A biography of Robert Ripley, believe it or not

By Matthew Hays - Friday, May 10, 2013 at 1:30 PM - 0 Comments

Reading this seasoned biographer’s spicy take on the life of Robert Ripley—the man behind the long-running, sensational newspaper column—leaves one wondering why no one had thought to write up the man’s life before.

It’s every bit as crazy as one might expect, given Ripley’s penchant for all things bizarre. As a child in small-town California, he was an outsider, a misfit who escaped into drawing and a fascination with print media. Among the dramatic events that shaped Ripley’s world view was the carnage from the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

Ripley went from being an illustrator of sports events to creating Believe It or Not, a cartoon that featured the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction content that became legendary. Just as the world was entering into a phase of rapidly shifting technologies—“radio, moving pictures, vacuum cleaners, electric razors”—audiences gained a taste for Ripley’s esoteric bravado. If you took a small bundle of spider webs and straightened it out, it would span 350 miles. What was the shortest letter Victor Hugo ever wrote? It was a query to his publisher, consisting of one question mark: “?” The reply was an exclamation mark.

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Why Russians are disappearing

By Bookmarked and Brian Bethune - Friday, May 10, 2013 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

Foreigners think they know how much Russians drink, but you really have to be there, writes Bullough, to see an alcoholic society—and its effects—in action. Bullough, a Briton who spent seven years as a Reuters correspondent in Russia and other former Soviet republics, reels off a series of statistics and personal accounts that reach far beyond the journalistic cliché of “sobering.” Russians have been on a 50-year bender, and not just men: anyone riding the Moscow subway can see well-dressed young women drinking beer from cans on their way to work. And the more Russians drink, the quicker they die and the less they replace themselves.

Russian life expectancy hit a high in the mid-1960s—69 years, the same as in the contemporary West. Since then, Westerners have added about a decade and a half to their average lifespans, while Russian life expectancy for males has shrunk to 63 and Russians of both sexes are five times more likely to die of “external” causes—murder, suicide, drowning, car crashes—than West Europeans. Birth rates cratered along with the Soviet Union; there were 148 million Russians in 1990; now there are 141 million. The country, Bullough argues, is dying from within.

What distinguishes The Last Man is the way Bullough searches for why, which he does by tracing the story arc of a dissident Orthodox priest under Communism. As much as Dimitry Dudko preached the saving message of the Gospel, he also ceaselessly urged Russians—thousands of whom attended his 1970s sermons—to fight state attempts to divide and break them, especially along ethnic lines, and to form communities of trust, however small, in which no one had to fear that everyone around him was a potential informer. But the KGB eventually got to him too, and Dudko appeared on TV in 1980 to say the Kremlin was right all along: the Jews and enemy spies were to blame for everything. In Bullough’s retelling, Dudko’s story is Russia’s: a broken man representing a broken nation. “If you deny people hope and love and friendship, then they sicken and despair,” he writes. “They drink themselves to death, and they stop having children.”

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Book review: A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

By Bookmarked and Richard Warnica - Friday, May 10, 2013 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

It’s hard to say whether now is a great or a terrible time to publish a novel about Chechnya. On the one hand, more Americans than ever before probably know where Chechnya is. On the other, few of them are likely to view Chechens in a particularly favourable light. The Boston bombings—and the Chechen immigrants accused of pulling them off—seem bound to hang over Vital Phenomena. Which is too bad. Set in the Chechen countryside in the war years between 1994 and 2004, the book is strong enough to be judged on its own merits.

Marra, a recent M.F.A. graduate now on a fellowship at Stanford, has pulled off a difficult trick for a debut novelist. His characters occupy a world foreign to his own, yet he makes them believable. The story stretches back over the two Chechen wars, but its main plot spans just five days in 2004. It centres on: Akhmed, the worst doctor in Chechnya; Havaa, a young girl left in his charge after Russian soldiers kidnap her father; and Sonja, a London-trained surgeon drawn back to Chechnya when her sister disappears.

The book encompasses torture, infidelity, heartbreak and human trafficking, but also love, friendship, family and humour. Marra doesn’t gloss over the horrors of the Chechen wars. But he doesn’t dwell either, and despite the subject matter, this is not an exclusively dark book. In his afterword, Marra acknowledges a debt to Michael Ondaatje. Like Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, Vital Phenomena is about the gaps left behind by the forcibly disappeared. It’s a difficult subject for fiction, but one Marra manages with a voice that approaches something like the gauzy beauty of Ondaatje’s prose.

