Bestsellers – Week of May 18th, 2012

By Brian Bethune - Friday, May 25, 2012 at 10:09 AM - 0 Comments

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REVIEW: The Chemistry of Tears

By Dafna Izenberg - Thursday, May 24, 2012 at 10:22 AM - 0 Comments

Carey’s new novel reads like a dream, and not just for its literary virtuosity. On the surface, it seems to be the story of a nerdy spinster with a secret life—and a torrid love affair. But as she copes with a heartbreaking loss in a most unconventional manner, the book’s deeper and more universal themes emerge: our love-hate relationship with technology, our inability to comprehend death, our see-sawing needs for intimacy and autonomy.

Not that Carey indulges in such psychobabble. He’s too busy doing a seamless job linking the narratives of unlikely soulmates Catherine Gehrig and Henry Brandling. Catherine lives in modern-day London and works as a curator at a museum with a “world-famous collection of clocks and watches, automata and other wind-up machines.” When she discovers that her married lover, Matthew, has dropped dead of a heart attack, Catherine is faced with the near impossible task of hiding her grief at work. (Matthew was also her colleague.) Then the department head sequesters her in a tightly guarded annex where a unique assignment awaits—the reconstruction of a massive automated duck.

It is thus that Catherine comes across Henry, via journals he kept some 150 years earlier, when he left his consumptive son and adulterous wife and set off for Germany to have the duck built in the hopes that it might “agitate” young Percy enough to keep him alive. The scheme is out of character—Henry is more timid than intrepid and has a limited imagination—but he is so desperate to save his son that he surrenders his project to a shady ensemble of characters who bombard him with mystical notions about science and fate.

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REVIEW: Birdseye—The Adventures of a Curious Man

By Joanne Latimer - Wednesday, May 23, 2012 at 12:38 PM - 0 Comments

Fans of Kurlansky will recognize the name Birdseye, a man mentioned in three of the author’s earlier works. Clarence Birdseye was an American original—a college dropout and adventurer who died in 1956 with over 200 patents to his name. The advances he made in frozen food processing changed the way we distributed food as society became urbanized. If the history of frozen food doesn’t sound fun, you’ve underestimated Kurlansky. He has a gift for turning dry topics (salt, cod) into narrative gold. This biography is packed with swashbuckling tales of a curious man who made a fortune betting on his own ingenuity.

First, Kurlansky defends Birdseye’s legacy from today’s locavores, who probably view the “father of frozen food” as the Antichrist. Kurlansky does this by explaining that Birdseye’s fast freezing process was welcome in a world of canned, salted, smoked or slow-frozen food. As Birdseye’s life story unfolds, we meet a voracious hunter, an entrepreneurial fur trader and heroic researcher who tried to cure Rocky Mountain spotted fever in Montana. Next, he took his bride and new baby to the wilds of Labrador, where he marvelled at the Inuits’ ability to flash-freeze their fish. In 1924, he perfected and patented a mechanized process called multiplate freezing, then sold it for $23.5 million just before the Depression. Birdseye then turned his attention to improving portable freezers and food dehydration machines. Always juggling several pursuits, he formed a light bulb company, where he designed a brighter filament and created a built-in reflector. Angina slowed him down, but didn’t stop him from inventing a new process for making paper and writing a book about gardening. He died at age 68.

Inside this book lies a wonderful mini-bio of a medical missionary, Dr. Wilfred Grenfell, and an impassioned short history of ice. This reader bets ice is the topic of Kurlansky’s next big book. Avid poker player Birdseye would be the first to take that bet.

REVIEW: Squeeze this!: a cultural history of the accordion in America

By Mike Doherty - Tuesday, May 22, 2012 at 4:50 PM - 0 Comments

As musical instruments go, the accordion is an odd duck. It has both bellows and buttons, reeds and keys. It’s cumbersome but designed to be portable. It’s stylistically versatile, but its sound stands out in any ensemble. Its detractors are legion, but even its proponents disagree: is it the homely instrument of the common folk, or a testament to human ingenuity and a vehicle for self-improvement?

Jacobson, an ethnomusicologist who started playing the accordion in Brooklyn 10 years ago, has a convert’s zeal and a scholar’s erudition. Her book is an academic resource, a detailed history, and a quirky travelogue through U.S. folk festivals. Though its prose may strike a few bum notes, it tells us how the story of the accordion echoes and amplifies aspects of American history.

