‘The Bell Jar’ at 40

By Flannery Dean - Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 1:36 PM - 0 Comments

Mike Krzeszak/Flickr

Who needs another feel-good coming-of-age story when there’s a classic bleak coming-apart-at the-seams tale to savour?

Forty years after it was first published in North America, The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath’s acid chronicle of teenage depression in Eisenhower-era America, stubbornly resists simple categorization. Like its head-sick teenage heroine Esther Greenwood, the novel doesn’t really fit in among its sunnier, more conventionally appealing peers.

And not unlike your above average teenage contrarian—you shall know said creature by her crossed-arm scowl—it doesn’t really want to fit in either.

The Bell Jar concerns itself solely with the recollection of a “queer, sultry summer” in 1953 and a singular season in the life of Esther Greenwood, 19. An inveterate overachiever with dreams of becoming a poet, Esther is in the middle of a highly coveted internship at a quasi-literary women’s magazine called Ladies Day in Manhattan.

It’s a dream come true and, as often happens when dreams take on reality, it’s the worst summer of her life. Continue…

The backlash against David Foster Wallace

By Richard Warnica - Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 8:20 AM - 3 Comments

Gary Hannabarger/Outline/Corbis

David Foster Wallace died on Sept. 12, 2008. He hung himself in his home in Claremont, Calif., while his wife, the artist Karen Green, was at work. He was 46 years old. A novelist, essayist and short story writer, Wallace produced a relatively thin portfolio for an author of his fame. But he touched readers in a way few others of his generation and genus—the high-brow literary kind—did. “There was so much of him in his writing,” says the novelist Matthew Baldwin. Fans felt as if they knew him, as if he was their friend.

In the years since Wallace’s death, he has become a kind of fringe pop icon. His name today is almost a shibboleth for a certain kind of reader, a symbol of faith, of conversion to his particular genius. “The undergraduates I’ve taught who love him, typically, they love the person, they love the idea of him they have from his books,” says Alexander Chee, a novelist who now teaches at Columbia University.

Wallace’s pop culture footprint, meanwhile, continues to grow. This summer, the Decemberists, an indie folk band, released a music video based on a scene from Wallace’s most famous novel, Infinite Jest. In October, a character bearing an uncanny resemblance to the young Wallace—a bandana-wearing, tobacco-chewing polymath from the Midwest—will appear in the new novel by Jeffrey Eugenides. (New York magazine was the first to point out the resemblance.) It’s almost as if Wallace has “become an icon for being an iconoclast,” says the Canadian author Bill Gaston, as if his life is now as important as his work.

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Conrad Black: not just another number

By Nicholas Köhler - Monday, September 12, 2011 at 10:35 AM - 2 Comments

Phil Snel

That a man whose baronic title remains Lord Black of Crossharbour should have written a book so redolent of his abhorrence of hierarchy, and of authority in general, must tell us something about our enduring fascination with Conrad Black, who returned to prison this week after a 13-month reprieve. During that period of freedom he saw an appeal of his 2007 fraud conviction fail and, because he could do himself no further harm, arranged publication of A Matter of Principle, as subversive a treatise on American justice as has likely ever been written by someone who also boasts of having received correspondence “from every U.S. president from Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush, the last four while in office.”

In total, the story represents “the ludicrous demise of my great love affair with America.” It’s as much a tale of lost fortune, influence and reputation, one that should have been foreseen: “My pride and haughty spirit were of the nature that often leads to a fall,” he allows. “My prison number, 18330-424, is stamped on my clothes and mandatory on all correspondence. I am 65 years old. I entered these walls a baron of the United Kingdom.”

He and his wife, Barbara Amiel, first arrive at Coleman Federal Correctional Complex in Florida and are ignored. “Barbara, thinking I had been struck dumb, said, ‘My husband, Conrad Black, is here to self-surrender.’ ” Soon, a “beefy correctional officer, unarmed but heavy-laden with gadgetry, surged into the room and pointed at me with well-rehearsed purposefulness.” He and Amiel prepare to separate: “A kiss, a searching look, a very few words, and I walked forward, not turning back to wave lest I be reproved in front of her and add to the distress of us both. She departed.” Long before, Amiel had quoted from the Book of Ruth—“Whither thou goest, I will go.” The night before, “We had held each other during the night.” Within a few paragraphs Black is handcuffed and prison officials are probing “the approaches to my rectum.”

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Why Emily Brontë will never be as popular as Jane Austen

By Flannery Dean - Friday, August 26, 2011 at 10:42 AM - 14 Comments

I’ve read Wuthering Heights so many times that it no longer exists as a wholly absorbing fiction for me; it’s more like a memory. Emily Brontë’s first and only novel, an indecorous riot of emotion and event conducted across the windswept Yorkshire moors, occupies a pivotal moment in the history of literature that’s worth remembering.

Brontë, a writer both raw and refined, is as rough on reader expectation as her characters are on each other. With Wuthering Heights, she turns the romance novel—a genre exemplified, albeit in a comic vein, by that other vicar’s daughter Jane Austen—upside down and grinds its cheerful conventions into the muddy heath with the heel of her little black boot. Continue…

Shoplifting is flourishing worldwide

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, July 19, 2011 at 9:35 AM - 0 Comments

Simon Marcus/CORBIS

In 1800, the first known trial of a shoplifter who was not a known criminal took place in Bath, England. Jane Leigh Perrot, 55, was not exactly the Winona Ryder or Lindsay Lohan of her day, but she was a respectable married lady of means, Jane Austen’s aunt no less. Leigh Perrot claimed in court that the shopkeeper was running a scam—that he had inserted the white lace in question into her legitimate purchase so that he could shake her down outside the shop, extorting a bribe for not reporting her to the magistrate.