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Book review: Life in a Marital Institution: Twenty Years of Monogamy in One Terrifying Memoir

By Joanne Latimer - Friday, May 10, 2013 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Braly and his wife (he calls her Jane in the book) run through 13 marriage counsellors before deciding to separate. The journey, as told by Braly, is hilarious and raw, full of self-excoriating stories and internal monologue. Readers who miss the late Spalding Gray will cheer on Braly, wondering if his relationship with Jane is anything like Gray’s complex entanglement with Renée Shafransky and his last wife, Katie Russo. Not so much. Braly’s marriage is a unique mess, and the description of its undoing has much to say about monogamy, celibacy and parenting.

When Braly first met Jane in a university café, she took it upon herself to edit a poem he was writing and criticize his handwriting. He was hooked. Struggling to impress Jane—an older, worldly masters of divinity student—he had to find his place among her seminary friends. “Salving the hurt feelings of a waiter, or a spurned bisexual predator—that’s my strength,” he deadpans. The next 15 years were a power struggle. In places, the book reads like a rollicking monogamy farce, intercut with fights about breastfeeding, organic food and burying placentas. “Sometimes my facts are no substitute for Jane’s feelings,” he finally realized.

It takes a move to upstate New York to actually trigger the separation. He mocks their new neighbours, Jane’s friends, for being “pussy-whipped beta farmers who’ve been ground into the soil of the organic Luddite psycho-matriarchy.” Even so, Braly never takes any cheap shots directly at Jane. That’s an endearing quality in a marriage memoir. If anything, the book contains one too many loving tributes to her force of personality. This is the book he felt he could write. I’d also like to read the first draft—the book he knew he couldn’t.

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Book review: All That Is

By Sarah Murdoch - Thursday, May 9, 2013 at 8:00 PM - 0 Comments

Salter has long been regarded as among America’s greatest yet most overlooked writers, a crafter of the most luminous sentences in modern letters. Until recently, his name might have rung a faint bell with only the most diligent readers, but now, with the publication of his sixth novel, his first in 34 years, he is everywhere, including a profile in The New Yorker. The two other things you need to know about this suddenly celebrated writer is that he is 87 years of age and he is famous for writing deliciously on the subject of sex.

This must be a gratifying episode in the life of a man for whom episodes seem to be important. Indeed, most of the book’s 31 chapters, and frequently passages within them, can be read as entirely satisfactory short stories, frequently with a strong whiff of autobiography and recollected anecdote.

We follow Philip Bowman, the subject of this odyssey, beginning in 1944 as a young Navy lieutenant in the Pacific. He establishes himself as a presence in New York’s publishing society, marries then divorces a privileged young woman with whom he has nothing in common, gets in some travel, attends fashionable dinner parties and, most importantly, sustains relationships with several women.

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Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation’s Treasures from the Nazis

By Jessica Allen - Thursday, May 9, 2013 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments

On May 10, 1945, a young American officer in Italy, Fred Hartt, drove from Tuscany to the northern region of Alto Adige. There, in a mountain hamlet jail, nestled away in damp cells and stacked side by side with little protection were some 300 paintings by the likes of Caravaggio, Titian and Botticelli.

How the masterpieces—worth about $500 million—ended up there is just one of the fine art adventures chronicled in Saving Italy, Robert M. Edsel’s third book to document the Nazis’ plundering of Western art’s greatest cultural treasures and the Allies’ race to rescue them.

This time, the author tells the story through two Monuments Men, the nickname given to the group of 24 American officers and enlisted men created in 1943 and assigned to help preserve Europe’s art and architecture: Capt. Deane Keller, a 42-year-old professor at Yale and an artist, and Hartt, a rising art historian, who went on to write a definitive text on Italian Renaissance art.

While the Nazis dished out propaganda to then-Fascist Italy about the Allies removing precious works of art from their country to London they were quietly scheming to clear out the Vatican of its archives and art treasures, not to mention stealing priceless paintings from their wartime resting place in Tuscan country villas and stowing them in labyrinth-like mines closer to German borders, many destined for Hitler’s Führer museum. The Monuments Men not only took inventory of what was missing but also produced field reports detailing the damage done by Allied bombing. In 1943, Milan suffered “all manner of hell” as Churchill promised: the La Scala opera house was gutted and the roof and east wall of the Santa Maria delle Grazie’s refectory destroyed. (Miraculously, the north wall—with Leonardo’s painting of the Last Supper—survived.)

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Growing up with a gay dad

By Rebecca Eckler - Saturday, May 4, 2013 at 7:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photo illustration by Sarah MacKinnon

Alison Wearing’s 12-year-old son had a friend over recently. He saw a mock-up cover of Wearing’s upcoming book, Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter: Growing Up with a Gay Dad. “Yeah, my grandfather’s gay,” her son told his friend. “Do you want some chips?” It wasn’t as easy for Wearing when her father came out in the ’70s, in the small city of Peterborough, Ont. He’d always been different from other dads, baking croissants, wearing silk pyjamas, skipping while singing songs from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. “There wasn’t even the word ‘gay’ in those days. It didn’t really exist. It was like hearing a different language,” she says, of finding out. Her mother, equally in shock, divorced her husband.

