Pete's Picks

Scotiabank Alt-Giller Shortlist

2011-10-04T12:25:00.028-06:00

Today the Scotiabank Giller Prize jury of novelists Howard Norman, Andrew O’Hagan and Annabel Lyon announced the results of their culling of the Giller longlist of 17 down to a shortlist of 6. Congratulations to all the authors who have made it to the official 2011 Scotiabank Giller shortlist:

David Bezmozgis	*The Free World*
Lynn Coady	*The Antagonist*
Patrick deWitt	*The Sisters Brothers*
Esi Edugyan	*Half-Blood Blues*
Michael Ondaatje	*Cat's Table*
Zsuzsi Gartner	*Better Living Through Plastic Explosives*

Here at St. Albert Public Library our patrons created a local version of the shortlist by placing holds on the longlist titles - an Alt-Giller shortlist. Our list would drop Bezmozgis, Edugyan and Gartner in favour of Endicott, Vanderhaeghe and Johnston:

1	Michael Ondaatje	Cat's Table
2	Marina Endicott	The Little Shadows
3	Guy Vanderhaeghe	A Good Man
4	Wayne Johnston	A World Elsewhere
5	Patrick deWitt	The Sisters Brothers
6	Lynn Coady	The Antagonist

Locally, Michael Ondaatje's Cat's Table is by far the most popular, but Marina Endicott's The Little Shadows and Guy Vanderhaeghe's A Good Man aren't far behind. We are very big Marina Endicott fans hereabouts, so we were disappointed not to see The Little Shadows on the shortlist. But we shout huzzah for another local hero, Lynn Coady, making it to the shortlist with The Antagonist. Look for an appearance by both Marina and Lynn at the Library, probably early in the new year. [Photo above is Marina (L) and Lynn (R) at the launch of The Antagonist in Edmonton in September].

Summer Gone

2011-08-26T11:23:00.001-06:00

They go too quickly, Alberta summers. Driving north from Red Deer yesterday I couldn't help but notice the tinge of yellow in some of the trees along the highway. Sigh. The end of summer always reminds of David Macfarlane's lovely novel Summer Gone - a book that didn't get near enough buzz when it came out in 1999.

Below a few end-of-summer reads:

Summer Gone by David Macfarlane (1999)

A beautifully-written, elegiac novel about fathers and sons, fleeting Canadian summers, canoeing, Muskoka cottages, secrets and regret.

Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead (2009)

Summer brings out memories of the endless sun-drenched summers of youth. Brooklyn writer Whitehead remembers the summer of 1985 (New Coke and The Cosby Show) with this autobiographical coming-of-age novel set in Long Island’s Sag Harbor starring 15-year-old Benji Cooper.

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson (1972)

Swedish writer Tove Jansson distills the essence of summer into twenty-two crystalline vignettes. This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophia's grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland.

A Fair Country

2011-06-21T12:03:00.003-06:00

Some recent Native/Metis Canadian books that were picked for the St. Albert Gazette Good Reading column in honour of National Aboriginal Day.

One Story, One Song by Richard Wagamese
For National Aboriginal Day, a new collection of warm, wise and inspiring true stories in this a follow-up to Wagamese’s bestselling memoir, One Native Life. This time Wagamese invites us with him on his travels as he tells stories that show the four principles of native Ojibway tradition: humility, trust, introspection and wisdom.

Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont by Joseph Boyden
You could meet Louis Riel in person - as portrayed by St. Albert actor Matt Chaney - at the Rendezvous 2011 "Meet the Street" event on June 12th. Local actors lead by Paul Punyi and Maureen Rooney took on the personas of local historical characters (plus people like Riel important to local history) in celebration of St. Albert's 150th anniversary. In this fascinating dual biography novelist Joseph Boyden (Three Day Road) takes on Riel and his fellow Métis leader Gabriel Dumont.

Motorcycles and Sweetgrass by Drew Hayden Taylor
The noted Native Canadian writer has written and edited a number of books, but here it puts it all together in his first novel for adults. This engaging, funny story is set in the sleepy Anishnawbe (Ojibwa) community of Otter Laek, Ontario, where Chief Maggie Second is trying to juggle her busy life. Then one day a handsome stranger pulls up on a 1953 Indian Chief motorcycle and life is turned upside down.

A Fair Country: Telling Truths about Canada by John Ralston Saul
From one of Canada’s great thinkers, a brilliant and persuasively argued book that proposes that Canada is a Métis nation, shaped by aboriginal ideas of egalitarianism, a balance between individuals and groups, and a reflex for negotiation over violence.

The Yacoubian Building

2011-02-07T14:53:00.000-07:00

"Egypt? What? Really?" I like to think I'm reasonably well-informed but the protests in Egypt definitely surprised me. If only I'd read the novel The Yacoubian Building by Cairo dentist, activist, journalist, and - oh yes - novelist, Alaa Al Aswany. It is a perfect example of a work of fiction being able to give context to fast-moving current events.
The New York Review of Books said the novel (2002 Arabic, 2004 English translation) is "an amazing glimpse of modern Egyptian society and culture". The novel focuses on the lives of the residents of the decaying Yacoubian apartment in downtown Cairo, during the Gulf War of 1990. Each character is a thread in the colourful carpet that is modern Egypt, "where political corruption, ill-gotten wealth, and religious hypocrisy are natural allies, where the arrogance and defensiveness of the powerful find expression in the exploitation of the weak, where youthful idealism can turn quickly to extremism..." (from the book's cover).
Al Aswanny is a modern-day version of Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz. Both are social realists, using fiction to point out the problems of Egyptian society. Both have a strong dislike of Islamic fundamentalism and its Egyptian home in the Muslim Brotherhood. In books like his classic Cairo Trilogy (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street) Mahfouz was writing about the malaise of Egypt under colonialism from the 20s to the 50s. Al Aswany writes of the malaise of Egpyt under born-in-Egypt oppression.
Al Aswany's latest novel, Chicago (2007 in English) is about the life of young Egyptians living in Chicago, with Egyptian and American lives colliding on a college campus, post-9/11.
A bit of a media star, here's Aswany talking to Charlie on the Charlie Rose show in 2008:

The New Yorker suggests The Yacoubian Building and some more fiction (plus the memoir Persepolis to help understand the Egyptian crisis.

Goat Song

2010-07-15T09:27:00.006-06:00

When I saw the photo above of Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff holding a pack of St. Albert cheddar, I wondered where this "St. Albert" fromagerie could be? Alas, a little googling revealed that the cheeserie in question is in another St. Albert, in Ontario, not far from Ottawa. Le fromage, c'est dommage (our Alberta St. Albert would be perfect for an artisan goat cheese operation!)

Iggy seems quite pleased with his cheese. I don't blame him - cheese is a true delight. For me, one of the highlights of visiting BC's Salt Spring Island in the summer is a trip to Salt Spring Island Cheese, not far from the ferry dock at Fulford Harbour. This is a delightful place, with a gorgeous view over the Pacific. It was founded and is owned by David and Nancy Wood, who were refugees from the hectic urban life of Toronto. In 1990 Wood sold his hip Toronto gourmet grocery to "get a life" on Salt Spring. Perhaps the life of a goat cheese maker sounded bucolic, but Wood soon realized the hard work and headaches involved.

Two recent memoirs talk about the dream of packing in the city life for a life of artisan cheese making:

Goat Song: A Seasonal Life, A Short History of Herding and the Art of Making Cheese (2009) by Brad Kessler - Novelist Kessler (Birds in Fall, Lick Creek) turns his skilled hand to the memoir, describing his escape from the urban grind of New York City to a 75 acre Vermont farm which he and his wife turned into a goat farm. He details the many difficulties of farming but is clear that the cheese makes it all worth it!
The Year of the Goat: 40,000 Miles and the Quest for the Perfect Cheese (2007) by Margaret Hathaway - Like Kessler, Hathaway and her husband were busy, busy, busy New Yorkers who yearned for an escape to the pastoral. Fans of goat cheese, Hathaway embarked on a yearlong "goat odyssey", traveling the U.S. in search of anything and everything goat.

The Snowman

2010-05-18T09:43:00.001-06:00

I've posted a piece on Norwegian Nordic Noir over at the Library version of Pete's Picks. Yesterday was Norway's national holiday, Constitution Day, so I chose a Jo Nesbo book (The Snowman) for one of this week's St. Albert Gazette Great Reading picks. The other pick was an Icelandic novel, the latest mystery from Arnaldur Indridason (Hypothermia) - in honour of the infamous Eyjafjallajokull volcano!

The Big Thaw

2010-04-22T14:53:00.000-06:00

I'd love to celebrate Earth Day today. I'd love to take a walk along the banks of St. Albert's mighty Sturgeon River. But, alas, I have severe tree pollen allergies that keep me inside, wheezing at the window with red, gloppy eyes. Trees - I shake my fist at you!

So I had a laugh when I read Margaret Wente's latest rant in her Globe and Mail column. At the very end of a piece about the sex ed controversy in Ontario she veered off into bashing Earth Day:

"If you’re a parent, it’s not sex ed that deserves to drive you nuts. It’s green ed. Today is Earth Day, as you have surely noticed – the holiest day in the school calendar. All across the land, millions of schoolchildren are being reminded that the glaciers are melting and the polar bears are drowning and the entire planet is in peril."

Maybe it's an Alberta thing, but when I asked my junior high daughter what the plan was for Earth Day at her school, she grumpily replied, "Nothing. Nothing at all." So maybe Wente should relax, Earth Day orthodoxy isn't everywhere.

Personally though, Earth Day seems entirely fine. Over its 40 years it has dropped most of its hemp and hippie roots, and seems mainstream enough that it can guilt even retrograde water bottle buyers into thinking twice.

For the Library Good Reading book picks in the St. Albert Gazette this week I chose a couple books in honour of Earth Day.

Solar by Ian McEwan
McEwan's new novel, Solar, pokes fun at the climate change movement. A departure for the usually quite serious McEwan (Atonement), Solar is a satirical novel about climate change! Michael Beard is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist coasting on work from years past. A freak accident gives him an opportunity to save his fifth marriage, reinvigorate his career and perhaps save the world!

The Big Thaw by Ed Struzik
A slow economy and debates about data may diminish the celebration of Earth Day this year but the fact remains: our Earth is warming. Edmonton writer Struzik has been nominated for a 2010 Alberta Literary Award for this fascinating and alarming investigation of Arctic climate change, based on his eleven trips through the north.

The Fatal Shore

2010-02-05T17:44:00.002-07:00

My library-related posts for this blog have shifted over to the St. Albert Public Library's new website. Go here for a post on Australia Day (January 26) books like The Fatal Shore and novels by Kate Grenville.

Thanks,

Pete the Libarbarian.

Zeitoun

2009-12-31T13:07:00.004-07:00

It isn't cool to admit, I know, but I love lists. And as this is the last day of the decade there are lots of lists out there to enjoy. Of course, some grumble that the decade doesn't end until next year (remember the same argument in 1999?). And there is no consensus on what to call the decade (the Noughts? the Oughts? the Zeros? the Noughties?). There is some consensus among the lists about some of the decade's best books. Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (2001) and Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000) show up on many lists.

For my year and decade-ending St. Albert Gazette book picks I chose two books from a writer who I think really represents the decade: Dave Eggers. From the Gazette:

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius In 2000, the decade began with the debut of an exciting young writer and his groundbreaking memoir. Taking the ironic tone of 1990s postmodernism and blending it with a new sincerity, Eggers told the stunning story of his life — his mother and father dying of cancer within a month of each other, and his struggle to raise his little brother alone.

