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.

Continue…

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.

Continue…

Bestsellers – Week of May 4th, 2012

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

Fiction

Non-fiction

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

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.

REVIEW: Drop Dead Healthy: One Man’s Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection

By Julia Belluz - Friday, May 4, 2012 at 12:27 PM - 0 Comments

This may be the first book written on a treadmill. After living like Jesus for The Year of Living Biblically, and tackling the entire Encyclopedia Britannica for Know-It-All, the self-improving Esquire magazine writer is on a two-year quest for bodily perfection.

Of course, becoming “the healthiest man alive” involves a wacky range of experiments. Guided by scientific research and expert opinion, Jacobs works through improving every aspect of his physical being, taste buds to toes. In a chapter on the lower intestine, he buys Nature’s Platform, “a squat-aiding apparatus” because sitting strains the bowels and can lead to hemorrhoids. When focused on the stomach, he studies the “chewdiasm” movement and tries to chomp more to increase mindfulness and eat less. Along the way are entertaining asides about his domestic life, and hundreds of quirky pop science tidbits.

But like most consumers of health information, he gets lost in a sea of contradiction. There’s the problem of which diet is best: raw food, no sugar? The former makes him gassy, the latter is “ridiculously hard to sustain.” Unfortunately, Jacobs doesn’t do much to explore the complexity of the science.

Like Bridget Jones on a health kick, the author periodically tracks his progress using metrics such as the number of walnuts consumed and pounds lifted on the squat machine. By the end, he’s a lean triathlete. But he also notices he’s lost something in his striving. He disappoints his kids when he won’t eat their birthday cupcakes, and misses their rites of passage in his hours spent exercising.

In this parody of our scattered, consumerist approach to wellness, one key insight emerges: being healthy is not as complex—or costly—as we sometimes think. Take his experience with the BluePrintCleanse, a pricey juice fast. After the “detox,” he feels angrier and foggier but no better, and concludes the “simplest liquid”—water—is best of all.

Book boost: ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ helps sell ‘Between Shades of Gray’

By Rosemary Counter - Thursday, May 3, 2012 at 11:05 AM - 0 Comments

Some readers of E.L. James’s erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey are accidentally snapping up Between Shades of Gray, the story of a 15-year-old Lithuanian girl who is exiled to Siberia in 1941. Hardly the smutty thrill they were hoping for.

The steamy book about a billionaire and a woman who likes to be spanked has been hogging the No. 1 spot on the New York Times paperback bestseller list for eight weeks, but the other book is no literary slouch: Between Shades of Gray was a Wall Street Journal best children’s book, not to mention its nomination for the prestigious Carnegie Medal given yearly to an outstanding book for young readers.

But when the paperback version of the young adult (YA) book was released this April, the author’s friends were sending her emails saying, “Wait, what’s the name of your book again?” says Ruta Sepetys, author of Between Shades of Gray. On Amazon, Sepetys regularly sees the notice that customers of her book bought the other, and vice versa. In just three weeks, her novel moved into the No. 5 bestselling children’s paperback on the New York Times list.

Meanwhile, people clutching the other book began showing up at Sepetys’s events. “They come up to me afterward and confess they got their events mixed up, but ask, ‘Is it really true that Stalin killed 20 million people?’ So if people discover this part of history, even by lucky accident, it’s a win for me.”

Still, there’s no shortage of Internet snark. “There’s a YA novel called Between Shades of Gray . . . is that like an S&M book for the younger generation?” one tweeter wrote from New York. On Amazon, between mostly rave reviews, appears some unfortunate feedback. “Horrible book, very demeaning to women. I would not recommend anyone read this trash,” reads one misplaced opinion.

Online publishing has long had an issue with knock-offs—Thirty-Five Shades of Grey, I Am the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and Twilight New Moon are all “spam books” designed to confuse readers—but legitimate publishers often unknowingly do the same.

Lynne Missen, publishing director for the young reader’s group at Penguin Canada, has seen a lot of title overlap. “One year we published The Hat Trick at the same time Scholastic published Hat Trick. These things happen,” she says. While authors and publishers obviously want strong titles that stand out, because you can’t copyright a book title, repetition is inevitable. Last season’s shelves were stocked with anything containing “daughter,” as in My Father’s Daughter, The Witch’s Daughter and The King’s Daughter.

