Book Buzz

SARAH ADDISON ALLEN

When her mother died, Emily went to her grandfather’s house in Mullaby. She had never been in Mullaby before; she had never met her grandfather. She soon found out that Mullaby is a town where strange things happen. The wallpaper in her room changes depending on her mood and on what is happening in her life. At night strange lights haunt the town. Some people are quiet friendly but other are quiet hostile. Hostile people tell horrible stories about her wonderful mother. What is going on?

If you like magic realism this is a good book for you.

MICHAEL AKYOOB

Set in 2001, In Search of Mercy seamlessly moves between events in the past and the present, and blends scenes from all time periods into surreal dreams for Dexter that seem more fact than fiction, more real than not. Ayoob writes well. Dexter is working two dead-end jobs when he’s approached by Lou, a bum who inexplicably throws around $100 bills when the mood suits him, to find his long lost love, an actress named Agnes Zagbroski, who took the stage name of Mercy Carnahan when she was “discovered” by Hollywood in the 1940s. Dexter thinks Lou is crazy — and he probably is — but he’s intrigued nonetheless. Kidnapped and tortured by four men eight years ago, Dexter is still trying to straighten out his life.

Mercy is not so much a mystery but a character study. A good read.

MITCH ALBOM

I must be the last person in the world to have read this book. And it is delightful. The author reconnects with a former prof who is dying of ALS or Lou Gehrig’s Disease. What an awful way to leave the body. Morrie helps Mitch to embrace life and live it to the fullest. The visit every Tuesday for fourteen weeks until Morrie dies. The story is full of love and light.

ELIF SHAFAK

Ella, a bored housewife, takes a job previewing books for a publishing house. She is sent Sweet Blaspheme, a novel by Aziz. The best part of Rules is the novel that Aziz  has written. However Rules is interrupted by correspondence between the reviewer, Ella and the writer, Aziz. Sweet Blasphemy, tells the story of a 13th-century wandering Sufi Dervish, Shams of Tabriz, and his inspirational relationship with Rumi, the great Sufi poet. I loved the story of Rumi and Shams and its many parables. The modern story of Ella and Aziz was a distraction. If you have a mystic bent, as I do, this is a great book. Just skip the sections that deal with the modern relationship.

HUSTON SMITH with Jeffery Pain

Smith was born in China to missionary parents. As a young man he imagined himself as a missionary. But when he went to school in the states he knew he would not return to China. He studied and taught world religions as universities around the US. He wrote the much acclaimed book The World’s Religions. He writes, “I never met a religion I didn’t like.”

“When people hear that I practiced Hinduism for ten years, and then Islam for another ten — all the while remaining a Christian and regularly attending a Methodist church — they assumed I had a check list. But when I discovered Hinduism and saw its beauty and profundity, I intended to practice it, a faithful devotee, forever. But then when I encountered Buddhism and later Islam, and was dazzled by their heady possibilities. I had to try them on for size. They fit.”

Well worth the read if you have an interest in world religions.

WADE DAVIS

The essays in this wonderful collection were written for the celebrated Massy Series for CBC.  Davis looks to the San tribe who live in the Kalahari desert, as how our ancestors lived before they migrated out of Africa and spread out over the world. The Kahari is one of the most hostile environments in the world. “In English we have 31 sounds. The San have 141, a cacaphony of clicks and cadence that many linguists believe echos the very birth of our language.”

In Australia: “Knowing the extraordinary reach of the Aboriginal mind, the sublets of their thoughts and philosophy and the evocative power of their rituals it is chilling to think of this reservoir of human potential, wisdom, intuition, and insight that very nearly ran dry during those terrible days of death and conflagration.”

“Genocide, the physical extermination of a people, is universally condemned. Ethnocide, the destruction of a people’s way of life, is sanctioned and endorsed as appropriate development policy.” In Borneo, “Penan explicitly perceive wealth as the strength of social relations among people.”

