Book review: The Hungry Ghosts

By Dafna Izenberg - Friday, April 19, 2013 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Self-sabotage is mysterious. Why, for example, would you push away the person you love most in the world? This question is at the heart of why Shivan, the thirtysomething protagonist of Selvadurai’s new novel, is travelling to Sri Lanka, where he grew up in the 1970s. On the eve of the journey, pining for the boyfriend he left in Vancouver, Shivan wonders whether karma—the belief that actions committed in previous lives come home to roost—is responsible for his heartache, as well as his family’s painful history.

When his father died, it fell upon six-year-old Shivan to appease his maternal grandmother, Daya, an angry and demanding woman, so she would take the family in. While he soaked up his grandmother’s recounting of ancient Buddhist tales about ghosts who haunt their future selves until past wrongs are redeemed, Shivan also chafed against her hold on him. He persuaded his mother to move the family to Canada, as much to get away from Daya as to flee the escalating conflict in Sri Lanka. Not that he could really escape—neither his grandmother nor his troubled country were anywhere near finished wreaking havoc in Shivan’s life.

This story feels epic for the ground it covers, temporally and geographically, and also for revealing how legacies are handed down through generations. In Shivan’s family, a virulent strain of resilience thrives—Daya survives being ostracized by her family for a sin she didn’t commit, reinventing herself as a powerful member of Colombo society; Shivan’s mother repeatedly overcomes self-destructive urges to build a better life for her family; both Shivan and his sister rise to the top of their fields at work. But Shivan nurses a twinned sense of bitterness and guilt, inherited from Daya, for the anguish he has both suffered and inflicted. And as much as he wants his trip to Sri Lanka to bring him closure, he knows that “denouements are often long in Buddhist stories”; “working off the karmic effects” of loss or betrayal or vengeance takes time. Which, he realizes, is often the point of the tale.

Visit the Maclean’s Bookmarked blog for news and reviews on all things literary

What ever happened to Al Capp?

By Bookmarked and Jaime Weinman - Thursday, April 18, 2013 at 9:08 AM - 0 Comments

For decades, Al Capp was the most famous comic-strip artist in America, and Li’l Abner, with its dumb hillbillies, biting satirical humour, and ludicrously sexy women, was the most popular strip in the newspapers. By the end of his life, his artistic and personal reputations were in ruins; today he’s mostly a footnote in the history of comic art. What happened? Michael Schumacher and Denis Kitchen, who have written biographies of other pioneering artists such as Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman, attempt to explain Capp’s importance, and also convey why his downfall—including accusations that he sexually harassed college students—was such a shock.

The book leaves no doubt that Capp looms large in the history of comics. Before the former Alfred Caplin started drawing Li’l Abner, most comic strip artists were relatively anonymous figures. Capp worked to make himself as popular as his title character: with his pugnacious wit and wooden leg, he was known to people who weren’t even readers, and his bitter feud with Joe Palooka creator Ham Fisher—culminating in the latter’s suicide—became big news. After he became an arch-conservative in the ’60s, he had a famous confrontation with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, where he introduced himself as “that dreadful Neanderthal fascist.” He also was a pioneer in the field of merchandising, figuring out how to make a fortune from product tie-ins and a new character, the Shmoo, who became a worldwide sensation.

What Schumacher and Kitchen don’t always succeed in conveying is the artistic, as opposed to commercial, impact of Li’l Abner. They mention some of the strip’s innovations, such as the combination of comedy with serialized storytelling, and Capp’s parodies of other comic strips (including the long-running Dick Tracy takeoff “Fearless Fosdick”), but there are relatively few examples of the strip, and not much suggestion of whether it still holds up. They do succeed in offering a balanced portrait of Capp, as a man whose artistic ambitions belied his statement to Lennon that “I draw my cartoons for money,” and who opposed censorship as furiously as he opposed hippies.

Visit the Maclean’s Bookmarked blog for news and reviews on all things literary

Book review: Drunk Mom: A Memoir

By Bookmarked and Anne Kingston - Thursday, April 18, 2013 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Admitting that you’re a new mother who spent the first year of your son’s life getting so plastered you routinely blacked out, tended to him while fairly out of it, and wheeled him through a snowstorm while lost is both brave and reckless in a culture that chastizes pregnant women for even glancing at a glass of wine. True, maternal tippling is a trendy topic on “mom” blogs like Mommy Needs A Cocktail and Vodka Mom. But these chirpy, jokey accounts don’t touch the dark spiral of addiction Toronto writer Jowita Bydlowska relives in this riveting account of her relapse into alcoholism after her son’s birth.

Bydlowska is an evocative, talented and gutsy writer who appears willing to confess all—googling how long it takes cocaine to pass through breast milk, putting her fist in her mouth to mask the sound of vomit, waking in a hotel room alone, not remembering how she got undressed. The former fashionable party girl details the grip of her addiction—“the wanting that was bigger than me”—while tempering out-of-control behaviour with paeans to motherhood: the cosmic joy of her son’s first smile, her agony of knowing, in her lucid moments, that she’s failing him.