Another popular phrase is “out of the blue,” which has 386 book versions and variations on Amazon.ca. Jan Wong, author of this week’s Out of the Blue: A Memoir of Workplace Depression, Recovery, Redemption and, Yes, Happiness, isn’t too concerned. “It’s like naming a child; unless you get weird, you’re not going to be unique.” Among the Amazon options are Out of the Blue: A History of Lightning; Out of the Blue: A Book of Color Idioms and Silly Pictures; Out of the Blue: On Fishing at Sea; and Out of the Blue: Confessions of an Unlikely Porn Star. “Oh, that one’s my favourite!” says Wong. “They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but I guess you can’t judge it by its title either.”

While duplication is common, Missen’s never seen fans of one appear at the other’s book signing, nor has she witnessed an overlap of two so very different books as the Shades of Grey/Gray. “I can’t think of one instance where they’re at such opposite ends of the scale,” she says. Nevertheless, it could be a great thing for adults who accidentally discover what a great book it is, but perhaps it’s not so great for young adults who pick up the erotic novel. If teens have picked up the wrong version, not surprisingly none are complaining. “So far I haven’t received any angry emails,” says Sepetys, adding that her own book’s opening line—“They took me in my nightgown”—has adopted a new overtone. “I like to joke that Lithuania has never looked so sexy.”

REVIEW: Escape From Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, May 3, 2012 at 10:21 AM - 0 Comments

Forget the subtitle: the story of how Shin Dong-Hyuk, after crawling through a lethal electrified fence over the insulating dead body of a companion, made it out of a North Korean prison camp and eventually into the U.S., is a remarkable odyssey all right. But nowhere near as remarkable a story as Shin’s early life. Of the thousands who have fled his nation, including two dozen from its gulag, Shin is the only one who was born in a prison camp—the only one whose life was, from its very beginnings, brutally circumscribed to a degree that shocked even his countrymen.

Shin is a physical witness to the deprivations of growing up in a camp: stunted by malnutrition; scarred and bent by heavy childhood labour, beatings and torture; his right middle finger missing, cut off with a kitchen knife as punishment for dropping a sewing machine. Still worse was the damage to his soul. The incessant, driving need for food dominated Shin’s life. He stole his mother’s rations, and was brutally beaten by her for it; he scooped spilt soup off filthy floors and picked undigested corn out of cow excrement. He did not feel degraded by any of it because he had no idea humans could be degraded. He hadn’t been taken from a decent life and thrust into the valley of the shadow of death—Shin was born there, and, as Harden notes, “he accepted its values.”

The product of a “reward” marriage—guards had matched his parents, who continued to live in separate dormitories—Shin had no experience of any kind of affection. He viewed his mother and older brother as competitors for food, and turned them in when he learned, at age 13, that they planned to escape. Unsurprisingly, his adjustment to life in the West has been difficult. Issues of trust and guilt—Shin now knows how most people view the idea of betraying their mothers—sometimes overwhelm him. He is still learning, as Harden reports in this spare but moving book, to be a human being.

REVIEW: Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young English Woman Haunted the Last Days of Old China

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, May 3, 2012 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments

It’s Peking, 1937. China’s former capital, not yet known as Beijing, has fallen on hard times and, menaced by Japanese armies, is soon to experience worse. With the government withdrawn to the supposed safety of Nanking, it’s a backwater. Still home to scholars and former bureaucrats, it’s also crammed with desperate migrants fleeing the Japanese. The foreign population is as combustible, a mix of well-off diplomats and old China hands living in the walled Legation Quarter, and penniless refugees from Stalin and Hitler, mostly clustered in a neighbourhood of opium dens, brothels and cheap rooming houses.

On a frozen January day, in the midst of this tense situation, comes the discovery of the body of Pamela Werner, the 19-year-old daughter of a prominent sinologist, mutilated almost beyond recognition, with many of her internal organs missing. Two detectives, one Chinese and one British, are assigned the case, but everywhere they turn they are stymied by their own scandal-averse governments. It all sounds, right down to the cops’ bicultural partnership, like the kickoff to a promising new mystery series. Except it’s a true story. And, unlike a novel, the police were not able to overcome the barriers put in their way. Werner’s murder was never solved and was quickly forgotten after the Japanese occupied the city in July 1937.