Zeitoun The decade ends as it began, with an excellent book from Dave Eggers. Here Eggers uses narrative non-fiction to tell the moving, true story of one New Orleans family during and after hurricane Katrina. Adulrahman Zeitoun remained in New Orleans during the storm, helping other victims, but disappeared a week later.

Happy New Year all!

My thanks to Calgary Public Library Signal Hill branch for the wifi that enabled this post!

The Year that Follows

2009-12-04T14:56:00.001-07:00

Every time I see a current ad for Westin hotels (above) I think of 9/11. I assume estin would rather I thought of one of their hotels (like the delightful Westin Maui in Ka'anapali). But the stock photo the ad uses of a boy running through beach grass is almost identical to the front cover of Scott Lasser's 9/11 novel, The Year that Follows. The running boy in beach grass reminds me of this spring's Beachgate, where a similar shot of kids on an English beach was used to promote Alberta (below). There's something irresistible about blond kids running on a beach to advertisers and branders!

I recommended the Lasser book in September as a 9/11 read for my Gazette newspaper book picks:

When a bond trader dies in the 9/11 attacks, his family must deal with the consequences in "the year that follows". His sister and father struggle with their grief and their relationship, but also with a mystery left behind: the search for an orphaned infant son. A moving novel of grief and family ties.

The Year that Follows is a real tear-jerker, so seeing the same photo used for an ad for vacations is jarring. It isn't uncommon for different books to share the same cover however. There are blogs that feature copycat covers, including She Reads and Reads, which pointed to a recent one involving Penelope Lively's novel, Consequences (below). Other sites are here and here. Chip Kidd is the king of book cover design - read about him and other designers here.

Canada Reads 2010

2009-12-01T15:04:00.007-07:00

The 2010 edition of CBC's Canada Reads was launched with the announcement of the books and their defenders this morning. The debates will run on CBC Radio from March 8-12, 2010. Once again Jian Ghomeshi will host.

This group of CanCon has a fair amount of EdCon, with one novel, Good to a Fault, by Edmonton's Marina Endicott and another novel, Generation X, defended by Edmonton musician and Poet Laureate Rolly Pemberton (aka Cadence Weapon). The Edmontonian blog calls it "Edmonton Reads" (The Edmontonian blogger Alexis Kienlen will be blogging about the Canada Reads at the Roughing it in the Bush blog). Here's the 2010 Canada Reads books:

The Jade Peony by Wayson Choy. Defended by Samantha Nutt. A 1995 novel set in Vancouver written by a Toronto writer and defended by a Toronto physician/humanitarian.
Good to a Fault by Marina Endicott. Defended by Simi Sara. A 2008 novel set in Saskatoon written by an Edmonton writer and defended by a Vancouver broadcaster.
Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner. Defended by Michel Vézina. A 2005 novel set in Montreal written in French by a Montreal writer and defended by a Montreal writer and critic.
Generation X by Douglas Coupland. Defended by Roland Pemberton. A 1991 novel set in California written by a Vancouver writer and defended by an Edmonton musician.
Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald. Defended by Perdita Felicien. A 1996 novel set in Nova Scotia written by a Toronto writer and defended by a Toronto athlete.

A solid list of great books. Maybe a little too solid, as they are all award-winners of various kinds and except for Nikolski they are all very well-known books. With Fall on Your Knees a 2002 Oprah Book Club pick I'm pretty sure many folks have already read the book. I'm surprised a little by Pemberton's pick, Generation X. Published in 1991 it is the moldy-oldy of this group, and for me it seems a book that had its moment in the sun but now seems a bit quaint. Coupland has just published a sort-of-sequel, Generation A, so perhaps I should have another look. Pemberton could have shone the light on an Edmonton book, like Minister Faust's acclaimed SF novel The Coyote Kings of the Space-Aged Bachelor Pad. Faust has been compared to Nalo Hopkinson, whose book Brown Girl in the Ring was a 2008 Canada Reads' pick. I'm sure there is a complicated process behind the scenes picking defenders, books and authors, with the requisite cross-Canada representation (it is a CBC production after all!), so I won't hold it against Mr. Weapon.
The Library has at least one copy of each book at present, and we are buying more as demand requires.

Holodomor

2009-11-30T16:15:00.004-07:00

There were two memorials held in Edmonton on Saturday, both remembering acts of inhumanity that continue to reverberate in the community. The memorials were very different, one remembering a act of state genocide against an entire nation over 70 years ago, another remembering a single act of violence against an Edmonton teenager just a few years ago. The Edmonton Journal's front page on Sunday carried a picture of a service at Edmonton City Hall for the annual commemoration of the Holodomor famine genocide of 1932-33 in Ukraine. Robert Conquest's book, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine was instrumental in changing world attitudes towards the famine. Lubomyr Luciuk is a Ukrainian Canadian activist and academic who published Holodomor: Reflections on the Great Famine of 1932-33 in Soviet Ukraine in 2008. This is a collection of essays and documents discussin the famine, including the text of the 2008 Canadian Statute which officially established Holodomor Memorial Day and officially recognized "the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-33 as an act of genocide". [Edmonton Holodomor Memorial pictured above left]

The other memorial was an annual indoor soccer match, EVAN's Game, which remembers Evan Grykuliak. Evan was the popular student and soccer player who was killed in 2006 at his 17th birthday party by a youth who has since been convicted of the crime and sentenced as an adult. EVAN (End Violent Acts Now)'s Game remembers Evan as a soccer player and raises awareness and funds for anti-bullying programs in Edmonton schools. This year a group of west-end U18 community players took on the Edmonton Police Service Masters team, with the result a draw 3 - 3 after an exciting comeback by the teens. Can soccer change the world? Perhaps not, but Evan's Game is an inspiring response to a terrible event.

Books reviewed and noted from Sunday's Edmonton Journal (November 29, 2009)

Reviewed in Books & Authors: Fiction:

A Change in Altitude by Anita Shreve "Shreve's story is certainly thought-provoking" says local author and reviewer Debby Waldman.
Day After Night by Anita Diamant "A solid introduction to Holocaust literature.... an easy and entertaining read, but it lacks the spark and freshness that could have made it truly transcendent " says Debby Waldman.
Peter & Max: A Fables Novel and Fables: The Deluxe Edition, Book One by Bill Willingham Reviewer and author Robert J. Wiersem a notes that both titles serve as good introductions to Willingham's Fabletown graphic novel stories, with Peter & Max the first prose novel in the series.

Reviewed in Books & Authors: Non-Fiction:

A Soldier First: Bullets, Bureaucrats and the Politics of War by Rick Hillier Ottawa Citizen reviewer David Pugliese notes the retired Canadian general's memoir is a "media-savvy take on the Afghan mission" that is "strong on patriotism and weak on details".
Gravity, Steam and Steel: An Illustrated Railway History of Roger's Pass by Graeme Pole "A marvellous, jaw-dropping rendering of the monumental effort it took to lay the tracks through Roger's Pass" says the Calgary Herald's Naomi Lakritz.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest

2009-11-20T15:57:00.004-07:00

I'm chuffed. The St. Albert Public Library is the first Alberta library to get a copy of the new Stieg Larsson novel, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, into patrons' hands! It looks like Vancouver Public Library beat us to the national title. This is the third and final book of the Millennium Trilogy that Larsson handed into his publisher before he passed away in 2004. Hornet's Nest won't be published in North America until May or June 2010, but we have a single copy of the 2009 British edition (by way of purchase in Australia). The first two of the trilogy:

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2008)
The Girl Who Played With Fire (2009)

This situation is an unusual publishing world quirk. However, it isn't uncommon for British titles to be published in Canada before the American edition. Booker prize nominees often are unavailable in the US but available here. Hilary Mantel's novel, Wolf Hall, wasn't due for US publication until 2010 - until it won the Booker Prize and the release date was moved forward. See, keeping Canada's remaining links with the motherland has its perks! Rule Britannia!

With only one copy available you may have to be patient waiting for Hornet's Nest. Bide your time with some other great Scandinavian crime fiction. The recent BBC series starring Kenneth Branagh as Ystad, Sweden detective Kurt Wallander has made the books by Henning Mankell more popular than ever. [Library has the series on DVD] In the summer of 2009 Branagh filmed three more of the books in Sweden. Below is a list of the Wallander books in chronological reading order. The Pyramid is a group of stories Mankell wrote later that fill in some of the gaps in Wallander's life history. Faceless Killers was the novel that first introduced Wallander to readers. Below the Wallander titles, with BBC I meaning a title filmed for last year's Branagh series, BBC II for the upcoming series filmed the summer of 2009.

The Pyramid (stories) (1999)
Faceless Killers (1991) BBC II
The Dogs of Riga (1992)
The White Lioness (1993)
The Man Who Smiled (1994) BBC II
Sidetracked (1995) BBC I
The Fifth Woman (1996) BBC II
One Step Behind (1997) BBC I
Firewall (1998) BBC I

Mankell brought forward a new detective, Inspector Stefan Lindman, in The Return of the Dancing Master (2000). There are some links to Wallander in the book. More recently Manning made Wallander's daughter Linda a detective in Before the Frost (2002).

A third Swedish crime writer, Hakan Nesser, was called the "odd man out" amongst the trio of Mankell, Larsson and Nesse by The Times. Nesser's detective is Chief Inspector Van Veeteren, with the novels taking place in Maardam in a country that seems a mixture of Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany.

Next door in Norway we have some great crime writers, including Karin Fossum, who I have recommended before. Fossum's mystery series focuses on small-town police Inspector Konrad Sejer, with more psycholical thriller to them than Mankell's procedurals. Here are the Sejer books available in English so far:

Don't Look Back (2002)
He Who Fears the Wolf (2003)
When the Devil Holds the Candle (2004)
The Indian Bride (aka Calling Out For You) (2005)
Black Seconds (2007)
The Water's Edge (2009)

For more Swedish crime check out Camilla Läckberg's Top 10 Swedish Crime Novels from The Guardian. (burial ground in Wallander's Ystad below)

Berlin Noir

2009-11-10T17:21:00.014-07:00

Back in 1986 I decided it was a good idea to travel all around Europe with nothing but Let's Go Europe and a giant paperback of the Collected Novels of Thomas Hardy. Sure, thousands of miles away from home, why not read the most depressing novels in the English language? [ABE Books compiled Bleak Books: The Top Ten Most Depressing Books awhile ago. Hardy's Jude the Obscure was #3]

But Hardy was good prep for a day in grim East Berlin. We walked past Checkpoint Charlie and it felt like the Morrissey song: "Every day is like Sunday / Every day is silent and grey". Night to West Berlin's brilliant shining day of 24 hour bars and bustling main drag, the Kurfürstendamm (the Ku'damm). There was a real sense of history in East Berlin though. There was less postwar reconstruction, especially close to the Wall where many of the buildings were full of bullet holes from the war. The picture above is me in East Berlin on Rosa Luxemburg Strasse, with one of the infamous 27 horsepower East German Trabant cars behind me. [Edit Nov. 17 - Globe has a slide show of new hipster car - the Trabant!]