Confessions of a Fairy’s Daughter was originally a one-woman show that Wearing performed all over the world. When she saw the reaction she knew she could delve a lot deeper than her 25-page script. “When I tell people that my father is gay, no one has ever said, ‘That sounds boring. Let’s talk about something else.’ It’s actually a great party trick,” laughs Wearing, 45. The book also started with a box her father handed her which, she says, “was a window into his heart.” In it, she not only found newspaper clippings about the gay scene in the ’70s, but her father’s journal, and letters to friends and family. One diary entry contained this bombshell: “Last night I made it with a Roman Catholic priest.” When she read it aloud to him, her father didn’t tear the page away, she writes. “He melted into a coy posture and cooed, ‘Oooh, I remember him. He was so cute.’ ”

At first, Joe Wearing didn’t like the idea of his daughter writing about him. He has not yet read her book. “I have a certain distance from it,” he said in a telephone interview. Now in his late 70s, he has been in a relationship with the same man for 30 years. Asked how he didn’t know he was gay, he says, “When I look back, I realize that, ‘Oh yes, I was struggling with admitting it.’ In the 1950s it was just out of the question.” He led a Dr. Jekyll straight life in Peterborough, where he was a political studies professor, eventually spending four days a week in Toronto. In a letter featured in the book, he writes of his then-wife, “How much she is aware of I just don’t know, though I would have thought that, if anything, my sexual performance at home ought to have aroused suspicions. In the end I don’t know whether she will be prepared to accept a gay husband (I have been amazed to find out that some do.)”

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Time for spring reading

By Bookmarked - Friday, May 3, 2013 at 10:41 AM - 0 Comments

Scott Halleran/Getty Images

Our latest book reviews:

• The Secret Lives of Sports Fan: The Science of Sports Obsession, by Eric Simons, review by Jonathon Gatehouse

• Math on Trial: How Numbers Get Used and Abused in the Courtroom, by Leila Schneps and Coralie Colmez, review by Peter Shawn Taylor

• A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind: What Neuroscience Can and Cannot Tell Us about Ourselves, by Robert A. Burton, review by Brian Bethune

• And Hell Followed with Her: Crossing the Dark Side of the American Border, by David Neiwert, review by Martin Patriquin

• Country Girl: A Memoir, by Edna O’Brien, review by Patricia Dawn Robertson

• Salt Sugar Fat, by Michael Moss, review by Jonathan Chevreau

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On out-of-control border patrollers

By Bookmarked and Martin Patriquin - Friday, May 3, 2013 at 9:30 AM - 0 Comments

There is a grim satire to the Minuteman movement, that cabal of self-appointed patrollers of America’s borders. They are a breed of what Hunter S. Thompson used to call “flag-suckers”: self-righteous, blindly patriotic and often heavily armed, Minutemen are convinced that most of what ails America sneaks, huddled and hungry, across its 3,000-km border with Mexico. In the overheated economy of the mid-2000s, these “illegals,” the least offensive Minuteman epithet, often did the work Americans themselves eschewed, but no matter. Dressed in their army-surplus best, their guns loaded and polished, the Minutemen sought out this apparent scourge. Even at this, as Neiwert convincingly argues, the Minutemen were rather hopeless, more likely to shoot one another than catch any border-crossers. And like many blindly self-righteous groups, they attracted strays—dangerous strays in their case: neo-Nazis, military cast-offs and other often criminal reprobates.

Chief among them was Shawna Forde. A petty criminal with a litany of criminal charges and failed marriages to her credit, in 2006, Forde latched onto Minuteman right-wing, nativist ideology like a drowning swimmer, becoming one of its luminaries. She arrived on the scene as the movement was splintering, becoming more radical, and Forde took full advantage, traipsing about the desert in high heels and a loaded gun for the hordes of media, and talking openly about robbing drug dealers to finance her own Minuteman chapter. Tragically, she followed up on her words: she and accomplices, posing as immigration officers, stormed the house of an Arizona drug smuggler, killing him and his nine-year-old daughter. And Hell Followed With Her draws a direct line between the dangerous, dehumanizing Minuteman rhetoric, the broadcasting of it by cheerleading media, and the senseless murder of a father and his daughter. The case, as well as the economic slump, drew much of the air out of the Minuteman movement. May it never come back.

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Book review: Math on Trial: How Numbers Get Used and Abused in the Courtroom

By Peter Shawn Taylor - Friday, May 3, 2013 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Was it a successful purse-snatching or an abomination of math? In 1964 Los Angeles, an elderly lady had her handbag grabbed by a young, blond woman who then ran down an alley and got into a yellow car driven by a black man. No one saw the thief’s face, or got a clear look at her driver.

