Book Buzz

BRADY FOTHERINGHAM

What an undertaking to ride 3000 km through mountain passes, deserts, different countries and many, many ethnic groups all on bicycle. What a wide range of gear was necessary: cold weather gear for high in the mountains, desert gear for weather so hot that tires wouldn’t patch properly if they punctured. Brady started the trip with a couple of Brits, one turned 58 on the trip, but only stayed with them for three weeks. He  preferred go solo. The trip was not so much a cycling excursion but a “cultural odyssey.” I love his description of the food he ate and how he would order from menus he couldn’t read. “I was counting on a strong immune system to get me through the dubious food and water I ate and drank.” There was always the possibility of experiencing bouts of diarrhea in places with less than modern toilet facilities. One amusing description was of the author using a squat toilet on a moon lit night but the way it was constructed once you were inside it was pitch black. The silk road was also the road that the world’s religions traveled. “Buddhist monks travelled through the Indus Valley over the border into China. The eventual clash between the Buddhist faith and Islam, introduced by the Mongols, led to the desecration of Buddhist artwork.”

Trail is well researched and a fantastic travel story. Well worth the read.

Basharat Peer

Peer’s Curfewed Night is an incredible memoir that brings the Kashmir conflict between India and Pakistan and into the lives of Kashmiris and into our awareness. Peer was only 13 in 1990 when Indian troops fired on pro-independence Kashmiris and, as he puts it, “the war of my adolescence started”…One of the great achievements of Curfewed Night is its seamless mingling of memoir and reportage. It is the book of Basharat’s Peer experiences, yes, but those experiences include returning to Kashmir and seeking out the stories of others affected by the conflict. It is not an easy book to read. Man’s cruelty to man is overwhelming. Why didn’t we know about this when it was happening?

IAIN REID

Reid has constructed quite a funny memoir in part thanks to his warm and engaging parents. Reid himself seems self centred, both pessimistic and indolent. His parents truly love their life together and their life on their farm. Reid makes his parents come alive in all their eccentricities. One of the scenes that I laughed out loud at was the family choosing what to eat while they eat the previous meal. Which is something my spouse Bev loves to do. There are several places in the book that are laugh out loud funny. Worth the read though somewhat uneven.

DR. IZZELDIN ABUELAISH

“My daughters are dead! They killed my daughters. We need help.” These words haunt me to this day. I heard them through Abuelaish’s tears, pain, and wailing. AnIsraeli rocket tore into his daughters’ bedroom and exploded killing three daughters and a niece and wounding and mutilating others. Abuelaish called his journalist friend for help and support because he knew the journalist could get him access to Israeli hospitals and medical care. The journalist took his call live on TV news so all of Israel heard his pain, suffering and loss. All that he has been through and he can say “I shall not hate.” The book tells Abuelasish’s story of growing up in Gaza, not having enough to eat, of the pain and humiliation of Israeli boarder check points, of living with constant fear.

This is a book everyone should read.

DAVID AXE and MATT BORS

Axe is almost a war junkie. ” The first 72 hour [home] after a big trip are pure animal bliss. Them I crash. Hard. I should have been happy After all I’d seen and done, I should have treasured every friendship, relished every beer and revelled in every moment I wasn’t getting shot at, blown up or mortared. ”  ”I didn’t feel much any more. What pleasure I used to take in everyday things was replaced with a constant low-grade anger. Anger at the assholes who started it all. But mostly anger at myself for thinking that going off to war would make me smarter sexier and happier.”

An excellent read about the consistency of the horrors of war and one man’s struggle to stay sane while trying to document the conflicts around the world.

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.

KAREN CONNELLY

Connelly writes with an honesty that is refreshing. She writes about meeting with dissidents and protesters in Rangoon while researching for her novel, The Lizard Cage. The Lizard Cage is a powerful book written about the military  juanta and how the people are being abused by their own government. Lessons lacks the power of her fiction because it is swamped with too much detail and repetition. The book (460 pages) would have been better if a third of the book had been edited out. Writing needs to be concise. She does a particularly good job of describing life in refuge camps.

It is worth reading but needs skimming.

BENJAMIN ERRETT

I like the humour of Improved as well as learning Hebrew and learning about Judaism. One of Errett’s first call to convert was how much he appreciated Jewish tradition in mourning the dead and funerals. He says he was converting for his fiance but truly it was for himself.  Several of his future relatives-in-law  tried to talk him out of converting, one cousin joked, “Anyone can eat bagels these days.” And about God, both Ben and Sarah were indifferent, he admits in Chapter 3, “Religion, Shmeligion.” In a way, explains Errett, that was part of Judaism’s appeal for him. “Judaism puts an emphasis on action over belief,” he says. “At my shul, there’s a sizable contingent of atheists who are members.” It was the tests of faith that drove Errett away from his Christian upbringing, he says. In contrast, “I’m glad that Judaism says, ‘Okay, you know what? You can believe what you want, but let’s move on!’”