Squeezed in between a dense beginning and a rambling last chapter are a number of thought-provoking insights and mini-biographies. Jacobson takes us from the instrument’s 19th-century genesis in Austria and Italy to its early 20th-century arrival on American shores, then through the development of the “accordion industrial complex.” She details its early-1950s heyday, its precipitous decline after the rise of the guitar, and finally its resurrection of sorts among Brooklyn hipsters, San Francisco devotees and alternative rock bands across the country.

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The Beach Boys have a senior moment

By Rosemary Counter - Tuesday, May 22, 2012 at 4:33 PM - 0 Comments

Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Depending on your point of view, the Beach Boys are either back again or they never left. For five decades, splintered versions of “America’s band” have been touring under the Beach Boy name, but it’s the new incarnation that’s selling out arenas: Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine, Bruce Johnston and David Marks, who was 14 the last time he was part of the band in 1963. Like many fans, Canadian music journalist Mark Dillon fell for the early melodies. “I gravitated to the fun-in-the-sun songs,” he says. Dillon attended his first concert in 1979 when the Beach Boys played the Montreal Forum. He was 10.

“I remember Brian being off to the side, living in his own world,” says Dillon, who grew up in Montreal and lives in Toronto. Even the squeaky-clean Beach Boys have some dark stories, and Dillon’s been dreaming of telling them for two decades.

For his book marking half a century since the band formed, Fifty Sides of The Beach Boys, Dillon spoke to 50 people—everyone from Mike Love to drummer Hal Blaine to Alice Cooper—on how the songs came to be. None are as simple or innocent as they seem.

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REVIEW: Arcadia

By Sarah Weinman - Tuesday, May 22, 2012 at 11:02 AM - 0 Comments

To the outside world, a commune can be something of a freak show, easily misunderstood and dismissed. And the inhabitants of Arcadia, the 1970s-era western New York commune that serves as the world of Lauren Groff’s novel, appear to fit the bill, what with the living in a ramshackle mansion, the fluid sexual relationships, decided lack of money, and dark charisma of a leader named Handy, whose word is law, decreed with seduction and occasional violence.

For Bit, the novel’s narrator, Arcadia is the only world he knows. He was born not long after the commune’s own birth to parents Hannah, a dreamy-eyed historian, and Abe, a more earthbound carpenter. Through Bit’s childlike viewpoint we see Arcadia for the promise it holds but also its inevitable collapse: its denizens grow restless, longing for what lies beyond the mansion’s borders. Inner turmoil and dwindling finances spoil what began with noble intentions, and as Bit grows up he finds himself thrust into the terrifying spotlight shone upon him by larger cities and greater conflicts.

Arcadia demonstrates the possibility of idealism made manifest. Just because a utopian society may be destined to fail doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying, as Groff (also the author of a previous novel and short story collection) demonstrates in languid prose and with wise observations about human behaviour. The denizens of Arcadia believe themselves to be pioneers. And many years later, when barely remembered by anyone other than Bit, the lessons he learned as a child, and the feeling of community won and lost, linger with him—and us—to the very end.

REVIEW: Crusoe: Daniel Defoe, Robert Knox and the Creation of a Myth

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, May 22, 2012 at 9:56 AM - 0 Comments

One of the most charming aspects of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), generally regarded as the first English detective novel, is the way the kindly old steward Gabriel Betteredge, when troubled by doubt or anxiety, would turn to his Robinson Crusoe and invariably find a passage that soothed his worries or bucked him up. Crusoe has been entrenched for so long in our cultural DNA—its 1,000-plus direct descendants, known collectively as Robinsonades, include TV shows like Lost and novels, like Gulliver’s Travels, that are classics in their own right—that we have forgotten Daniel Defoe’s novel once functioned not just as a grand adventure tale, but as a kind of secular Bible. From its 1719 publication, writes Frank, Defoe’s true hold on his readers has been his gospel of positive thinking: face up to your circumstances however grim, work hard to improve them, count your blessings rather than your sorrows, keep the faith and muddle through.

