REVIEW: 1616—The World in Motion

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, March 28, 2012 at 12:04 PM - 0 Comments

Of the making of books there is no end, Ecclesiastes warns, and today its author could have added, “with numbers for titles.” On the heels of 1491, 1493 and 1494, to consider only one well-represented 15th-century decade, comes 1616, a year most notable for the deaths of both Shakespeare and Cervantes. The year’s ordinariness is actually part of its appeal for Christensen, who believes attaching his tale of a premodern world in the first throes of globalization to a well-known date—say, 1492—would see its everyday moments overshadowed by the big event. And there’s no doubt his general timing is good.

The world was in upheaval by the early 17th century: European trade routes to Asia were well-established; the Spanish had overthrown the indigenous states of what was now Latin America and had established, with Ming China, one of the most lucrative and violent East-West exchange points ever known in the Philippines; and the first African slaves had crossed the Atlantic.

Where Christensen shines, though, is in his tales of individuals incongruently ricocheting around this newly opened world. There’s the samurai Hasekura Tsunenaga, visiting the Vatican in late 1616. And in one of the most arduous journeys of the day, Tsunenaga—the last Japanese ambassador to Europe until 1862—had taken a ship to Acapulco, crossed Mexico by donkey and sailed on to Spain.

And then there were the truly random wanderers, who seem as alienated from their home societies as any modern globetrotter. An Italian traveller met George Strachan in the desert outside Baghdad, where the Scotsman had been following the life of a nomadic Arab, because of “the generous mode of freedom in which they live.” Strachan, however, was about to depart for India, because the local authorities were urging circumcision on him. His later years are unknown, Christensen notes, but every so often Eastern manuscripts surface, like the Persian book in the British Library bearing the note, “translated into Latin by George Strachan, Scot of the Mearns, 1634.”

REVIEW: Tutankhamen: The search for an Egyptian king

By Brian Bethune - Friday, March 23, 2012 at 10:14 AM - 0 Comments

Like many a historical figure, the young man once named Living Image of the God Amen has had two lives. There’s his still murky actual existence as Pharaoh Tutankhamen, who ruled Egypt for a decade some 33 centuries ago, and his enduring place, as King Tut, in Western pop culture since archaeologist Howard Carter broke open his tomb in the Valley of the Kings, the only largely undisturbed royal resting place found in modern times, in 1922. Over the past 90 years, Tut’s legacy has included mummy films and mummy curses, countless Halloween costumes, the original blockbuster travelling art exhibition, and even Saturday Night Live skits, while his golden death mask, together with the pyramids and Sphinx, is among the trinity of icons that form our very image of Ancient Egypt.

Tut was perhaps eight years old when he came to the throne, and still a teenager when he died without heirs. His death at so young an age has prompted—in a demonstration of Tyldesley’s law that “any theory about ancient Egyptians, however unlikely, will be accepted as true by someone”—endless speculation. Malaria, murder and the congenital weaknesses often found in the offspring of incest (Tut’s parents were quite possibly brother and sister), all have their defenders, but Tyldesley interprets Tut’s pre-mortem broken leg as evidence of a fatal hunting accident.

But in truth the pharaoh looms larger in death than in life. When Lord Carnarvon, Carter’s backer, died of complications from a mosquito bite four months after the excavation, the legend of the mummy’s curse was born. That added fuel to the first bout of Tut mania, which survives in horror movies and popular songs, before coming to more respectable life with the 1970s travelling Treasures of Tutankhamen exhibition. It attracted 1.6 million visitors in London alone; the current tour has been seen by millions more.

Tut’s extraordinary afterlife, the story of our fascination with a man who had as much bling as any modern star, makes him, in Egyptologist Tyldesley’s judgment, the world’s oldest celebrity.

Hunger Games fans are starved for a glimpse of their favourites on film

By Brian Bethune - Friday, March 23, 2012 at 2:10 AM - 0 Comments

Rune Hellestad; Andrew Vaughan/CP

Extreme reality TV with echoes of Greek myth and Roman history; a post-sexism world and the makings of a romantic triangle; a girl who can shoot an arrow through a squirrel’s eye and twirl prettily in her teen queen dress even while it’s on fire; a dystopian world and a (mostly) happy ending. Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games, a mega-selling young adult novel set to become a blockbuster film, has a lot going for it, both in surface dazzle and in its deeper hooks. Some teen girls (and their mothers) admire a stubborn heroine fighting hard for herself, her family and friends; others, as Collins notes, “zero right in on the romance.” And some love it all. If the factors fuelling The Hunger Games’ success often seem contradictory, no matter. What teenager’s life is not a mass of contradictions?