Leigh Perrot offered no compelling evidence on that point, however, and it seems more likely the jury was swayed by her lawyer’s first-ever use of the so-called celebrity defence, which would echo through prominent shoplifting cases for the next two centuries: why would a prosperous woman like my client risk liberty and reputation to steal a trinket she could easily afford to buy? In any event, she was acquitted, and it wasn’t until the 1980s that Aunt Jane emerged from family records—combed exhaustively by Austen scholars for their own purposes—as a compulsive kleptomaniac. (Nursery plants were particularly at risk when she came to visit.)

It’s no accident this strangely contemporary event took place in England, the first commercially modern nation, argues Rachel Shteir, author of The Steal: A Cultural History of Shoplifting, or that the concept of kleptomania was developed in early 19th-century Paris, home to some of the world’s earliest and most alluring department stores. Kleptomania, Shteir points out, was both a key concept in early psychiatry and a social necessity, a defence that kept respectable women from ending up in the same rat-infested cells as their poor sisters. It still performs that function today, when a defence is needed at all. The rate of detection—an estimated one person caught per 48 thefts—makes shoplifting among the safer crimes to commit.

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The wife with the angry memoir

By Brian Bethune - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 10:45 AM - 0 Comments

Elin Berge/Moment/Redux

Millennium Stieg, as Stieg Larsson’s widow Eva Gabrielsson, 57, disdainfully refers to the celebrity afterlife of her common-law husband of 32 years, is still going strong. Seven years after the Swedish writer’s death, sales of his crime novels, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and its two sequels—collectively known as the Millennium trilogy—have topped 40 million copies worldwide. Far from fading, the buzz is only going to increase. The Hollywood version of the first book, starring Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara, which bills itself as “the feel-bad movie of Christmas,” reaches theatres in December; and “There Are Things I Want You to Know” About Stieg Larsson and Me—Gabrielsson’s long-awaited version of her Stieg, her bitter dispute with Larsson’s family, and her take on the much-rumoured fourth volume—will be in bookstores this month.

Gabrielsson’s book is compelling: in places poignant (her life with Larsson) or raw (the immediate aftermath of his fatal 2004 heart attack), and in others, uncomfortably self-aggrandizing. In Gabrielsson’s account, Stieg poured their common life, from their upbringing in northern Sweden to their joint leftist and feminist advocacy, into the trilogy. “I cannot tell exactly what part of the Millennium trilogy comes from Stieg and what comes from me.” It may have been his fingers on the keys, but the story is theirs: she, and only she, Gabrielsson argues, could finish Larsson’s work. Whatever its merits as a memoir, There Are Things I Want You to Know is also a weapon, deliberately crafted and wielded, in the widow’s war with the Larssons.

Stieg, a mostly penniless investigative journalist dedicated to battling far-right extremism, and Eva, a scarcely better off architectural planner and writer, did share everything for three decades, including their one solid material possession (a 600-sq.-m Stockholm flat), and the dangers posed both by Stieg’s violent political enemies and by Swedish law. They had practical reasons not to marry or have children. In the 1990s neo-Nazi groups murdered more than a dozen people in Sweden, including journalists; such incidents in the trilogy were drawn from real life, Gabrielsson writes: “nothing was made up.” If Eva and Stieg had wed, she would have been linked to him in publicly available databases, and so it was safer for Eva that Stieg be listed as “single” in official documents.

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Is flogging less cruel than jail time?

By Brian Bethune - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 9:55 AM - 23 Comments

Popperfoto/Getty Images

Peter Moskos is an American criminologist whose experiences and research, first as a Baltimore beat cop and later as a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, have shown him just how immorally counterproductive, ruinously expensive and profoundly stupid his country’s prison system is. He’s also discovered that he can tell his fellow Americans this, and even convince many, but it doesn’t really matter: they just want criminals punished. Very well, Moskos decided, consider this, meaning the startling suggestion in the title of his elegant polemic, In Defense of Flogging. Like 18th-century satirist Jonathan Swift, whose Modest Proposal offered a tidy if savage solution to chronic hunger in Ireland—have the rich eat the starving children of the poor—Moskos aimed “to shake up people,” as he says in an interview, “alter their thinking.” With one key difference: Swift never really thought eating babies was a good idea, but by the end of In Defense of Flogging, Moskos had convinced himself of the benefits of flogging.

His argument has two pillars. The first is how awful the current punishment regime is, mostly as a result of the abject failure of the war on drugs: “These 2.3 million prisoners we have, more than one per cent of the adult population, more prisoners than soldiers, more prisoners than China, seven times the incarceration rate of Canada? Somehow we’ve convinced ourselves this is normal and rational.” (References to Canada pepper his book as well, with Moskos pointing northward to what he considers a land of rational incarceration policies. He is discouraged, to put it mildly, to hear that Canada now seems set to take some steps, at least, down the American penal road, embarking on an expensive prison expansion program and increasing mandatory minimum sentences.)

Moskos, no bleeding heart, has no quarrel at all with his countrymen’s demand that criminals be punished—he merely despises the way the U.S. currently goes about it.