Which makes it all the more fascinating that Defoe, whose earlier self-help books included The Family Instructor (dealing with unruly children) and Conjugal Lewdness (sex in marriage), found it much easier to dish out honest-living advice than to act on it. He published his great work anonymously—hardly surprising, given Defoe rented his home under an assumed name and was often on the run, all in aid of evading creditors. (Not that he was always successful: in 1703 alone, Defoe was sent to the public pillory three times.) And when a second publisher was hauled into court for producing a pirate Crusoe edition, the man indignantly claimed that Defoe had sold him the rights too.

One matter Defoe, a congenital plagiarist (usually of his own earlier works), was reticent on was his sources for Crusoe. They ranged from Homer’s Odyssey to memoirs of his own day, including Robert Knox’s account of his 20-year captivity in Sri Lanka, which was full of eerily similar incidents. Comparing, contrasting and weaving together the tumultuous lives of Knox, Defoe and Crusoe himself, Frank has opened a window on the origins of one of Western civilization’s most enduring stories.

Bestsellers – Week of May 11th, 2012

By Brian Bethune - Friday, May 18, 2012 at 1:53 PM - 0 Comments

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REVIEW: Heart of Dankness: Underground Botanists, Outlaw Farmers, and the Race For the Cannabis Cup

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, May 18, 2012 at 11:25 AM - 0 Comments

This fascinating plunge into the demimonde of marijuana cultivation is a trip, in every sense. It’s an armchair travel book that ranges from Amsterdam’s coffee shops to a California plantation hidden in a sequoia forest. And it’s a grail quest by a witty American journalist not afraid to inhale. Haskall Smith’s mission is to find the ultimate high, what the cognoscenti call “dankness.” But like the Amsterdam judges who award the annual Cannabis Cup, the Super Bowl of pot appreciation, he faces a paradox: “Would I be too stoned to recognize ‘dankness’ when I found it?”

Smith, a novelist and contributor to the Los Angeles Times, stays straight enough to do some fine reportage. We learn that weed is the new wine, with dizzying varieties of taste, nose and terroir. The two basic cannabis strains are as distinct as cabernet and sauvignon blanc—indica, with its stupifying “body stone,” and savita with its espresso buzz of mental acuity. Then there are the names—such as Himalayan Snow, Green Crack, AK-47, White Widow, Lemon Haze, Trainwreck, Casey Jones and Connie Chung. As Smith tracks down cult-like teams of botanists breeding new strains of superweed, he meets some remarkable ganja gurus—notably Michael Backes, a Los Angeles visionary who helped create sci-fi technologies for Iron Man, Spider-Man and Jurassic Park.

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REVIEW: Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

By Cathy Gulli - Thursday, May 17, 2012 at 7:20 PM - 0 Comments

In her memoir, the American journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner contemplates her life through a variety of lenses including motherhood, marriage and friendship. But the book is in no way a lament for days gone by. Rather, Quindlen crafts a witty and poignant homage to lessons learned and experiences gained—and even better, she offers a toast to the future.

Quindlen, who for years wrote a popular New York Times column about being a working mom, is a master of clever word twists that contain the wisdom that comes only with age. Petty marital disagreements, she says, are like hothouse tomatoes: “They get way bigger than they ought to, and they bear little resemblance to the real thing.” Of the pressure to maintain a youthful appearance, Quindlen writes that “women were once permitted a mourning period for their faces; it was called middle-age. Now . . . we have the science of embalming disguised as grooming.”

These notes are as much personal truisms as they are social commentaries. Quindlen takes on a number of loaded topics. The secret to an enduring marriage, for example, lies in realizing that it is bigger than both spouses. “It’s also families, friends, traditions, landmarks, knowledge, history. It’s children.” For all the merits of the feminist revolution, she admits that many women got more than they bargained for—80-hour work weeks, plus time spent in the kitchen, the car, at the athletic field and overseeing homework or housework. Young women today who want a different life aren’t ungrateful; they’re sane.