Addictions, and the damage they cause, are messy, resistant to pat narratives. So it is here. Details of Bydlowska’s relationship with her partner are blurry, and a chapter blaming family “dysfunction” feels tacked on. She writes from newly won sobriety, rehabs and relapses behind her, one hopes, though drinking is clearly part of her self-definition. “Alcoholism isn’t something you can slow down or ever unlearn,” she writes.

Bydlowska is also careful to sidestep some of the inevitable censure she’ll receive: she drank only twice during pregnancy, she writes. Still, this memoir is destined to garner debate. Bydlowska writes of watching other upscale stroller-pushing moms and wondering: do they hide mickeys in their diaper bags too? With this bracing book, others will now be asking that question as well.

How Anne Carson makes us wish we were smarter

By Bookmarked and Brian D. Johnson - Monday, April 15, 2013 at 10:55 AM - 0 Comments

Poets must envy her. A typical poet, if there is such a thing, does not win a $500,000 MacArthur “genius” grant, and become the subject of a feature profile in The New York Times Magazine. Especially one as audaciously avant-garde as Anne Carson. This Canadian-born enigma, who teaches ancient Greek, paints volcanoes, and is adapting a sonnet cycle as a choral dance spectacle, is the Robert Lepage of poetry. To read her is a challenge and a thrill. Red Doc> arrives as an orphaned sequel to Carson’s crossover hit, The Autobiography of Red (1998), which recast Geyron, a winged red monster from Greek mythology, as a contemporary gay teen. Now called G, he lives in a red hut by a freeway underpass, reading Proust and tending a herd of musk oxen.

Red Doc> defies plot summary, but as Carson plunges down black-diamond couloirs of narrative freefall, there’s nothing abstract about it. Her writing is intensely cinematic. G embarks on a surreal road trip with Sad, a traumatized war vet, and drives north past “panels of a torn planet,” “black chunks of lava” and “cliffs with white shocks of waterfall.” They park in a glacier cavern where G tests the ice like a trampoline and drops through a fault, seduced by hypothermia, “that old cliché of polar adventure fatigue flooding his body in waves, silver ebbing and flowing.” And when G flies free—“Wings wildawake. Front body alive in a rush of freezing air . . . the ancient smell of ice floods every corner of his skull”—it’s like an action scene from an icy Avatar .

A verbal acrobat and compulsive inventor, Carson dreams up words like “warplay” and creatures called “ice bats” who dwell in Batcatraz. Vaulting genres, she’ll steer a car toward a lava flow or have a riot interrupt a play called Prometheus Rebound staged in a psych clinic. She’s a dramatist with an ear for domestic dialogue, and an eye for intimate detail. After a tryst in a laundry room, sex is “like pie without a fork” and love is “a big bunch of grass that grows up in your mind and makes you stupid.” Carson messes with our heads and makes us wish we were smarter; it’s huge fun just trying to keep up.

Visit the Maclean’s Bookmarked blog for news and reviews on all things literary

The Wheel of Time: A 23-year cliffhanger comes to a close

By Richard Warnica - Saturday, April 13, 2013 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photo Illustration by Sarah Mackinnon

The appeal of serial stories is all in the delayed satisfaction. It’s about waiting the whole summer to find out who shot J.R., or three years to see if Han Solo would make it out of the carbonite. It’s about cliffhangers and the blissful agony of wondering what’s next. But for fans of The Wheel of Time—a massively popular series of fantasy novels that debuted in 1990 and recently came to an end—it must have felt at times that the payoff would never come.

Set in an imaginary world of squabbling kingdoms, magic and swordplay, The Wheel of Time set a new standard for delayed gratification. Originally intended to be a handful of books, the series eventually stretched to 14, spread across 23 years, with more than 2,000 characters and nearly 12,000 pages. For a time, fans—who number in the millions and rival Trekkies for their fervour—wondered if it would ever end. In 1996, with eight books and nearly 17 years still to come, a writer in the New York Times joked that “humankind may well reach its promised apocalypse before Mr. Jordan’s characters do.”

The human race did survive to see the conclusion of The Wheel of Time. But its creator, Robert Jordan, did not. He died in 2007 with only 11 books written. Brandon Sanderson, a young fantasy writer, was brought in to finish the series, and fans stayed loyal. In January, Sanderson released A Memory of Light, the final book. Like the titles before it, it debuted at number 1 on every major book chart in the U.S. To date, the entire series has sold at least 25 million copies in North America alone, according to Tor, its publisher. With international sales rolled in, that makes it quite possibly the most popular series of adult fantasy books since The Lord of the Rings.

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Eat your heart out: cookbooks, book reviews and bestsellers

By Bookmarked - Friday, April 12, 2013 at 11:11 AM - 0 Comments

Paul Natkin/Getty Images

Our latest book reviews:

• A Prince Among Stones: That Business with the Rolling Stones and other Adventures, by Prince Rupert Loewenstein, review by Mike Doherty

• Nocturne: On the Life and Death of My Brother, by Helen Humphreys, review by Brian Bethune

• I Died for Beauty: Dorothy Wrinch and the Culture of Science, by Marjorie Senechal, review by Katie Engelhart

• Gun Guys: A Road Trip, by Dan Baum, review by Brian Bethune

• A Beautiful Truth, by Colin McAdam, review by Dafna Izenberg

• The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II, by Denise Kiernan, review by Michael Petrou

Plus, the Cookbook Store’s March bestsellers.