Diligent police work soon identified a likely couple: young, blond Janet Collins and her husband, Malcolm, who was black and owned a yellow Lincoln. Lacking any physical evidence to tie the pair to the robbery, however, the prosecution was initially stymied.

In a now-infamous stroke of inspiration, prosecutor Ray Sinetar decided to enlist math as his crime-fighting partner. He assigned probabilities to each identifying characteristic. Yellow car: one in 10, white woman with blond hair: one in three, black man with a beard: one in 10, interracial couple: one in 1,000, etc. By the time he was done, Sinetar claimed he had proven there was a mere one-in-12-million chance Janet and Malcolm were not the perps. The jury was impressed enough with this computational approach to law that they found the pair guilty of second-degree robbery.

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Book review: A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind

By Bookmarked and Brian Bethune - Friday, May 3, 2013 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Over the past two decades, neuroscience has become the new social explain-all, replacing previous behavioural Rosetta Stones that failed, from original sin to psychoanalysis as a hard science. (Burton, a physician, novelist and former chief of neurology at a San Francisco hospital, reminds readers of the days when schizophrenia was attributed to overbearing mothers.) Today, fuelled by advances in imaging techniques that light up brain areas associated with various human passions, from religion to sex, neuroscience is expected to tell us the real story about everything from stock market crashes to criminal behaviour to the workings of consciousness itself.

Except it won’t, Burton argues soberly, because it really can’t. Using our minds to study our minds is like using a second-hand, scratched and smudged microscope to examine bacteria. Amazing contraptions as our brains are, they are “hard-wired to experience unjustified feelings about ourselves, our thoughts and our actions”; our curiosity and desire to understand are so overwhelming, we are brilliant in detecting patterns in the data our senses provide, even when there is no pattern to perceive. When humans train their inquiring minds on the outer universe, we have ways of correcting for our biases that don’t work when we look inward, Burton says. Understanding the brain’s mechanics is a spectacular and useful achievement for medical science—this part controls speech, that part lights up when the object of desire comes into view—but tells us nothing of what is consciously experienced.

For readers comfortable with a neurological mind map that resembles a series of your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine Rorschach inkblots, the Skeptic’s Guide is a delight. Burton’s tour through the latest brain research demolishes certainty like a daisy-cutter bomb. By the time he points to a study indicating that brain images themselves are a potent factor in convincing people of neuroscience’s new claims—our brains are impressed by the elegant shapes and ethereal colours—he has us. We have seen the pattern, even if Burton keeps begging us to distrust it.

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

Book review: ‘Country Girl: A Memoir’

By Patricia Dawn Robertson - Thursday, May 2, 2013 at 8:00 PM - 0 Comments

Irish writer O’Brien’s first novel, The Country Girls, was written in three short weeks. It poured out of her from the safe distance of her London digs. The sexually explicit story of two Irish girls coming of age was set in the 1950s and published in 1960. Public reaction back home in County Clare was swift and merciless. The Irish censor banned the book, O’Brien’s parents were ashamed and the parish priest burned it. The die was cast: Ireland had given birth to its first heretical female scribe. (Irish poet Thomas McCarthy has since dubbed O’Brien the “Solzhenitsyn of Irish life.”)

In this lively and lyrical memoir, which took three painful years to write, O’Brien outlines her life story with the mordant detachment of a trained observer and the eloquence of a novelist. O’Brien, who once told an interviewer that “unhappy houses are a very good incubation for stories,” proves her maxim as she tracks her bumpy journey from country girl to Chelsea matron.

The most compelling material in the first half is her elopement with writer Ernest Gébler. As marriages go, it was a Shackleton expedition. Gébler, less than thrilled with The Country Girls’ success, proclaimed his wife’s talent “resided in her knickers.” That didn’t stop him from cashing her publisher’s cheques.

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‘Salt Sugar Fat’: The seductive powers of processed foods

By Jonathan Chevreau - Thursday, May 2, 2013 at 8:00 PM - 0 Comments

Walk into any grocery or convenience store and you’ll be confronted by the unholy trinity of the processed-food industry: salt, sugar and fat. These are the not-so-secret ingredients most human beings can barely resist. They’re also the basis of enormous profits for Kraft, Kellogg, Nestlé and PepsiCo. Once tasted, readers may also be unable to resist Moss’s book, subtitled How the Food Giants Hooked Us.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter at The New York Times interviewed most of the captains of this industry, discovering that many “go out of their way” to avoid eating their own products. Clearly, they know something the rest of us do not. Until now. Moss’s book is a consumer manifesto to guide the unwary away from the shoals of the processed-foods industry. The moment you leave the fresh-produce section of the grocery store, says Moss, you enter this unhealthy netherworld of slick packaging and advertising.