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REVIEW: Floating Gold: A Natural (& Unnatural) History of Ambergris

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, May 17, 2012 at 5:30 PM - 0 Comments

Everything about ambergris—hardened sperm whale dung that unpredictably washes up on shore—is as alluringly mysterious as the perfumes it fuels. Solid information is near impossible to pin down, from the unknown genius who centuries ago first realized that this stuff is just what’s needed to allow more pleasant scents to linger on the skin for hours, to those who gather and sell ambergris to its end users. The finest grade goes for up to $20,000 a kilo, and the buyers are not necessarily perfumers: during the tense Camp David negotiations of 1978, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s astrologer distributed pieces to the Arab negotiators to dissolve in their tea, in order to bolster their stamina. Ambergris is the kind of singularity—in nature and in human affairs—that cries out for investigation by an obsessed scientist who can write well. In Kemp, the world’s most lusted-after poop has found its man.

Kemp is an American microbiologist, not a cetologist, and he had hardly heard of ambergris before a suspected lump of it washed up on a nearby beach while he was spending a year in New Zealand. Kemp watched in amazement as locals jostled to divvy up what turned out to be 500 kg of worthless lard, rather than $10-million worth of whale feces, but he was even more astonished to learn how little even experts know.

He meets collectors, who speak of tense standoffs and occasional violent clashes on lonely beaches, and scientists unsure if ambergris kills the sperm whales who make it (via intestinal rupture). The perfume critic for the New York Times tells Kemp perfume-makers don’t use it any more. But independent perfumers—the sort who provide clients with half-ounce bespoke scents for $1,000 or more—show him their supplies, and French ambergris trader Bernard Perrin says his clients include Chanel. Perrin also sells to buyers in Singapore. What they want with it, he has no idea. Perhaps it goes in their tea or, like King Charles II, they sprinkle it on their scrambled eggs.

Augusten Borroughs’ anti-self-help book

By Julia McKinnell - Wednesday, May 16, 2012 at 11:55 AM - 0 Comments

Raincoast Books

Repeating positive affirmations such as “I’m a loveable person” may boost the spirits of already happy people, but it can leave sad people feeling worse, according to research by psychologists at the University of Waterloo and the University of New Brunswick. It made perfect sense to American memoirist Augusten Burroughs when he read about the study in 2009.

In an interview last week, Burroughs said the Canadian findings went “right into what I instinctively felt, which was that affirmations are completely absurd.” The research is the starting point for Burroughs’s new book, a truly different self-help guide called This is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More.

“The truth is, it is not going to help to stand in front of a mirror, look into your own eyes, and lie to yourself,” he writes. Burroughs would know. His 2002 bestseller Running With Scissors is a fearlessly honest account of a bizarre childhood with a mother who sent him to live with her psychiatrist; its follow-up, Dry, is a squirmingly detailed account of his near fatal addiction to alcohol.

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REVIEW: Driving Mr.Yogi Berra, Ron Guidry, and Baseball’s Greatest Gift

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, May 16, 2012 at 11:51 AM - 0 Comments

After years of steroid scandals and cold-hearted business decisions, Araton has given us an old-fashioned story about the redemptive power of baseball. The book follows the relationship of two former New York Yankees greats, catcher Yogi Berra and pitcher Ron Guidry. They first met in the ’70s when Guidry was a star and Berra, a generation older, was a coach. But their friendship really blossomed in 1999 when Guidry started driving Berra to the Yankees’ spring training in Tampa, a ritual that turns the two men into a sort of baseball odd couple, with the dignified Southerner Guidry becoming a sidekick to Berra, the ultimate lovable grumpy old man.

Araton, who covers sports for the New York Times, is obviously in love with the Yankees’ traditions of “pomp and pathos,” and enjoys showing us how two old, retired players can still be relevant to those traditions even in a computer-dominated era. We see them disturbed by changes in the game: Berra notes that catchers’ equipment is now “all lightweight and fibreglass stuff,” and Guidry doesn’t like the computerization of baseball (“it seems like we’ve been brainwashed into getting so much information”). But unlike the old players in Moneyball, they’re treated with respect and awe for their old-fashioned ways. “I had this tremendous feeling of being part of the Yankees family, of tradition,” pitcher David Cone recalls of meeting Berra.