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A social history of the women who helped win World War II

By Bookmarked and Michael Petrou - Friday, April 12, 2013 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

“It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered,” U.S. president Harry S. Truman confided to his diary as he contemplated unleashing an atomic bomb against Japan in 1945, “but it can be made the most useful.”

It was the promise of making a useful, if undefined, contribution to the war effort that drew thousands of women to a newly created factory complex at Oak Ridge, Tenn. They were clerks, chemists, machine operators and cleaners. They came from all over America to live in trailers and prefabricated homes in a town that didn’t officially exist, and to work on a project none of them were allowed to understand. Their job, they learned after atomic bombs obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was to enrich the uranium that made these weapons so destructive.

This is a social rather than a scientific history. Its focus is on previously voiceless women who worked together at a time when Americans shared a common purpose but were still divided by race. Black employees lived segregated lives under poorer conditions than their white counterparts, without their children and apart from their spouses.

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A road trip to gun country results in a book

By Bookmarked and Brian Bethune - Thursday, April 11, 2013 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments

The journalist-cum-cultural anthropologist who conducts this expedition among the byways of U.S. gun culture is uniquely qualified for the job, precisely because he’s not (entirely) a stranger in a strange land. Baum is a New Jersey liberal Democrat—pro-union, pro-gay marriage, pro-Obamacare, even (for God’s sake) pro-UN—and also a guy who loves his guns. In the American gun debate, where the middle ground is as dangerous as the no man’s land between Great War trenches, Baum stretches across the divide like few others.

It doesn’t make him any more friends than being a partisan would. On the firing ranges, suburban shooters spraying 30-bullet clips from their lightweight plastic AR-15 semi-automatics looked askance at the writer’s heavy-as-lead, five-shot Karg rifle made for the Spanish-American War. They didn’t know that Baum thinks the AR-15, used in both the Aurora and Sandy Hook massacres, doesn’t deserve banning; it is, after all, “enjoyed harmlessly by millions of law-abiding citizens.” Nor do the customers in a Hispanic grocery shop in Colorado, backing away from Baum as he enters wearing a massive army revolver in an open holster, realize he’s on their side in the state’s bitter immigration debate.

Baum’s engrossing book is similarly bifurcated: he may have cast much-needed light on gun culture for those outside its orbit—even if they’ll find it unsettlingly sympathetic—but that wasn’t his personal aim. Baum already knows the lure of guns. What he was trying to figure out was why “a fondness for guns comes with political conservatism.”

And Baum probably won’t bowl over either side with his modest proposals for effective firearms regulation. Gun opponents have to stop calling gun fans literally insane for their passion, he argues, and gun lovers must stop thinking any and all regulation is the slippery slope to confiscation. Then the gun show loophole, which allows far too many completely unregulated sales, could be closed. A baby step, yes, but for Baum the only forward progress currently imaginable.

Visit the Maclean’s Bookmarked blog for news and reviews on all things literary

Book review: A Beautiful Truth

By Dafna Izenberg - Wednesday, April 10, 2013 at 8:00 PM - 0 Comments

Mourning isn’t only about losing a person you love—it’s also about losing a person you never had the chance to love. For Judy and Walt Ribke, the Vermont couple at the centre of McAdam’s novel, that person is their own child. After having a tumour removed, Judy is unable to get pregnant. She and Walt spend their days on charity and art and a dog named Murphy, trying to be rational and waiting for the despair to fade. But before they make it all the way through their grief, Walt sees a photograph of a chimpanzee in a diaper. Several weeks later, he and Judy drive to a park where a circus clown introduces them to Looee, a chimp from Sierra Leone. Looee reaches for Judy immediately, and once in her arms, he “nuzzles and squirms and settles.” Judy and Walt bring Looee back to their idyllic country home and pretend he is their baby.

Looee potty trains, learns to dress himself, eats at the table. He’s good with Murphy and a delight with children. He soaks up all of Judy’s nurturing and bonds with Walt over beer and fishing. But there are worrisome episodes. Looee runs away one night. He tries to feel up Judy’s friend Susan. On his way to knocking out a landscaper who laughs at him, he takes a run at Judy and bites Walt’s arm. Horror seems always on the horizon.

The tension is broken up by an alternate narrative, told primarily from the perspectives of apes that live in a research institute. The shift can be jarring; the voice isn’t tied to any one animal, and sometimes the sections read like an observation log. But gradually the chimps’ relationships gather drama and they also provide a reality check to Looee’s fairy-tale existence. Inevitably, the storylines merge, and while the plot begins to drag, the theme of mourning resurfaces. You can’t go around it, over it or under it, McAdam seems to be saying. To get to the other side, you have to go through it.