Behind such legendary advertising slogans as Lay’s Potato Chips’ “Betcha can’t eat just one” lies a concerted effort by food scientists to craft the perfect “bliss point,” one that renders the average person incapable of resisting. Sugar and fat exert the same addictive pull as heroin does for drug addicts, while salt transforms bland to savoury. Some products, like s’mores, combine all three with devastating caloric consequences. To fight back, Moss says, consumers need to scrutinize the labels and fine print on packaging. Far easier to resist at the point of sale than when these concoctions find their way into the larder and refrigerator.

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Why sports fans fall so deeply in love

By Bookmarked and Jonathon Gatehouse - Thursday, May 2, 2013 at 11:50 AM - 0 Comments

For millions in this country, spring is the season of false promise. The stirrings of hope followed by a few weeks of joy, then, almost inevitably, heartbreak and mourning. In the 20 seasons since a Canadian NHL club captured the Stanley Cup, hockey fans have become accustomed to the disappointment. But it hasn’t stopped them from caring—sometimes beyond all reason—about the accomplishments and failures of their home teams.

That irrational attachment to a bunch of millionaires playing a game for the profit of of billionaires is most often explained away as a national obsession, or maybe something akin to a religion. But as Simons points out, what motivates passionate sports fans is a lot more complex than what happens on the field or at the rink. “The first great power a team has is to grant us the answer to the who-am-I question, to give us that pride in ourselves, even when other parts of our lives aren’t okay. But the even better power they have is to confirm our identity and turn our pride into self-esteem.”

In his quest to unravel just why that is, Simons—a committed fan of the California Golden Bears and the San Jose Sharks—delves deep into the science of fandom. What he finds is a nexus of almost everything that makes humans tick, from hormonal reactions to questions of identity, and even romantic love.

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How Stalin started the Cold War

By Bookmarked and Katie Engelhart - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 at 9:30 AM - 0 Comments

For decades, Cold War scholarship focused on a single question: whodunit? In the ’40s and ’50s, historians blamed the Soviets. In the ’60s, however, a wave of revisionism washed ashore. New scholars argued that the postwar East-West escalation was, in fact, a product of American bullishness—rooted either in America’s “foreign policy idealism” or its “military-industrial complex,” depending on the interpretation.

In his masterful new account of the early Cold War period, historian Robert Gellately takes us back to square one. Whodunit? Stalin. “Moscow made all the first moves,” writes Gellately, a proud Newfoundlander who teaches at Florida State University. The West’s main crime was complacency. Gellately takes aim at FDR, who believed for too long that he could soften Soviet ambition with kindness. In meetings of the “Big Three,” Roosevelt often sided with Stalin, at Churchill’s expense. Gellately recounts a famous episode at the 1943 Tehran conference. At dinner one evening, Stalin joked that the Allies should execute 50,000-100,000 German Army leaders outright. Roosevelt joked back that the number should be set at 49,000. Churchill rose from the table and stormed away

Still, Churchill does not get away unscathed. Both Britain and the U.S., increasing fearful of Germany, ignored Soviet acts of barbarity—like the 1941 Katyn massacre, which saw some 22,000 Poles slaughtered by Russians. Soon after news of the massacre broke, British officials instructed the BBC to praise the Kremlin for its wartime “co-operation.”

But Gellately’s account does not get lost in high-level diplomatic machinations. It is also noteworthy for its grim rendering of life in Stalin’s backyard. Gellately uses a mass of archival material, released from Soviet archives in 1992, to account for the estimated 25 million Soviet lives lost to the Communist experiment—and to the exporting of Stalin’s revolution. The book ends in 1953: when Stalin died, “in circumstances that are still subject to controversy.” For four cold decades, his war lived on.

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Book review: The Woman Upstairs

By Bookmarked and Anne Kingston - Tuesday, April 30, 2013 at 9:10 AM - 0 Comments

Lonely, single female teachers who yearn for emotional connection are fixtures in fiction—from Muriel Sparks’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal. To that list we can now add Nora Eldridge, the 42-year-old narrator and protagonist of Claire Messud’s compelling new cerebral melodrama.

Nora, who is 37 when the story begins, teaches third grade in Cambridge, Mass. She’s a self-described “good girl,” a reliable, invisible “woman upstairs” who lives alone and takes pride in never inconveniencing anyone. With middle-age encroaching, however, Nora is a cauldron of rage and self-loathing for always sublimating her needs and artistic aspirations to those of others—foremost, her sick mother whose death meant no one in the world “loved her the most.” Her greatest sense of betrayal, however, stems from her doomed relationship with the cosmopolitan Shahid family newly arrived from Paris: her student, Reza; his mother, the Italian-born installation artist Sirena; and his father, Skandar, a prominent academic now visiting Harvard.