The Hunger Games are often compared to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight vampire-romance series, reasonably enough in terms of pop cultural reach. The first Twilight film grossed $35.7 million on its 2008 opening day, while The Hunger Games has already recorded the highest ever first-day advance tickets sales for its March 23 opening. But for many critics and fans, Collins’s and Meyer’s stories are also often linked together, inevitably but wrongly, by their love triangles. For every girl furiously typing on a fan site, caps lock usually in place, “This is NOT Twilight!” there’s another at one of the film’s galas waving a sign at Josh Hutcherson (who plays Peeta, the baker’s son and one of the love interests) reading, “Is that a loaf of bread in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?”

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REVIEW: When General Grant Expelled the Jews

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, March 22, 2012 at 6:20 PM - 0 Comments

The long history of Western anti-Semitism features several expulsions of entire Jewish populations from European nations—most infamously, from Spain in 1492. But from Civil War-era America—specifically the Department of the Tennessee, a huge slice of land under military rule—and by order of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, future U.S. president? The little-known General Orders No. 11 of Dec. 17, 1862, expelling Jews “as a class” from the department “within 24 hours,” remains the most overtly anti-Jewish act by a government official in U.S. history. In this engrossing account by a Brandeis University historian, the order is also shown to be a key moment in the life of Grant. In his two terms in the White House, the sincerely repentant war leader appointed more Jews to public office than any president before him and made the U.S. a forceful advocate for human rights on the world stage.

Grant’s reasons for the expulsion went from the general to the particular. Smugglers were busy exchanging the Confederacy’s sole export—cotton—for goods Grant thought were prolonging the war, namely gold and quinine, and Grant viewed them all as traitors. And Jewish merchants, though hardly alone in the profitable business, were prominent offenders. Grant had been growing steadily more frustrated when, in mid-December, his 68-year-old father came to visit, accompanied by new business partners, Jewish clothing manufacturers from Cincinnati, who had promised him 25 per cent of the profits if he could wheedle his son into giving them exclusive trading permits.

Presumably, the Cincinnati clothiers were unaware of the fraught relationship between the ever-shady elder Grant and the alcoholic general. The younger Grant exploded in disgust and issued his expulsion order. Grant seems to have regretted it almost immediately, offering no justification when an appalled president Lincoln countermanded him as soon as the news reached Washington. Six years later, president himself, Grant started making amends, successfully enough as to be able to record his satisfaction, as his life ended, that Jewish well-wishers were among those who had visited him during his final illness.

REVIEW: House of stone: A memoir of home, family, and a lost Middle East

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, March 22, 2012 at 6:10 PM - 0 Comments

It’s eerily hard to read this elegiac memoir, by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times Middle East reporter Anthony Shadid, in the full knowledge of his death. After years of surviving the dangers of his profession, including beatings in Libya a year ago and being shot by an Israeli sniper in 2002, Shadid, 43, died in February while leaving revolt-torn Syria on horseback, of an acute asthma attack apparently brought on by a reaction to the horse. It’s not just the plain fact of Shadid’s death that haunts the book, though, but the way the memoir was so evidently written to describe a journey toward a happy ending.

Shadid was too realistic and far too good a writer to have offered up a facile tale of healing himself by repairing his great-grandfather Isber’s house in Lebanon. But coming from a man who began his project six years ago “no longer young, no longer married,” and no longer living with his beloved daughter, Laila, the fragile but very real note of hope that ends House of Stone is heartbreaking. “I thought of my daughter, soon to arrive,” Shadid writes in his epilogue, “suddenly grown, beside these trees and repeating the Arabic words that I would one day teach her, words that would take her back to what was once our land.”