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Superheroes vs. right-wing Canada

By Elio Iannacci - Friday, May 27, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 8 Comments

Courtesy Marvel Entertainment; Richard Comely 2011

When news of Canada’s federal election hit Marvel comics headquarters in New York, a group of employees interrupted work on an important deadline to do a happy dance. “We jumped for joy, literally!” laughs graphic novelist Fred Van Lente via phone from Manhattan. “It was as if we’d won the lottery.” As luck would have it, Van Lente, his co-writer Greg Pak and illustrator Dale Eaglesham were just putting the finishing touches on the relaunch of their latest comic book, Alpha Flight, due out in June. The Flight, as it’s called on many fan sites, is a team of Canuck superheroes defending truth, justice and the Canadian way. Created in 1983 by John Byrne, Alpha Flight ceased publication in 2005. Van Lente and Pak’s prequel to the first issue—which landed on comic book stands this week—focuses on Byrne’s original nine-member team of caped and bodysuited crusaders. What’s different is who they’re up against: namely an enemy Van Lente calls “their most horrific villain of all time—the Canadian government.”

In fact, the plot Van Lente and his crew boiled up—months before Stephen Harper, Jack Layton and Michael Ignatieff were waging their own epic battles—includes our nation going through some serious political unrest post-election. The prequel begins weeks after an extreme right-wing majority takes over the country and Vancouver is completely destroyed. After a series of events unfolds, Alpha Flight, a government-hired group of freedom fighters, are suddenly deemed enemies of the state for not toeing the line.

“It’s so perfect,” explains Van Lente. “Our actual tag line is: ‘Do you fear your country turning on you?’ It is definitely an art-imitating-life moment if you look at what is going on today. As American writers, we do take liberties, of course,” Van Lente says, jokingly. “Despite Alpha Flight’s best efforts, the Canadian government goes fascist and chaos ensues.” One of the historical liberties they’ve taken is using parts of Pierre Trudeau’s October Crisis speech to frame the catastrophe.

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Reviving the search for Madeleine McCann

By Michael Barclay - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 0 Comments

M. Spencer Green/AP

Madeleine McCann went missing while her parents were vacationing in Portugal in May 2007. Four years later, on the child’s eighth birthday last week, her mother Kate released a memoir, simply entitled Madeleine, which details not only the family’s grief surrounding the disappearance, but also the pain of being vilified by the British press and Portuguese police, who suspected the parents were complicit in the crime—or at least negligent, for dining nearby while leaving three children under five alone in a hotel room. The book, which found a publisher with the help of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, is already a British bestseller and is being translated into Portuguese. The parents’ hope is to raise $1.5 million to pay for two more years of private investigators’ work.

As the McCanns were doing press to promote the book, Portuguese authorities announced that, for the first time, they were allowing London’s Metropolitan Police squad into the country to review their files. As well, British Prime Minister David Cameron instructed Scotland Yard to reopen the case, citing its “exceptional” nature and its “international dimension.”

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Mellissa Fung and her captors

By Anne Kingston - Friday, May 13, 2011 at 7:00 AM - 3 Comments

Photograph by Jessica Darmanin

“Do you want to see where I was stabbed?” Mellissa Fung asks, pulling aside the strap of her sleeveless pink blouse and pointing to the back of her right shoulder. The CBC reporter is proud of the bruise-like wound: it marks the resistance she put up during her abduction outside of Kabul in 2008.

A similar spirit of refusal animates Under an Afghan Sky, Fung’s memoir of her kidnapping and 28-day captivity in an underground hole the size of a closet. The publicity tour has brought her to a Toronto hotel, where she’s politely, if reluctantly, discussing it. “I’m an old-school journalist,” the 38-year-old says. “I’d rather tell the story than be the story.”

She was a hesitant memoirist, too. “I wanted to move on.” Dredging it up again was “pretty horrible,” she says, but she needed to address “misinformation”—that money or Taliban members were exchanged for her release. A screenplay was rumoured to be in the works. “I wanted my own record, the way I remembered it,” says Fung, a self-described “control freak.”

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Midnight in the garden of evil

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, May 11, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

There’s an obvious chicken-and-egg question that arises in an interview with British author Philip Kerr. A thorough pro, Kerr has penned stand-alone novels in various genres, including science fiction, and a first-rate preteen fantasy series (Children of the Lamp). But he’s best known for seven thought-provoking novels featuring German private eye Bernie Gunther. A note-perfect Berliner, from his alcohol consumption to his instinctive antipathy to authority, Bernie is both an everyman striving to maintain his humanity (and his life) in the Nazi and postwar eras, and the Teutonic reincarnation of Raymond Chandler’s PI, Philip Marlowe.

So which came first, noir or Nazis, an interest in hard-boiled detective stories or in the Third Reich? “Germany—I went there long ago,” the 55-year-old replies, “to do a post-grad degree in philosophy of German law. Really, just an excuse to read German philosophy. You know how Bernie hates lawyers? That’s because I hate lawyers.” Immersed in German history, Kerr—like so many writers before him—fell under Berlin’s spell. “Its role in the world wars and the Cold War, its cultural influence in the 1920s—Berlin is the ur-city of the 20th century.”

And the city’s inhabitants won him over too, partly because Berliners had, in Kerr’s opinion, the right enemies—any group loathed by Bismarck and Hitler couldn’t be all bad—and partly because of their black humour, which “sounds cruel if you don’t understand it,” Bernie once remarked, “and even crueller if you do.” Rather like the detective’s comment during his harrowing if brief stay in the Dachau concentration camp, where he met an inmate who was not only Jewish but homosexual and a Communist: “That made three triangles. His luck hadn’t so much run out as jumped on a f–king motorcycle.”