Visit the Maclean’s Bookmarked blog for news and reviews on all things literary

The Cookbook Store’s March bestsellers

By Alison Fryer - Wednesday, April 10, 2013 at 4:13 PM - 0 Comments

The Cookbook Store's Allison Fryer (Photograph by Jessica Darmanin)

International flavour rules the roost this month, with the beautifully designed Polpo–from the London, U.K. restaurant–taking the number 1 spot.

We thought we’d look back to our bestseller list from our first month way back in April 1983–that’s right, The Cookbook Store turns 30 this year. You’ll recognize most, if not all, of these titles. Needless to say, everyone was making Chicken Marbella from The Silver Palate Cookbook, helping it to become an iconic dish.

March, 2013

1. Polpo, by Russell Norman
2. Nigelissima, by Nigella Lawson
3. Jerusalem, by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi
4. Pati’s Mexican Table, by Pati Jinich
5. Clueless in the Kitchen, by Evelyn Raab
6. Plenty, by Yotam Ottolenghi
7. Full of Flavor, by Maria Elia
8. The Smitten Kitchen, by Deb Perelman
9. The Art of the Restaurateur, by Nick Ladner
10. The Flavor Bible, by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg

 Spring/Summer, 1983

1. The Silver Palate Cookbook, by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins
2. Entertaining, by Martha Stewart
3. Soho Charcuterie, by Francine Scherer & Madeline Poley
4. Muffin Mania, by Cathy Prange and Joan Pauli
5. New York Times 60-Minute Gourmet, by Pierre Franey
6. Fare for Friends, by The Fare for Friends Foundation

Author Margorie Senechal resurrects a brilliant female scientist

By Bookmarked and Katie Engelhart - Wednesday, April 10, 2013 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments

The book jacket dubs her an “ultimately tragic figure,” but in the 1930s, Dorothy (“Dot”) Wrinch was one of the hottest mathematicians alive. Scientists had just determined that proteins were molecules. But what did those molecules look like? Dot—the first woman to earn a science doctorate from Oxford, and the first female mathematician to lecture at Cambridge—had a theory: globular proteins were a kind of fabric or “lace.” The idea “set off a buried land mine.” Wrinch was a sensation.

As it turns out, she was also incorrect. Powerful microscopes have long since proved her theory wrong. And Wrinch has slipped quietly into the annals of fallen greats. In I Died for Beauty, she is resurrected by Senechal, her former pupil. Why was Wrinch forgotten when her contemporaries—many of whom also had error-studded careers—are revered and even Nobelled?

Senechal offers a detailed portrait of her pioneering mentor. In early chapters, we meet an unapologetically bright young brain who spends free evenings at Cambridge’s Heretics Society. Next, we see Dot through her intellectual prime. Those of a philosophic bent will delight in Wrinch’s thick-as-thieves friendship with famed logician and thinker du jour Bertrand Russell.

But the book’s second half is hard to bear. When Wrinch’s model proves wrong she is exiled from the halls of Oxbridge. In old age, she is partially vindicated (her structure was found, though not in protein), but remains ostracized. “First they said my structure could not exist in nature,” Wrinch explained. “Then when it was found in nature, they said it couldn’t be synthesized. Then when it was synthesized, they said it wasn’t important anyway.” Dot dies marginalized and alone.

A novelist on the death of her brother

By Bookmarked and Brian Bethune - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 at 5:40 PM - 0 Comments

Humphreys has always been a minimalist. None of her first six novels topped 200 pages; they couldn’t go on much further, she once said, because they caught “the emotional lives of my characters at a high pitch.” The intensity of their situations meant that both Humphreys and her readers could “only stay there for a while—that kind of terrain is not good to linger in.” With this taut elegy for her brother, Humphreys is back in that familiar terrain again, and with a similar result. However bleakly intense and grief-racked the landscape of memory is for the author, for a reader Nocturne is simply beautiful, still and moving in even measure, definitely terrain to linger in.

Martin Humphrey was a gifted musician diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in late July of 2009. By Dec. 3 he was dead, aged 45. The shock, the speed and the helplessness tore through his older sister. She began to write of her loss and its effects, in part for Martin, in part for their younger sibling, Cathy, but mostly because that’s what writers do: impose structure, craft a story, claim memory.

There are lovely moments throughout, all infused with the heightened awareness brought by knowledge of his death. There’s one of Martin’s concerts, a lunchtime event for a bunch of sandwich-eating, white-coat-wearing scientists at the National Physical Laboratories in England, which must have happened when Helen visited him there. She can’t recall, but no matter. “There was a lot of overlap to our lives in those days. We were made of each other then.”

But what makes Nocturne powerful art, paradoxically enough, is its capture of art’s powerlessness before physical reality. If there is a theme that runs right through, it’s a cold-eyed realization that, much as we’d want it otherwise, the only presence we can count on in our lives is our own.