When the Ottoman Empire crumbled in the wake of the Great War, a Lebanese diaspora began that sent refugees around the world, some even to as unlikely a place as Oklahoma City, where Shadid’s grandmother ended up. In 2006, Shadid went to repair Isber’s home after it had been damaged by Israeli rockets. In between dealing with some of the most foul-mouthed (and amusing) workmen on record and townspeople divided over whether he was a CIA spy or an American naïf ripe for the picking (or both), Shadid recounts the history of his family and of a lost Middle East of grace and tolerance. There is a fairy-tale tinge to these beautifully written tales of harmony under the sultans, but they, too, reflect a kind of hope Shadid didn’t live to see realized.

Bestsellers – Week of March 19th, 2012

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, March 22, 2012 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

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REVIEW: Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America’s Soul

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, March 15, 2012 at 6:00 PM - 0 Comments

For anyone who remembers Ayn Rand (1905 to 1982)—the founder of objectivism and prophet of unfettered capitalism—only from her late 1950s days of glory to her relegation to the intellectual sidelines a decade later, Weiss offers a book full of surprises. Rand’s works actually sell like frozen peas, especially her two famous novels, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957): polls show that about a third of Americans claim to have read the latter. But The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)—Randian dogma demands, inter alia, that social welfare programs like Medicare and indeed the government itself (except for policing) be abolished—and other non-fiction tomes are also selling briskly.

Aside from Rand’s overall resurgence, part of a rise of libertarian thinking in the U.S. (and Canada), there is her particular appeal to the Tea Party: she’s “as much a part of the Tea Party’s soul as Ronald Reagan, Glenn Beck, and Jesus Christ,” according to the alarmed Weiss, a leftist financial journalist. And that’s certainly surprising, because Tea Partiers are overwhelming religious, while Rand’s atheism is strident enough to make Christopher Hitchens’ assault on Mother Teresa look tepid. Then there’s the disproportionately Canadian presence among her chief acolytes, especially during Rand’s lifetime, some of whom later became objectivism’s chief heretics.

But nothing’s more surprising than the way Weiss occasionally finds himself in kind of, sort of, oh-my-God-she’s-right agreement with Rand. He does emerge with his core principles intact: a Randian U.S.“would resemble the lands from which our ancestors emigrated.” But he recognizes the root of her appeal: preaching rugged individualism taps into deeply held American values and so too does the way Rand’s adherents make moral arguments, declaring policies right or wrong rather than prudent or reckless. That’s what Weiss wants his side to do: not ignore “the godmother of the Tea Party” or argue about practicalities, but take its own moral stance, based on its own reading of American tradition.

REVIEW: Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now— As Told By Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long For It

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, March 14, 2012 at 1:14 AM - 0 Comments

The eccentric cast of characters Taylor assembles from among the eight million inhabitants of the Anglosphere’s great metropolis would—for the most part—happily echo Samuel Johnson’s celebrated declaration that, “When a man is tired of London he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” Sometimes, anyway. At other moments every one of them would retort, in the words of another famous Londoner, “Bah, humbug!” That’s precisely the point the author, a transplanted Canadian who is now an entrenched Londoner, wants to make in his vivid portrait of the 21st-century city.

There are 83 interviews here, with people as varied as an airline pilot distinguished by his rare ability to literally see the city as a whole, a proper black-cab driver (naturally) and a Wiccan priestess. Taylor’s skill at inducing his fellow Londoners to actually tell him what’s on their minds is evident, but it’s helped in no small measure by the fact that London is clearly what is often on Londoners’ minds.

A nightclub bouncer revels in its “purple-pinky” light at summer dawns; a street photographer worries the late-to-arrive high-rises are stealing that same light. Almost everyone is concerned with what recent years of riots— both economic and physical—have done to their town. A sour antique restorer thinks the city’s slogan should be, “London: It just gets worse.” A former inhabitant, who fled for rural England, considers London a nest of “Asperger’s people.” But for every one like them there’s another like Ethel Hardy, an East End pensioner who wasn’t at all surprised that two young Asian men sat with her, holding her hand after she fell, until paramedics arrived. Forget Johnson and Dickens—Taylor may have found the most apt summation of his city in the words of a Thames River boatman: “If there is just one London, I have two arses.”

In conversation: Dick Teresi

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, March 13, 2012 at 10:44 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Tim Gray/Getty Images

Dick Teresi is the former editor of Science Digest and author of The Undead, a newly released and unsettling inquiry into the demands of organ transplanting, and when and how the medical community decides someone is dead.

Q: You began this project to explore how death is now determined, assuming that medical advances have surely pinned down the moment a person dies. What did you find?