Besotted by the bunch of them, the childless Nora ingratiates herself into the household—babysitting Reza, sharing a studio with Sirena and striking up a friendship with Skandar. Mistaking kindness for intimacy, she constructs a rich, line-crossing fantasy life in which they offer her escape: “I wanted a full and independent engagement with each of them, unrelated to the others,” she recounts. “I needed their family-ness.” It’s not a spoiler to say Nora’s needs aren’t met.

Messud is a sharp, nuanced storyteller, able to compel the reader even when the narrative bogs down. Comparisons to Ibsen’s A Doll House are also heavy-handed—from Nora’s name to her doll-house-size dioramas depicting rooms of famous women artists. Still, Messud’s Nora is an original—a caustic vessel for exploring obsession, dependence, loneliness and creative expression. And while the novel’s resolution is a long time coming, it packs a quiet, shocking, but satisfying wallop.

Book review: Just What Kind of a Mother Are You?

By Bookmarked and Anne Kingston - Monday, April 29, 2013 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

Paula Daly gets the action moving on the first page with a creepy man watching young girls on their way home from school. You just know nothing good will come of this. This taut page-turner of a novel, set in England’s fabled Lake District, home to twee villages, Beatrix Potter bunnies, and dreamy Wordsworth poetry, torques every parent’s nightmare.Everyone’s attention is suddenly diverted from their Kendal Mint Cakes when Lisa, harried working mother of three, messes up big time: her chaotic life screeches to a heart-thumping halt when a child—not hers, but her best friend’s—disappears on her watch. Oh, and there’s a serial rapist on the loose.

Lisa makes a bit of a hash trying to set things right, enduring public humiliations and private recriminations. None of us want to be in her Wellies, and while we can’t resist the itch on the brain that asks, “What sort of a bonehead loses someone else’s child?”— deep inside we know perfectly well that we could all be that sort of bonehead.

Daly has a gift for realistic, snappy dialogue, She shifts the action between a series of well-drawn female protagonists and moves the narrative from first-person to third-person to keep the reader slightly off balance. Gradually, the veneer of perfection and capability that underlines this tale gets destroyed by an infestation of lies.

This story is as much about cornering a criminal as it is about aiming a light on the human knack for acquiring martyr complexes, an affliction that sticks to all the characters in varying degrees. During the course of her bumbling attempts at finding missing Lucinda, Lisa uncovers something far more pernicious, something you don’t see coming. As one character admits, “We all want everyone to think our family’s perfect, that we got it right.” To what length would any of us go to to prove that?

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Book review: The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and Their Enduring Power

By Bookmarked and Brian Bethune - Sunday, April 28, 2013 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

In 1984, Navasky, then publisher of the leftist magazine The Nation, decided to publish a cartoon by David Levine, depicting Henry Kissinger in bed, under an American flag and on top of a naked woman who had a globe for a head. The message was obvious enough and, in Navasky’s mind, surely congenial to Nation writers and editors: the United States, as personified by its former secretary of state, was engaged in “screwing” the world. Two hours after Navasky okayed the drawing, he was presented with a petition signed by 25 staff members—out of a work force the puzzled publisher thought totalled only 23—denouncing the image’s sexism. That experience, reinforced by the deadly riots over the Danish Mohammad cartoons of 2005, set Navasky to searching for the reasons behind the galvanizing emotional impact of political images.

He investigates the three leading theories. Content is the obvious choice, except the same message expressed in words doesn’t seem to have a fraction of the impact. Content, in fact, looms largest when it’s misinterpreted: New Yorker cover illustrator Barry Blitt was mocking Obama caricatures, not Barack and Michelle Obama themselves, in 2008 when he portrayed the presidential candidate and his wife dressed in terrorist garb and doing a fist bump, but it was Obama supporters who poured vitriol on the magazine. Second, the image theory: simply to draw something is to make it come alive in a way it wasn’t before (the cartoonist as creator of what he is mocking). Finally, neuroaesthetics: some scientists believe our facial recognition hardwiring responds more powerfully to caricatures than to the real thing, because the former exaggerates the very features we use to distinguish one face from another. In other words, if you harbour strong feelings about Richard Nixon, you will respond more quickly and forcefully to a caricature of the former president than to a photo.

There’s something to be said for each theory, Navasky suggests, but explanations are clearly of less interest to him than the rich survey he offers: exquisite samples from two centuries of political caricatures, from Hogarth to Levine.