There’s also a sad undertone to the story, emphasized by Araton’s decision to start the book with a bad fall Berra took in 2010: Guidry’s bittersweet knowledge that Berra might not be able to keep coming to spring training for long. We also see the prickly, stubborn side of Berra, who refused to talk to Yankee owner George Steinbrenner for 14 years and forced Steinbrenner into an apology. But the overriding theme of the book is Guidry’s fierce respect for Berra’s age and wisdom. When he pushes Berra to give advice to Yankee star Nick Swisher—and Swisher takes the advice—it’s a heartwarming moment; as Guidry puts it, “he was still able to contribute something.”

REVIEW: The Art of the Sale: Learning from the Masters About the Business of Life

By Ken MacQueen - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 at 3:42 PM - 0 Comments

Why buy a book about selling if you don’t want to sell, and the very idea of salesmen makes your skin crawl? Ah, my friend, because you need this book. It’s the key to a better life. And, if you order now, for one easy payment of $29.50, the publisher will include absolutely free, a paper cover decorated in tasteful woodgrain!

Sold yet? Well, consider your prejudice against sales. Perhaps, as the author notes, it’s rooted in probably the only sales-related book you read in school: Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller’s sadly brilliant play about the crushed dreams of door-to-door peddler Willy Loman. And when sales isn’t being denigrated, it’s simply ignored. Delves Broughton, a journalist, was baffled during his time at Harvard Business School to find that sales wasn’t even on the curriculum, though he considers selling the very engine of capitalism.

He set out to find out what makes sellers tick by talking to the best: a rug merchant in Morocco, infomercial whiz Tony Sullivan, Japan’s top insurance salesman. But wait, there’s more! He looks at the strategies of master salesmen like the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela whose products are big ideas. The author admits to a certain ambivalence about the tactics of selling but he ultimately finds something ennobling about the ability to overcome the diet of rejection that is the salesman’s lot. Selling ourselves to an indifferent world is a skill we all need to acquire, he concludes, “as much a part of growing up as learning to read and write.” What is life really, but one big sales pitch?

REVIEW: Mr.Broadway: the inside story of the Shuberts, the shows, and the stars

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, May 14, 2012 at 11:39 AM - 0 Comments

Schoenfeld’s memoir of his decades as a Broadway producer was published posthumously (he died in 2008), but even if he were alive, it would seem like a missive from a lost world of theatre showmanship. Originally a lawyer for the powerful theatre owner J.J. Shubert, Schoenfeld and his partner Bernie Jacobs took over the Shubert Organization in 1972, when Broadway theatre was in a death spiral that mirrored the collapse of New York City: theatregoers were driven away, he writes, by “unsafe streets littered with trash and all kinds of hustlers and criminals.”

Schoenfeld tells us how he and Jacobs helped turn this around by vertically integrating their business: instead of just booking shows into their theatres, they began to produce and invest in the plays. Part of their strategy was to lure “young as well as minority audiences” to Broadway, starting with ’70s smashes like Pippin and A Chorus Line; another part was campaigning for “the revitalization of Times Square,” making New York more attractive for tourists. Much of the book from that point on is a catalogue of hits, from British-invasion shows like Amadeus and Phantom of the Opera to cult favourites like Sunday in the Park With George and The Goat.

Because Schoenfeld was not known as a particularly colourful producer, the book doesn’t abound in juicy anecdotes; the closest he comes to anger is when he complains at length about Nine beating his hit Dreamgirls for the Tony Award. But Schoenfeld helps us understand the business of Broadway and how backward it can be; theatres didn’t even take credit cards until he came along. And he calls attention to the neglect of Broadway by the city and state governments, which subsidize film and TV instead. The “I Love New York” campaign of the ’70s boosted theatre revenue, but “inexplicably, it was not repeated.” Still, the book provides some hope for Broadway: if Schoenfeld helped revive it when it was dead once before, someone else might come along to revive it again.

REVIEW: Sacré bleu: a comedy d’art

By Mike Doherty - Monday, May 14, 2012 at 11:38 AM - 0 Comments

What if Vincent van Gogh didn’t commit suicide, but was murdered by a little old man with a cane and a bowler hat? And what if this murderer—known as the Colorman—were in some nefarious way associated with the history of art and the production of the Old Masters’ paint? Sacré Bleu starts with this oddball premise and gets progressively weirder: it’s a supernatural detective story, an art-historical tribute to the colour blue, and a ribald romp through belle époque Paris—with sidetrips to Michelangelo’s Italy, the building of Hadrian’s Wall, and the Stone Age.