A: That determining death has been a problem since the beginning of civilization. In ancient times, doctors and others who mistakenly called a living person dead were often stoned. Death was not the domain of doctors; it was too important to be left to them. People set up vigils over their relatives and friends to make sure they were dead, because one of the worst things one could do was bury a living person. Doctors became more involved, but the real change occurred in 1968: a committee of 13 men at Harvard Medical School endorsed brain death as legal death, and this became U.S. law in 1981. Doctors were now the sole arbiters of who is dead and who is alive, and they lowered the bar for death—it is now easier to be declared dead than any time in human history.

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Bestsellers – Week of March 5th, 2012

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, March 8, 2012 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

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REVIEW: The Lost History of 1914: Reconsidering the Year the Great War Began

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 at 8:10 AM - 0 Comments

If there is a consensus among historians about any seminal event in human affairs, it’s that the First World War had to happen. Not necessarily in 1914 because an Austrian archduke was assassinated, but around then and for some excuse. Too many people with the power to make war happen thought it was the answer to their nation’s problems, and far too few had any idea what it would unleash: the deaths of nine million soldiers and the utter ruin of the old order. That presents journalist Beatty’s counter-argument with an uphill battle from the start; that he succeeds in making an intriguing (if ultimately unsuccessful) case is an achievement in itself.

As many paths led away from war as to it in 1914, Beatty argues. In France on March 16, the wife of the finance minister fired four shots that may have been as significant as the bullets that killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Henrietta Caillaux, convinced the editor of Le Figaro was about to ruin her husband’s career, killed him. Joseph Caillaux, France’s leading supporter of reconciliation with Germany, would have otherwise almost certainly have been prime minister during the decisive days between Franz Ferdinand’s June 28 death and the guns of August.

Yet to point out might-have-beens that could have negated actual events is not to overturn the view that something would have eventually lit the fuse of war. At least, that is, for as long as the war party in Germany, the Great War’s driving force, remained ascendant. But that’s an assumption Beatty challenges. Like Britain, on the brink of civil war over Irish Home Rule, Germany was riven by internal tension: if war was staved off for even a few years, change—peaceful or otherwise—was coming. Beatty doesn’t muster a very strong argument for that idea, and, in fact, gives the impression his heart isn’t really in it. What he really wants to proclaim is that peace is always a work in progress, and we should never give up on it.

REVIEW: Laughing at the Gods: Great Judges and How They Made the Common Law

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

Considering that the roots of the English-speaking world’s legal traditions reach back more than a millennium, it’s manifest that the common law is an organic entity, constantly subject to pruning and updating, mostly by judges. Nonetheless, judicial discretion is always a bone of contention between legislators and judges. Sometimes, as in Canada now, it even becomes a hot political issue, which makes Hutchinson’s book timely indeed.

Hutchinson’s eight great judges run from relative unknowns like Albie Sachs, who retired from South Africa’s Constitutional Court in 2009, to the famous: John Marshall, whose 34-year term (1801 to 1835) as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court raised that institution into full equality with Congress and the presidency. Then there is the one Canadian, Bertha Wilson, whose nine-year career on our Supreme Court highlights many of the points Hutchinson ponders as he weighs up the factors that make a great judge.

Some of those factors are not in any individual’s control. Wilson was certainly in the right place at the right time. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, seeking a woman and a candidate who shared his individual-rights-based approach to the new Charter of Rights, named her as the court’s first female member only a month before Queen Elizabeth II signed the Charter into law. If Trudeau also wanted someone as unyielding in her principles as he was, he had certainly found her. As well as crafting her share of majority opinions, Wilson wrote more than 80 concurrences—meaning she agreed with the outcome, but not with the reasoning that led to it—and almost as many dissents. Both numbers, Hutchinson notes, are well above the norm. Her work in these areas often bore fruit afterwards, influencing later court decisions.

And that is where Wilson earns her place among Hutchinson’s greats: an ability to convince fellow judges to follow along on the path being blazed is the most important factor he considers. Wilson was lucky in her opportunity, but she made the most of it.

And the winner of the Charles Taylor Prize is…

By Brian Bethune - Monday, March 5, 2012 at 6:03 PM - 0 Comments

Michelle Siu/CP

Click on the links to read excerpts from the five books that were nominated for the Charles Taylor Prize.