“Canada is leading the way, not only as a model of a successful multicultural country, but a s nation-state prepared to acknowledge past mistakes and seek appropriate means of restitution in a pluralistic society. I am reminded of this every time I travel in Nunavut which is now under the administration of the Inuit people.”

Wade Davis points out that ancient peoples lived on Earth for millennia without destroying it. So why can’t we? “By their very existence, the diverse cultures of the world bear witness to the folly of those who say we cannot change, as we all know we must, the fundamental manner in which we inhabit this planet.”

A wonderful book. A must read!

PATTI SMITH

AKA: Portrait of the Artists As A Young Couple

If you like reading about art, artists and the sixties this book is for you. I hadn’t realized that Patti Smith was an author and visual artist as well as her career in music. Smith and the celebrated photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe,  were a young couple exploring life, love and art in New York. They were “roommates, soul mates, friends, lovers and muses.”  “We gathered our colored pencils and sheets of paper and drew like wild, feral children into the night, until, exhausted, we fell into bed.” Smith’s supportive family is the opposite of Mapplethorpe’s. Taking Smith to meet his parents, “His father barely looked at me, and said nothing to Robert except, “You should cut your hair. You look like a girl.” When Smith met Allen Ginsberg the beat poet he bought her a sandwich then asked, “Are you a girl? I took you for a very pretty boy.” He let her keep the sandwich.

“Robert took areas of dark human consent and made them into art. He invested the homosexual with grandeur, masculinity, and enviable nobility. He created a presence that was wholly male without sacrificing feminine grace. He sought to elevate aspects of male experience, to imbue homosexuality with mysticism.”

Thankfully pictures are sprinkled through the book; many of them Mapplethorpe’s.

A great book depicting art and life in an interest time in history.

ISABEL ALLENDE

Island is a rich historical novel of racism and slavery. The first part takes place in what will become Haiti on Sainte-Domingue. Tete is bought by a French sugar plantation owner who rapes her when she is 11. She has two children fathered by her owner. The second one she is allowed to keep. Allende’s strong descriptions of the brutality that slaves lived with all their lives are chilling. The sugar trade in the Antilles was often called “blood sugar.” When the slaves rebel Tete saves her owners life and is promised her freedom and her daughter’s freedom. They flee to New Orleans where the story drags somewhat.

Allende is one of my favorite authors. But this is not one of best works. Still it is a good read.

Jayanti Tamm

Jayanti was named by her parents’ guru Sri Chimnoy who claimed that he  especially choose her from the Highest Heaven to come to be with him. She was the Chosen One. She always had a special place close to guru. But there was terrible pressure to “do the right thing.”  If disciples strayed from the path, Chimnoy would manipulate with “such pain you are causing me. Such physical pain. Disciples who left were scorned; the people left were forbidden to talk to them on pain of being sent away. Chimnoy courted celebrates for the publicity. Jayanti wonders after Chimoy’s meeting with Nelson Mandala and Archbishop Desmond Tutu what they would think if they knew the way ex-devotes and straying devotes were treated by the faithful at Chimnoy’s insistence. As time went on Jayanti realized that it was ” a myth. A fake.”

I found this an interesting look inside this spiritual path. In many ways it reminded me of my  spiritual community but in most ways it was completely different. My guru was a woman so the woman as man’s servant, second to her husband was not part of my community.

Unfortunately gurus are fallible humans too.

AUDREY NIFFENEGGER

An almost wordless book. Beautiful illustrations tell the story. Themes similar to Her Fearful Symmetry: sisters, ghosts, abandoned children. In the post-word the author wrote that as the pictures developed the words fell away. “When I try to explain SISTERS to someone who hasn’t seen it, I tell them to imagine a silent film made from Japanese prints, a melodrama of sibling rivalry, a silent opera that features women with very long hair and a flying green boy.