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The Divorce of Henry VIII: The Untold Story

By Bookmarked and Patricia Treble - Saturday, April 27, 2013 at 9:50 AM - 0 Comments

It took six years for Henry VIII to divorce wife No. 1, Catherine of Aragon. While England was being torn apart by the scandal, the king relied on Gregorio Casali, an Italian diplomat employed to look after England’s interests at the Vatican, to persuade Pope Clement VII to end the marriage. Aside from the odd mention—Shakespeare calls him “Gregory de Cassado”—Casali had vanished from history before Catherine Fletcher brought him back in an absorbing investigation of the diplomat’s ultimately failed attempt to fulfill his employer’s wishes.

As she explains, part of Henry’s problem was timing. Italy was in turmoil. When the king started down the road to divorce in May 1527, Rome and the Vatican were being sacked by unpaid troops of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. The pope was besieged. For Clement’s family, the Medicis, to get back into power in Florence, they needed the increasingly victorious army of Charles V, who just happened to be the nephew of Catherine of Aragon. The pope would do anything rather than rule on a divorce that was splitting Europe into factions and threatened the Church, already under attack from Martin Luther’s Reformation movement.

Still, Casali, not even 30 years old yet already a seasoned diplomat, soldier and well-connected Vatican power player, and his relatives—diplomacy was a family business—never gave up. They entertained lavishly, played patrons against each other and tried to follow Henry’s evolving tactical position. And pursue their own interests, which often conflicted with Henry’s, including getting a Venetian bishopric, fending off the relatives of Gregorio’s rich bride, and even an alliance with Suleiman the Magnificent, who was pushing his Turkish empire to the gates of Vienna. There are so many plot twists that it can be difficult keeping track of the cast of characters. Indeed, the only boring part of this book is the title.

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

David Sedaris hits middle age

By Joanne Latimer - Friday, April 26, 2013 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments

In previous books, David Sedaris has mined his childhood and early twenties for amusing anecdotes, leaving many fans to wonder if there’s anything left to say. There is. Plenty.

His latest essays sparkle with newness and the confidence of a writer hitting middle age. Sure, fans will recognize the cast of characters—his boyfriend, Hugh, his sisters, his country home—but this familiarity only enriches reading about Sedaris’s neurotic flailing. Success has given him more resources and, with this book, everyone benefits.

Sedaris begins the collection with “Dentists without Borders,” a hilarious American counterpoint to the aria of dental misery in Martin Amis’s memoir Experience.

Sedaris’s signature anxiety undermines his jet-setting lifestyle, leaving us free from jealousy to savour stories that could stultify if told by another. He puts his usual unexpected twist on the mundane—getting his passport stolen, waiting in line for coffee at a Marriott. He feels “Titanically gay” at a Costco. He describes Australia as Canada in a thong. Turning 50 has only added to Sedaris’s arsenal of life experiences to lampoon, like his colonoscopy.

Occasionally, things get political. The gay marriage issue, Sedaris quips, is “like voting on whether or not redheads should be allowed to celebrate Christmas.”

Stories of Sedaris’s father are peppered throughout the collection and are, predictably, unflattering. Young David was belittled by his dad, made to feel second fiddle to a local swimming champ, and even Donny Osmond. Sedaris couldn’t get his father’s approval even after writing a book that landed on the New York Times bestseller list. Jeez. There is a shocking moment of score settling with his dad that is so emotionally complicated it made this reader impatient for Sedaris’s next seemingly light-hearted book of amusing anecdotes. It’s funny—funny like a spade to the face.

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

Dear J.D. Salinger

By Jessica Allen - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 at 6:32 PM - 0 Comments

Antony Di Gesu/San Diego Historical Society/Hulton Archive Collection/Getty Images

Nine letters written in the early 1940s by author J.D. Salinger to Marjorie Sheard, a young woman living in Toronto, have been acquired by the Morgan Library & Museum in New York and shared with the New York Times.

The letters are ”a wonderful opening onto [Salinger's] earliest years as a writer,” the Morgan Library told the paper. “He’s just at the threshold of his career, but his voice is there.”

Sheard was an aspiring writer and began corresponding with Salinger after reading some of his early short stories in magazines such as Esquire and Collier’s. In a letter dated Nov. 18, 1941, Salinger told Sheard to look for a new short story about to be published in The New Yorker. It was about “a prep school kid on his Christmas vacation,” which had spurred his editor to ask for an entire series on the character. Still, the author had his doubts: “I’ll try a couple more, anyway,” he wrote, “and if I begin to miss my mark I’ll quit.”

The character, of course, was Holden Caulfield. And Salinger,  just 22-years-old, asked Sheard to share her thoughts on the story once she’d read it.

In turn, Sheard, who was roughly the same age as Salinger, wrote to him for writing advice: “Seems to me you have the instincts to avoid the usual Vassar-girl tripe,” he wrote in a letter dated Sept. 4, 1941. “You can’t go around buying Cadillacs on what the small mags pay,” he wrote, “but that doesn’t really matter, does it?”

