last a long time. Next, I will read something more upbeat.

Thanks, Vera.

On an early dawn walk, I found this wet, dew-soaked book abandoned on the same lakeside park bench where I had found The Moscow Cipher over a year ago. But unlike The Moscow Cipher this one is a well researched, true spy story, and stranger than any novelist could ever dream up. Thomas: Harris’s Hannibal Returns is another book that I found deserted outdoors , although I can’t recall what park bench it was on. A friend whose whole career was as a counterintelligence agent around the world suggested that perhaps that park bench is a ‘drop’ for some local secret agent network. If so, I have interrupted their communications two or three times. More likely someone just likes to read spy stories in the fresh air. But who would leave any deserving book to the elements on a park bench? At least as far as I know, no one followed me home.

Eddie Chapman was a British bank robber, extortionist and philanderer, associating with the criminal gangs around Soho before WWII. After diving out the window of restaurant on Jersey Island where he was entertaining his latest lover to escape from the law officer who showed up, he was imprisoned by the Nazi occupiers. Taken to various mainland sites, he eventually volunteered to work with the Nazi Abwehr secret service. Between 1942 and late 1944, he was variously in England (parachuted in at night twice), occupied France, Quisling’s Norway, neutral Portugal, or at sea. He was trusted by his Nazi handlers and later by the British MI5 and MI6 spooks, providing radio information of apparently great strategic value to both sides. But much of the information was meant to deceive, and he was a master at deception. His handlers were obliged to arrange for prostitutes to satisfy his unbridled libido. He was paid by both those whom he betrayed and those he helped, but money was never a major motivation to him. Rather, he was one of those interesting totally amoral human beings who was also absolutely addicted to taking risks.

The world of double agents, espionage and counterespionage is laid bare in fascinating detail. It is enough to make any reader paranoid and suspicious of the real motives and activities of close friends and casual acquaintances alike. The moral dilemmas faced by wartime leaders, such as feeding the Germans false information about where their V-1 rockets were landing, which would result in an adjustment by them to aim at different population centres, are difficult to resolve.

After the war, when back in his British criminal element, Chapman attempted unsuccessfully to write a book about his role in the war. But like my espionage friend, he was prevented from doing so by the legal and political establishment. (There is no Statue of Limitation in the Official Secrets Act applicable to those holding state secrets) That was probably just as well, because Eddie Chapman, like some current politicians, seemed to be constitutionally unable or unwilling to distinguish truth from fiction.

The detailed Nazi radio codes provided in the Appendix, which I cannot decipher, are enough to make me wonder about why this book was left on a park bench. Perhaps my suspicions are unfounded.

Better than almost any spy or crime novel, this is a fascinating well researched and well written book.

I am not sure how this title got on to my wish list, but I am glad that it did. My Kentucky daughter says that it is mandatory for many school English classes in the southern states. It is told in the first person singular by a young boy who like the author eked out a living with his family in the remote foothills of the Ozark mountains in northern Oklahoma in the 1920s.

The story of Billy Colman’s deep longing for two coonhounds, acquiring them, then the fantastical stories of their hunting adventures is both far fetched and entertaining. The deep understanding and love between a boy and his dogs can probably be best appreciated by a farm boy who loved dogs and hunting as much as I did, but even city folk should be able to understand the deep affection that is tenderly portrayed. In some ways this is reminiscent of the adventures of Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn, in a bit more modern setting. Sex is barely mentioned and women play only minor roles, except for BIlly’s overprotective mother. The outcome of her latest pregnancy is the only dangling item left to the reader’s imagination. Religious beliefs are not a major factor in the story, and are treated as mystical whims.

The very different personalities of the two Redbone hounds, Old Dan and Little Ann, are strikingly different but their loyalty to Billy never wavers. Their adventures and feats of courage are really quite unrealistic, but the reader will get caught up in them and wish them luck. The scenery is described beautifully, and although the family is strikingly poor, the childhood is portrayed as a happy carefree one. The significance of the old Indian myth of the red fern is revealed only in the last chapter but is a great finishing touch to a great story of love, loyalty, connections to nature, and coming of age. A great yarn that took me back to my own coon hunting days, albeit in a very different setting.

The thesis in this thought-provoking book is neatly summed up on page 4 of the Prelude. “….picture a world from which we all suddenly vanished.” Then, ominously, “Say a Homo sapiens specific virus…picks us off but leaves everything else intact.” But it also goes into great detail about what the world was like before we arrived on the scene, and how our existence has altered that.

The author is a science writer whose Harper’s article about life around Chernobyl after the meltdown got me interested in this tome. Packed with obscure, often counterintuitive observations, it is nevertheless highly speculative and full of depressing facts about the harm we have done to our home planet and other life forms that we share space with. This includes the Africa-sized three million tons of plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Dump, the long-lasting effects of petrochemical pollution, climate change, and reduction of biodiversity everywhere.

If we were to suddenly disappear, explosion of petrochemical storage facilities would dump massive amounts of toxic waste into the atmosphere and the oceans, and radioactive waste from unmaintained reactors and storage sites would harm every other species, but mosquitoes and fish might become more plentiful. Our newest buildings would collapse before some ancient structures. Birds would stop killing themselves by the millions in collisions with glass windows and buildings.

The topics discussed include a broad range from archeology to all kinds of biology, ecology, astronomy, physics and chemistry. The writing is largely humourless and dry, and I found some ‘what if’s’ so unlikely as to be hardly worth our speculation. That includes the discussion of a virus that is so specific as to wipe us out without touching any other species. Such a virus cannot logically develop as it would self-annihilate, contrary to everything we understand about evolutionary science. In discussions about crumbling concrete under the influence of freeze-thaw cycles, there is no recognition that there are differing grades of concrete, some designed to specifically counter such effects. And concrete is at times equated with cement. I cannot pretend to understand the engineering jargon used to describe the crumbling of the Panama Canal after we depart nor much of the astrophysics.