Well worth the read and the view

PETER SIS

Red Box is a most personal book. Sis is writing about his father’s trip to Tibet when Peter was a young child. Within a red lacquered box, which sits upon his father’s desk, Sis discovers a diary of thin, old pages, filled with words, passages, and stories that would strain credibility. He finds the many bedtime stories his father had told him again and again – here, as a serious and first-time telling of real events.

Sis’ father was a documentary filmmaker, in now communist Czechoslovakia, and shortly after WWII was ordered away on assignment, to a “remote western province of China,” which turned out to be Tibet. The Chinese army was building a road into Tibet, and instructed the filmmaker and his crew to record the construction. This would mean cutting straight through a mountain, the road looking “like a cut into a beautiful cake.” After a disastrous landslide, the filmmaker finds himself, his cameraman, and two of his Chinese students, trapped on the other side of the mountain, away from the rest of the team. They head off in the only way they can – into Tibet. Thus, instead of recording on film the construction of a road into Tibet, he records on paper his travels through the foreign place.

It is a strange land, Tibet – home to wondrous things the men have never seen before. The mountains rise up around them like the pipes in a church organ, and the sky is endless and deep. The beauty and magic of the land inspire them, and when they finally encounter people – Tibetans they have been warned are barbaric, dark and controlled by evil lamas – they find simple joy and loveliness of character. The Father was trying to rush to the Potala (where the Dalai Lama resides) to inform the Dalai Lama of what was coming.

A good book, but the illustrations are not the best for this story. For Tibetophiles only.

MARLO MORGAN

Mutant Message is a follow up to the bestselling Mutant Message Down Under. It is a tale of  self-enlightenment based on aboriginal lifestyle and philosophy. The novel is  about aboriginal twins separated at birth and the search for roots that reunites them from opposite sides of the globe. Message from Forever is an incredibly moving story in which the power of purity, acceptance, and openness transcends injustice and degradation. At times I thought that the aboriginal people of Australia were treated worse than the first nations people of the Americas but the I remembered the slaughter in central and south America and the blankets infected with small pox in North America. The book is didactic in the extreme combined with simple writing but still worth reading.

YESHI CHOEDON

DAWA NORHU

Tibet by Tibetans. Photojournalism at its best. This book has some of the most beautiful pictures of Tibetan people that I have seen. The text is well thought out. One of the new insights that I learned is that Sky Burial is the person’s last gift of charity. Sky Burial is placing the chopped corpse out for vultures to eat.  I had always assumed that sky burial so the vultures would take the body up into the heavens.

The history and Tibetan religion are briefly explored.  A great book to borrow from the library.

This blurred photo of the cover does not convey the beauty of  the book.

MIRI RUBIN

A scholarly treatise on the Virgin, written from a solely  Roman Catholic point of view. When I first ordered this tomb, I was hoping for a more general discussion of what it is in human nature and religious history before Christ that would elevate Mary so extremely in the Christian hierarchy of deities. Especially since so little is said about Mary in the gospels.

Rubin explains that in Spain Christian, Muslim and Jews had been living side by side for years but when the last Moorish city was defeated the Christian monarch started the Spanish Inquisition to force conversion and  rid the country not Christian belief. This was done in Spain under the banner of the Virgin. Ironic that the Christian symbol of compassion, think of La Pieta, was used to start the Inquisition. When the Spanish were conquering the New World soon after the religion that they were exporting was basically  a Mary Cult.

I enjoyed skimming the book despite its limitations. Recommended for Catholic readers.

KATE HORSLEY

Set in Ireland at the time Christianity was starting to take hold, and over power the old ways of the pagan Druids. Gwynneve learned the ways of a healer gathering herbs and fungi deep in the forest from her mother. Her mother frequently was called upon to help and to heal. Gwyn was also known to take sustenance to families in need. Her husband was also a Druid but he was taken way by the monks, the tonsured ones, who burned their simple home and all their medicines and belongings. Eventually she joined a community of nuns but that life spoiled when a group of brothers joined them and the abbot took control. Fascinating reading about an irresolute time.