The Ohio-born Moore, known for his bestselling series of “yuppie vampire” books such as You Suck and Bite Me, also rewrites literature and history from the point of view of made-up, or reimagined, minor characters. His novel Lamb introduces us to Christ’s “childhood pal” Biff; Fool is told by King Lear’s Blackadder-like jester, Pocket; and Sacré Bleu shows us the lives of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters as seen through the lens of young baker and aspiring painter Lucien Lessard.

Lucien, an idealist in a decadent era, joins forces with Henri de Toulouse Lautrec—in Moore’s hands, a marvellously dissolute comic creation—to look into van Gogh’s murder. While moving through the realms of high art and the dinginess of the demimonde, Lucien and Henri encounter a number of suspiciously perfect muses and explore the sources of artistic inspiration—both aesthetic and priapic. The bleu in the title is both Monet’s ultramarine and the raciness of a blue movie.

Granted, Moore’s enterprise is somewhat silly, but he finds the right mix of homage and off-the-wall irreverence, bringing to earthy life a group of painters whose work is often derided as crowd-pleasing and pretty. But who exactly is the Colorman? We’re not telling. Zut alors!

The future of reading and publishing according to Amazon

By Peter Nowak - Friday, May 11, 2012 at 2:48 PM - 0 Comments

CP/AP-amazon.com Inc.

I had a great chat with Russ Grandinetti, the vice-president of Kindle content for Amazon, last week. We covered a bunch of topics, so I thought I’d share some of that here.

As an author, I was naturally self-interested in Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program, which lets writers self-publish and sell their own e-books through the company’s apps and devices. It seems like not a week goes by without some new story about a self-published author achieving great success this way. I can’t wait to try it myself and indeed plan to with my next book, in some markets at least.

With Amazon putting increasing effort into its self-publishing platform, I couldn’t help but wonder what its real relationship with publishers is like. As a growing competitor, it’s clear that the battles we’ve seen so far might only be a precursor to an all-out war down the road.

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Sunk and then bombed in Berlin

By Brian Bethune - Friday, May 11, 2012 at 2:14 PM - 0 Comments

Isabel Guernsey Collection

For a Canadian book published in the middle of the Second World War, Free Trip to Berlin was an arresting title. Certainly Carolyn Gossage thought so when she encountered it listed in a reference library. Pulling at the threads in Isabel Guernsey’s memoir eventually yielded the extraordinary story Gossage captures in The Accidental Captives. There are entire bookshelves dedicated to the effects of the war, the greatest upheaval in human history, on the Canadian home front (in every sense), but Gossage’s book is one of a handful to show it wasn’t only male soldiers who spent some dangerous times behind enemy lines.

Guernsey had been a passenger on the Zamzam, a decrepit British ship hastily kitted out as a neutral Egyptian liner. Setting out on a fingers-crossed run from New York to Cape Town in March 1941, the Zamzam carried a very mixed bag of more than 200 passengers, including 34 children. The majority were missionaries, mostly American but with a sprinkling of Canadians, from 20 different Christian denominations, all bound for Africa to replace—ironically enough, as it turned out—the German missionaries there who had been interned by the British.

The missionaries were joined in uneasy companionship by two dozen boisterous and hard-drinking American volunteers for an Anglo-American ambulance unit formed to serve with Gen. Charles de Gaulle’s Free French in North Africa, six equally bar-propping North Carolina tobacco executives responding to a British invitation to help establish their industry in what is now Zimbabwe, and a handful of random individuals. Most of those were women with deeply personal aims of their own, including Guernsey. In her mid-30s, well-educated (an M.A. in French from UBC), and from a well-to-do Vancouver family, Guernsey—on a visit home— had been trapped in Canada by the outbreak of the war, and wanted to rejoin her geologist husband in South Africa.

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Bestsellers – Week of May 4th, 2012

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, May 10, 2012 at 4:50 PM - 0 Comments

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REVIEW: The Lifeboat

By Jen Cutts - Thursday, May 10, 2012 at 10:22 AM - 0 Comments

First-time novelist Charlotte Rogan found the inspiration for The Lifeboat in a 19th-century criminal case: two men stranded on a lifeboat were found guilty of murder for killing other passengers to save themselves. It’s a classic moral question, one you might have breezily explored in a high school ethics class: who do you toss out when the boat is sinking fast? Most of us will never have to answer that question (Survivor contestants don’t count). But Rogan’s story—an addictive read that’s over too soon—gets us awfully close.

