BEDTIME STORY
Robert J. Wiersema
Chris Knox struggles with his second book while trying, half-heartedly, to repair a strained marriage, connect with his kid, quit smoking and stop nursing a bottle of vodka. In other words, we know this guy. We’ve heard him whine in books and movies. But Wiersema does the unexpected: he plants Knox and his son in the middle of a ripping fantasy quest.
Readers have to suspend disbelief only once. We’re required to believe in the magical power of a book to render 11-year-old boys catatonic after stealing their minds and souls. (Just play along. It’s fantasy.) Chris’s son David falls into an autistic-like state, then performs feats of bravery in a parallel kingdom filled with soldiers, mystics, swords and even a tavern wench. His mental quest unfolds in sync with a book his father reads aloud to him each night. During the day, Chris has to solve the mystery of the spellbinding book, which leads him to Vancouver’s Wiccan subculture and a library devoted to the occult.
Wiersema mesmerizes with this artful telling of two interlocking tales. Jumping back and forth between David’s fantasy kingdom and the real world, both plots drive the story forward and blur together at the end, resolving in a way that will no doubt attract Hollywood producers. (John Cusack or Nicolas Cage could play the hangdog dad.) All this makes Bedtime Story a page-turner. It’s not entirely clear, however, if the book is skewed for young readers or adults. The bits about Chris’s career slump and bad marriage might bore kids, while grown-ups may skim over the minutiae of David’s Tolkien-like quest. Still, the book is hard to put down once Chris springs into action and lets us forget he’s just another ineffectual writer.
- Joanne Latimer
CRY HAVOC: HOW THE ARMS RACE DROVE THE WORLD TO WAR 1931-1941
Joseph Maiolo
In conventional historical memory, the 20th century was marked by two major arms races—a naval competition between Britain and Germany that helped spark the First World War, and the nuclear missile contest between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which somehow avoided catastrophe. The interwar years, though, are often presented as an object lesson in the folly of not matching, gun for gun, Hitler’s military mobilization: the Western democracies essentially encouraged Nazi aggression by turning the other cheek. All wrong, counters Maiolo, who teaches in the department of war studies at King’s College in London. Not only was there a pre-Second World War arms race, it was instrumental in igniting the greatest conflict in history.
Between the wars, soldiers in almost every would-be great power—men who tended to see the armed forces as the embodiment of their nations’ souls—drew a key lesson from the Great War. Martial prowess was no match for industrial might, and the latter required sufficient resources and—in most countries—dictatorial governments.
Maiolo’s marvelous revision of 1930s history proves his point in case after case, but none so neatly as that of Imperial Japan. If the empire did not have the resources to produce men and material, so its military’s reasoning ran, then Japan was vulnerable to its enemies; therefore it must seize much of weak China so as to control the iron, coal and cropland needed to take on powerful countries. But the China war increased tensions with the U.S., inspiring an American arms build-up and oil embargo. That in turn inexorably led the Japanese to a great gamble: Pearl Harbor, planned not to knock the U.S. out of action, but to gain enough time to gobble up the European colonial states of Southeast Asia and thereby gain the ability to fight the Americans to a standstill. The logic of arms races, Maiolo argues, is always use it or lose it, but their deeper impact is the threat they pose to civil liberties.
- Brian Bethune
THERAFIELDS: THE RISE AND FALL OF LEA HINDLEY-SMITH’S PSYCHOANALYTIC COMMUNE
Grant Goodbrand
If you have never heard of Therafields, you might be surprised to learn that, beginning in 1967, a commune with some 900 members flourished on a farm northwest of Toronto. You might be surprised, but not very. After all, those were the halcyon days of the counterculture—living off the land and plotting world peace was hardly unheard of. But while most hippies looked to rabble-rousers such as Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters for inspiration, the Therafielders had rather more staid influences: Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein, for example. Psychoanalysis was the raison d’être. At least, at first.
Therafields got its start in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood, where Lea Hindley-Smith first worked as a therapist. Hindley-Smith came to Canada with her young family from England in 1948, at age 36. Little is known about her formal training in psychoanalysis, but by the early ’60s, she had a busy practice. Gifted at intuiting patients’ innermost conflicts, she was relentless about pushing them to resolution. She famously treated some 50 nuns and priests, many of whom left their orders after experiencing one of her “house groups,” wherein patients lived together to work through interpersonal problems. She also trained a select group of patients to become therapists, among them the celebrated Canadian poet bpNichol and Grant Goodbrand, this book’s author.
Rural expansion was born of a need to accommodate Hindley-Smith’s “marathons”—weekend-long therapy sessions for upwards of 80 people. But the times were a-changin’. Therafields began to sink into debt, and gradually psychoanalysis took a back seat to more practical enterprises such as farming and construction. By the mid ’70s, a group of therapists—including Goodbrand—turned against Hindley-Smith, who was by then preoccupied with diabetes and her unfaithful Latvian lover. Shortly after a newspaper story in 1980 described Therafields as a cult, most members jumped ship. Group love was out, and the lofty days of “therapy in the fields” were over.
- Dafna Izenberg
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