Visit the Maclean’s Bookmarked blog for news and reviews on all things literary

The prince who advised The Rolling Stones

By Mike Doherty - Tuesday, April 9, 2013 at 10:34 AM - 0 Comments

At first glance, Prince Rupert Ludwig Ferdinand zu Loewenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg, scion of a ruling line of the Holy Roman Empire, seems an unlikely associate of the Rolling Stones. However, Sir Mick Jagger’s proclivity for “crossing the portal into a different social world,” as Loewenstein puts it, was established as early as the late ’60s, when the two met and bonded. At the time, the Stones were being taken to the cleaners by the British taxman and their manager, Allen Klein; Loewenstein, who owned a merchant bank, was in a position to help.

His 40-year business relationship with the Stones forms the basis for this book, and Jagger, unimpressed, has decried Loewenstein’s lack of “good manners” in penning a financial tell-all. Indeed, there are embarrassing revelations here, such as the time the front man, considering himself the band’s “quasi-manager,” tried to skim off an extra share of the profits. Loewenstein describes how over the years he saved the Stones from one another as well as from greedy promoters and hangers-on. He explains how financial decisions influenced the Stones’ art, as he relocated them to the south of France (hence, Exile on Main Street), hooked them up with Atlantic Records in the U.S., and showed them how to run a profitable tour as an efficient “hierarchy” comparable to a court. Throughout, he offers eye-opening insight about the transition rock bands must make from idealist rebels to shrewd businessmen if they’re to learn how not to be exploited.

Loewenstein, with his colourful anecdotes, proves an amusing guide. At times his banker’s perceptions (e.g., that the Stones should have sold the band to an investor) do mark him as a little culturally tone-deaf, and although he portrays his former charges in an affectionate way, he dismisses the Stones’ oeuvre as, for instance, “rhythmic music expressing trite emotion.” The prince remains a minor, if intriguing, character in the history of music royalty, recalling T.S. Eliot’s description of Hamlet’s Polonius: “Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse.”

Visit the Maclean’s Bookmarked blog for news and reviews on all things literary

Lemony Snicket’s new illustrator

By Sarah Weinman - Sunday, April 7, 2013 at 8:00 PM - 0 Comments

Candlewick Press; Somerville

Just before 6:00 a.m. on Jan. 29, Jon Klassen was about to get in a cab for a cross-country flight when the phone rang at his Los Angeles home. He took the call as calmly as he could, considering the news he’d just received and the increasingly impatient cab driver waiting outside. Then the phone rang a second time. When Klassen finally stepped into the cab, he’d accomplished something no one had since 1947: winning the Caldecott gold medal, the most prestigious children’s book illustration prize, for This is Not My Hat, as well as a silver medal for the same prize, for his illustrations of Mac Barnett’s Extra Yarn. The honour’s even more impressive given the Winnipeg-born, Niagara Falls, Ont.-raised Klassen only published his first book of illustrations three years ago, after he left a full-time animation job at Dreamworks.

Klassen, 32, told Maclean’s that the news sank in after several weeks, but it hasn’t changed his life very much: “It’s not like I had a bunch of dream projects where I could say, ‘Now I can work on these things.’ I was left to do what I wanted to do with my books. I’ve always had that freedom.”

That freedom showed in the picture book that made his reputation, I Want My Hat Back, which hit the top of the New York Times bestseller list in 2011. It’s a slyly playful tale about a bear in search of his missing hat that ends with a delicious twist—an ending that proved so controversial that all publishers who saw the book wanted to change it, except for Candlewick, who said the “lesson would be lost” otherwise. By contrast, This is Not My Hat, published last fall, is a moodier, monologue-driven story, the clash between a great whale and a tiny thief of a fish playing out against a velvet-inflected black background and vaguely menacing ocean plant life. Klassen said the contrast between the books was intentional, as opposed to the Group of Seven-esque vibe of some of his landscape illustrations, which must have been “totally subliminal.”

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In conversation with Paul Anka

By Mike Doherty - Thursday, April 4, 2013 at 12:10 PM - 0 Comments

In Rotterdam at the North Sea Jazz Festival on July 13,13-7-2007. (Copyright Paul Bergen)

Paul Anka enters the ranks of the great celebrity storytellers with his new book, My Way, in which he recounts how he kept his head while many around him lost theirs. From the early years of rock ‘n’ roll through the heyday of the Rat Pack through the ‘70s and ‘80s with Tom Jones and Michael Jackson to the present, Anka–one of the rare artists whose teen stardom translated to significant adult success–seems to have been everywhere and hung out with everyone. In the current issue of Maclean’s, Nicholas Köhler discusses some of the book’s more startling anecdotes – about Frank Sinatra’s wild mood swings, Sammy Davis, Jr.’s outrageous love life, and Dodi Al-Fayed’s financial crisis. Here, the Ottawa native tells Mike Doherty, on the phone from his Hollywood office, about the book, his new album, Duets, and money, integrity, and truth.

Q: You’ve been working on this memoir for years now, although at first, you had insisted it wasn’t going to be called My Way.

A: That’s right. I got forced into it [laughs]. Everything about the book was my way except the title.

Q: It seems as though in writing the book, you haven’t really held back.