In an interview with a rabbi he was tole, “You can be a good Jew and not believe in God. Judaism is bout what you do and how you live your life. We have members who don’t believe in God and are quite open about it. The important part is to act in a was that’ consistent with Jewish teachings.”

LEV RAPHAEL

I found My Germany great at some points and disappointing at others; uneven at best. The first section describes the life of a the author as a boy with parents who survived the holocaust and the stories of his parents. And how they all lived ” in the shadow of the holocaust. Wonderful. At an early age, he inherited his parents’ rejection of all things German. “We were different from other American children, with no grandparents and hardly any other relatives, no old furniture in the attic and no heirlooms from the past. There was, in effect, a personal Berlin Wall in our house, and what was on the other side was dangerous, rebarbative, perpetually off limits.” Lev knew he was Jewish but learned from his parents to dislike Jews and Judaism. His family did not attend synagogue or do family rituals. “His father felt contempt for these America Jews. My mother for the Yiddish spoken [in America]. They lived in the shadow of both the Hoocaust and Germany. “We lived in their shadow far more than was typical for immigrant children. Therir lives were monumental and – because not entirely known – mysterious. Our lives were insignificant. Nothing we suffered or accomplished could match their having survived”

The second part deals with his interactions with other Jews and his coming to terms with being gay.”How to children of holocaust survivors find meaning in their parents’ lives? What is the role of gays and lesbians in American Jewish life? This section is also captivating.

It is part three when he goes to Germany to discover his roots while doing readings, that the memoir begins to drag. Some of what I disliked was the bragging; several times he writes how he was a pioneer in writing about children of holocaust survivors and gay Jews. He does come to terms with his roots: “Whatever Germany is today, it’s not the country that persecuted my parents — and I’m not them. Likewise, their Germany isn’t my Germany. I suppose it never was.”

I loved the photographs of his family. A good read but needs skimming.

MICHEL TREMBLAY

What a wonderful volume of memories. Tremblay takes through his childhood describing how much reading meant to him. Most of his work is autobiographical but this is definitely a memoir of real events and thoughts. He tells about entertaining his friends with alternate endings to Snow White having read the Brothers Grimm. When his teacher finds out that he has been reading Victor Hugo they immediately send him across the street to confess his sins. Hearing that there is a novel about a homosexual in Quebec, A Storm Over My Body, he tries repeatedly to sign it out of the public library, which was his home away from home. Finally an honest librarian informs his that, “It’s alway out, as you say, for men under twenty-one. On managements orders. But the best story is the publishing of his first book, a collection of fantasy stories, Stories for Late Night Drinkers.”

This is a must read for people who love reading. Tremblay also wrote Bambi and Me about the movies that affected his life and imagination.

MICHAEL THOMAS FORD

Some of the essays in this book are , laugh aloud funny. Ford writes a column for some newspapers and this book is a collection of these essays. The funniest story tells about his trepidation about going to a dyke dance with some of his friends. Will they even let him in? Will some of the women be upset to see a man at the dance? When he does go so many dykes stop to welcome him his friends complain that he is meeting more women than they are. It is a good light read.

KEVIN SESSUMS

This memoir of a boy discovering who he is, is an uneven read. Some sections are page turner but too often the narrative bogs down in unnecessary  detail. It is really unfortunate because the interesting parts are well done and tell a meaningful story of a life. Kevin was orphaned when he was eight years old.  Born in 56 Mississippi was still an extremely racist environment. At his mother’s funeral, his Aunt remarked, “I would have brought my nigger gal if I had known how busy it would be [setting out the lunch.] At his age he was old enough to hear what people were saying at the funerals but not old enough to comprehend. Violence happens to Kevin and around him.

It is worth a skim.

LOUNG UNG Life in the killing fields. In four years Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge killed over a quarter of the population of Cambodia. Ung’s memoir is a well written account of a suicidal genocide. She conveys the confusion in the mind of her child self. Slowly her family was taken away and she was filled with Khmer Rouge propaganda. Ung was indoctrinated against the monstrous Vietnamese who were attaching to colonize Cambodia. After liberation by Vietnamese soldiers she learned that the Khmer Rouge were different in various parts of the country. In the east they were “more moderate and humane: the work hours shorter, the food rations were larger, and the soldiers did not kill the villagers indiscriminately.” In the part of Cambodia where Ung’s family was “the cadres were among the most brutally insane.