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Romantic love is the last thing he wants

By Nicholas Köhler - Monday, May 2, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 2 Comments

Chester Brown/Drawn & Quarterly

In the whole of the Platonic canon, Socrates leaves Athens just once: in the Phaedrus, the second of the dialogues on romantic love. As Socrates walks through the city he sees Phaedrus, an attractive young man, deep in thought. Phaedrus tells him he has just heard a speech about love and invites Socrates to walk with him into the countryside to hear the details. Under a tree, he outlines the speech: you should always be with someone who doesn’t love you rather than someone who does. Someone who loves you will make your life difficult: they want to be with you always; they become jealous, frightened you’ll leave, and so discourage you from meeting people who might take you away; they become angry when you change; they suffocate you. With someone who doesn’t love you, you can come and go as you please. It doesn’t hurt to be with someone who doesn’t love you; often it hurts to be with someone who does.

Later, just as Socrates turns to leave, he stops. He realizes that by discussing love in these terms he has committed the sin of impiety against the god Eros. To make amends, he must make his own speech: that to be in love is actually the greatest good.

CLICK HERE FOR A Q&A WITH CHESTER BROWN

Consider now a modern treatment of the issue. Cartoonist Chester Brown’s new graphic novel, Paying For It, is sure to stir controversy when it’s released next month, for its explicit chronicling of his life paying for sex, and for its impassioned argument in support of prostitution’s decriminalization. But the book is at its best when it explores the same territory as the Phaedrus—the nature of romantic love. The comparison isn’t so far-fetched. Brown, a Canadian, has been instrumental in popularizing the notion that comics are capable of a lot more than just caped superheroes, and he’s best known for a psychologically acute biography of Metis leader Louis Riel.

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Food as a weapon of war

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 6 Comments

Henry Guttmann/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Death by starvation is appallingly quiet, historian Lizzie Collingham notes in her massive study, The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food. But from an enemy’s point of view, it’s just as effective as by any other means. In a book densely stuffed with statistics, two stand out starkly: 20 million starved to death overall (more than the 10 million plus civilians who died from deliberate atrocity or collateral damage, more even than the 19.5 million military casualties) and the mere 56 Chinese POWs in Japanese hands who survived until 1945. The Japanese high command was fanatical enough to believe its army could win a war on the basis of fighting spirit alone—to the extent that 60 per cent of Japan’s 1.7 million military deaths were due to starvation—and it is not hard to imagine what befell thousands of their prisoners.

The conventional view of the last world war has always been that it was a war of the big battalions, a titanic struggle determined by how many ships, bombers and fresh cannon fodder could be poured into the fight. But food, The Taste of War makes clear, was absolutely central to the Second World War: as a cause, as a chief preoccupation of the combatant nations, and as a weapon. Japan and Germany went to war over it, at least in part—the lebensraum of Nazi dreams was a vast agricultural breadbasket, an eastern European recreation of the American Midwest. Hitler also obsessed over keeping the home front as well-fed as the armed forces, because he believed Germany’s collapse in the previous war was directly tied to the hunger brought by the Allied blockade.

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Western adoptions, Chinese mothers' pain

By Anne Kingston - Friday, March 11, 2011 at 6:10 AM - 8 Comments

Charlotte (Kristin Davis, second from the right), on the popular TV series Sex and the City, adopted a baby girl from China.New Line Cinema/Everett Collection

After China legalized foreign adoption in 1993, the sight of adorable Chinese girls with their proud Western parents became commonplace. The fact that 120,000 Chinese children, almost all girls, would grow up far from their homeland was framed in happy supply-demand terms: a daughter surplus in one hemisphere filling the needs of would-be parents in another; a child denied a home united with a family eager to provide one.

Now a stunningly candid new book, Message From an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love, illuminates the unexplored side of that equation: the plight of Chinese women who give their daughters up for adoption. And that arithmetic is far more complex and brutal, the journalist Xinran writes: “a black hole in the woman’s heart and unanswered questions in her daughter’s.”

The Beijing-born Xue Xinran, who writes under the pen name Xinran, is known for giving voice to Chinese women—first on her radio program in China that aired from 1989 to 1997, when she moved to England, and more recently via her Guardian column and books, notably The Good Women of China. After that collection of real-life stories was published in 2002, Xinran was flooded with letters and videos from adopted Chinese girls and their families, she says on the telephone from her home in London. Many of the letters punctuate her new book.

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How Laurier’s stirring speech defending Riel forged his reputation

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, March 7, 2011 at 12:24 PM - 1 Comment

National Archives of Canada/CP

“Those who are seeking a knight in shining armour, a defender of principles against all odds, will be disappointed by Wilfrid Laurier,” writes André Pratte in his biography of Canada’s seventh prime minister, the latest in Penguin’s Extraordinary Canadians series (in stores March 8). “Those who know that a man of principle can govern only by showing patience and realism will find in him a model.”

He was a master of rationality, reason and the middle ground—“the most pragmatic of men,” as Pratte dubs him. And not only was he able to sustain such balance—serving in Parliament from 1874 to 1917, as prime minister for 15 of those years—but he did so passionately and at a time when the young nation was divided by questions of language, race, religion, region, war, imperialism and nationalism. “What I discovered for myself was how much he reflected what Canada is or in some cases should be,” says Pratte, the editor-in-chief of La Presse. “Canada is built on compromise and conciliation and dialogue and listening to others and trying to find common ground, and Laurier not only did that because it was imposed on him by the country’s situation, he really was someone who wanted to discuss and wanted to look for compromise.”