Rosa Luxemburg was a Communist pioneer, killed during a rebellion in Berlin in 1919. Novelist Jonathan Rabb wrote a detective novel, Rosa, using her story. PW said Rabb's "re-creation of post-World War I Berlin is masterly". Rabb has a new (2009) sequel to Rosa out, Shadow and Light, set in 1927 Berlin.

The master of Berlin-set detective fiction is Philip Kerr, with his trilogy Berlin Noir (1993), originally published singly as March Violets (1989), Pale Criminal (1990) and A German Requiem (1991). The books star Bernie Gunther as a very hard-boiled detective in 1936, 1938 and 1947 Berlin (and Vienna in the 3rd one). Gunther fans were delighted when a new novel appeared in 2006, The One From the Other, followed by A Quiet Flame (2008) and soon If the Dead Rise Not (2010). Highly, highly recommended, particularly March Violets.

If you are looking for that Alan Furst-style eve-of-destruction atmosphere, David Downing has two thrillers set in 1939 Berlin, Zoo St ation (2007) and its sequel, Silesian Station (2008). Both star Anglo-American journalist John Russell and concern the moral compromises war brings. Booklist called Zoo Station a "quiet but suspenseful tale of an ordinary man living in a dangerous place during a dangerous time".

Veteran espionage writer Charles McCarry was an American spy during the Cold War. Christopher's Ghosts begins in 1939 with Paul Christopher witnessing an atrocity committed by S.S. officer Franz Stutzer. 20 years later, back in Berlin during the Cold War, Stutzer emerges from the ruins looking to kill the last witness to his crime.

The best novel about the postwar/prewall period, the 1950s before the Wall's construction in 1961, is Ian McEwan's masterful, The Innocent. This is the Ian McEwan of A tonement fame. The Innocent was the first McEwan novel I read and I was blown away by it. This is a psychological thriller built around naive young telephone technician Leonard Marnham, brought to 1954 Berlin to help work on a secret tunnel under the Soviet sector, but finds himself deep in other nefarious deeds. A nice slow build to a shocking climax.

Paperbacks of Len Deighton's spy novels can be found mouldering away on many a cottage shelf as they made excellent beach reads. He set many in Berlin, including the first spy thriller to star his character, British spy Bernard Samson: Berlin Game (1983). You can follow Samson through three sets of trilogies: Game, Set and Match; Hook, Line and Sinker; Faith, Ho pe and Charity. Many have fallen out of print but Deighton may be due for a revival, especially with Quentin Tarentino considering filming Game, Set and Match.

Finally, a thriller set just before the fall of the Wall, in September 1989: Brandenburg Gate by Henry Porter. A riveting tale of a former East German Stasi agent forced back into service in the waning days of the DDR to save his brother on the wrong side of the Wall. Simon Winchester called it a "total triumph...one of those bedside table books so thrilling you reach for it on waking."

More Berlin? More Wall?

The Guardian has a Top 10 Books about the Berlin Wall list.
The Globe and Mail has Alison Gzowski's Best Books on Berlin list, including Jason Lutes' graphic novel, Berlin: City of Stones and Chloe Aridjis' novel Book of Clouds.

The Wall

2009-11-09T11:23:00.025-07:00

Where were you on 11/9? I'm not sure. I was living in London, Ontario when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, but I don't remember November 9th in particular. That whole year was full of momentous events - glasnost, perestroika, Solidarity, Tienanmen, Timosoara.

Today I remember 1986, three years before the Wall's fall, when a friend and I were in Berlin for a few days. That's me above, writing rude things about East German President Erich Honecker on the Berlin Wall (or more likely, "I wuz here").

Being at the Wall was an odd experience. Despite having grown up during the Cold War, having studied Soviet history in university, it was still felt strange to actually touch geopolitical reality. It was actually true, a country imprisoning its own people. A city literally divided by a giant wall. How could this really be?

From a tower near Potsdamer Platz I looked down at the Wall and saw that "the Wall" was actually a system of walls, fences and a barren no-man's land (see 1986 photo above). Talk among the tourists was that a mound of dirt in the middle of no-man's land was where Hitler's bunker was. The Platz was the site of the worst violence during the 1953 East German uprising. And the Wall was first breached at the Platz in 1989.

Today the Wall is long gone and Potsdamer Platz is full of glitzy corporate buildings (below in 2007). In her review of Frederick Taylor's book about the wall, Anne Applebaum wrote:

To anyone who remembers the surreal presence of the Berlin Wall, its absence now seems little short of miraculous. Walk from the Tiergarten, once in the West, across Pariser Platz, once a wasteland, and have a beer on the Unter den Linden, once in the East. Now it takes a few minutes; before November 1989, it wouldn't have been possible at all. Or drive through Berlin's western suburbs: Although there are neighborhoods where the streets form odd patterns, it is no longer possible to say which house was on which side of the border back then, so thorough has been the renovation and regeneration of the landscape. And yet at the time, the concrete structure of the Wall seemed so permanent, so indestructible.

Some folks aren't all happy with the shiny new Berlin and Germany. There's even a name for this nostalgia for the old days: ostalgie. (ost=east) Eleanor Wachtel interviewed prominent German writer Ingo Schulze yesterday on CBC's Writers and Company (replayed Wednesday or podcast). He grew up in the DDR (East Germany) and was happy the wall fell as he had the freedom to write. But he worries that in the new Germany "everything is commodified". He said in Deutsche Welle:

... public space is disappearing and being replaced by commercial space. Take Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. Only tourists go there. Locals never do. It's not a proper public space -- it's a space that has been rented out to businesses. Democracy is about having public spaces. In the DDR, public space could only be used for official events. And now the public space that we have access to and should be using has been hijacked by commercialism. People are reduced to mere consumers.

Or people say, "Well, at least we had jobs under Communism". Sure, and prisoners have jobs too! The Globe & Mail's Doug Saunders, in one of his excellent pieces about the Berlin Wall anniversary, points to Archie Brown's new book The Rise and Fall of Communism. Brown notes that a key cause of the collapse of communism in Europe was the giant loans these governments owed to western banks. The loans were used to try and approximate a Western standard of living. By 1989 the western debt was unsustainable. Other good books on the ills of Communism:

Richard Pipes, Communism: A History (2001) - A short overview from the Harvard professor and Reagan adviser: "Communism was not a good idea that went wrong; it was a bad idea"
Robert Service, Comrades! A History of World Communism (2007) - A scathing overview, with pithy lines such as calling Communist "fellow travelers" "Stalin's admiring slugs."
The Black Book of Communism (1999) - The groundbreaking catalogue of Communism's crimes which argued that Communism was morally no better than Nazism.

For a focused look at the history of the Wall here are two recent books:

Michael Myer, The Year That Changed the World: the Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall (2009). Myer reminds Americans that the Wall did not fall because Ronald Reagan shouted "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"
Frederick Taylor, The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989. An excellent overview, full of intriguing personal stories, from the author of the acclaimed Dresden.

A new book by Russian historian Constantine Pleshakov, There Is No Freedom Without Bread! : 1989 and the Civil War That Brought Down Communism notes that for the Soviet Bloc "making a living came first and was for many years almost enough to make the socialist experiment seem gratifying". But the command economy couldn't keep up its end of the social contract and the payment crisis accelerated discontent.

The human cost of living within the "socialist experiment", indeed the true nastiness of, in this case the DDR, is shown well in the 2006 German film, T h e Lives of Others. Even though it portrays a secret police officer ("Stasi") as having some sense of human decency, the overall picture gets the message across of a state that was a dark, Orwellian nightmare. It won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language film.

For younger readers there is the graphic novel by Peter Sis, The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain. Sis grew up in Communist Czechoslovakia before defecting in Los Angeles in 1982. In this book he tells his kids about his childhood, about learning at school to think and draw what he was told, and then his gradual rejection of Communism, thanks to things like rock and roll.

Next post - some Berlin fiction of note.

PW Best Books of 2009

2009-11-03T10:16:00.013-07:00

When our colleagues over at City Hall refer to "PW" they mean Public Works ("Gotta run - meeting out at PW today"). At the Library by PW we mean Publishers Weekly, the bible of the publishing industry and a source of reviews for our Library selection team. Generally PW reviews are short and positive (a must-buy!). You run across them in the Library catalogue as they are a featured review source along with Library Journal. Yesterday PW published a well-considered list of their 100 Best Books of 2009, with a PW Top Ten culled from the 100. The top ten is a good mix of interesting titles I think, but there has been a few comments and raised eyebrows in the blogosphere as none of the ten are by women writers.

Non-fiction

Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey
A biography of writer John Cheever, the "Chekhov of the suburbs", who died in 1982. The Library has his collected stories, his journals and his novel, The Wapshot Chronicle.

The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science
by Richard Holmes
Esteemed literary biographer Holmes looks back to the Romantics and a time when the sciences and the arts were not at war with each other. This summer marked the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow's famous "Two cultures" essay about the divide that separates science and the arts. I'm reminded as well of Jenny Uglow's 2002 book, The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World.

Shop Class as Soulcraft
by Matthew B. Crawford
For everyone contemplating a middle age crisis: a book making the case for ditching the white collar grind and working with one's hands.

Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon
by David Grann
I recommended this classic adventure tale as a great fall read. Grann tells of his experience in researching the story of explorer Percy Fawcett, who disappeared in 1925.

A Fiery Peace in a Cold War
by Neil Sheehan
The only one on the list the Library doesn't have yet (we'll order it). The story of the development of the ICBM (that's intercontinental ballistic missile for the young folk). Sheehan is the author of one of the essential Vietnam books, A Bright Shining Lie : John P aul Vann and America in Vietnam.

Fiction

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon
A book with buzz that I recommended as a great fall read. In this novel Chaon deftly juggles three intriguing plots about people dropping their old lives and remaking themselves.

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders
by Daniyal Mueenuddin
A linked story collection about life in Pakistan beyond the insanity of Waziristan, from a Pakistani-American writer.

Big Machine by Victor LaValle
LaValle is the cover boy for the PW Best Books issue (above). Kirkus said of this novel: "Too idea-hungry and haywire to be fully successful, too alive and abrasive to be missed. The multicultural novel has come of age - smashingly."

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi
by Geof f Dyer
Dyer is one of those smart, witty English guys who cranks out brilliant fiction and non-fiction . In Yoga For People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It he told of his own travels in search of enlightenment. In this novel he tells the story of an aging hipster traveling in search of enlightenment. And a girl.

Stitches by David Small
Graphic memoir is threatening to become a genre of its own, with excellent books like Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic or Jeff Lemire's Essex County series, and many others out there. Here Small tells of his difficult childhood. Have a look at the trailer for an introduction to the book:

Ten Great Reads for Fall

2009-10-30T16:38:00.015-06:00

Ten Great Reads for Fall

Pete's Picks presented at the STARTA (St. Albert Retired Teachers Association) breakfast meeting on October 30th. Thank you to hosts Brenda Kane and Jack Flaherty!

Two English ghost stories for Halloween:

Sarah Waters The Little Stranger

Waters is the critically-acclaimed author of neo-Victorian novels like Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet. She moved forward in time with her last novel, The Night Watch to the Second World War. Now she looks at the grey world of postwar Britain. with her excellent take on the classic English haunted house story. A doctor is called to a decaying family manor in England to treat a young man’s war injury, but an evil presence in the house soon makes itself known. Some resemblance to Shirley Jackson’s classic The Haunting of Hill House with a little Edgar Allan Poe too. Shortlisted for the 2009 Booker Prize.