Andrew Westoll emerged as the winner of the 2012 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction from one of the strongest shortlists the prize has ever assembled. Literary jurors—in this case authors Allan Brandt and Stevie Cameron, and publishing consultant Susan Renouf—always say their choice was excruciatingly difficult, but anyone familiar with all five books could only nod along. Continue…

REVIEW: How To Win an Election: An Ancient Guide For Modern Politicians

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, March 1, 2012 at 8:15 AM - 0 Comments

The more things change: aside from the fact that dealing with Iran was a perennial foreign policy issue for both groups, candidates for consul of the Roman republic (the highest office of state) 2,000 years ago and candidates for president of the American republic in 2012 faced radically different worlds. But when it comes to getting elected, campaign manager Quintus’s pragmatic advice for his famous brother Marcus could have been written by Karl Rove. (Small wonder George W. Bush’s electoral éminence grise provided How to Win an Election with a fulsome blurb.)

Don’t forget to remind voters, Quintus urges, in words Rove could have penned, “what scoundrels your opponents are and to smear these men at every opportunity with their crimes, sexual scandals and corruption.” Attack ads may well be, as many despairing observers consider, a curse of our jaded times, but there is nothing new about them. In his campaign of 64 BCE, Marcus had a bit of an advantage in that regard—some of his opponents really were criminals and scoundrels. One—Catiline, who later led an armed rebellion against the republic—was notorious for a litany of offences, from sexual involvement with his sister to personally decapitating a political enemy during one of Rome’s periodic violent upheavals.

The wretched quality of his rivals not only gave Marcus, Rome’s greatest orator but an outsider without family connections, a shot at victory, Quintus shrewdly observed, it also justified his own tactics. An election for consul—or, today, for president—does not turn on who is the ideal person for the job, but on who is the best of the available candidates. Marcus had to do what it took to keep Catiline out of office. To that end, his brother told him, assure the rich and powerful you support their privileges, and tell the common folk you’re on their side. Promise everyone whatever it takes: after the election, you can explain how circumstances beyond your control prevent you from carrying out those promises. Timeless wisdom indeed: Marcus won.

Bestsellers – Week of February 27th, 2012

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, March 1, 2012 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

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REVIEW: Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts From Europe At the End of World War II

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, February 28, 2012 at 8:40 AM - 0 Comments

On May 1, 1945, Pte. Josef Ratzinger, 18, abandoned his Wehrmacht post in Bavaria and set off for home. There was an anxious moment when he ran into two soldiers with orders to shoot deserters, but they too, the future Pope Benedict XVI later recalled, “had had enough of war,” and let him go. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, always too outspoken for his own good, was in a Moscow prison, while 11-year-old orphan Roman Polanski was playing with grenades on the streets of Krakow. U.S. Army 2nd Lt. Bob Dole, his spine badly damaged by shrapnel, was lying in a hospital bed outside Florence. He had been paralyzed for two weeks, and his doctors expected his imminent death, but the man who would be Bill Clinton’s opponent in a presidential election 51 years later had just managed to wriggle his toes.

Best’s kaleidoscopic tale of individuals caught up in the chaotic final days of history’s greatest upheaval is utterly absorbing, made all the more compelling by the reader’s awareness the people in it just have to last a few days, a few hours more. Many do not, especially the infamous. There’s Hitler, having a last meal of spaghetti with two secretaries, their bizarre conversation focusing on dog breeding, and Mussolini and his mistress strung up by the heels in a Milan square.

But Five Days’ real power lies in the snapshots of moments in the lives of the later famous. Teenaged Audrey Hepburn, for one, starving in Holland with her Dutch mother and now vastly relieved she no longer ran the risk of ending up in an SS brothel. Or that other lieutenant and future leader of his church; Robert Runcie, a decorated warrior known as “Killer” to his men, was leading his three Churchill tanks toward the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Thirty-six years later, as archbishop of Canterbury, he officiated at the wedding of Charles and Diana. For all the millions killed in the Second World War, it reassembled the lives of millions more.