French makes a wonderfully atmospheric tale out of the dying days of a young woman and an ancient city, and manages to craft a very convincing solution to the crime. He was aided immeasurably by a lucky find in Britain’s National Archives, a 150-page report by Werner’s iconoclastic father. Edward Werner was a former diplomat, a scholar who spoke eight Chinese dialects, and a man so stubbornly devoted to China that he stayed in Peking through the Japanese occupation, the Chinese civil war and even two years of Mao Zedong. He wasn’t about to abandon his daughter’s case. What Werner found out, after spending his life savings in Peking’s demimonde, is more shocking than many novelists could imagine.

REVIEW: Let’s Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir)

By Patricia Dawn Robertson - Wednesday, May 2, 2012 at 2:44 PM - 0 Comments

This memoir of mom blogger Lawson’s eccentric Texas childhood and rambunctious married life is not Saint Augustine’s Confessions or Emma Goldman’s Living My Life, but it does fit the new life-writing-meets-Tumblr genre. It’s a manic set of essays that pays tribute to her rural upbringing (“Most people don’t go out into the woods to catch armadillos so that their father can race them professionally”), while simultaneously nodding and winking at her primary readers—the loyal members of her extensive blogging community. The influences of Chicago satirist Jen Lancaster and wickedly funny Atlanta columnist Hollis Gillespie are evident here, along with a sprinkling of Amy Sedaris’s Simple Times: Crafts for Poor People.

Lawson’s is a popular blog—she draws a half-million readers a month—but her rambling style occasionally stalls when she attempts the tightrope walk that is the essay form. In an ideal world, Lawson’s self-conscious banter would be trimmed to allow her strongest material to take centre stage. Still, she has a storyteller’s timing and instincts. The best material comes out of Lawson’s goofy adventures with her husband (and straight man), Victor. He reminded me of Phyllis Diller’s hapless husband, “Fang.”

A heady mix of bad-boy shocker Borat and critter-collecting Elly May Clampett, Lawson has written a bold, raucous adventure of a book.

Author Peter Hobbs’ creative life—despite virus and parasites

By Noah Richler - Tuesday, May 1, 2012 at 10:56 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph By Andrew Tolson

In 1996, Englishman Peter Hobbs was on course for a dramatic new life—though not the one he’d foreseen. Just 23 years old, he’d finished a master’s in international relations and had been recruited out of Oxford by the British Foreign Office. He deferred the start of his job to travel to Pakistan for a few months. But in Pakistan, Hobbs contracted a virus and parasites that would befuddle London doctors and incapacitate him for 10 years. He was diagnosed with post-viral fatigue and then chronic fatigue syndrome—“diagnoses by exclusion,” said the author during a recent conversation—and then depression. Even today, Hobbs suffers a certain frailty.

“I’m not sure I can fully articulate how isolated I felt during that long illness,” said Hobbs. “It was all-encompassing. Illness is a foreign land where you go always alone. I couldn’t work, I couldn’t see my friends, and if I did, it was clear that I was inhabiting a different world to them.”

Hobbs, who is visiting Canada for the publication of his critically acclaimed second novel, In the Orchard, the Swallows, was nominated for several prizes including the 2007 Impac Dublin award for his first book, The Short Day Dying. A honed, elegant work of casual audacity, In the Orchard, the Swallows is narrated in the first person and tells the story of a young, unnamed Pakistani man who returns from many years in prison, broken and ill, to the village in the northern mountain ranges where, as a boy, he sold pomegranates. It is the boy’s terrible misfortune to have fallen in love with the daughter of a local politician and to have deigned to show the object of his love the most beautiful thing he knows—dawn in his family’s orchard. After a remonstration with the girl’s father that he cannot possibly win, he is thrown into jail and suffers terribly.

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REVIEW: The Red Book

By Anne Kingston - Tuesday, May 1, 2012 at 10:50 AM - 0 Comments

As one would expect in a novel about the 20-year reunion of the Harvard class of ’89, there’s a character called Bucky, children named Trilby and Dante, and protagonists on the cusp of 40 fretting over life choices, the loss of their younger selves, and the meaning of life half lived.