“I had thought that the love of Christ would make us kinder and less likely to smash skulls. But now I see that we will be asked to smash skulls for Christ.

ANDREW DAVIDSON
A man burned beyond recognition, a beautiful stranger come to be his saviour add up to a page turner of a book. Some of the descriptions of the healing of burn victims are nasty but at the same time interesting. Descriptions of monastic life in a nunnery in medieval Germany also captivating, especially the scriptorium. A sculptress, in a trace, laying on stone waiting for the gargoyle trapped within to reveal itself to her so she could release it. The couples’ love waiting 700 years for fulfillment. I always hate to say too much other than I loved it. It was hard to put down.

AMY TAN
SAVING is narrated by a ghost, Bibi which is not atypical for Amy Tan, thought this is not by far her best work. Bibi had organized an art expedition down the Burma Road for herself and a group of West Coast tourists, but died in a ‘freak accident’. The tourists end up in the the jungle in Burma where they are kidnapped by tribesmen and end up in No Name Place. The Karen tribe believe the teenage boy in the group is a reincarnation of the teacher that converted them to Christianity. Both humourous and touching, this novel spoke to me because of my connection to Burma and the political terrorism that is still taking place. A pious man explained to his followers: “It is evil to take lives and noble to save them. Each day I pledge to save a hundred lives. I drop my net in the lake and scoop out a hundred fishes. I place the fishes on the bank, where they flop and twirl. ‘Don’t be scared,’ I tell those fishes. ‘I am saving you from drowning.’ Soon enough, the fishes grow calm and lie still. Yet, sad to say, I am always too late. The fishes expire. And because it is evil to waste anything, I take those dead fishes to market and I sell them for a good price. With the money I receive, I buy more nets so I can save more fishes.”

Jill Bolte Taylor

A young brain scientist has a devastating stroke but decides to use that stroke as an opportunity to learn more about how the brain learns and heals. She describes the event and her subsequent lengthy recovery from a clinical and very personal point of view. What surprised me the most was the spiritual nature of the book. Her stroke damage the left side of the brain leaving the right side of the brain to flourish which left her in a state of spiritual bliss.
Jill Taylor credits her mother for her complete recovery, which took eight years, noting that stroke recovery can take much longer than we used to think was the case.

Quote:I have heard doctors say, “If you don’t have your abilities back by six months after your stroke, then you won’t get them back!” Believe me, this is not true. I noticed significant improvement in my brain’s ability to learn and function for eight full years post-stroke, at which point I decided my mind and body were totally recovered. Scientists are well aware that the brain has tremendous ability to change its connections based upon its incoming stimulation. This “plasticity” of the brain underlies its ability to recover lost function.

Very interesting, yet a light read. Highly recommended.

A Novel of the After Life

HARRY FREUND

Was it chance or was it ordained that these five souls, quite the motley crew, would end up at the pearly gates at the same time? As they compare stories they are amazed at the many intersecting lines that intersect their lives. How could this be? One character is an angry survivor of Nazi concentration camps as a boy. A young gay man who couldn’t make it as interior decorator earned an excellent living husseling his body. A rich philanderer actually believed that his wife didn’t know about all his dalliances. A woman had a lot of fun and earned money as a professional shopper. The last was a poor born again Christian who sacrificed her own children to take care of the wealth woman’s child. They all have their secrets that must be brought out into the open.

At times touching, other times hillarious. They nearly drove the care taking angels crazy! After the child soldier book I was in the mood for something light. Worth the read.

MICHAEL BOYLAN
What would you do if you suddenly became rich? I know I would like to find out! Michael had never asked himself this question. A high school history teacher, Michael was content- until he unexpectedly finds himself the beneficiary of a million dollars that disrupt his life and leave him questioning everything he had and everything he thought he wanted. The Extinction of Desire blends Buddhist philosophy and fiction to maps the course of one man’s voyage to uncover the fundamental truths about what is valuable in life.