How Van Gogh went from being an abject failure to a hero

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, February 23, 2012 at 8:40 AM - 0 Comments

ChinaFotoPress/Getty Images

Vincent Van Gogh, who sold but a single painting in his time, died penniless in 1890, by his own hand or—in a theory proposed by his latest biographers—by a combination of accident, sheer bad luck and mulish self-denial that seems more emblematic of his emotionally tumultuous life than suicide. A century later, after decades of ever-increasing popular adulation, Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet sold for $82.5 million, the most any painting has ever fetched in the 20th century. It’s true neither fact says anything about Van Gogh as an artist or as a human being, but both speak volumes about us, according to the acclaimed Canadian cultural historian Modris Eksteins.

“We choose our heroes out of our deepest concerns,” Eksteins says during an interview about his new book, Solar Dance: Genius, Forgery, and the Crisis of Truth in the Modern Age. In it, Eksteins traces Van Gogh’s 20th-century arc from abject failure to “demonic saint and hero,” while ironically contrasting that transformation with the story of Otto Wacker, one of the artist’s most prolific forgers. Van Gogh, a lonely misfit in his own era, struggled against the dominant Victorian values of sublimation, duty and structure. But by the end of the Great War, Eksteins argues, the whole Western world had caught up with the painter in its rejection of the old order, now lying in ruins. Van Gogh was seen, as he is now, as someone who saw through veils of hypocrisy and lies into the essential truth of the human experience, a kind of icon of authenticity: “Van Gogh is ours, and we are Van Gogh,” concludes Eksteins.

Twenty-three years ago, Eksteins wrote the book on that seismic change in Western culture, finding its origins as much in the violent currents—emotional, spiritual and aesthetic—running beneath the surface of pre-war European society as in the actual violence of the war. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age took its title from Sergei Diaghilev’s ballet The Rite of Spring. Through its defiantly dissonant music, radically twisted dance steps and shocking storyline featuring human sacrifice, Diaghilev’s modernist classic famously provoked a riot at its 1913 Paris premiere.

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Bestsellers – Week of February 20th, 2012

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, February 23, 2012 at 7:51 AM - 0 Comments

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In conversation: Thomas Collins

By Brian Bethune - Monday, February 20, 2012 at 12:40 PM - 0 Comments

Jessica Darmanin

Guelph, Ont.-born Thomas Collins, archbishop of Toronto, is among 22 prelates joining the College of Cardinals in Rome on Feb. 18, placing him among the governing elite of the Roman Catholic Church.

Q: You are both a pastor and a politician. Does that make it difficult to talk to the media?

A: I suppose it does. You’re always concerned that [what you say] be expressed the right way, and that’s a constant issue.

Q: You are about to become one of the Pope’s advisers in governing the worldwide Church. What are the major issues facing it?

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REVIEW: The Castrato and His Wife

By Brian Bethune - Monday, February 20, 2012 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Mozart composed for him, and Gainsborough twice painted his portrait. Giusto Tenducci (1736 to 1790), an opera singer with a rock-star-level female following, was famous even before his notorious scandal. He eloped, at 30, with his singing pupil Dorothea Maunsell, the 15-year-old child of a prominent Dublin barrister. That, of course, was bad enough in itself. But Tenducci was no ordinary tutor.

He was a castrato, subjected as a boy to a dangerous, illegal but tolerated operation to remove his testicles to preserve his prepubescent voice. And therein lies Tenducci’s final claim to fame: when Dorothea, nine years after their wedding, wished to marry another man, she launched an annulment claim that became one of the celebrity lawsuits of the age. Berry, a historian at Britain’s Newcastle University, turns all these events into a fascinating exploration of 18th-century concepts of sex and procreation, love and marriage.

Castratos, who were also outwardly recognizable (because their lack of testosterone meant their bone joints did not harden, allowing their limb and rib bones to grow unusually long), were the stuff of prurient fantasy. Famous for rumoured affairs with noble ladies desirous of infertile lovers—an exaggeration at best, given castrati’s low sex drives—the singers were also mercilessly mocked for their appearance and their maimed masculinity. Catholic to boot, Tenducci was never going to be a welcome son-in-law for Dorothea’s stoutly Protestant father.

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REVIEW: Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone

By Brian Bethune - Friday, February 17, 2012 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

All around the developed world, people are increasingly living alone. In the U.S., that’s 31 million American adults, forming 28 per cent of households, more than any other domestic unit, including the nuclear family. And that’s still short of international levels, including Canada’s: the peak rate is found in social democracies like Sweden, where it reaches 47 per cent of adults.