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Where we need 'The Book of Negroes'

By Clement Virgo - Tuesday, March 1, 2011 at 11:09 AM - 9 Comments

National Geographic Society/Corbis

In Canada, African-Canadian culture is still trying to find a foothold in our collective history. We didn’t have a high-profile black Canadian novel that captured the imagination of Canadians until Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes was published in 2007. It has now sold 500,000 copies in Canada alone, an extraordinary feat given the size of the population. But it’s still difficult for black Canadian cultural products to get the attention of the Canadian media establishment, and so when a novel like The Book of Negroes cuts through that, it should be celebrated.

As the director of the upcoming film adaptation, I’m hoping the movie will introduce audiences to one of the strongest female characters in recent literary history, a woman who cuts a swath through a world hostile to her race and her gender. Aminata Diallo is a character who, despite an onslaught of travesties, maintains courage, faith and acuity—rising above her adversaries and achieving what she truly desires most: to return to her homeland in West Africa. Acting as the agent who guides audiences through historical events, not unlike the protagonists in Forrest Gump and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, she becomes our eyes and ears, emotionally connecting us to the realities and the horrors of the period.

The success of the book stands on its ability to operate on a number of different levels—it’s a great story, and Aminata is a compelling heroine. But, just as important, there’s so much rich history the reader can discover about the legacy of slavery: it is both an emotional and enriching reading experience. In the American canon of books dealing with the aftermath of slavery and the African-American experience, there are the classics such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird, and many other modern African-American novels like Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, or Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. In Canada, we don’t have that same kind of literary history. Giller Prize-winner Austin Clarke’s The Polished Hoe and Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For have had some impact, but The Book of Negroes has entered the psyche of Canadians, winning a host of prestigious accolades, including the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

When we ask ourselves how to bring the rich yet under-represented story of African-Canadian heritage to life for our youth, The Book of Negroes is a natural centrepiece, as it vividly documents some of the first African Canadians who settled in Nova Scotia after the American Revolution. The Historica-Dominion Institute’s new “Black History in Canada Education Guide” draws on the rich narrative, history and archives found in the book to bring black history alive in classrooms across Canada. There is a great importance in studying new literary works in the classroom, and introducing new voices that reflect the changing face of Canada.

That said, I do not believe we should put aside books such as To Kill a Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn because a new work represents the progression the culture has made. As in music and film, the work that has gone before helps shape the work of the present. A novel like Mockingbird is part of the continuum with a novel like The Book of Negroes. I wouldn’t want a young person to be deprived of the opportunity to read Mockingbird or Huckleberry Finn, because it’s important for them to know why they are classics, within the context of the era in which they were written, and how they reflected and challenged society. The same way that, as a filmmaker, I wouldn’t want a classic like Gone With the Wind or even D.W. Griffith’s controversial The Birth of a Nation to be taken out of circulation because of elements that are objectionable to the sensitivities of today’s audiences.

These classic novels and films are valuable but present our history through one lens. The Book of Negroes gives us another perspective that was under-represented in previous generations. When I was in high school, it would have been fantastic to have the “Black History in Canada Education Guide” as part of a learning tool to understand more, not only about my history as a proud Canadian, but about our collective history.

The making of a Loyalist

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 at 11:42 AM - 0 Comments

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Rich, white, virulently anti-democratic, and more British than the British. The United Empire Loyalists, those colonials who stuck by the British Crown during the American Revolution and who afterwards fled to what would become Canada, still suffer from a certain image problem. And that’s here, where as English Canada’s founding fathers, they have been long celebrated by nationalistic historians, made into bulwarks of the classic Canadian whatever-we-are-we-are-not-Americans mindset. Everywhere else the Loyalists went in the British Empire—the Caribbean, Africa, India, Britain itself—they were largely forgotten. But nowhere was that more true than in the land of their birth. When the revolution ended in 1783, 60,000 Loyalists and their 15,000 slaves crammed on to Royal Navy vessels and sailed out of New York, Savannah and Charleston. And sailed out, too, from American historical consciousness, which has never liked to dwell on the civil war aspect of the War of Independence.

A new understanding of the Loyalists has started to emerge lately, though, especially through the works of American historians taking a fresh look at their country’s origins. Such books as Alan Taylor’s provocatively titled The Civil War of 1812 (2010) and Harvard professor Maya Jasanoff’s just-released Liberty’s Exiles, the first global study of the revolution’s losing side, offer Canadians an arrestingly foreign portrait of our founders. And of their widely varied backgrounds.

Among the extraordinary individuals featured in Jasanoff’s work are two ex-slaves, David George and George Liele. “I continue to be struck,” Jasanoff says in an interview, “how little the non-white component of the Loyalists is known in the U.S.” Those 15,000 slaves were, naturally, of African descent, but the 60,000 free exiles—two-thirds of whom came to Canada—included more than 2,000 Mohawk allies, and 8,000 free blacks. The latter were survivors of the 20,000 slaves, including some owned by George Washington, who had fled patriot owners for the British promise of emancipation for those who took up arms for the king.