A: It’s like being with a great woman that you’ve always wanted to be with in bed – would one hold back? I saw no need to sit there and calculate every word on every page, because then you’d have people going, “Come on – you were there and this happened, and how come you didn’t see it?” So it’s all the truth, and it’s all what I observed, and certainly there are no confidences broken in any way. It’s what I experienced as a kid growing up in this business, and that’s what books are for: to inform, to give people a real look at the backdrop of this crazy business. I guess the whole message is there: don’t put all of us up on these pedestals like we’re idols and perfect human beings.

Q: You’ve mentioned how when you were in Vegas around the mob, people didn’t bother you because you were a kid. Do people feel comfortable with you, in general? 

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Much ado about Shakespeare

By Jessica Allen - Tuesday, April 2, 2013 at 2:53 PM - 0 Comments

Coriolanus Act V, Scene III (Wikipedia Commons)

Turns out Shakespeare dodged taxes and deliberately tried to make a profit during famines, according to a recent paper published by Aberystwyth University academics.

The study brings to light 15 years worth of court and tax records that show Shakespeare bought grain, malt and barley, stored it, and then tried to resell it at inflated prices during times of famine.

“There was another side to Shakespeare besides the brilliant playwright — as a ruthless businessman who did all he could to avoid taxes, maximise profits at others’ expense and exploit the vulnerable — while also writing plays about their plight to entertain them,” Jayne Archer, a researcher in Renaissance literature at Aberystwyth University, told the Sunday Times.

One of the plays to which she is referring is Coriolanus–the last installment in Shakespeare’s Roman series–about war, conflict and social unrest where peasants revolt after wealthy merchants and politicians create–and to try make money from–a famine. (The play was not without controversy–it was even banned in France during the 1930s.)

So was Shakespeare, “a successful businessman and major landowner in his native Warwickshire who retired an extremely wealthy man,” as the Telegraph says, trying to cool his conscience by writing Coriolanus in the early 17th century?

The public may have to wait for the inevitable onslaught of Ph.D. theses that will be written in light of this new study for new psyche-related revelations on the man who Laurence Olivier once said was “the nearest thing in incarnation to the eye of God.”

In the meantime, there’s this: Archer suggests the playwright cared more about providing for his family than he did his literary legacy: “In 1613, having ensured a . . . sustainable future for himself and his family, Shakespeare stopped writing,” she said.

Must-reads for an extra-long weekend

By Bookmarked - Thursday, March 28, 2013 at 10:50 AM - 0 Comments

Michael Ochs/Archives/Getty Images

Our latest book reviews:

• Napalm: An American Biography, by Robert M. Neer, review by Brian Bethune

• Spartacus, by Aldo Schiavone, review by Colby Cosh

• Criminal Enterprise, by Owen Laukkanen, review by Ken MacQueen

• Young Titan: The Making of Winston Churchill, by Michael Sheldon, review by Patricia Treble

• Vampires in the Lemon Grove, by Karen Russell, review by Mike Doherty

• I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon, by Touré, review by Brian D. Johnson

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Prince is hungry for both religion and sex in Touré’s reverent new biography

By Bookmarked and Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, March 28, 2013 at 10:47 AM - 0 Comments

This slim volume about a one-name pop star by a one-name writer flirts with biography. But Touré—journalist, co-host of MSNBC’s The Cycle and sage author of Who’s Afraid of Post Blackness?—has a higher purpose. In a triptych of propulsive essays, he’s on a mission to crack the Prince enigma and canonize him as a preacher/provocateur who has liquidated lines of race, gender and genre with music that’s both carnal and Christian. Although Prince was born on the tail end of the baby boom, Touré holds him up as a mirror ball for the author’s own Generation X—a latchkey kid and child of divorce who became a hypersexual icon of diversity. Fearful of being ghettoized as a black artist, he has always cast his musicians as a multicultural mix of black and white, male and female. And despite his voracious heterosexuality, he has cultivated a gay mystique with high heels and eye shadow—the sensitive Machiavellian.

Though Touré’s book is reverent, not trashy, in a chapter titled “The King of Porn Chic,” he draws a tantalizing portrait of Prince as a man “who loved to be with multiple girls, or to watch,” but who often preferred to bathe a woman than have sex. Recalls an ex-girfriend: “He ran the bath, he put the bubbles in, he took your clothes off, he washed you, he washed your hair . . . He put lotion on after. He’d give you a robe.” But the star of Purple Rain has always had a thing for baptism.

Raised a Seventh Day Adventist and now a Jehovah’s Witness, Prince channels religious and sexual fervour with equal intensity. And Touré shows how he’s spun the roots of blues, soul and gospel into ecstatic towers of song, more erotic and spiritual than both Michael Jackson and Madonna. As for his Messiah complex, Touré isn’t sure if Prince feels he is Jesus or merely Jesus-like. But when he calls him “the most important religious artist ever,” somehow forgetting Bob Marley, you have to wonder if he’s been drinking too much of the purple Kool-Aid.