Around the same time that Salinger was corresponding with Sheard–often in a humourous and flirty tone, notes the New York Times (he went so far as to ask for a large photograph of her, and later apologized for his brazenness)–he was also, on occasion,  approaching women for dates in New York, claiming to be a goalie for the Montreal Canadiens.

Sheard, now 95, “stored these letters in a shoe box in a closet,” reports the New York Times. “About six years ago, she moved to a nursing home and gave the letters to a relative, who kept them in a dresser drawer.”

Her family made the decision to sell them in order to cover the costs of increasing health care.

Maclean’s latest e-book: Justin Trudeau — A life lived in the spotlight

By Bookmarked - Friday, April 19, 2013 at 6:37 PM - 0 Comments

What does Canadian politics do about Justin Trudeau? What will he do for himself? What are the possibilities—and the limits—of a sunny personality, a magic name and a polarized electorate?

The member of Parliament for Papineau, Que., is 41 years old and has been in elected politics since 2008. He has a modest CV of accomplishments from his days before he entered politics. But that is an odd thing to say, of course, because Justin Trudeau has been in politics, in one way or another, since the day he entered the world.

He has never known a life that wasn’t public. His birth on Christmas Day, 1971, to Margaret Trudeau and her husband, prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, was front-page news. He grew up while a nation discussed the breakup of his parents’ marriage and watched him and his brothers at play and on the campaign trail. Years later, Canadians grieved along with him when his brother Michel and, later, his father died.

Throughout those decades, some of Maclean’s finest reporters—Peter C. Newman, Paul Wells, John Geddes, Aaron Wherry, Jonathon Gatehouse, Scott Feschuk, to name only a few—have watched Justin Trudeau, too. We covered his eulogy at his father’s funeral and were first to report when he began talking about a run for the House of Commons. Fifty weeks ago, we suggested the Liberals should consider him as their next leader. We have covered every step of his campaign, asking hard questions.

Those stories are collected here for the first time, along with photo essays that illustrate a vivid evocation of a life lived under the gaze of millions, for $2.99 until May 3 (afterwards, for $3.99.)

Buy the e-book here.

Sunday reading

By Bookmarked - Friday, April 19, 2013 at 2:33 PM - 0 Comments

Once the most famous comic-strip artist in the America, Capp created 'Li'l Abner' (Capp Enterprises)

Our latest book reviews:

• Al Capp: A Life to the Contrary, by Michael Schumacher and Denis Kitchen, review by Jaime J. Weinman

• Drunk Mom: A Memoir, by Jowita Bydlowska, review by Anne Kingston

• Red Doc>, Anne Carson, review by Brian D. Johnson

• The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, by Kristopher Jansma, review by Richard Warnica

• The Hungry Ghosts, by Shyam Selvadurai, review by Dafna Izenberg

• A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel: Murder, Money, and an Epic Power Struggle in China, by Pin Ho and Wenguang Huang, review by Brian Bethune

Continue…

Book review: A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel

By Bookmarked and Brian Bethune - Friday, April 19, 2013 at 11:05 AM - 0 Comments

As a lurid tale of wealthy and powerful people behaving badly, the authors’ account of what has been unfolding in China since November 2011 can’t be beat. There’s the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood by Gu Kailai, the ambitious wife of Bo Xilai, an even more ambitious princeling (as the children of the founding fathers of the Chinese Communist Revolution are known), and their joint downfall. There’s even the high-speed crash of a Ferrari carrying yet another princeling (third generation, this time) and two young women, all engaged in an intricate—given a Ferrari’s interior space—sex act.

This detailed recreation argues, however, that the story is not just one of a Chinese Lord and Lady Macbeth reaching too high and falling far. It’s also part of a vicious political struggle within a corrupt regime that still lacks an orderly means of distributing spoils and high offices. Fine, except that the writers’ own scrupulousness in noting which claims are well grounded and which are not, highlights a tale that is largely a collection of facts in search of a unifying narrative.

Take the Ferrari crash, an isolated incident in that nothing else in the book depends on it. That the male driver was naked when pulled from the wreckage is mentioned as something unquestioned, but that the two women passengers were “semi-naked” is put in the “reportedly” category. The authors’ conclusion? “Allegations of che zhen (‘car sex’) have not been substantiated.”

When it comes to the murder, far more crucial to the storyline, such uncertainty is even more disorienting. Gu may not have poisoned the Briton—there may not have been a murder at all given his heart condition. It all leads to the key truth Ho and Huang do illuminate: the effect of social media on China has not (yet) been what so many hoped for, to cast a revealing spotlight on the ruling caste, but instead to fire up a kaleidoscope of misdirection and spin.

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