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The busy woman's anti-book club

By Sarah Lazarovic - Tuesday, February 22, 2011 at 8:45 AM - 5 Comments

Photograph by Cole Garside

It began as a joke. I resented my husband’s book club and its ability to work through doorstoppers like Matterhorn (597 pages) with surprising alacrity, parsing narrative threads while making wild-game chili. Attempting to fashion a rival club, I found my girlfriends fell into two camps: the book-club-fatigued and the time-crunched. Whereas my mom can juggle two book clubs and seven novels on her Kindle, I can barely get through the ingredients list on my jar of peanut butter, with work, a baby and a Twitter feed all clamouring for my attention. And so I convened the Ladies Short-Form Media Auxiliary. We would drink buttery whites, eat cake and discuss magazine articles, YouTube clips and clever tweets. We’d all be on the same page, but that page wouldn’t be in a book.

Book clubs have seen their popularity rise and taper over the past decade. In the early part of the 20th century they enabled women, relegated to the home and often denied formal education, the chance to broaden their minds. Instead of reading the same book, women would read whatever they could get their hands on and then deliver detailed reports to their literature groups, writes Elizabeth Long in Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life.

If the role of the book club as a tool for female empowerment and education has waned over the century, its promise as a place for spirited discussion and intellectual engagement hasn’t, especially as women’s time has grown increasingly fractured. “If you don’t have a lot of leisure time, don’t have time to think interesting thoughts and talk about interesting things with people, then you really miss that,” says Long.

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We've been misled about how to grieve

By Nicholas Köhler - Monday, February 14, 2011 at 1:15 PM - 14 Comments

Corbis; Getty; Redux

Many years ago, Nancy Moules, a pediatric oncology nurse who specializes in grief, got a call from a family member of one of her clients, a woman in her late 20s whose six-year-old daughter had died of leukemia a month or so earlier. The relative told Moules the woman was carrying an urn full of her daughter’s ashes everywhere she went; that if you met her for lunch she’d get a table for three; that, in a nutshell, the family was concerned about how she was coping. Sure enough, when Moules later met the client for lunch, they ate with the ashes at the table. “So, are you wondering why I invited you out?” Moules asked. “Oh no, I know,” the woman said. “Somebody phoned you, they’re worried about me. They think I’m crazy.” Moules probed further: “Do you think it’s crazy?” she asked. “No,” said the woman. “F–k them.

This is the last human, physical connection that I have to her and I’ll put her down when I’m ready to put her down.”

For Moules, who now lectures on grief as a nursing prof at the University of Calgary, the young mother’s story helps illustrate the sometimes paradoxical relationship many of us have with the emotions accompanying a loved one’s death. “There’s all these cultural expectations of grief that are contradictory,” she says. “One is, ‘Get over it, you should be over it by now!’ And the other is, ‘What’s wrong with you that you aren’t continuing to feel it? Didn’t you love the person?’ And we turn all those judgments inward.”

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Rumsfeld lashes out at John McCain, Condoleezza Rice, and others

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Monday, February 14, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 6 Comments

Photograph by Yuri Gripas/Reuters

Donald Rumsfeld is still at war. In his new memoir, Known and Unknown, George W. Bush’s former defence secretary takes aim at fellow Republicans. And one is blasting him back. Rumsfeld writes that Republican Sen. John McCain, who criticized him for sending too few troops to Iraq, had a “hair-trigger temper and a propensity to fashion and shift his positions to appeal to the media.” McCain, who had argued for a “surge” in the number of troops, went on Good Morning America this week to respond: “I respect secretary Rumsfeld. He and I had a very, very strong difference of opinion about the strategy that he was employing in Iraq, which I predicted was doomed to failure.” And, he added, “Thank God he was relieved of his duties and we put the surge in; otherwise we would have had a disastrous defeat in Iraq.”

Others may be weighing in as well. Rumsfeld also takes on the image of Colin Powell, who served as secretary of state, as a voice of dissent in the Bush cabinet. “The media image of Powell battling the forces of unilateralism and conservatism may have been beneficial to Powell in some circles, but it did not jibe with reality. The reality was that Powell tended not to speak out at National Security Council or principals meetings in strong opposition to the views of the president or of his colleagues.”

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Colin Farrell and me

By Mike Doherty - Tuesday, February 8, 2011 at 10:37 AM - 3 Comments

Brigitte Sire/Guardian News & Media Ltd; bigpicturesphoto.com

Emma Forrest’s new memoir, Your Voice in My Head, deals with bulimia, self-harm, attempted suicide and heartbreak—the latter brought on by actor Colin Farrell—but whatever you do, don’t feel sorry for her. “If the things that happen to me in the book are the worst things that are ever going to happen to me,” she says, “I’ve been f–king lucky—I really believe that.”

Her long brown hair tucked into a woolly hat, the Los Angeles-based screenwriter is speaking over dinner at a low-lit brasserie in west London, near the house where she grew up and where her parents still live. She’s on one hour of sleep, having just flown in from California, but nonetheless enthusiastic, startlingly forthright and unsentimental. Just as in her writing, she balances her tales of horrific events with lacerating humour. Returning from the ladies’ room at one point, she muses: “The problem with writing a book that deals with bulimia is that whenever you go to the washroom, people think you’re throwing up.”

She’s spent the past few years, in fact, with bile being cast in her direction: in 2008, when she revealed her history of mental illness in an Observer article about Britney Spears, she encountered “a lot of griping English people” unmoved by the pain of someone who got to go to the famously expensive clinic the Priory. In the same year, when her relationship with Farrell was revealed by the press, she was vilified by the actor’s obsessive fans online for being “fat” and “ugly”—neither of which she is or was.