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Book review: Vampires in the Lemon Grove

By Mike Doherty - Thursday, March 28, 2013 at 10:41 AM - 0 Comments

Lest this book’s title make you run screaming, fear not: Russell’s second short story collection isn’t another blood-spattered rip-off. It owes its tense plotting and weird textures to genre fiction—in particular horror and dark fantasy—but its probing themes, dense prose and openness to ambiguity belong to more highbrow fiction. Vampires offers the best of both literary worlds.

The Florida-born Russell burst onto the scene in 2006 as a Granta- and New Yorker-feted enfant magnifique at age 25; the title of her debut collection, St. Mary’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, reveals her fascination with how unruly nature can warp mundane reality. Vampires’ title story features a fanged couple who, tired of coffins and killing, slake their thirst with fresh citrus in Sorrento. Elsewhere, we read about kleptomaniac seagulls, tailgating partiers in the Antarctic for whom the food chain is a tournament, and U.S. presidents reincarnated as horses, reduced to giving themselves titles such as Commanding General of the Standing Chickens.

Russell’s protagonists are poised on the cusp of life-changing events; sometimes, in a nod to avowed influence Ray Bradbury, they’re adolescent boys, and often there’s a Gothic suggestion that the strangeness of their surroundings is a projection of their inner turmoil. Her coming-of-age tales also read, at times, like allegories, satires and surreal escapades, set in a defamiliarized America where cars can acquire “a sort of doomed mastodon glamour, shaggy with snow” and a crop may grow up like “the future sprouting new fur.” Her language draws attention to itself but doesn’t threaten to capsize her tales—as it sometimes did in her debut novel, the Pulitzer-nominated Swamplandia! (2011). She uses her oddball premises to offer new angles on venerable themes such as memory, time, friendship, greed and love. And though the short story is often considered an inferior form to the novel, Russell’s restless imagination proves its possibilities haven’t yet been sucked dry.

Visit the Maclean’s Bookmarked blog for news and reviews on all things literary

14 telling years in the life of Winston Churchill

By Bookmarked and Patricia Treble - Thursday, March 28, 2013 at 7:33 AM - 0 Comments

Winston Churchill’s 90-year life was so stuffed with adventures that Michael Shelden has the luxury to start in 1901, Churchill’s first year as a politician, and end in 1915, with his career in ruins. During those 14 years, his twin qualities of brilliance and recklessness would make headlines. The book starts in frigid Winnipeg, as the 25-year-old regales a theatre with his adventures as an officer and war correspondent during the Boer War. He’s already famous, but desperately needs the $150,000 (in today’s currency) that he’ll make from a two-month lecture tour: his job as an MP has prestige but no salary.

Even before he entered the House, he was marked as a politician to watch. His hard work was legendary. After Churchill was made undersecretary of the Colonial Office, a bureaucrat sought out some aristocratic advice before signing up to work with the mercurial, demanding politician. “The first time you meet Winston, you see all his faults,” advised the dowager countess of Lytton, “and the rest of your life you spend in discovering his virtues.” By 1906, he was in trouble with his boss when what Churchill had claimed was a private fact-finding mission to the colonies turned into an official tour, involving the use of a naval cruiser. Naturally, he turned the journey into a book, My African Journey. That same year, he got permission to attend German army exercises as a guest of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Even then, warning bells were being sounded about Churchill’s impulsivity. “The king asked me to warn you against being too communicative and frank with his nephew,” the prime minister warned Churchill. His upward political trajectory ended as first lord of the admiralty, destroyed by the disastrous Gallipoli campaign. In one of his typical sweeping gestures, he left his political life and rejoined the military full-time, as a major in the trenches of France. Fortunately, he’d rise again. In 1939, he was back at the Admiralty. And this time, his brilliance would outweigh his recklessness.

B.C. novelist takes a gamble on ‘life of crime’

By Bookmarked and Ken MacQueen - Wednesday, March 27, 2013 at 7:57 AM - 0 Comments

Owen Laukkanen has been a commercial fisherman, an impoverished university student and an international tournament reporter for a poker website. But the biggest gamble for the young British Columbian was a decision to live off his savings, reinvent himself as a crime novelist and write The Professionals. Such efforts usually die forgotten in a dusty corner of a computer hard drive, but with its release last year, Laukkanen stepped onto the top tier of the genre, earning raves from such giants as Jonathan Kellerman, John Sanford and Lee Child (“characters that live and breathe, and chills aplenty”).

It’s not just a case of working a formula—constant action, crackling dialogue, short chapters with cliff-hanger endings. Laukkanen builds that framework and populates it with flesh and blood, offers outsider insights into the economic decay of urban America and spins plots that build from an everyday premise into spiralling disaster. In The Professionals, it was underemployed university grads launching a low-risk kidnap business. What could go wrong? In this riveting second novel, we meet Carter Tomlin, number-cruncher, overextended family man, volunteer high school basketball coach. Then he’s laid off. Happens every day. The job market sucks. He robs a bank, with a note. Then another with a pistol. Then he finds true love with an AR-15 assault rifle and the rush of playing God with people’s lives. As for the money, well, there’s never enough, is there?