All are duly accounted for in Copaken Kogan’s smart and engaging, if formulaic, novel—an effort that owes a big debt to Mary McCarthy’s landmark 1963 novel The Group and a smaller one to The Big Chill. The title is taken from Harvard’s own “Red Book,” in which alumni update their personal bios every five years. It’s a clever literary premise, allowing a baseline to explore the disconnect between how characters want to be seen and how their lives have actually unfurled.

Action over three eventful days in 2009 focuses on four former roommates who’ve remained close despite divergent paths: the entitled Addison, a mother, wife and still-aspiring artist who lives in a Brooklyn loft buffeted by trust-fund money; the beautiful, biracial, commune-raised Clover recently let go from a big job at Lehman Brothers; Mia, a once-aspiring actress turned stay-at-home mom married to a Hollywood producer; and Jane, a Paris-based newspaper correspondent grappling with marital deception while grieving her mother’s death.

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REVIEW: The crisis of Zionism

By Emma Teitel - Monday, April 30, 2012 at 1:57 PM - 0 Comments

If American journalist Beinart wasn’t Jewish, it’s likely that his new book might be carelessly mistaken for run-of-the-mill anti-Semitism. Which is precisely Beinart’s point: criticism of Israeli policy, he argues, is too often labelled anti-Semitic by the Israeli and American-Jewish establishments. It’s a reality that prevents Jews from recognizing modern Israel for what it truly is: a rapidly receding democracy. The ever-expanding settlements in the West Bank and the occupation of Gaza are, in Beinart’s view, totally antithetical to the liberal Zionism championed by Israel’s founding fathers. He believes that without liberal Zionism, Israel is morally defunct, and without morals, Israel’s survival is not guaranteed.

Beinart is extremely critical of the Netanyahu government, and what he considers its hypocritical stance on social justice: “Israel’s leaders defend the Jewish state against international isolation by invoking its liberal democratic character,” he writes, even though “their own policies are eroding it.” Unfortunately, Beinart is no stranger to hypocrisy himself. He rails on about stock victim rhetoric recycled from the Holocaust and its crippling effect on modern Jewry—“we need a new American-Jewish story, built around this basic truth: we are not history’s permanent victims.” Yet the basis for his Zionism, and his passion for a healthy, democratic Jewish state, is victimhood itself: “As a Zionist, I believe that after two millennia of homelessness, the Jewish people deserve a state dedicated to their protection in their historic land.”

In the world according to Beinart, then, American Jewry should base its identity on the “truth” that they are not history’s permanent victims, and at the same time, justify Israel’s existence on the reality that they are. It’s hard to swallow, to say the least. Or as one rabbi, Ammiel Hirsch, blogged in the Huffington Post recently, The Crisis of Zionism poses some “interesting questions for an academic thesis.” But, Hirsch says, it’s “hardly a serious political proposal.”

Bestsellers – Week of April 23rd, 2012

By macleans.ca - Friday, April 27, 2012 at 4:36 PM - 0 Comments

Fiction

Non-fiction

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

David Frum’s first novel reckons with conservativism in crisis

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Friday, April 27, 2012 at 12:10 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Jeff Fusco/Getty Images

“It’s a book about Washington and how it really works,” explains David Frum, the Canadian-American who once wrote speeches inside George W. Bush’s White House, but now finds himself in a genteel exile from the power circles of America’s conservative movement with a surprising new turn in his career.

A one-time true believer who helped coin the “axis of evil” label, who wrote a book defending Bush (The Right Man), and who was foreign policy adviser to the presidential campaign of Rudy Giuliani, Frum has since been called a turncoat, a rat, and a “RINO” (Republican in Name Only). The Wall Street Journal editorial page has denounced him as “the media’s go-to basher of fellow Republicans.”

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REVIEW: The Final Leap: Suicide On the Golden Gate Bridge

By Nicholas Köhler - Friday, April 27, 2012 at 11:58 AM - 0 Comments

When the City of Toronto installed a suicide barrier at the Prince Edward Viaduct, the bridge went from being the world’s second-deadliest suicide site, with almost 500 fatal jumps since 1918, to none at all.