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Copycat titles based on bestsellers and other books we could do without

By Scott Feschuk - Tuesday, February 8, 2011 at 9:11 AM - 4 Comments

Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

Dear everyone: Please stop writing memoirs.

That’s the gist of a recent piece in the New York Times, which argued that most autobiographies being penned these days are boring books by boring people about boring, boring lives.

Agreed. But why stop there? There are many other books we can do without.

Copycats. I get it—you’re bummed that you didn’t think of Sh*t My Dad Says, the Twitter feed that some guy has parlayed into a sitcom, a bestselling book, a Happy Meal and a Nobel Prize (I assume). Your frustration does not give you the right to burden us with Sh*t My Kids Ruined or Crazy Sh*t Old People Say, both of which are actual books. Do you have any idea how many variations on Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother we’re about to be inundated with? Battle Hymn of the Kitten Father. Power Ballad of the Heavy Metal Momma. And those are just the two that I’m writing.

Sequels and spinoffs. Congratulations—you just wrote a bestseller. We now look forward to you exploiting and ultimately betraying our goodwill with your future efforts. Consider What to Expect When You’re Expecting, which has become a bible for pregnant women, even though its relentless hectoring promotes self-loathing and fills every mother-to-be with the urge to slam the authors’ faces onto the business end of a waffle iron. What to Expect has spawned no fewer than 11 sequels, including What to Expect: The Toddler Years, What to Expect Before You’re Expecting and What to Expect When Despite All This Folic Acid Your Kid Grows Up to Be A Massive Disappointment, only one of which I made up.

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“Super-parenting or abuse?” How about neither?

By Anne Kingston - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 5:58 PM - 7 Comments

Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother has elicited the sort of fury properly summoned by war crimes. No surprise there. The Yale Law School professor’s memoir about her attempt to raise her two daughters with strict “Chinese parenting” techniques combines two highly charged topics—ethnicity and child-rearing. Combustion was inevitable. As Chua tells it, she was a Type A Mom to the max, obsessive about her two daughters succeeding on her terms, believing that the regimented way she was raised by her immigrant parents gave her the tools to make choices that made her happy later in life. She was Draconian in setting goals for her girls, to whom she was endlessly devoted, refusing to praise results she saw as mediocre. She forced them to practice classical music for hours every day and deprived them of rites of modern childhood—sleepovers, play dates and computer games. Then her younger daughter rebelled and she was forced to recalibrate her approach dramatically.

Since its publication a week ago, both the book and Chua have been obsessively scrutinized—and trashed—in the media and online. The Wall Street Journal’s excerpt, “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior” (the paper’s title, not Chua’s), generated more than 7,000 comments on its website. The New York Times ran two features on Chua on Sunday, one gleefully titled “Retreat of the ‘Tiger Mother’.” Novelist Ayelet Waldman, who coined the term “sanctimommy” years ago to describe the smug judgment privileged mothers lay on one another, wrote a bombastic rebuttal in the WSJ: “In Defense of the Guilty, Ambivalent, Preoccupied Western Mom.”

Maclean’s Q&A with Chua also generated rabid comments and letters to the editor; some went so far as to suggest Chua be prosecuted for child abuse. Chua herself has been deluged with emails—even death threats. Continue…

Amy Chua on high-stakes parenting

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, January 13, 2011 at 5:00 PM - 57 Comments

Photographs by Steve Simon

Amy Chua is a professor of law at Yale University and the author of two acclaimed books about globalization and free-market democracy. Her new memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, recounts raising her two daughters, now 15 and 18, using what she calls “Chinese parenting” methods.

Q: So, are you ready to be pilloried as the ultimate tough-love mum who threatened to burn your daughter’s stuffed animals if she didn’t perform piano practice perfectly?
A: I’m not sure. I did not write this book as a parenting book; and it’s not about promoting the Chinese parenting model, although some people will take it that way. I was raised by extremely strict, extremely loving Chinese immigrant parents whom I adore and feel I owe everything to them. By instilling a work ethic and self-discipline my parents allowed me to have choices as an adult and be who I wanted to be. I tried to raise my daughters the same way. With my first, Sophia, things went smoothly, but then Louisa [Lulu] came along and I got my comeuppance. At 13, she rebelled. I wrote the book seeking catharsis.

Q: You were an obsessive taskmaster, demanding your girls be top of their class, be fluent in Mandarin, practise classical music for hours every day and do chores. You also banned TV, computers, play dates and sleepovers.
A: I didn’t want my kids to fall into a familiar pattern as the granddaughters of immigrants. I was fighting the tendency for them to be entitled and consumerist.

Q: In the book you write “I’m using the term ‘Chinese mother’ loosely. I know some Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish and Ghanaian parents who qualify too.” So why call it “Chinese parenting”?
A: It’s Chinese people of a certain demographic, along with other immigrants. And there are patterns; it’s not just stereotypes. I also say Western parents come in all varieties. I have Western friends who are very strict. But I think the current dominant Western parenting approach is much more protective, much more permissive. Western parents are shocked by some of the things that Chinese parents say and do, it seems so harsh. But a lot of immigrant parents are horrified by many aspects of Western parenting: how quickly they let children grow up, how much time they let them waste, and how poorly they prepare them for the future.

Q: You insisted your girls also have hobbies so they wouldn’t become “weird Asian automatons.” So you chose classical music. You didn’t want them doing crafts which “go nowhere” or playing drums which “lead to drugs.”
A: For me classical music symbolized refinement and hard work and delicacy, and a certain depth. Both the piano and the violin are capable of producing such beauty, something more meaningful than watching TV or doing Facebook for 10 hours.