The author makes a powerful argument to limit the birth rate of Homo sapiens to one child per fertile female to reduce our population to at least nineteenth century levels to reduce the harm to our home planet, but does not discuss the sociological effects of that, as seen in China. And I am bored with speculations about somehow removing ourselves to some other planet after we have destroyed this one, as I will not be around if/when that becomes a possibility.

A depressing read that nevertheless delivers important information for planners and public officials to consider, this book should be consulted before undertaking major projects affecting large populations. But it is of limited use for everyone else, though stuffed with interesting facts that could be used enliven a faltering cocktail party conversation with almost anyone.

Part biographies of billionaires Barry and Honey Sherman, part true double murder mystery story with no definitive conclusion and part insight into the interesting world of Toronto Jewish wealth and philanthropy, this is a fascinating read. The couple were brutally murdered in their mansion in a posh area of North York, on December 13th, 2017.

The author is a Toronto Star investigative reporter. As such, one would expect him to be critical of the police investigations, and he does not disappoint. But in this case, the deficiencies of the police attempts to solve the crime seem to be glaring lapses as they, from the start, developed tunnel vision and only after six weeks admitted that their initial conclusion about the nature of the crime was wrong. That admission was forced by the findings of the private investigators hired by the family.

Barry Sherman was an interesting character, a 77 year old self-assured workaholic, atheist, philanthropist, and risk-taker who parlayed a modest start into a multibillionaire dollar empire, with the generic drug company Apotex responsible for much of his wealth. The vast fortune available to those willing to cut corners in the pharmaceutical industry is well documented in Katherine Eban’s Bottle of Lies and in Gerald Posner’s Pharma. But Sherman also funded many other risky enterprises, won and lost millions in hundreds of court battles, and eschewed conspicuous wealth, driving old cars, travelling in economy class, preferring fast food outlets to fancy dining, and wearing tattered old clothes. Although he is sympathetically portrayed as a highly moral philanthropist, he apparently had no qualms about starting up a Florida plant to produce tons of fentanyl during the opioid addiction epidemic.

Honey was an equally interesting contradictory character. The daughter of Holocaust survivors, she drove a ten year old battered SUV, preferred old clothes to the new designer outfits that she bought and hoarded, pushed herself to physical limits in spite of severe arthritis, and enthusiastically supported many Jewish philanthropies. Their marriage seemed to be a happy one, although Barry at one point joked about hiring a hit man to knock her off. In contrast, the lives of their four children, and Honey’s sister and her children have been marred by addictions and endless conflicts among themselves and between them and the victims.

There is no definitive finger-pointing by the conclusion of this book, published in mid 2019, but it is clear that the author believes that the killer(s) were known to the victims. Conspiracy theorists have weighed in with many unlikely scenarios. Although the Toronto police continue to be tight-lipped about the case, they have acknowledged that they have a theory about the killer(s), but there have been no arrests. I suspect they just haven’t enough evidence to convict. But if you really need to believe in a conspiracy theory, you could do worse than propose that some corrupt senior politician standing to gain financially- there are lots to choose from- has bribed an equally corrupt senior police official to not pursue the investigation or lay any charges. Stay tuned.

Thanks, Floyd.

This seemed like a timely novel for our current situation. In the Algerian port town of Oran, an epidemic of plague results in a huge death toll, mandated lockdown, isolation of the town of 200,000, and social stresses. The parallels are indeed very impressive with the separation of family members, endless debates about what authorities mandate, economic collapse, and individuals introspectively questioning the meaning of their lonely lives. But there are also striking differences that we should appreciate. With personal letters prohibited due to fear of disease transmission, the residents are forced to use limited access to telephones and telegraphs for communication, in the age before email, the internet and FaceTime, and many had no means of communication with separated loved ones at all.

There are other parallels to more recent social history. A priest, in a long sermon, calls the plague God’s punishment for the evil deeds of the townspeople, like evangelicals calling AIDS his punishment for homosexuality in the 1980s. The daily fluctuations of the radio announcements of the number of deaths and corresponding fluctuating moods of the populace seem familiar in the age of Covid, but in 1947 no one had the TV talking heads and self-proclaimed experts on social media mouthing off ad nauseum. The other obvious parallels include anxieties about shortages, hoarding, and some folks’ interpretation of the pestilence as fulfillment of ancient prophesies. Information fatigue sets in as the epidemic drags on, and all emotional responses become blunted. “No one experienced great feelings anymore, but everyone experienced banal feelings.”

Camus inserts much of his absurdist philosophy and a hint of his anarchistic political leanings into the story by discussing his views as the dissident ‘narrator’s opinion’. Only toward the end do we find out who the narrator is.

There is a strong theme throughout the story of the meaning of separation, whether by death or by enforced quarantine. In an undated Afterword by Tony Judt, he makes the case that the whole story is an allegory for the trials of the French during the Nazi occupation, something that was not obvious to me at this chronological and geographic remove.

The writing style is reminiscent of Faulkner- baroque, ornamental, and polished with long esoteric discussions about the nature of good and evil, religion, and the purpose of living by all the characters all of whom are threatened by, and in proximity to, death. Part III consisting of musings about flattening emotional ranges and fading memories of those one is separated from, was a bit confusing, vague and disappointing to me.

An interesting, timely reminder that the challenges that we face with Covid-19, and the varied responses, are far from unique in history. Although this story is fictional, there is nothing unrealistic about it. I quite enjoyed it.