Audrey Niffenegger Her Fearful Symmetry

The long-awaited new novel from the author of The Time Traveler’s Wife is a bit of a ghost story, set beside London’s famed Highgate Cemetery. Moving into a London flat they inherited from their aunt Elspeth, Chicago identical twins Valentina and Julia find aunt Elspeth still hanging about as a meddling ghost. Like The Time Traveler’s Wife at its heart this is a romance, albeit an odd one.

A crime novel, for grey, grim November:

Stieg Larsson The Girl Who Played with Fire

Scandinavian crime fiction is hot. Kenneth Branaugh brought Henning Mankell's Wallander books to BBC/PBS recently. Swede Stieg Larsson’s first thriller, The Girl With a Dragon Tattoo, was a critical and a popular success all over the world. Computer hacker Lisbeth Salander and journalist Mikael Blomkvist are back, this time in the thick of the action, with Salander accused of the murder of two journalists about to expose a trafficking business. Larsson died of a heart attack in 2004 just after delivering the manuscripts for three of these novels, so it is doubly sad finishing these books.

A war novel for Remembrance Day:

Hans Fallada Every Man Dies Alone

Like the Larsson book, this is a posthumous novel, but only in that this is the first time it has been published in English, over 60 years after its initial publication in German. It was actually written in Germany during the Second World War and published – and was a bestseller – in German in 1947. But no English language publisher saw fit to publish until now. An excellent but sad book, about a couple who try to defy the Nazis in their own small way.

An up and comer:

Dan Chaon Await Your Reply

Chaon is an American whose first novel, You Remind Me of Me, was excellent. This new one might be even better. Chaon starts with seemingly unrelated characters and slowly brings them together. This technique reminds me a bit of Kate Atkinson and her tightly-wound plots. Here Chaon deftly juggles three intriguing plots about people dropping their old lives and remaking themselves. Ryan drops out of college to live in the woods, Lucy runs off with her high school teacher and Miles searches for his elusive twin brother. Chaon brings the three together.

Local Hero:

Thomas Trofimuk Waiting for Columbus

The Edmonton writer had two novels on the scoreboard, one an Alberta novel of the year, and then he stepped up to the plate and hit this third one out of the park. This is a great read, a combination of a strong, compelling story with interesting characters and beautiful writing. A modern-day man is admitted to a Spanish mental hospital convinced he is Christopher Columbus. But who is he really?

Oh those Tudors!

Hilary Mantel Wolf Hall

He's been dead five centuries, but Henry VIII is a having a moment, with The Tudors on TV, Pope Benedict inviting Anglicans to leave Henry's church and now this superb Tudor-era novel winning the Booker Prize. Mantel focuses on the turbulent years of Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn, telling the story through the eyes of his crafty advisor, Thomas Cromwell. A long read but worth it.

Three non-fiction tales:

Stephen Brunt Gretzky’s Tears: Hockey, Canada and the Day Everything Changed

Globe and Mail columnist Stephen Brunt stopped by the Library last fall for a reading. He tantalized us with talk of his next book which would focus on the Wayne Gretzky trade. And now here is the book: Gretzky’s Tears - a must-read for Oilers and Gretzky fans and anyone interested in a brilliant look at how our game changed after “The Trade”. Brunt is not only one of Canada’s best sports writers, he’s one of the best writers period.

David Grann The Lost City of Z

A true story of classic adventure in the jungles of the Amazon with this true story of classic adventure. In 1925 British explorer Percy Fawcett entered the Amazon jungle in search of an ancient civilization and was never seen again. Grann intersperses the story of Fawcett with his own search for the truth. Intriguing.

Greg Grandin Fordlandia

The cliché is true: truth is stranger than fiction. The intriguing true story of iconic businessman Henry Ford’s quixotic attempt to build a utopia in Brazil’s Amazonian jungle. From the 1920s through 1945 Ford tried to remake the rainforest into an outpost of white picket fence America with a rubber plantation as its heart.

Waiting for Columbus

2009-10-16T15:34:00.011-06:00

Thomas Trofimuk popped into the Library last night for a reading and a chat about his great new novel, Waiting for Columbus. Thomas is a critically-acclaimed Edmonton writer with two well-received novels to his name. His 2002 debut novel, The 52nd Poem, won the Writers' Guild of Alberta's Georges Bugnet Award for Alberta Novel of the Year as well as the Edmonton Book Prize. His second novel, from 2006, Doubting Yourself to the Bone, was a Globe & Mail 100 pick. He is also an accomplished poet, one of the founders of the Raving Poets collective.

And of course, being a successful poet and novelist in Alberta means Thomas also has a full-time day job - working in the salt mines of the Provincial government (No, not literally - I'm pretty sure the government has no salt mines. Thomas works as a Business Analyst for Municipal Affairs). But with his new Columbus book Thomas has turned the dial on his writing career up to 11. The book had big buzz before publication and a major American publisher paid him a sizable advance. Foreign rights have been sold in various countries.

What created the buzz was a great story really. Around the library we call them "good reads" - those special books that find the sweet spot between the serious literary work and the popular thriller with the strong narrative that pulls you through. At the reading Thomas noted that with this book he really tried to focus on the story. Clearly he was successful as this is a very readable book with the beautiful language and memorable characters of capital "L" literature.

The seed of Columbus had been knocking about Trofimuk's mind for 15 years until recently when he had an epiphany and figured out how to write the story. He pulled off the road (I think he said the Whitemud freeway?), phoned his wife and asked her to copy down his ideas on how he would write the book.

The book is a mistaken identity tale which begins with a modern-day man being admitted to a mental hospital in Seville, Spain. The man is convinced he is Christopher Columbus. He tells his story to Consuela, a sympathetic nurse, and we soon see problems with his story (he has a cell phone for example). Meanwhile there is a parallel story of a detective searching for someone in Spain. Momentum builds as we learn who Columbus really is. In the meantime we're treated to a fun character, for Columbus is quite the rogue, with a fondness for women and winer.

The Library has another Columbus-related novel: Codex 632 by José Rodrigues dos Santos. This thriller is a late entry in the "it's like The Da Vinci Code" sweepstakes, for it has a Robert Langdon-ish historian hot on the trail of a improbable conspiracy involving the true identity of Christopher Columbus. Like The Da Vinci Code, the novel quickly jumps from New York to Jerusalem to Brazil, using clues from Kabbalah and the Templars. But unlike The Da Vinci Code the author seems to want to get EVERYTHING he knows about Columbus onto the page, leaving the various plots gasping for air.

Reading Trofimuk's Waiting for Columbus I was reminded of George Bowering's postmodern Canadian classic novel, Burning Water. The Library's copy is long-gone, so I was happy to see that Vancouver's New Star books brought it back into print. This really is an underrated book. It did win the 1980 Governor General's Award for Fiction but no one seems to have heard of it when I mention it. Maybe it is because it doesn't fit the mold (any mold!) as it is a funny book. Check out the impassioned praise of the book by Jeff Foss in Books in Canada, where he calls it "one of the best Canadian books of the last 50 years or so".

Burning Water is a novel that re-imagines the 1792 voyage of Captain George Vancouver to the coast of British Columbia. He cheekily invents history, having Vancouver in a love affair with the Spanish explorer Don Juan Francisco la Bodega y Quadra. Have a read when the Library's new copy arrives!

Man on Wire

2009-09-11T14:32:00.006-06:00

Eight years on and it still seems unbelievable: two giant towers, there one minute, gone the next. The New York City skyline still seems incomplete these days, even though the Empire State Building has more room to shine. The World Trade Center lives on in memory of course. The best memory is from August 1974, when a young Frenchman, Philippe Petit, walked eight times between the twin towers on a narrow wire.

Petit wrote of his dazzling feat in his 2002 book, To Reach the Clouds: My High Wire Walk Between the Twin Towers. The 2008 documentary, Man on Wire, is based on Petit's book. This is one of the rare cases when the film is better than the book in my opinion. British director James Marsh said he thought of his film as a "heist movie". It does feel like a heist film, focusing on the preparations for the walk -Petit readying himself with supporters in France, casing the towers and so on. There is no footage of the walk itself (unthinkable in these Youtube days!) but plenty of photographs. And the film is also a love letter to the World Trade Center, an homage.

Canadian writer Steven Galloway, of The Cellist of Sarajevo fame, centred his 2003 novel, Ascension, on a wire walker who walks between the twin towers in 1976. But his fictional walker is not a young Frenchman. He is Salvo Ursari, a 66 year-old Roma man. And his walk doesn't end as well as Petit's shall we say (we know this in chapter one - not a spoiler!).

Since 9/11 there have been the endless wrangles about how to both remember the towers and the people who died there, as well as how to replace the buildings. William Langewiesche wrote about the immediate clearing up of the site ("unbuilding") in The Atlantic magazine, later published as his book American Ground: Unbuilding the Word Trade Center. Philip Nobel wrote of the wrangles in Sixteen Acres: Architect ure and the Outrageous Struggle for the Future of Ground Zero (2005). The starchitect Daniel Libeskind, selected to do a master plan for Ground Zero, talks a bit about the aesthetic and other struggles in his 2004 memoir, Breaking Ground: Adventures in Life and Architecture.

Of course the reverberations of 9/11 go way beyond the towers. Just this summer the "Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative" came into effect, forcing everyone crossing the US-Canada border to have a passport. This "thickening" of the formerly "undefended border" between friends kind of means the terrorists won, doesn't it? Jim Lynch uses the politics, both personal, local and cross-border, of what he calls the "nonchalant border" between BC and Washington State as the setting for his excellent new novel, Border Songs. Small-town oddball Brandon Vanderkool unexpectedly finds his calling when he joins the U.S. Border Patrol and is soon at the centre of an uptick in pot smuggling and human trafficking. Mike Doherty in the National Post called the novel "required reading" and noted that Seattle-area writer Lynch "gets Canada right."

The Dominion of Wyley McFadden

2009-09-03T15:50:00.011-06:00

"You can't ignore the rat. Kill him." So goes the 1950s rat eradication poster from the Alberta Department of Health (available on a t-shirt from the Provincial Archives of Alberta shop!). The anti-rat campaign worked, making Alberta the only rat-free jurisdiction in Canada. Or perhaps the world? Recently there has been talk, as there is periodically, that rats were found here or there. They're usually pet rats (not allowed in Alberta) that have made an unsuccessful break for freedom. Or muskrats or "pocket gophers" misidentified as rats.

The most recent rat scare even got a comment from Premier Ed Stelmach, who otherwise has been pretty quiet this summer: "You won’t have any rat feces in the food that we produce ... I have great confidence in our pest control people ... they’ll get every rat that there is in the province.” I'm sure the Premier doesn't mean to imply that the food everyone else produces has rat feces in it. Pretty sure.

Meanwhile next door in Saskatchewan there is news of a rat infestation in Swift Current. I'm sure Saskatchewanians enjoyed the reports that focused on 'what does this mean for rat-free Alberta"', as in the CBC report: "Swift Current rat problem puts Alberta on alert" (okay, we've got rats, but what about our rat-free neighbours?)

Toronto writer Scott Gardiner focused on this inherent inter-provincial rivalry, or perhaps Alberta smugness, regarding rats in his acclaimed 2000 novel, The Dominion of Wyley McFadden. Toronto "urban trapper" Wyley McFadden sets out to "redress geo-zoological discrimination" by introducing a truck full of Toronto rats into Alberta. Complicating his mission is the female hitchhiker he picks up in Wawa, Ontario. An eccentric but funny road novel, full of authentic Cancon.

