Book Buzz

MARGARET ATWOOD

Literary to the n’th degree. It is Margret Atwood after all. And her dry sense of humour shines through out. Witty in the extreme. Interestingly her musings on debt were published just before the financial crisis. The work was prepared for the Massy Lectures heard on CBC. The final section is a rewriting of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol. Her version has the spirits of Earth Days past, present and future. It is from far from the only funny part of the book but certainly the funniest. Some parts need skimming. Especially those of us less literary than Atwood.

Jack W. Brinks

For 6000 years First Nations hunters on the prairies used their knowledge of the land and of buffalo behaviour to drive their quarry over cliffs. Archaeologist Jack Brink has written a major study of the mass buffalo hunts and the culture they supported before and after European contact. Brinks draws on his 25 years excavating at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in southwestern Alberta – a UNESCO World Heritage Site. “I love the story behind the jump – the events and planning that went into making the whole event work. I continue to learn more about the complex interaction between people, bison, and the environment, and I continue to be impressed with how the ancient hunters pulled off these astonishing kills.”

When the first Europeans hunted bison they would shoot the biggest oldest male. The First Nations hunters would laugh. The meat would not be good for eating nor would the hide be good for tanning. A hunt for meat would take place in the fall when the cows would be fat. For hides they would hunt in the spring when hides would be thinner and easier to work with.

The workers at Smashed in Head were unsuccessful at creating a tipi made of buffalo hides. They found a group of people who made tipis for Wanuskewin Heritage Park, a buffalo jump near Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. But when they contacted these people they were no longer process buffalo hides the tradition way. It was too much work!

Filled with facts and stories and beautifully illustrated. An excellent read.

MARK SCHULTZ

ZANDER CANNON     KEVIN CANNON

Love learning about life. How do scientists know all this stuff? Some of the science in this book was in too much detail for me and this is in graphic form. The premise is an alien race is studying humanity because they are having problems with inherited diseases because they reproduce asexually. Asexual reproduction is basically cloning. The alien scientist is explaining how sexual reproduction works and its benefits  to his world’s leader.
The last chapter that talks about how knowledge of genetics can be used in the future and how it can tell us about the past is most interesting. A good book to skim.

A JOURNEY THROUGH THE REALM OF VANISHING CULTURES

WADE DAVIS

Ethnobotanist and anthropologist Davis has traveled the world for 25 years to study the myriad ways indigenous people live in physical and spiritual intimacy with the natural world. Though listed as a book of photographs, LIGHT is much more. The pictures are amazing but the writing is a synthesis of many of the cultures he has explored. A beautiful, stunning book that is ultimately somber and sorrowful for it is describing “vanishing cultures.” Davis wrote that genocide, the deliberate and systematic extermination of a racial,  or cultural group is abhorred in modern times but ethoncide the systematic destruction of an ethnic culture in many ways is accepted. While discussing Andean culture of South America he wrote how nutritionally important the coco leaf contributing large quantities calcium and other minerals that were not traditionally found in their diet. Gems like this are found throught the book. Much of what he writes is the spirituality of the culture. Davis reflects on the effects of colonialism in these areas and laments the uncertain fate of groups like the Penan of Borneo, the nomads of Kenya and the Inuit in Canada is Russia.

An excellent read and an excellent collection of photographs.

RUPERT EVERETT

Everett’s autobiography is surprisingly well written for a Hollywood gossip rag. Having previously publish two or three novels he most certainly does have a way with words. His start was in an upper middle class English family which of course led to the brutality of boarding school. It was there Rupert got his first acting experience and made plans to attend acting school. He ended up being kicked out of acting school for being unruly. But that certainly has not hurt his career at all. Rupert is a shameless name dropper. It seems that he knows everyone in Hollywood. Light fare. I actually listened to an audio version that was abridged to 4.5 hours. At the time I was quite sick so listening was the best way to appreciate this book.

SUSAN KUKLIN

Kuklin has written a well balanced look at the issues surrounding capital punishment of teens. She tells the stories of the perpetrators: one who killed someone, but another one who maintains his innocence. I was just reading a report in Macleans magazine of yet another Canadian wrongly convicted of murder. And the scary thing about that is the murderer is in a position to commit more violent crime. Wrongful convictions is the strongest argument against capital punishment for me. But back to NO CHOIRBOY. KUKLIN also looks at how the victim family is affected and the family of the perpetrator of the crime. This well balanced approach makes for a most thought-provoking read.

I did have to ask my self why did all these kids have guns? That idiotic belief that it is a right to bear arms might have been necessary in 1800 but makes no sensense today.