What powers both novels, though, is the complicated chemical attraction of its heroes, FBI Special Agent Carla Windermere and Kirk Stevens, Minnesota state investigator: husband, father, basketball coach. Windermere is the prickly loner who craves the big case; married to the job. Stevens re-enters the quiet life in the second novel, working cold cases, pining for a hit of adrenalin; married to Nancy, with a high hotness quotient and a low tolerance for cowboy cops. Windermere and Stevens are a team, better together; strictly professional, of course. What could possibly go wrong?

Visit the Maclean’s Bookmarked blog for news and reviews on all things literary

The truth about the gladiator Spartacus

By Bookmarked and Colby Cosh - Tuesday, March 26, 2013 at 8:26 AM - 0 Comments

Italian classicist Aldo Schiavone has written a little 19th-century sort of book, a book whose main body is just 153 pages but expresses the concentrated effort of a lifetime. There is an intoxicating intensity in classical studies that is hard to match in any other field, with entire theoretical structures standing or falling on a single word or an interpretation of a verb tense. Schiavone has become known, and deemed worthy of English translation, by approaching the old standards of literary elegance and erudition about as well as anybody.

What we know about Spartacus, the gladiator who broke out of his training camp with a few dozen pals in 73 BCE and nearly mastered Italy, amounts to a few lines from half-mangled manuscripts. On the whole, it is better than the surviving documentary basis for Jesus’s life, but not much, and Spartacus was naturally adopted as a sort of alternative Christ by revolutionaries of the 19th and 20th centuries. His rebellion almost seems like a sudden outburst of modernity in the centre of the Roman era. In old Rome, the naturalness of universal slavery was never questioned. The Thracian gladiator explodes forth vividly from the setting, routing experienced legions and trying to strangle the Empire in its cradle: an early avatar of liberty and equality, fighting a doomed struggle for the future.

But Spartacus was probably not an enemy of slavery as such. When he captured Roman soldiers, he promptly made them fight to the death for his army’s amusement; there is no indication he wanted to renovate the social order. Schiavone’s Spartacus is no arch-liberator, but a prophetic gambler who found himself with no easy escape from Italy and thus sought to turn Rome’s beaten-down neighbour cities against it. Schiavone’s step-by-step analysis of Spartacus’s actions is reminiscent of A.J.P. Taylor’s eccentric interpretation of Hitler; this Taylor-ish tome could have been titled Origins of the Third Servile War. You’ve seen the movie: now get the straight dope.

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Book review: Napalm: An American Biography

By Bookmarked and Brian Bethune - Monday, March 25, 2013 at 11:26 AM - 0 Comments

On a beautiful July 4 in Boston in 1942, Harvard chemist Louis Fieser, head of Anonymous Research Project No. 4, lugged a 35-kg object onto the university’s soccer field. After he retreated a dozen metres and pushed a button, a spectacular fire cloud rose into the air and lumps of flaming gel fell back to earth. Tennis players scarcely 15 m away fled in panic, the first of hundreds of thousands to be terrified or killed by Fieser’s invention. Napalm, icon of the war in Vietnam, had come to life: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” says Robert Duvall’s demented character, Bill Kilgore, in Apocalypse Now, “it smells like victory.”

Although it had roots as deep as Greek fire—humans have been doing their best to burn one another to death for millennia—that Independence Day explosion was also a newborn, one of the first fruits of the military-industrial complex President Eisenhower would later warn his nation about. Long before Pearl Harbor, influential American academics, already convinced their country would become involved, had watched the Luftwaffe drop tons of incendiaries on British cities. Some became intensely interested in finding ways to literally fight fire with fire.

By the war’s end, napalm was an angel of death on a vast scale. In 1945, the U.S. “scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo on the night of March 9-10,” during a mass bombing run, “than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined,” wrote Curtis LeMay, the American general who directed all three attacks. But the atomic bombs took all the notoriety and postwar moral qualms, while napalm continued in unquestioned use.

Until Vietnam and one of the 20th century’s most famous photos: nine-year-old Kim Phuc, now a grown woman in Toronto, running down a Vietnamese road in 1972, naked and on fire. Revulsion has held sway in popular opinion, foreign and domestic, ever since. Napalm, a hero of the Second World War, Neer writes, is now a war criminal on probation.

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Springtime reading: From Clive Davis and Scientology to polar bears and Zelda

By Bookmarked - Friday, March 22, 2013 at 11:06 AM - 0 Comments

David Mounce/Corbis

Our latest book reviews:

• The Truth About Luck, by Iain Reid, review by Jessica Allen

• Never Look a Polar Bear in the Eye, by Zac Unger, review by Joanne Latimer

• The Soundtrack of My Life, by Clive Davis, review by Jaime J. Weinman

• Beyond Belief: My Secret Life Inside Scientology and My Harrowing Escape, by Jenna Miscavige Hill with Lisa Pulitzer, review by Joanne Latimer

• Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald, by Therese Anne Fowler, review by Katie Engelhart

• Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked, by Jeffrey Frank, review by Mike Doherty

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