Apparently Gardiner was inspired to write the novel by a summer working the Alberta rigs, where he was teased mercilessly for his Toronto-ness. And that to me is the flip side to the cheery talk of a rat-free Alberta. There is something very Fortress Alberta about patrolling the border, looking to kill invaders. Shades of building a firewall or "Let the eastern bastards freeze in the dark." Or look further back in Alberta history, in the darker periods when some Albertans dabbled in anti-semitism, or what the late Howard Palmer called "nativism" in his 1982 book Patterns of Prejudice: A History of Nativism in Alberta. Keep them foreigners out! I'm reminded of the classic graphic novel about the Holocaust, Maus: A Survivor's Tale, in which Art Spiegelman depicts the Nazis as cats, attempting to exterminate the Jews, depicted as mice or rats. Just yesterday I saw the new Tarantino WWII film, Inglourious Basterds and sure enough there in scene one is a Nazi going on and on about Jews as rats.

I don't mean to denigrate the fine work of the Alberta rat patrol of course! I'm as pleased (and smug) as the next Albertan to live in a rat-free zone. Just don't be surprised if your cousin in Moncton rolls his eyes.

For a first rate natural history of rats, in this case in New York City, pick up Robert Sullivan's excellent 2004 book Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants. Sullivan poked around garbage-strewn alleys in Manhattan to learn more about this great American success story.

A more general, breezy overview is available in Hamilton writer Jerry Langton's 2006 book Rat: How the World's Most Notorious Rodent Clawed its Way to the Top.

Ladykiller

2009-02-06T10:14:00.008-07:00

It is always interesting meeting an author off the page and in the flesh. I had to be dragged to a reading last night over at the U of A but as always happens I'm glad I went. Three writers were reading, two that teach at the university: Thomas Wharton and Marina Endicott and one from the U of C: Charlotte Gill. I was suprised by Gill as her Governor-General's Award-nominated book of stories, Ladykiller, is full of nasty and unlikeable folk. I had an impression in my mind of someone tough, punkish, maybe goth-y or grunge-y. In fact Gill was a slim, polished, fashionable woman wearing killer boots. So I recalibrated my perceptions more along the lines of Kitsilano-yoga-latte person. But my attempt to stereotype her was dashed again when the moderator noted that Gill is currently working on a non-fiction book about tree-planting, based on her many years' experience as a tree planter! And tree planting may take all kinds, but Kitsilano-yoga-latte people aren't the type one would normally associate with the trade. You can read a piece about tree planting on Gill's website here. Gill is currently at the U of C as Writer in Residence.

Gill read a bit from Ladykiller, the title story I think. Endicott read a bit from a work in progress, a novel she is working on about the Belle Auroras, a sister-trio vaudeville act touring Alberta and Montana in 1909. It sounds quite different than her Giller-nominated novel, Good to a Fault, and should be interesting. [*** Save the date: Marina Endicott will visit St. Albert Library on March 8th, 2pm!] Wharton read a delightful bit from his book The Logogryph. All three were witty and wise during questions from the audience. And in the audience was U of A's Writer in Residence, Lynn Coady (author of the excellent Mean Boy, among others).

Getting a Grip

2009-02-04T10:55:00.007-07:00

If the Obama-induced optimism you felt last month is ebbing away with the usual doom and gloom in the news, get over to the University of Alberta. February 2-6 is the 24th annual International Week at the U of A, with another rich menu of inspiring speakers, workshops, performances and displays. This year’s theme is "Hungry for Change: Transcending Feast, Famine and Frenzy". It is perhaps counter intuitive, but listening and talking about global issues like climate change, economic disparity and food security can be cheering.

Look at Monday's keynote speaker, activist and writer Fran cis Moore Lappé. You would think a talk on hunger and global inequity would be depressing, but she left the crowd at Horowitz Theatre filled with the possbilities of change. Known as a "warrior for hope" she once noted: “Hope is a stance, not a calculation. We don’t find hope. We become hope.” Lappé is well-known for her 1971 book, Diet for a Small Planet, which sold over 3 million copies. Her most recent book, Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity and Courage in a World Gone Mad, is an empowering call to action.
Lappé is interviewed by Byran Birtles in Edmonton's Vue Weekly here. Todd Babiak wrote about her and local food and land issues in this column in the Journal here.
Other Lappé books at the Library:

Today's special speaker (via live TV feed) is writer George Monbiot, who published Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning in 2006 to great acclaim. His latest, Bring on the Apocalypse: Essays on Self-Destruction (cheery title that!) is a collection of his columns written for The Guardian.

Lullabies for Little Criminals

2009-01-29T15:18:00.005-07:00

I've become addicted to This American Life in the last year. TAL is the long-running radio program from Chicago Public Radio that is broadcast on NPR in the States, but for awhile now has been available as weekly podcasts (free! but consider pledging). Hosted by Ira Glass, TAL is usually a documentary or two, a personal essay, a bit of humour, held together by the week's theme. TAL has a stable of excellent writer/performers and contributors, some of whom have gone on to fame and fortune, like David Sedaris, others well-known amongst, well, public radio listeners / Volvo drivers / latte drinkers shall we say (Sarah Vowell, David Rakoff, Anne Lamott). The Library has a 2006 CD of some of TAL's greatest hits and a DVD of the TAL TV show from 2007.

Recently I was surprised to hear a piece by Jonathan Goldstein on TAL. As a CBC Radio listener I have heard his Wiretap program for years. But apparently Goldstein was a TAL producer in 2000-2002, and continues contributing to TAL. And even more suprising, in googling Goldstein I discovered his long-time partner is writer Heather O'Neill, author of the 2007 CBC Canada Reads winning novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals. And apparently she is a TAL contributer as well.

Okay, perhaps only surprising to me. But maybe you can ask Heather if Jonathan is really as neurotic as his on-air personality when the Q & A session happens after her reading tonight in Edmonton. Lullabies for Little Criminals is this year's "College Book of the Year" at Grant MacEwan College, where the whole campus is encouraged to read the same book. The author spends a few days on campus and does a public reading. Tonight is Heather O'Neill's public reading: Thursday, January 29th @ 7:00pm, Conference Theatre (5-142), GMCC downtown campus.

City of Thieves

2009-01-27T16:16:00.012-07:00

The Second World War's terrible 900 day Siege of Leningrad ended 65 years ago on this day. The siege began September 9, 1941 when German troops surrounded the city as part of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in "Operation Barbarossa". Around 3 million people lived in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) at the start of the siege. By the time the siege was lifted it is estimated that a million people died, mostly due to starvation. (Pictured at left, a Russian soldier stands by an eternal flame marking the 65th anniversary, from BBC News)

Faced with invasion, even opponents of the Soviet regime threw themselves into the defense of "the city of Peter, the city of Lenin, the city of Pushkin, of Dostoevsky and Blok, the city of great culture and great achievement". These last lines are from a radio broadcast in 1941 by a Leningrad resident, one of Stalin's political enemies - the famed Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova. She vowed, "I, like all of you now, live with one unconquerable belief - that Leningrad will never be Fascist." You can read about Akhmatova's interesting life in Elaine Feinstein's book, Anna of All the Russias: The Life of Anna Akhmatova. (Portrait by Nathan Altman, 1914, from the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg)

Akhmatova, like some other high-profile citizens such as composer Dmitri Shostakovich, was evacuated from Leningrad in October. From her exile in Tashkent she wrote the poem "Courage":

We know what trembles on the scales,
and what we must steel ourselves to face.
The bravest hour strikes on our clocks:
may courage not abandon us!
Let bullets kill us - we are not afraid,
nor are we bitter, though our rooftops fall.
We will preserve you, Russian speech,
from servitude in foreign chains,
keep you alive, great Russian word,
fit for the songs of our children's children,
pure on their tongues, and free.

American writer Debra Dean's novel, The Madonnas of Leningrad (2006) focuses on the life of one of the Leningraders, a young woman working at the famed Hermitage Museum. The novel begins with the woman, now an elderly Russian emigré in present-day Seattle, preparing for a family wedding. Fighting Alzheimer's, she has trouble remembering day-to-day basics, but is able to think back to her youth, especially to the days of the siege.

One of the buzz books of 2008 was David Benioff's excellent thriller, City of Thieves, set in Leningrad during the siege. Benioff is the author of the also-excellent thriller, The 25th Hour (2003) which became one of Spike Lee's best films, with the screenplay by Benioff. After The 25th Hour Benioff wrote screenplays for the films, Troy, Stay and The Kite Runner, and is working on an adaptation of George R.R. Martin's fantasy series A Song of Fire and Ice. And he married actress Amanda Peet in his spare time! (Benioff and Peet pictured at right, from Men's Vogue)

In City of Thieves, Benioff tells a thrilling and darkly humorous story of two men faced with an impossible task during the Siege of Leningrad. 17-year-old Lev Beniov is caught looting a German paratrooper's corpse. Kolya is a young Russian army deserter. Both men face execution for their misdeeds. But Soviet Colonel Grechko decides to spares them both if they can manage to find a dozen eggs for the colonel's daughter's wedding cake in the starving city. The impossible mission takes them around Leningrad and behind enemy lines to the Russian countryside. An intriguing premise and setting and engaging characters make this a superb novel.

Simple Gifts

2009-01-27T11:48:00.013-07:00

Songs are amazing things. So simple (verse - chorus - verse - chorus - bridge - verse - chorus) but so powerful. One of President Obama's best lines, in his election night acceptance speech, alluded to Sam Cooke's civil rights' song, "A Change is Gonna Come":

"It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America." - Barack Obama

"There been times that I thought I couldn't last for long
But now I think I'm able to carry on
It's been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will" - Sam Cooke

Independent "freeform" New York radio station WFMU celebrated Obama's inauguration with an hour of versions of "A Change is Gonna Come" (including one by Montreal band Arcade Fire). The Library has versions on CD by Seal, Aaron Neville and Aretha Franklin (but, alas, not Sam Cooke!) You can read about the song in Peter Guralnick's excellent books:

There must be something in the air as two CBC Radio programs have focused on books about songs in the past couple of days. On Sunday on Tapestry, very enthusiastic guest host Robert Harris talked to author Bill Henderson about his book Simple Gifts: One Man's Search for Grace. Henderson's book recounts how a chance encounter with a hymn so moved him that it brought him back to the church he left as a youth. On Tapestry they talked about the stories behind two of them, "Simple Gifts", and "Amazing Grace". [Listen to both songs on Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel's CD Simple Gifts.]

As Harris and Henderson noted, the latest wrinkle on the old Shaker song, "Simple Gifts" happened at Obama's inauguration. The super-quartette of Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, Gabriela Montero and Anthony McGill performed (or pretended to perform apparently) "Air and Simple Gifts", a piece John Williams arranged for the inauguration based on Aaron Copeland's arrangement of "Simple Gifts". Many might be most familiar with the tune via "Lord of the Dance", a song written by English musician Sydney Carter in 1963 using the melody with new lyrics. Canadians like me might remember the song thanks to Canadian musician John Allan Cameron ("The Godfather of Celtic Music") who performed the song on his 1970s-era TV shows on CTV and CBC. I have a suspicion that my childhood home had an LP with the Irish Rovers performing the song as well! And just last year the rock band Weezer used a bit of the tune on their song "The Greatest Man That Ever Lived (Variations on a Shaker Hymn)". on their "Red" album. A memorable tune never dies!