The growth of living solo has sparked warnings over everything from increased loneliness to the utter collapse of civil society. Klinenberg, a prominent U.S. sociologist who first ran into the phenomenon when investigating the 500 elderly and isolated people who died during a 1995 Chicago heat wave, is well aware of the risk factors. Single old people who lack an active support network—frequent phone calls and visits most importantly—are vulnerable to almost imperceptible health and nutrition declines and to sudden shocks like heatstroke. Women, more skilled and more practised at cultivating social networks, tend to fare much better than men, who often let those relationships slide.

But Klinenberg mostly focuses on the positives, some of which are surprising. Nuclear families tend to hunker down at home, while middle-aged and older singles, socializing together, keep urban amenities going. Art and music classes, public lectures, volunteerism and booming urban condo markets would all wither without them.

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Bestsellers – Week of February 13th, 2012

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, February 16, 2012 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments

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REVIEW: The Lifespan of a Fact

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, February 14, 2012 at 10:05 AM - 0 Comments

The faceoff/collaboration between writer and fact-checker is invisible to most magazine readers, but stick-in-the-eye obvious to anyone who has toiled on either side of that divide. Umpired by an editor viewed as a slippery ally at best by both sides, such clashes often bring to mind Bismarck’s remark about sausages and legislation—reader, sometimes you don’t want to know what goes into the making of a magazine article—and are fodder for countless tales in the trade. But none quite like the one between D’Agata (writer) and Fingal (fact-checker), and not just because this epic battle went on for seven years.

Most writers would admit to a bias in favour of well-crafted sentences over clunkier versions that get the mere details straight, but few would cheerfully admit, as D’Agata does, to altering the number of strip clubs in Las Vegas given by a source “because the rhythm of ‘34’ works better in that sentence than the rhythm of ‘31,’ so I changed it.” Nor do most fact-checkers, not even truculent and ferociously keen interns like Fingal, take advantage of a friend’s Vegas wedding to wander the locales mentioned in an article, just to get a leg up on the assignment. With such players taking the stage, small wonder that the to and fro over the very first sentence of the article takes up two pages of the book.

The exchanges quickly degenerate from mutual incomprehension to sarcasm. After D’Agata explains, yet again, that he “streamlined” a quote to “create a bit of resonance—it’s what writers do,” Fingal replies, “Okay, so now I understand. The rules are: there are no rules, just so long as you make it pretty.”

D’Agata: “That’s a bulls–t interpretation of what I just said.”

Fingal: “I thought you were the great defender of people’s rights to ‘interpret’?”

Amusing as all this is, what makes the book compelling is the way the two men eventually develop a wary mutual respect. Lifespan becomes a sustained meditation on the differences, should there be any, between “truth” and “accuracy,” without offering any definitive answers.

REVIEW: The Mormon People: The Making of an American Faith

By Brian Bethune - Friday, February 10, 2012 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

Polls recording the number of Americans who say they wouldn’t vote for a Mormon have held steady (at 25 per cent) for years, while the number who say the same about a gay person—now at 33 per cent—has been dropping. That raises the striking possibility that more Americans will soon be prepared to see a lesbian in the Oval Office than, say, Mitt Romney. Given that Mormonism is the all-American faith, the one religion rooted in the cultural DNA of the U.S. alone, the fact that so many Americans distrust and even hate it demands explanation. As this account by Bowman, a historian of religion who is a Mormon himself, makes clear, there is a lot of history between Americans and their native-born faith, much of it bloody.

Mormonism’s origins couldn’t have been more American. Its founding prophet Joseph Smith (1805-1844) grew up in northern New York state, known as the “burned-over district” for its fiery religious revivals. He was one of dozens of charismatic preachers of his day, all of whom, in Bowman’s lovely phrase, “heard the voices of angels outside their windows at night.” Even Mormonism’s bans on alcohol and tobacco are in the mainstream of 19th-century American Christianity.

But there are, of course, aspects well outside the norm too, including polygamy and, in the early days, a kind of communism. It was that last practice that brought the rapidly expanding faith into violent confrontation on the frontier, leading to Smith’s death when a mob stormed the Illinois jail where he was held, and leading also to the Mormons’ great trek westward, out of the U.S. to a new theocratic Zion in Utah.

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