The book opens with 22-year-old Grace being charged with murder, and her lawyers suggesting she write down her side of things. Five days into a journey back to New York to escape the war breaking out in Europe in 1914, there is an explosion on board the ship. In the panic, Grace and 38 other passengers end up in a lifeboat, though not one that will hold them all for long. As the hours drift into days, and the hardtack and water run out, it isn’t long before, as Grace says, “the bare bones of our nature were showing.”

Loyalties in lifeboat No. 14 divide between one of the ship’s officers, Mr. Hardie, who keeps his charges in the boat and fights off other Empress passengers (wide-eyed, drowning children included) as they distance themselves from the sinking ship, and Mrs. Grant, an older, buttoned-up socialite who gains an air of moral superiority by vaguely suggesting more could have been done to save the others. Grace presents herself as a woman doing the best she can to make the right choices in an impossible situation. But she gives away hints of a ruthlessness of her own, including the details of how she came to secure her rich husband, and her spot on the lifeboat for that matter. After rescue arrives, it’s left to the lawyers to tease out whether anyone can be blamed for the death that brought Grace and two others to trial. When one of her co-defendants asks, “Is the only way we can prove our innocence by drowning?” Grace astutely suggests that perhaps a person cannot be both alive and innocent.

REVIEW: The I Ching: a biography

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, May 10, 2012 at 10:22 AM - 0 Comments

Foreigners, even foreign devotees—and they have been legion over the centuries—find The Classic of Changes fundamentally hard to engage with. Everywhere else among the world’s great civilizations, the foundational texts—the Bible, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Popol Vuh—are fundamentally narratives. They explain, or at least describe, ultimate reality via a storyline about the aims and actions of God (or the gods). Not the I Ching, the ancient Chinese text that Smith, following the current Pinyin transliteration system, usually renders as the Yijing. Taking shape about 3,000 years ago, the Yijing consists of 64 six-line symbols, all distinguished from one another by their pattern of solid (—) and broken (- -) lines. The first two hexagrams, for example, are Qian (six unbroken horizontal lines) and Kun (six broken lines). The other 62 are permutations of the first two.

From the outside looking in, hexagrams make pretty thin gruel for crafting a story, our species’ default means of making sense of otherwise random forces and events. But for millennia the Chinese, from emperors to peasants, have seen the book of nature writ clear in the Yijing’s lines. They have ceaselessly plumbed it to understand natural cycles of ebb and flow—crucial information for a culture in which, as Smith notes, the ideal has always been “to do the right thing, at the right time, in the right place, facing the right direction.” And just as entire libraries of theological tomes have followed upon four thin Christian Gospels, over time the hexagrams have spawned the narrative elements they required—names, brief descriptions of what they represented and commentaries.

Ever since the Han Dynasty declared the Yijing a Confucian classic in 136 BCE, it has infused not just Chinese art but science as well. Today Chinese scholars see relationships between the hexagrams and atomic structure, the patterns of the human genome and the eight-tier matrix of linear algebra. Their Western influence has stretched from Carl Jung’s psychology to I.M. Pei’s architecture. As Smith demonstrates, in a rather premature “biography,” the Yijing remains vibrantly alive.

REVIEW: Wild: from lost to found on the Pacific crest trail

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, May 9, 2012 at 11:28 AM - 0 Comments

At 22, Strayed loses her mother to cancer. She struggles to cope as her family drifts apart. Her own marriage crumbles. She goes through a string of bad affairs and dead-end waitressing jobs, and dabbles in heroin. At 26, feeling she has nothing left to lose, Strayed decides to hike the Pacific Crest Trail alone, shrinking her life down to what she describes as a path “two feet wide and 2,663 miles long.” Wild is her memoir.

When Strayed steps onto the trail, in the spring of 1995, she’s never done a long distance hike before, and it shows: her pack is so heavy she can barely lift it. (She names it “Monster.”) “I was alone in the wilderness with a beast of a load to carry,” she writes. After a fellow hiker helps pare down her possessions—she gets rid of a foldable saw, a box of condoms, and a giant camera flash—Monster becomes a little more manageable.