Today on Q on CBC host Jian Ghomeshi talked to Ted Anthony about his book Chasing the Rising Sun: The Journey of an American Song (2007). [Listen to the podcast here] Edmonton writer Barry Hammond called the book "one of the best reads this year" in Vue Magazine. Anthony writes of his obsession with the song most of us know as "House of the Rising Sun" by 1960s English rock band, the Animals. But that version is just one of hundreds of versions of the song, and Anthony's book is his story of his research and travels around the world to discover more about it.

Finally, another intriguing book looking at the power of song: I Shot a Man in Reno: A History of Death by Murder, Suicide, Fire, Flood, Drugs, Disease and General Misadventure as Related in Popular Song by Graeme Thomson. The review in Toronto's Eye Weekly last week gave it 4 stars, noting:

"Graeme Thomson’s book is more than just a cornucopia of the splendidly grim and myriad ways we speak of death in rhyming couplets backed with a catchy beat. It’s a brain-teasing query into the strange, abstract place death occupies in our culture. That’s not to say it isn’t fun. He begins with a mad dash through death’s appearances in songs — from folk and murder ballads to teenage death songs of the late 1950s."

Have a look at Thomson's blog for more notes on deathly music.

A Long Time Coming

2009-01-20T16:05:00.017-07:00

Where were you when the world changed? On the Mall in DC? Huddled around a TV in an office? Alas, I was in a meeting discussing library statistics. Ah well, the big day was election day back in November anyway. Besides, I watched President Obama's fine speech online at lunch without the glitches or lagginess that the live online feed had for some. Regardless - a momentous day for our friends south of the 49 and a pretty darn good one for the rest of the world.

For those of us toiling in the salt mines of books and words, Obama's election is gratifying as finally the smart guy won! Perhaps the tide has turned for anti-intellectualism as the go-to play in political playbooks. Elvin T. Lim has some thoughts on this in his recent book, The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush. Clearly Lim's book went to press before he heard a few of Obama's speeches, for the book flap notes:"Why has it been so long since an American president has effectively and consistently presented reasoned, intellectually substantive arguments to the American public?"

Interestingly, George W. Bush may have seen the tide turning, for up popped "Bush's Brain", Karl Rove, in the Washington Post this week with a rather surprising tale ("Bush is a Book Lover") of how he and Bush are actually bookish men. Indeed, they have an annual contest to see who can read the most books. I agree with Martin Levin in his Globe & Mail Books blog post: "Excuse me, but I'm skeptical: When does somebody with that (presumed) workload have time to read a book-and-a-half a week? .... [Bush] simply didn't talk about books, or refer to them. He doesn't seem bookish."

Obama is not shy about making his reading choices known. He might just make reading cool! Motoko Rich even asked in the New York Times, "For Books, Is Obama the New Oprah?" Iconic book reviewer Michiko Kakutani made a case that "From Books, New President Found Voice", and included "A Reading List That Shaped a President":

The Bible
Parting the Waters: America in the King Years by Taylor Branch
"Self-Reliance" by Ralph Waldo Emerson
An Autobiography, or The Story of My Experiments With the Truth by Mohandas Gandhi
The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
Works of Reinhold Niebuhr
Writings of Abraham Lincoln

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Other books Obama has been identified with recently:

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin (available as an 41.5 hour eAudiobook here)
The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria
Ghost Wars: the Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Ladin... by Steve Coll

We may test this turn in the tide soon if we have a federal election in Canada. We'll see if Michael Ignatieff is demonized as a pointy-headed intellectual just like Stephane Dion was last time. Ignatieff has at least a dozen books to his name, with his latest, True Patriot Love, being rushed into publication for this spring.

High Wire Act

2008-12-02T14:43:00.012-07:00

Canadian communications mogul* Ted Rogers died Tuesday at the age of 75. His father died at 38 and Ted was never the healthiest of men, so he did manage to outperform expectations, just as he did in his business life. Rogers' own biography is entitled Relentless - an accurate description of a hard-driving, risk-taking entrepreneur, infamous for phoning his senior execs at 4 am. (photo below: Tibor Kolley/The Globe & Mail)

Rogers had a knack in forecasting where the technology was headed and getting his company there first. He started in Toronto radio, getting into FM radio when less than 3% of radio receivers could pick up FM. He got into cable in suburban Toronto in 1967 when no one thought this was a good idea. He lived on the edge, with a staggering level of debt, but he always managed to keep all the balls in the air.

There are two recent biographies out: High Wire Act: Ted Rogers and the Empire that Debt Built (2007) is by journalist Caroline Van Hasselt. It is unauthorized, although Rogers did cooperate with her. At 530 pages it may be more than enough detail for most readers, but it is an interesting story for folks who enjoy tales of the inner machinations of empire-building. Relentless: the True Story of the M an Behind Rogers Communications (2008) is Rogers' autobiography, ghostwritten by Robert Brehl.
Also just out is the life story of another recently deceased Canadian media giant: Izzy: the Passionate Life and Turbulent Times of Izzy Asper, Canada's Media Mogul, by veteran business writer Peter C. Newman.

(*are they still called moguls? and what's the relation to the moguls you ski through?)

28: Stories of AIDS in Africa

2008-12-01T23:10:00.003-07:00

Today is World AIDS Day. Sadly, the West couldn't get it together to really help millions of people with AIDS in Africa during the good times. And now with tough times upon the wealthy nations you can bet that help will get shunted to the back of the line. But it shouldn't. Canadians like Stephen Lewis and Globe & Mail Africa correspondent Stephanie Nolen continue to raise the alarm and tell us the things we can and should be doing.

Nolen made a huge impact with her Globe stories about Stephen Lewis, then the United Nations Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa. She told of the heartbreaking stories of the people Lewis was meeting every day in Africa and his heroic attempt to bring attention to their plight. Lewis spoke about his experiences and AIDS in the 2005 Massey Lectures, which were published as his book, Race Against Time: Searching for Hope in AIDS-Ravaged Africa. Lewis now runs the Stephen Lewis Foundation, which funds local, small-scale AIDS projects in Africa.

Nolen has moved permanently to Africa, living now in Johannesburg, South Africa with her husband and child. 28: Stories of AIDS in Africa (2007) is her Governor General's Award-nominated book about AIDS, with 28 stories from 28 people, each representing a million people with AIDS in Africa.

The Race of My Life

2008-12-01T11:13:00.007-07:00

When Austrian skiing legend Hermann "The Herminator" Maier wins a World Cup ski race, you know the ski season is ON! The wily veteran won the men's Super G race at the Bombardier Lake Louise Winterstart World Cup, pushing young Canadian hotshot John Kucera into second place. Maier is an ancient in ski racing's speed events, turning 36 next week. Canada's Thomas Grandi, who has un-retired recently in order to try and compete at Vancouver-Whistler 2010 is also 36, but competes in the technical events (slalom and giant slalom).

Folks were starting to write Maier off as he hadn't won a World Cup race in three years before this victory. Lake Louise is good to him - this is his third Super G victory there. Anyone should be wary of writing Maier off as he accomplished one of sports' great comebacks in 2004. In the summer of 2001 Maier almost died when he crashed his motorcycle. Doctors considered amputating his leg as it was so injured. There were thoughts that Maier might never walk again, never mind ski and certainly not ski competitively. But Maier worked his way back, first to walking, then to running, then to skiing. And in 2004 Maier not only made it back to the winner's podium, he won his fourth World Cup overall title.

I hope I haven't spoiled the story in his book, The Race of My Life. It is an interesting, even inspiring, read, including a foreword from that other comeback kid, Lance Armstrong (It's Not About the Bike).
Photo below of John Kucera courtesy www.winterstartworldcup.com

Not Buying It

2008-11-29T00:14:00.011-07:00

I thought I'd stumbled upon a satirical piece from The Onion when I saw the headline, "Wal-Mart Employee Trampled to Death". Sadly, it isn't a joke. A 34-year old man died when 2,000 "Black Friday" shoppers/idiots surged into a Long Island, NY Wal-Mart. Later the Black Friday toll moved to three dead as two men had gunned each other down in a California Toys-R-Us store. An added bit of madness in the LA Times report about the aftermath at the Toys-R-Us: "Many shoppers Saturday were slightly skittish." Is there nothing that will keep the North American shopper from their appointed rounds?

Judith Levine took herself out of the shopping madness when she tried to not shop for a year, as reported in her book, Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping (2006). Given that one needs to shop to eat in North America, Levine and her husband had to define what was a need and what was a want. The year begins with enthusiasm but by fall she's weary. She makes use of the local public library (of course!, joins a local Simplicity group and participates in Buy Nothing Day (shouldn't be too difficult if you are already not buying anything!). An interesting look at consumerism and how what we buy can define who we are if we aren't careful.

Affluenza

2008-11-28T11:43:00.011-07:00

Has the cure for affluenza been found? No, not influenza - affluenza, a "painful, contagious condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more." John De Graaf produced a documentary on this alarming affliction for PBS in 1996. He published a book, Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic on it in 2001.

The cure has always been available: stop buying stuff! Stop renting storage places to store the stuff! But perhaps the current economic slowdown is a stern reminder to really think about what consumerism, the endless pursuit of stuff, new stuff, better, bigger stuff, is doing to our lives, our families and our societies.

Today is the biggest shopping day in the U.S. (called Black Friday as it is the day retailers hope to move from the red into the black". But anti-consumerism activists in Vancouver, lead by Kalle Lasn and the Adbusters Magazine folks, established today as "Buy Nothing Day" back in 1992. The day has spread across the globe as it has merged with the zeitgeist of the simplicity movement, the slow movement, the anti-globalization movements ... Lasn talked about his ideas in his book Culture Jam: How to Reverse America's Suicidal Consumer Binge (2000) and recently in Design Anarchy (2006).

An excerpt from Culture Jam is published in a handy collection, The Consumer Society Reader (2000), along with other classic and new pieces: John Kenneth Galbraith from The Affluent Society, Thorstein Veblen on "Conspicuous Consumption", Malcolm Gladwell on "The Coolhunt" and Thomas Frank on advertising as cultural criticism.

An interesting look at how the expansion of consumer choice (300 types of toothpaste!) hasn't made us happier, indeed, it appears to make us LESS happy is explored in The Paradox of Choice: Why Less is More (2004) by Barry Schwartz.

What to fill the void that not shopping leaves? Why visit your local public library of course! The Library is first on this list of "Ten Things to Do Instead of Shopping."

The Song of Kahunsha

2008-11-27T14:18:00.009-07:00

Happy Thanksgiving to the folks down below the 49th! With no snow on the ground hereabouts it almost feels like Thanksgiving today. With the economic troubles seeming to worsen daily, one could forget that we have much to be thankful for in North America, notably the freedom - knock on wood - from fundamentalist religious violence as erupted in Bombay (Mumbai), India yesterday.

It was just last week that I blogged about Bombay, talking about Salman Rushdie's comments in Edmonton about feeling at home in Bombay. He mentioned as well his feeling that the threat of communal religious violence seemed to be rising of late. Since last week I've stumbled upon some novels set in or about Bombay that seem apropos today.