Q: You believe rote repetition is undervalued in North America.
A: Yes, and this is where my book is really against stereotypes. I hear people saying, “Oh, Asians are born good at math, or good at music.” That’s ridiculous. So much of it is just hard work. When Lulu was 10, she had done poorly on a math test, and said, “I’m bad at math, and I don’t like math.” Some Western parents might have deferred to that and said: “That’s just her . . . she doesn’t like math.” But I made all these practice tests, and we drilled them and on the next test Lulu did very well and some of her friends called her a math whiz, and now math is one of her favourite subjects.

Q: You’re a critic of play dates and sleepovers, which you describe as “punishment parents unknowingly inflict on their kids through permissiveness.”
A: Westerners romanticize the sleepover: they say it’s about self-actualization and letting the kids explore. From my experience what that means is you go over to your friend’s house and the two of you do Facebook stalking or you watch reality TV for five hours.

Q: You maintain Western parents believe in choice; Chinese parents don’t.
A: Yes. Many things kids choose for themselves don’t bring happiness. I feel kids actually feel unhappy on Facebook because it seems everyone else has more friends and is having more fun. You’ll hear, “Oh, I want my children to pursue their passion.” Well, if you give a 10-year-old her choice to pursue her passion, it’s not going to be playing the violin for three hours, it’s going to be computer games. I think Westerners defer too much to their children in the name of respecting their individuality. There is a common pattern you’ll see: an Asian and a Western child will start with a violin; six months later the Western child will want to switch to the clarinet because the violin sounds terrible, and then four months later the clarinet turns out to be hard so their choice is the guitar, and then you’re at the drums.

Q: As you present it, the Chinese approach engenders more self-esteem because it focuses on mastery and accomplishment.
A: Yes. The techniques may sound harsh, but the Chinese parent is saying: “I believe in you so much that I know you can be excellent, and I’m going to be in the trenches with you for however long it takes and I’m not going to let you give up.” Now, eventually if your child says, “I don’t like math, I want to be a poet,” you have to let them.

Q: You also point out that in assuming their children are strong, Chinese parents often appear brutally critical.
A: It’s really important to put things in cultural context. When I won second place in a history contest once my father said, “Never, ever disgrace me like that again.” When I tell my Western friends they think, “What a horrible man!” But that’s not how I took it at all. For me, what he was saying is, “I know you could do better. I believe in you.” But I do understand why Westerners react the way they do, because not knowing my family, these things sound harsh.

Q: You were a closet Chinese mother; in public you’d say things like, “Good try, buddy.”
A: That’s another reason I published the book. After I wrote it, I showed it to my sisters and some Chinese friends and they totally related to it and thought it was hysterical. But they all said, “You can’t publish this! You’ll be attacked!” And I thought, “Why?” I certainly learned a lot from what I call the Western model. That’s how the book ends: I become more of a Western parent than I thought possible. I loosened up. Sophia has a boyfriend. Lulu did just get a sleepover. They still aren’t allowed to watch TV, but they can use Facebook, with limits. Where I did not give one inch is academically. I’m still the tiger mom on that front. There is a strong theme in favour of rebellion in the book. I identify with Lulu. Even though I was the obedient Chinese child, I disobeyed my father too. I married a white Jewish guy and now my father adores my husband. And writing this book is a completely non-Chinese thing to do, it’s a rebellious, very Western thing.

Q: Discussing ethnic differences has become a taboo, yet it’s your favourite topic to write about. Why?
A: The world right now is one in which there are definite cultural and ethnic differences. I heard the way my parents talk at home, and I know the way my colleagues talk at Yale law school, and it’s night and day. I’m against stereotypes, but I think not being able to talk about ethnicity or cultural patterns is worse. I was also trying to puncture a stereotype— there are all of these books portraying Asian mothers as callous people who don’t care about their children’s interests. My book is the opposite: it’s a heartfelt memoir about me as a Chinese parent trying do the best for my children because I love them.

Q: Given the focus of your previous books, I wonder whether you see parents as having a larger social responsibility to raise self-reliant, productive citizens.
A: I’ve taught students of all backgrounds for 18 years, and it’s not my experience that kids raised in permissive families are happier than kids raised in strict families—it might be the opposite. We have some serious issues in the West—very high rates of teenage depression and falling behind in terms of education. So it’s going to be hard for our kids to compete and to get jobs when they’re adults, and not being able to get a job is not a recipe for feeling fulfilled with their lives.

Q: Many people will think your parenting regimen was all about your agenda, and not for your kids.
A: That accusation is so hurtful. When I talk to my Chinese friends, we feel it’s the opposite: how easy would it be to say, “Oh, in the name of my child self-actualizing and socializing I’m going to leave them at their friend’s house for six hours and I’m going to a Pilates class and then go have a glass of wine.” So many times I’ve felt, “Wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t have to practise today?” I hope people know that when I write, “I don’t care if my kids think I’m like Lord Voldemort,” I really do care.

Q: Your daughters were raised in the Jewish faith. What’s your husband’s child-raising role?
A: My husband was raised in a liberal family. He adores his parents, but wished somebody had forced him to learn an instrument and speak a second language. And because I was willing to put in the time, he supported me. But from day one he insisted we take family bike rides and go to Yankee games, all things that I thought were a waste of time, but they helped bring balance to the family.