MAGGIE SIGGINS

BITTER is a powerful account of what has happened to the people in and around Pigeon Lake over the past 200 years. For over two hundred years, Pelican Narrows has endured an equally torturous relationship with the encroaching European culture, from the Hudson’s Bay Company factors and missionaries of earlier times to the bureaucrats and police of today. Siggins used oral history and documented the personal stories of contemporary Pelican Narrows Rock Cree. She gives us the human faces behind the newspaper stories of native issues. Bitter Embrace is an extraordinary contribution to our history and our understanding of ourselves and what our First Nations Communities have under gone and have to deal with now.

It is a difficult read but should be read by all Canadians and read and discussed by all high school students in Canada.

BEATRICE HOHENEGGER

Tea has had an amazing history in medicine, politics, the arts, culture, and religion. But behind tea there is treachery, violence, smuggling, drug trade, international espionage, slavery, and revolution. Western greed against Eastern spiritual ways.

China first used tea as a remedy. Taoists celebrated tea as the elixir of immortality. Buddhist Japan developed a whole body of practices around tea as a spiritual path, Zen simplicity and order. The first Westerners were merchants which led to trade wars, the emergence of the powerful English East India Company. Spies roamed China to steal the secrets of tea production. An army of smugglers made fortunes with tea deliveries in the dead of night. In the name of “free trade” the English imported opium to China in exchange for tea. China was not allowed to choose. They had to take the opium. The huge tea industry in the eighteenth century reinforced the practice of slavery in the sugar plantations as it became the norm to drink tea with sugar. And one of the reasons why tea became popular in the first place is that it helped sober up the English, who were practically drowning in alcohol. The enormous consumption of tea in England also led to the development of the large tea plantation system in colonial India — a story of success for British Empire tea and of untold misery for generations of tea workers. The British tax on tea sparked the American Revolution.

Liquid Jade is illustrated  with works of art and historical photographs.

No means a perfect book but definitely worth a skim.

Dalia Sofer

When I first started reading SHIRAZ, I thought that it wasn’t by far the best fiction about Iran. But the more I read the more I enjoyed and started to love this story and its writing. It is the story of a prosperous Jewish family in Tehran shortly after the revolution.

Isaac, the father, is a successful jeweler and gem merchant.. In the opening chapters, he is arrested by two armed Revolutionary Guards, taken from his office at lunchtime on a routine workday.  ” What crime has he committed?” is frequently asked. Before the revolution he had  been patronized by many in the aristocracy, including the wife of the shah. This economic class separation between the middle class before the revolution and the revolutionary guards after, was not something that I understood before this book.

Well worth reading.

TRANSSEXUAL CEOs, CROSSDRESSING COPS, AND HERMAPHRODITES  WITH ATTIDUDE

AMY BLOOM

Understanding the complexity of the human condition is one of the reasons we read. Bloom’s book is a welcome addition to the complexity of sexuality especially the only now beginning to be explored and understood intersex condition. I am reminded of Stone Butch Blues (autobiographical fiction) by transgender activist Leslie Feinberg.  Stone Butch Blues is a must read by the way. I remember her writing that it was difficult filling out job applications when it got to Sex neither male or female were right.

Normal tells the stories of the many people that she interviewed for this book. Fascinating stories. So many sad stories of people who had surgury at the whim of a doctor. “It is easier to dig a hole than build a pole.” So many people not told the truth by their medical professionals. Hopefully that is changing in Canada as well as the United States.

Definitely read!

THE FOUNDING OF FACEBOOK

A  TALE OF SEX, MONEY, GENIUS, AND BETRAYAL

BEN MEZRICH

Supposedly non-fiction, Billionaires reads like a novel, a somewhat cheesy novel. It seems that much may have been invented. There is a controversy about the authors previous work “Bringing Down the House” about beating the odd in Vegas (made into the movie 21) that he embellished scenes and concocted many of the details. For Billionaires, the brains of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg refused to meet with Mezrich. Zuckerberg and Saverin started Facebook not to take over the world or solve any fascinating puzzles in computer science, but to meet women. Fascinating that a man/boy, socially inept was the creator of the world’s greatest social networking program. Ironic.

But it is a fact that Facebook has not only changed the face of the internet but of the world and how people relate. Even politics around the world and revolution have been touched by Facebook.

These are issues that need far greater analysis than this book offers.

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.

TRAVELS IN SEARCH OF CANADA

WILL FERGUSON

Never would have thought I would read a travel book about Canada. But I enjoyed Ferguson’s ramblings. It’s part memoir, part comedy, part history as well as being a travel book. It turned out to be a great mix. I savored the stories from the places that I knew such as Thunder Bay and Moose Jaw as well as from the places that I had never visited such as “The Kingdom of Saguenay” and the “Republic of Madawaska.” Those are both parts of Canada.