The Song of Kahunsha is a 2006 novel by Vancouver writer Anosh Irani. He was born and grew up in Bombay before moving to Canada in 1998. He told the Calgary Herald:

Growing up in Bombay was the best thing that happened to me. Living in a place like that teaches you to handle pain. Because you see it everywhere. There is no way to escape the pain. And it gives you a sense of humour. Bombay has a great energy. But it is very dark now. Maybe it was always dark. Maybe the injustice and the corruption were always there. It just doesn't change. Even with the city doing so well with technology and economy. The real change will come only when we can change in other ways, poverty, injustice, corruption.

The Song of Kahunsha was one of the CBC Canada Reads picks for the 2007 session (promoted by writer Donna Morrissey). The novel is about an orphan boy named Chamdi who leaves his orphanage in search of his father as the 1993 Bombay religious riots are breaking out. Chamdi is befriended by Guddi, a young girl who is supporting her mother by begging on the streets. Chamdi joins her and is soon caught up in the violence, around him. Reviews mention 'heartbreaking but hopeful' a lot. It reminds me of one of the most depressing films I've ever seen, also about an orphaned boy on the streets of Bombay, Salaam Bombay!
Other Bombay novels:

The Space Between Us (2005) and Bombay Time (2001) by Thrity Umrigar
Sacred Games (2007) by Vikram Chandra
The Death of Vishnu (2001) by Manil Suri
Baumgartner's Bombay (1988) by Anita Desai

and of course, Toronto master Rohinton Mistry's fabulous books, all set in Bombay:

and on a lighter note, the mystery novel series starring Bombay police detective, Inspector Ghote, written by Englishman H.R.F. Keating:

#1 - The Perfect Murder (1964)
#17 - The Body in the Billiard Room (1987)
#24 - Breaking and Entering (2000) - the final one in the series

Mercy Among the Children

2008-11-25T12:15:00.019-07:00

CBC has launched the 2009 Canada Reads, which airs on CBC Radio March 2-6, 2009. Here's the lineup (annotations from CBC):

The Book of Negroes (2007) by Lawrence Hill
In Lawrence Hill’s gripping historical novel, an unforgettable heroine recounts a life story that spans more than 50 years and three continents. As Aminata Diallo moves from slavery to freedom, she fights to keep her dignity and find a place she can call home. Defended by: Avi Lewis

The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant (1981) by Michel Tremblay. Translation of La grosse gemme d'à côté est enceinte (1978) by Sheila Fischman.
In his lively and lovely first novel, Michel Tremblay pays tribute to the working-class Montreal of his childhood. Over 24 hours, the daily activities and social dramas of several pregnant women and their eccentric neighbours add up to a whole world.
Defended by: Anne-Marie Withenshaw

Fruit (2004) by Brian Francis
Brian Francis’ debut novel captures the many agonies – and a few ecstasies – of puberty in vivid and sometimes surreal detail. Peter Paddington is 13 years old and overweight when he sprouts a pair of talking nipples. When they threaten to out his secret desires, Peter has to come up with a real-life plan to get along with himself and others. Defended by: Jen Sookfong Lee

Merc y A mong the Children (2000) by David Adams Richards
The events of David Adams Richards’ wrenching, compassionate novel stem from one pivotal moment. When 12-year-old Sydney pushes a schoolmate off a roof, he promises God he’ll never harm anyone else if the boy lives. His vow sets him on a path to heartbreak. Defended by: Sarah Slean

The Ou tla nder (2007) by Gil Adamson
The Outlander is a classic western narrative with one twist: its outlaw anti-hero is a woman on the run after murdering her husband. In her flight, “the widow” encounters a gallery of strange characters in the rugged landscape of pioneer Alberta. Defended by: Nicholas Campbell

My prediction for the winner is Mercy Among the Children, based entirely on the track record of books defended by pop musicians winning this contest (2008, 2007, 2006, 2004). But The Book of Negroes and The Outlander are also good solid reads, defended by persuasive people. Avi Lewis grew up discussing big ideas around the dinner table with his dad, Stephen Lewis. Now married to Naomi Klein I imagine he continues to have to be persuasive around the table! But Nicholas Campbell played beligerent, bellicose and persuasive coroner Dominic Da Vinci on TV 's Da Vinci's Inquest (now available on DVD!) for years - would you argue with Da Vinci?

When Did You Last See Your Father?

2008-11-24T10:38:00.016-07:00

An old line goes, "There are no new stories, just new ways of telling them." We're living one of the classic stories in Alberta at the moment: boom and bust. Tonight's "Reel Monday" film, When Did You Last See Your Father? at Grandin Theatre (7:00 pm) explores one of the oldest stories, father and son and the quest for understanding. The film is based on the 1993 memoir by poet Blake Morrison, which was an unflinching look at Morrison's conflicted relationship with his physician father. The book, and the film, intercut between Morrison at his dying father's bedside and Blake's funny, embarrassing and upsetting memories of his childhood and youth.

The book (whose title begins with "And" in the UK edition) was critically acclaimed on its publication, with Nick Ho rnby, no slouch at understanding men's inner lives, blurbing: "A painful, funny, frightening, moving, marvelous book … everybody should read it." Jay Parini, in the New York Times, noted that is was a "small classic", one of few "books that say anything fresh about the death of a parent." Morrison's website puts the book in a class with classic father-son memoirs by Philip Roth (Pa trimo ny), Edmund Gosse (Father and Son) and J.R. Ackerley (My Father and Myself). [AWDYLSYF won the J.R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography in 1993].

Mordecai Richler wrote about Toronto journalist Joe Fiorito's father-son 1999 memoir, The Closer We Are to Dying: "His splendid memoir about his relationship with his dying father belongs on that small shelf with Philip Roth's Patrimony and Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes." Just recently the Library received Peter Godwin's father-son memoir, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa, an "exquisitely written, deeply moving account of the death of a father played out against the backdrop of the collapse of the southern African nation of Zimbabwe" (Publishers Weekly).

The film of AWDYLSYF has received good reviews, with a Metacritic rating of 66 ("Generally Favorable") and 70% "Fresh" at Rotten Tomatoes. One of the best reviews was from the very stingy Rick Groen of the Globe & Mail, giving it 3 1/2 stars and noting:

"A middle-aged son waits at the deathbed of his ailing father, sifting through his many and mixed feelings for the old man - reverence, hatred, envy, embarrassment, respect, frustration, love. Of course, none of these conflicting emotions is unique to him. They're felt, to varying degrees at different times, by most flawed sons toward most flawed fathers, all those patriarchs who are neither ogres nor saints. That's why this honest, unsentimental and, in the end, deeply moving film packs such a resonant charge: The relationship it explores may be specific and particular, but the wellspring it taps into runs wide and deep."

But enough about the thoughtful thought about mortality and the father-son chasm, this film stars the thinking woman's crumpet, Colin Firth (aka Mr. Darcy)! There, I've guaranteed a sell-out for the Friends of the Library showing tonight! Jim Broadbent stars as the father, and it is interesting how Firth and Broadbent actually look like father and son.

The Uncrowned King

2008-11-20T20:44:00.009-07:00

Across the river from the M.G. Vassanji reading is another high-profile author event, this one hosted by the other Greenwood sister at Greenwood's Bookshoppe (7925 - 104 St @ 7:30 pm). Maclean's editor Kenneth Whyte will do an on-stage interview with the delightful Todd Babiak, focusing on Whyte's just-released book about American media mogul William Randolph Hearst.

Yes, the Citizen Kane "rosebud" guy. Born rich, Hearst (1862-1951) started by running his father's San Francisco newspaper and built a powerful national chain of papers and magazines. Some consider him the father of tabloid journalism for some of his papers' focus on lurid sensationalism, but his aggressive reporters were the ones getting the stories. For a look at a true tabloid journalism king, check out The Godfather of Tabloid: Generoso Pope Jr. and the National Enquirer by Jack Vitek.
Hearst was early on a progressive, a supporter of FDR and the New Deal, but his politics shifted rightwards later in life, at odds with public opinion. His overextended media empire came crashing down in the 1930s, with a court seizing control in 1937. Remind you of anyone? Yes, Conrad Black, who, before beginning his media empire, "as a teenager, devoured W.A. Swanberg's biography of William Randolph Hearst, Citizen Hearst". And who did Conrad Black hire to run his new national newspaper, the National Post, in 1998? Kenneth Whyte. An interesting triangle. That's Whyte at the bottom of this post, as pictured in the New York Times, after testifying in defense of Black at his criminal trial in Chicago in 2007.

With the 1961 Swanberg bio and a weighty 2001 bio, The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst from David Nasaw, I don't think the world was desperately in need of another book about Hearst, but Whyte notes that his book focuses on Hearst's early career. He explains in an interview with Maclean's:

Q: I know your intent for the book wasn’t to create a full-fledged bio of Hearst, but to focus on the early portion of his career and his rise to prominence in newspaper publishing. Why that specific focus?
A: Well, a couple of reasons. One, that’s what I’m interested in. I’m a journalist so I was interested in Hearst as a journalist and a publisher and a newspaperman. The biographies of Hearst generally consider him to be a failure in his chosen profession. And his reputation in the industry is about as low as you can get. It all goes back to the period of so-called yellow journalism in the 1890s when Hearst went to New York and engaged Joseph Pulitzer in a newspaper war. I was going to do [the book] just on the newspaper war originally, but the more I read about it the more I began to realize that Hearst had been seriously misrepresented in these accounts. And that he’d done some astonishing work–even heroic work–and hadn’t gotten credit for it.

Whyte is an interesting guy himself. He grew up in Edmonton, starting his career in sports writing at the Sherwood Park News, moving on to the once-mighty right-wing mouthpiece, Alberta Report as reporter and then editor, before starting up The National Post for Black. I'm a Globe & Mail loyalist, but the years 1998-2000, into 2001, were magic for Canadian newspaper readers with two excellent papers every morning! Whyte assembled a great team of writers and designers at the Post and set a impertinent iconoclastic editorial tone. The Globe was forced to up its game and became a better paper thanks to the competition. But good things can't last - the Post lost buckets of money. The Asper family bought it and cut costs by cutting the pricey stuff - writers. Just recently the Post stopped publishing a weekday print edition in Manitoba and Saskatchewan and I don't think anyone will be surprised if it folds during the current economic downturn. Whyte was ditched by the Aspers in 2003. He moved on to Saturday Night magazine and then Maclean's. Forget about Hearst - I look forward to Whyte's memoir of his times in the media circus and the great Canadian newspaper war!

A Place Within

2008-11-20T15:03:00.013-07:00

"Home is where your books are" is how Salman Rushdie answered Eleanor Wachtel's question the other night about where Rushdie's home is. He first noted that he is a person of the age, at home wherever he happens to be - New York City, or London or his childhood city of Bombay, India (I applaud his insistence that the place is Bombay, not Mumbai). He said that after moving hundreds of books from London to New York he knows he never wants to move again! But he noted that there's a certain feeling of "home" when he's in India. For an outstanding reflection on this return to childhood India theme, read Suketu Mehta's book, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found. Like Rushdie, Mehta is a New Yorker, having moved from Bombay at 14. In this book he returns to Bombay, "the biggest, fastest, richest city in India" after a 21 year absence. It is a fascinating look at contemporary India.

M.G. Vassanji, the Toronto writer, resembles Rushdie in his peripatetic ways, but notes on his website that, "If pressed, I describe myself as an IndoAfrican Canadian writer. Attempts to box me in I find abhorrent." His new book is a memoir in which he travels in India, a place his ancesters left in the 19th century, for Africa. He's looking for that feeling of "home" too (from Philip Marchand's National Post review): "Why this obsession with the past?" he asks himself. "I can only conclude that it reflects the deep dissatisfaction of unfinished, incomplete migrations, a perpetual homelessness in my life."