Such success stories cause Bateson to seethe. The head of a Bay-area suicide-prevention centre, he has written the first book ever published about the world’s No. 1 deadliest suicide site, the Golden Gate Bridge, where 1,500 people have died jumping since 1937. What makes him angry is efforts to erect a barrier there stretch back almost to its first confirmed suicide: Harold Wobber, a First World War vet who, weeks after it opened, walked halfway across and told someone: “This is as far as I go.” Seventy years later, there’s still no barrier.

The drop is 25 storeys, a distance jumpers traverse in four seconds. The odds of surviving are “roughly the same as surviving a gunshot to your head,” Bateson writes, meaning some jumpers don’t die immediately. “Upon hitting the water their bones shatter, their body organs burst, they plunge deep beneath the surface, and ultimately they drown.” (In rare cases survivors live much longer.)

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Out of illness, a vital creative life

By Noah Richler - Friday, April 27, 2012 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

In 1996, Englishman Peter Hobbs was on course for a dramatic new life—though not the one he’d foreseen. Just 23 years old, he’d finished a master’s in international relations and had been recruited out of Oxford by the British Foreign Office. He deferred the start of his job to travel to Pakistan for a few months. But in Pakistan, Hobbs contracted a virus and parasites that would befuddle London doctors and incapacitate him for 10 years. He was diagnosed with post-viral fatigue and then chronic fatigue syndrome—“diagnoses by exclusion,” said the author during a recent conversation—and then depression. Even today, Hobbs suffers a certain frailty.

“I’m not sure I can fully articulate how isolated I felt during that long illness,” said Hobbs. “It was all-encompassing. Illness is a foreign land where you go always alone. I couldn’t work, I couldn’t see my friends, and if I did, it was clear that I was inhabiting a different world to them.”

Hobbs, who is visiting Canada for the publication of his critically acclaimed second novel, In the Orchard, the Swallows, was nominated for several prizes including the 2007 Impac Dublin award for his first book, The Short Day Dying. A honed, elegant work of casual audacity, In the Orchard, the Swallows is narrated in the first person and tells the story of a young, unnamed Pakistani man who returns from many years in prison, broken and ill, to the village in the northern mountain ranges where, as a boy, he sold pomegranates. It is the boy’s terrible misfortune to have fallen in love with the daughter of a local politician and to have deigned to show the object of his love the most beautiful thing he knows—dawn in his family’s orchard. After a remonstration with the girl’s father that he cannot possibly win, he is thrown into jail and suffers terribly.

It spoils nothing to divulge this much of Hobbs’s slim, perfect novel. In the Orchard, the Swallows doesn’t need any extraneous knowledge of the author’s illness to make it interesting, although it is impossible not to wonder whether or not the illness, a prison of a kind, provided the author a way into the story.

“Obviously,” says Hobbs, “I used some of what I knew about—undergoing drawn-out periods of isolation and suffering in order to imagine the life of the narrator, say—but I don’t think you can read the novelist from the novel.”

It was during his illness that Hobbs—as his central character does—found some catharsis through writing. And just as his protagonist finds succour in the kindness of strangers—one named Abbas, in particular, a kind man with a library who provides care and a notebook—Hobbs had his own rescuers.

There was his childhood friend Lee Brackstone, an editor at Faber & Faber: “He’d send me relief packages—books, music and the novels he was publishing,” said Hobbs. “They provided me with just enough sense of a vital, creative life carrying on—one presently out of reach but that might prove accessible in time.”

Another concerned friend was the Canadian public servant and “occasional scholar,” David Malone, president of Canada’s International Development Research Centre, a Crown corporation that supports applied research in the developing world. The pair met at New College at Oxford, where Malone remembers Hobbs “shooting around Oxford at warp speed on his bike, a look of fanatical concentration etching his features,” though, later in their friendship, “able to do very little indeed, as walking more than about three blocks would leave him in a state of near-collapse.”

This week in Toronto, his Canadian friend played patron at a generous launch of the book at the University of Toronto’s Massey College. “It’s very hard to make a living out of literary writing,” says Malone. Indeed, the Foreign Office kept a place open for Hobbs for years before accepting that he had found a new, more suitable métier. “I hope for Pete that his health—still tenuous—holds out,” says Malone, “so that he continues to write as brilliantly and movingly as he has done for many, many more years.”