Strayed encounters rattlesnakes, bears, and every weather condition from deep snow to scorching heat; she copes with the mundane pitfalls of hiking, like unappetizing camp food, or a wet sleeping bag. And she revels in the beauty of the wilderness around her, in the relationships she builds with other hikers she meets, and in her own solitude. When she finishes at the Bridge of the Gods, between Washington and Oregon, she’s reached no real conclusions about what to do next, but it seems to be enough to trust whatever brought her there. She spends her last $2 on an ice cream cone.

REVIEW: Why Spencer Perceval had to die: the assassination of a British Prime Minister

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, May 8, 2012 at 2:19 PM - 0 Comments

Perceval, the only British prime minister ever assassinated, is known today simply for being gunned down in the lobby of the House of Commons 200 years ago, on May 11, 1812. But Linklater, despite not much liking the victim, makes a convincing case that Perceval deserves to be remembered for far more, that he was a singularly important prime minister, a man, so to speak, well worth shooting. As for the hapless but oddly sympathetic killer, Liverpool businessman John Bellingham, he too has a story worth recording.

Linklater draws a parallel between the assassinations of Perceval and John F. Kennedy: both died in the midst of heightened international tensions (the Cold War for JFK, the long Napoleonic wars for Perceval), and both deaths threw their leaderless governments into panic mode. The author only draws the parallel, however, to highlight a crucial point of difference: Americans reacted with grief to the president’s murder, while tens of thousands of Britons greeted the prime minister’s killing with “the most savage expressions of joy and exultation,” in the words of an alarmed opposition MP.

Perceval was an iron-willed evangelical Christian not above using political guile and dictatorial methods to further his two passions: ending the slave trade and carrying on the struggle against Napoleon—two eventual victories that owe a lot to him. But in the process he wreaked economic devastation, nowhere more acutely than in Liverpool, home to the British slave trade and to John Bellingham. The assassin was no slaver, but a would-be Baltic trader who had been ruined in Russia and failed to gain compensation from his own government. His derangement was real but subtle. At his trial Bellingham tried to explain (rather like Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik two centuries later) that he was not guilty of a crime, for he was acting in the interests of justice. The same couldn’t have been said by those who aided Bellingham—and Linklater shows that someone was supporting him—with money that proved well spent. Many of Perceval’s economic measures were quickly dismantled after his death.

Maurice Sendak remembered

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, May 8, 2012 at 12:18 PM - 0 Comments

Maurice Sendak was an artist and writer for children long before identity politics ruled the genre.

He could have kick-started that move himself, had he a mind to, for if there was ever an outsider of outsized talent capable of upending the prim pre-1960s world of illustrated kidlit, Sendak—poor, sickly, Jewish and gay—was it.

Instead Sendak initiated a different sort of revolution with Where the Wild Things Are in 1963. The hero, cranky, back-talking Max, who could have starred in last year’s Go the F—k to Sleep (more for adults than children, but still a spiritual descendent of Wild Things), makes enough mischief to be sent to his bed without supper. There his imagination lets loose a sea over which he travels to a forest full of wild things, before (of course) making it home to where supper awaits.

The creatures Sendak drew are clearly extreme adults: loud, incomprehensible, hairy almost beyond belief, with unfortunate teeth and bulging, crazy eyes. (It was only after he had drawn them, the illustrator told NPR, that he realized they were the aunts and uncles who often hovered over his childhood sickbed.)

Like most great children’s book authors, Sendak had a note-perfect memory, not of what he thought as a kid but of how he felt. Everyone has been through the same experiences, been to “the same places,” he once said. “Only, I remember the geography, and most people forget it.” Sendak knew children—those walking bundles of id—as well as anyone who has ever created for them, and in Where the Wild Things Are he captured their inner fears and turmoil like few others before or after.

In the half century since, Sendak did acclaimed work designing opera sets, worked on film and TV projects and crafted many more fine books in a life well spent, but Wild Things is legacy enough for anyone.

See also Andrew Coyne’s review of the film Where the Wild Things Are from 2009.