M.G. Va s sanji is in Edmonton tonight promoting the new book, A Place Within: Redisc overing India at a reading put on by Laurie Greenwood. The event goes at 7:30 pm at The ARTery, that wee venue on the sketchy side of town (sorry - it's true! Lots of free parking is the bonus.) - 9535 Jasper Ave.

Marchand makes note of Paul Theroux's new travel book, Gho st Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar, in his Vassanji review. As with Vassanji, he travels through India by train, 33 years after traveling around Asia for his classic book, The Great Railway Bazaar.

Seductive Poison

2008-11-18T16:56:00.009-07:00

30 years ago today that over 900 people died in the People's Temple mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana. Wouldn't it be nice to think that the world learned a lesson from that awful event and vowed the next century would be different? Alas, there seems a straight line from Jonestown to this century's blight of suicide bombings by fundamentalist religious zealots.

Deborah Layton is a Jonestown survivor. She was a high-level member of the People's Temple cult that moved from California to Guyana to build a socialist utopia. She realized the utopia had become a nightmarish dystopia, was able to escape to the US and warn authorities there. Ironically, it was the resulting investigation by U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan that sparked the mass suicide, with Ryan and four others assasinated after they arrived by plane in Guyana. Layton's memoir,Seductive Poison: A J onestown Survivor's Story of Life and Death in the People's Temple, is a gripping story, even if we know how it all ends.

Journalist Tim Reiterman was with Ryan, and was shot and injured. He reflects on the anniversary in Time Magazine. Reiterman continued to work on the story for years, and in 1982 published the 600+ page, definitive book on Jonestown: Raven: the Unto ld Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His People.

An odd little thing here: CBC journalist Terence McKenna talking about Jonestown on December 1, 1978 on CBC's venerable TV show, Front Page Challenge, as he was one of the first reporters into Jonestown after the massacre. McKenna appears to be about 12 years old, with a big head of 1970s' hair. Panelist Gordon Sinclair asks some tactless questions, as he was wont to do. Need more about FPC? Read Front Page Challenge: History of a Television Legend by Alex Barris.

Massive Change

2008-11-17T09:35:00.008-07:00

U of A's very successful inaugural Festival of Ideas wrapped up on Sunday with a matinee performance of the opera, Orfeo. I took in the Saturday evening performance and thought it was outstanding: lovely singing by some great singers, with accompaniment from a small orchestra playing a wild assortment of period instruments (three "chitarrones" - a long-necked bass lute).

The Festival is over but there's a bit of a hangover today. Two speakers from Festival events are speaking today at other events:

Edward O. Wilson presents the 2008 Henry Marshall Tory lecture at 10 am at Myer Horowitz Theatre on the U of A campus: "How the hand of evolution shapes every aspect of life." Wilson is a world-famous writer, intellectual and "father of the modern environmental movement".
Jaime Lerner speaks twice today at a one-day colloquium, "Edmonton on the Edge: Innovative Urban Planning and Design". Lerner is the former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, where he put in place many forward-thinking green innovations that have become the model for other cities around the world. This event is presented by the City-Region Studies Centre, which is affiliated with the U of A. The event takes place at the Delta Edmonton Centre Suite Hotel (10222-102 Street) and there is no charge for the afternoon and evening sessions. At 2:30 Lerner is part of a panel talking about "Making a great city" and at 7 pm Lerner makes a presentation entitled "Learning from the Curitiba experience: achieving urban change”.

I first heard about Jaime Lerner via Canadian designer Bruce Mau's book, Massive Change. Mau is famous for his iconic design work, but this book is "not about the world of design; it's about the design of the world." Basically it is a compendium of optimisitic approaches, solutions, ideas about the world and its problems, with a focus on climate change. Mau has a section devoted to Lerner and the ideas from the city of Curitiba.

Lerner and his ideas are also profiled in another cheerfully optimistic book, chock-full of writings about making positive change in the world: The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of F ear, edited by Paul Rogat Loeb. Environmental activist Bill McKibben has a piece talking about meeting Lerner in Curitiba. McKibben wrote about Lerner in his book Toward the Liveable City, which is included in a recent 'greatest hits' collection, The Bill McKibben Reader.

Extraordinary Evil

2008-11-14T08:31:00.006-07:00

After a smash opening last night with Salman Rushdie at the Winspear Centre, the University of Alberta's inaugural Festival of Ideas continues today with several events. At 1:00 pm at The Citadel Theatre parenting and bullying guru Barbara Coloroso shifts gears to discuss "Genocide: What It Means, Where It Begins and Where It Must End," based on her latest book: Extraordinary Evil - A Brief History of Genocide.

The Enchantress of Florence

2008-11-13T11:23:00.009-07:00

A giant of world culture, a literary colossus, is in Edmonton tonight. Salman Rushdie opens the U of A's first ever Festival of Ideas with an appearance at the Winspear Centre at 7 pm. Even better, Rushdie will be in conversation on stage with Eleanor Wachtel, surely the best in the world at the literary interview (Kazuo Ishiguro agrees: "Eleanor Wachtel is one of the very finest interviewers of authors I’ve come across anywhere in the world." Listen to some of her interviews via podcasts of her CBC Radio show, Writers and Company.)

Rushdie comes to town with a new novel, The Enchantress of Florence. In this fantastical historical tale a traveler from Italy arrives at the court of Emperor Akbar of the Mughal empire. The traveler entertains Akbar with a story about Akbar's great aunt, Qara Kz, the 'enchantress of Florence'. As with Rushdie's other novels, it is big, full of dazzling language and requires full commitment from the reader (yes, that's a nice way of saying it is complicated, perhaps convoluted, and isn't one of those books you can read a few pages of just before you fall asleep! The Library has a copy on unabridged CD audiobook - perhaps a good approach).

This new novel and really all Rushdie's later novels are published under a cloud - not the cloud from T he Satanic Verses controversy - rather the cloud of the inevitable comparison to Midnight's Children. Rushdie's second novel was a game-changer, a novel for the ages, winning the Booker when it was published but then winning the "Booker of Bookers" in 1993 and "Best of the Bookers" in 2008. Any novel Rushdie publishes will come up short next to that.

Just last week it was revealed that Midnight's Children will join the list of "books that were considered unfilmable that are now being filmed". Canadian director Deepa Mehta will direct and will co-write the script with Rushdie.
Here's a selected bibliography of Rushdie's books. The Library has all the novels but Grimus at present.

Grimus (novel, 1979)
Midnight's Children (novel, 1980)
Shame (novel, 1983)
The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (non-fiction, 1987)
The Satanic Verses (novel, 1989)
In Good Faith (non-fiction, 1990)
Haroun and the Sea of Stories (children's novel, 1990)
Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991 (non-fiction, 1991)
East, West (stories, 1994)
The Moor's Last Sigh (novel, 1995)
The Ground Beneath Her Feet (novel, 1999)
Fury (Novel, 2001)
Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction, 1992-2002 (non-fiction, 2003)
Shalimar the Clown (novel, 2005)
The Enchantress of Florence (novel, 2008)

Through Black Spruce

2008-11-12T14:04:00.010-07:00

Joseph Boyden had a giant-sized grin even before winning the Giller Prize! Now the grin is entirely legit, having been fully endorsed by the 2008 Giller jury - Bob Rae, Margaret Atwood and Colm Toibin. Boyden's winning novel is Through Black Spruce, a semi-sequel to his debut novel, told by two narrators in two different settings - Will Bird, a Cree bush pilot who is the grandson of Three Day Road's Xavier Bird in northern Ontario, and Will's niece, Annie, in New York City, Montreal and Toronto.

The Métis of St. Albert may have been cheering Boyden on, with Boyden wearing the Métis infinity symbol on the front of his tuxedo while accepting the award at the glitzy Giller gala. After the ceremony Boyden noted, "What I'm most excited by is being allowed to give voice to a segment of the first nations population that I'm so impassioned by and so in love with and so a part of."
Joseph Boyden is one half of this year's lit "it" couple, with his wife Amanda Boyden (as noted in the National Post). The couple met in grad school in New Orleans, where they make their home now. Amanda Boyden has a well-reviewed novel out right now as well, B abylon Rolling. Her novel is set in and is about New Orleans, the year before Hurricane Katrina.

Passchendaele

2008-11-11T11:43:00.006-07:00

Ninety years ago today the war to end all wars ended. And ninety years later Canadians are fighting a war that seems to have no end. One of the chaplains speaking at the Ottawa Remembrance ceremony noted that "we all hate war" but "we love our troops". Perhaps that's the best way to think about the bloody futility of the Great War. The utter senselessness of that war need not diminish the sacrifice of the Canadians who died. And so too, celebrating the victories of the Canadian troops in that war need not diminish our hatred of war.

Remembrance Day is an opportunity to bemoan Canadians' lack of knowledge about our war history, particularly the First World War. Margaret Wente's column today in the Globe & Mail is an example of this. But I look to my own school-age kids and I know that Canada's war history is being taught in schools, that they know very well what Remembrance Day is all about.

But we could all know more of course. Tim Cook, the Curator of the National War Museum, has published the second volume of his excellent history of the Canadians in the First World War: Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting the Great War 1917-1918. This volume tells of the Canadian battles at Vimy Ridge, Hill 70, Passchendaele, and the Hundred Days campaign. The first volume, At the Sharp End: Canadians Fighting the Great War 1914-1916, tells of the terrible costly stalemate of the first years of the war.

One of the first regiments raised for battle in the First World War was the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry. The Patricias went to the trenches on January 6, 1915. On January 8, Norman Fry and Henry George Bellinger of PPCLI became the first Canadian soldiers to be killed in action in the Great War. The Patricias were one of the units fighting at the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917. Make time to go to the film Passchendaele, a fictionalized look at the battle, partially funded and filmed in Alberta, from actor/director (and U of A grad) Paul Gross. He has also published a novelization of the film, Passchendaele. Calgary historian Norman Leach was the historical advisor for the film, and he has published a photo-heavy history of the battle: Passchendaele: Canada's Triumph and Tragedy on the Fields of Flanders. A full-length history of the battle is available from the Library, Legacy of Valour: The Canadians at Passchendaele by Calgarian Daniel G. Dancocks. This book was published in 1986 by Hurtig Publishers of Edmonton. (I'm reminded yet again what a cultural hero Alberta and Canada had in Mel Hurtig during his Edmonton heyday. We miss him (he retired to BC years ago).) It is clear that Albertans have done and are doing their part to remember the Great War!

Another Albertan, David Bercuson, Director of the University of Calgary's Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, wrote a complete (to that point, 2001) history of the PPCLI: The Patricias: Proud History of a Fighting Regiment. Today, based in part out of CFB Edmonton, the Patricias continue to fight for Canada. A new book by Chris Wattie, Contact Charlie: The Canadian Army, the Taliban and the Battle that Saved Afghanistan tells the story of one of those fights, the Battle of Panjwayi in the summer of 2006.

Finally, what we remember today (from CBC):
More than 100,000 Canadians soldiers have died in various conflicts since 1899, including:

More than 240 in the Boer War.
More than 66,000 in the First World War.
More than 44,000 in the Second World War.
516 in the Korean War.
121 in peacekeeping missions.
97 in Afghanistan.