Well worth the read.

ANDREW X. PHAM

The subtitle is so provocative and sad, to have lived the majority of your life in a war zone. We are so blessed. I have often thought about Vietnam what a poor country. And then after all those years of war to be neglected by developed nations due to the US embargo.

Pham has these interesting ideas on memoirs as a foreword; “it seems to me as memorists, we are not historians, not even of our own lives. That is the job of biographers. Memoirs are our love letters and our letters of apologies, both. They hold our few gems, the noteworthy lessons of our journeys.

I did not set out to write my father’s biography. I have lent his life stories my words. ”

This superb book tell the author’s father’s story from 1940 when he was living in North Vietnam a rich landowner’s son, until 1976 when he is released from a communist reeducation camp. The father realizes that he still must leave his home country.

MALCOLM GLADWELL

Gladwell is an incredible thinker. In this volume he tackles the factors that make one successful. We often thinks that success comes from hard work and, being smarter than the other guy. But what Gladwell points out is that is not the end of the story. Sometimes, you can be those things and not be successful. Gladwell looks at how to know whether a child will be a star hockey or soccer player based on what month they are born in. What the Beatles and Bill Gates have in common. Why Asians are so good at math.

“Outliers are those who have been given opportunities – and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.” A child born in a low social economic situation with genius IQ most frequently goes no where. Children need the support of family and community to succeed. It is not the brightest who succeed.

Read!

PATRICK FRENCH

TIBET is a history, commentary and, travel book all rolled into one. An refreshing combination. French details the times China’s history and Tibet’s have overlapped. He raises an interesting point: had the British arrived in Tibet early enough to colonize Tibet, quite possibly the Chinese take over would not have happened. Impossible to know. So much has been lost especially in the turbulent 60’s, the cultural revolution. French comes to the conclusion that Tibet will never be free until China is free.

Recommended for all who care for what is happening in Tibet now and what has happened in the past.

MARY-ANNE KIRKBY

For people who have lived in the prairie provinces and have had some experiences of seeing and dealing with Hutterites (even if only buying their produce at Farmer’s Markets) this memoir is most provocative. Kirbey writes of loving her childhood in the colony. The freedom of the children to explore nature, to develop strong bonds of friendship and kinship. The book is rich with fascinating detail of daily hutterite life. One thing that I had not realised was how fluid a colony could be, with some people joining the brethren and some leaving.

At age ten Mary-Ann’s father decided to leave the colony and took his family with him. She was devastated leaving her friends and extended family. For the first time her sibling were her only play mates. For the first time the family cooked their own food and ate together. At the colony children ate separately from the adults. The father left because he had never been accepted and respected on the colony. Off the colony the entire family had to fight and change for acceptance and respect.

Well worth the read.

COMING OF AGE IN CHINA DURING THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION

MOYING LI

This moving memoir left me wondering where China would be today if the Cultural Revolution had not taken place. This heinous time left the country denuded of books, artifacts from the past and educated people. The only requirement for universities was to be peasant born. The Cultural Revolution left the people wounded, paranoid and poor. I’ve read fiction about this time in China but never a memoir. The memoir is more dynamic.

RANDY PAUSCH

AKA The Song of the Eternal Optimist

Time is all you have. And you may find one day that you have less time than you think. – Randy Pausch

Pausch’s lecture ”Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” was every bit as upbeat and inspirational as the man himself. Rather than focusing on dying, it was a speech about living, about achieving one’s dreams and enabling the dreams of others, about truly living each day as though it were your last. He had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and given three to six months to live.

The book THE LAST LECTURE elaborates on the processes of writing the lecture, of his life and loves, of his out look on life and death.

It is a truly inspirering book.

MARY ROACH
I love finding these non-fiction gems seething with stimulating facts. There is a chapter on putrefaction. How many days does it take till bacteria turn the internal organs into a liquid soup. And what kind of soup would that be? Chicken, it’s yellow. How surgeons can practice surgery on cadavers so they have it right when they get to a living being. Why cadavers are more useful in car test trials than crash test dummies. How the military uses corpses.

In Arabia some people would volunteer their aged body for medicine. For a month they would eat nothing but honey. Death soon follows. The remains are interred in a coffin full of honey that is carefully sealed. After one hundred years the coffin is dug up and the seals are broken. Eating a small amount of flesh is said to cure anything. Medicinal cannibalism.

But of course not all chapters are created equally – some skimming is necessary.
Fun but not for everyone.