An excellent read. And I want to read her following history “Lucky Child.”

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.

ANN VANDERHOOF

An intriguing combination travel memoir, food book and cookbook. Vanderhoof and her husband have done two major Caribbean tours in their sailboat. After the first two year trip she wrote An Embarrassment of Mangoes. Necklace is full of amusing and fascinating stories and facts. The Saba (say-ba), the smallest country in the Carribean, is known for its 151 proof rum in which many spices have been infused. St. Kits has not enforced a law against having a still since the British left. Ten percent of the population make their own moonshine. The book is full of interesting people who befriend this Canadian couple and teach them their local foods. Conch (konk) is a common delicacy. On our recent trip to Florida we ate conch often. Conch needs to be pounded to tenderize it. In Florida all the conch comes from The Bahamas because it was over fished in the States. In the Carribean conch is called Lambi and there is a recipe for Lambi Fritters. At times the book is laugh aloud funny. Bev, who is a true foodie, loved the book. For me it was enough to skim.

ELLY BERKOVITS GROSS

Elly is a slim, clear memoir of an extremely dark time. Elly pin points small miracles that aloud her to survive in Nazi death camps. There are areas of the book that more detail would have been nice to have. I loved the photographs in the book. It helps to make the story more alive.

I believe it important to read books about the holocaust so that it is remembered. It also gives readers a chance to remember that genicide is happening in many places in the world.

KEITH DONOHUE

An engaging book of love, loss, spirits and reconnecting. Margaret has been the town weirdo since the time her daughter, Erica, ran away under mysterious circumstances. With in four years she also lost her husband, the town doctor. When Nora arrives in the middle of the night Margaret takes her in as she would her own daughter. Nora is a mysterious child. They come up with the story that Nora is Erica’s daughter, Margaret’s grandchild.  Against my prediction she fit in amazingly well with her peers. The teacher noticed after a month how much better the entire class is doing. Students who before would not speak out in class are now participating. Strange.

The second part of book tells the story of the missing daughter. How much she is in love with her boy friend. How they get by on stealing cars and armed robbery.

The third part, brings the two stories together.

It’s a good read.

ALLEN CASEY

This beautifully written natural history is also part memoir. The combination works. “I knew,” he writes, “that Canada’s lake-greatness stemmed not from the sheer size of five titans, but from the great sprawl and density of its three million other lakes.”  Sixty per cent of the world’s lakes are found in just one country – Canada.  And if you add every bog, swamp, kettle hole, and seasonal prairie slough, there is nothing so uniquely Canadian as a lake. How many of us go to “the lake” on summer weekend? Casey’s “the lake” was Emma Lake north of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. And that is where he starts his musings and explorations. Emma is a symbol for what is happening with many inland lakes.  Divided and subdivided, it is being spoiled by gargantuan  cottages until there is no more room and environmental problems arise. Lake Winnipeg is almost a dead lake. So many acres of farm land and feed lots drain into this lake carrying fertilizers that boost algae growth that takes all the lakes oxygen. Casey describes the degradation of Lake Okanagan in its battle with wineries for water and land for housing.

Definately a must read.

MICHAEL DAVID KWAN

Kwan has written a wonderful memoir of his childhood in China. War time China, I thought that there might be graphic descriptions of Japanese cruelty but that wasn’t the case. I found myself laughing out loud several times through out the book. Of course Kwan was born into a wealthy home. His father was an administrator for the railway. When war started Father worked for the Japanese backed government while at the same time was a key leader of the resistance. But when the war ended he was arrested. How do you prove that you were a double agent. A great description of a country in flux. An excellent read.

PETER SIS

Sis is a prolific and popular children’s book author. However this book for young adults is a personal history and overview of the cold war. The book is picture book size and in graphic form. Sis starts with an excellent one page intro explaining the history leading into World War II. And starts with, “As long as he could remember, he had loved to draw.”  The illustrations are mostly black and white and red so when there are more colours they are most effective. He even uses bold fond effectively: “The display of red flags on state holidays — COMPULSORY. People who don’t comply are punished.” “Political indoctrination — COMPULSORY.”  He tells about children being rewarded for reviling  what is said by parents and friends.

Entries from his old journal and old drawing and photo are included which adds to the sense of realism. I had my twevle year old son read The Wall. When we discussed it he said that he never new so much about the cold war before.

This is a great book. The cold war is well understood by young people today. The Wall can help change that.