99 stupid things the government spent your money on (V)

By Jason Kirby with Richard Warnica, Gustavo Vieira, Chris Sorensen, Alex Ballingall, Martin Patriquin and Ken Macqueen - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 at 1:05 PM - 0 Comments

We’ve previously brought you items 1-18, on subsidies and infrastructure, 19-34, on food and job creation, followed by 35-55, the environment, animals, and money for nothing, and 56-73, culture and tourism. Here’s the wrap-up, a sample of questionable spending on employee expenses, patronage, makeovers, studies, polls and surveys as well as lawsuits and lawyers.

Canada’s finances may be the envy of the world, but the bar is awfully low these days. Whether it’s Ottawa, the provinces or municipalities, governments across the country face horrendous deficits. We must tighten our belts, say the politicians. Austerity and cutbacks are the order of the day.

Only, you wouldn’t know it looking at this list. What follows is but a slice of the silly, wasteful, craven and often outright stupid ways governments at all levels spent taxpayers’ money over the last year. To find our 99 items, Maclean’s scoured press releases and auditor generals’ reports, contacted watchdog groups like the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, and waded through news reports, looking for examples where the money was either spent or announced in 2011. We also included a handful of egregious instances of waste that only came to light in the past 12 months, even if the actual cash was doled out in previous years.

Not everyone will agree with all these items being on the list. Some will justify handouts to companies and sports teams as necessary to “promote economic activity,” or they’ll say a camping program for new immigrants was a nice thing to do. Sure, it would be great if we could afford everything, but at a time when government spending is under the knife, when services and jobs are being cut, it’s clear many of those with their hands on the public purse have yet to come to terms with Canada’s new fiscal reality.

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REVIEW: The Orphan Master’s Son

By Sarah Weinman - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

From video clips of citizens openly weeping over their Dear Leader to the painful stories of those who survived the country’s brutal work camps, the December death of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il demonstrated anew what a functioning dystopian society looks like.

In the most masterful of coincidences, Adam Johnson, a creative writing teacher at Stanford University, spent the past six years working on what would become The Orphan Master’s Son. As it turns out, this, his second novel, is precisely the work of fiction to help us comprehend the complex psyche of North Korea, ruled by a man so besotted with films that he directed several and kidnapped key figures to star in them.

Johnson’s thrilling, genre-bending tale, set in North Korea, tracks Pak Jun Do from a childhood surrounded by orphans (his father runs a work camp) and haunted by his own lost mother, through to an adulthood spent in tunnels, on a naval ship worthy of Patrick O’Brian, in grim prisons where he was tortured, and finally within Kim’s orbit as a worthy adversary. As he rises up the ranks, Jun Do sheds identities, falls in love with an actress, and comports himself with the bearing of the hero he knows he must always be, even if tragedy looms with unbearable certainty. What truly marks The Orphan Master’s Son as a feat of literary alchemy is that the high entertainment factor never lets readers off the hook: there’s no forgetting North Korea’s real horrors.

REVIEW: White Truffles in Winter

By Jessica Allen - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 at 8:25 AM - 0 Comments

Considering current tastes for all things culinary, it’s a wonder the life of Georges Auguste Escoffier, “king of chefs and chef of kings,” hasn’t been culled more often for historical fiction. Although there are relatively few biographical facts—he revolutionized professional cooking with his brigade de cuisine; he and César Ritz were both fired from the Savoy and went on to establish the Ritz Hotel Development Company; he allegedly had an affair with the actress Sarah Bernhardt—they were the right ingredients for author N.M. Kelby to prepare a tale of intrigue, war and love peppered with appearances of royalty, world leaders, literati and painters set in Paris, London and, of course, kitchens.

Kelby’s story is as much about Escoffier’s wife, the poet Delphine Daffis, confined to a wheelchair in her old age, as Escoffier himself. While her husband works on his fictional last book, The Complete Escoffier: A Memoir in Meals, Delphine hires Sabine, a chain-smoking redhead with a weakness for sailors—and an uncanny resemblance to “the Divine Sarah”—to be the cook at their homestead in Monte Carlo. But Delphine, who harbours resentment for the years Escoffier toiled away at the Ritz in Paris and the Carlton in London, not to mention her embarrassment over the scandal with Bernhardt, has an agenda: she wants Sabine to manipulate Escoffier into granting her immortality, by way of naming a dish after her. And the girl does try, but nothing seems “complicated enough, or passionate enough, or sensible enough,” in Escoffier’s eyes. It’s a hard thesis to swallow: Kelby’s Delphine, cheerless and practical, doesn’t seem to be the sort who’d yearn for something so vainglorious.

Kelby is more convincing when it comes to detailing Escoffier’s passions: his love for Bernhardt and his wife, and also for food, especially during tender moments when the elder chef instructs the stubborn Sabine in the culinary arts. How to ready lobsters for death? Drown them headfirst in a glass of Champagne, preferably Moët. A fine way to go, crustacean or not.

REVIEW: Mr. CSI: How a Vegas Dreamer Made a Killing in Hollywodd, One Body at a Time

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

Other TV creators are household names, but Anthony Zuiker is almost unknown after creating the biggest hit TV franchise in the world. This book is partly his attempt to change that by explaining how the CSI empire reflects his own personal vision. It’s also the story of how real-world violence became a part of his life after he made the goriest shows in TV history: the book begins in 2005, at the height of his success, with the suicide of his estranged father—reported to Zuiker, with inevitable irony, by a real-life CSI officer, whose job isn’t as glamorous as the ones on TV.

This tragic story, alternating with flashbacks to Zuiker’s early life in Las Vegas and his eventual move to California, makes Mr. CSI a more interesting read than the average TV-writer memoir. He had no television writing experience when he wrote the script for CSI, based partly on his own interest in forensics and partly on a Discovery Channel show about “police investigators who employed state-of-the-art science” (providing further proof of how much reality TV has influenced scripted TV). Unlike most TV shows, CSI wound up reflecting actual experience, including Zuiker’s Vegas childhood: “You ooze Vegas from every pore in your body,” an agent told him when advising him to set the show there.

But Zuiker leaves some doubt about whether he has the temperament to make a show with more depth than CSI. The book mentions his experience with CSI: New York, the first show he was allowed to run on his own. The early episodes were dark, brooding and haunted by 9/11, but he says he quickly retooled it when the network told him it wasn’t popular enough. The book is sometimes the same, cutting away from his father’s story to deal with feel-good subjects. It seems there’s a limit to how dark Zuiker can allow himself to go.

REVIEW: Heinrich Himmler

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 at 8:10 AM - 0 Comments

As head of the SS, chief of police, “Reich Commissar for the Consolidation of Germanness,” and deputy führer, Heinrich Himmler—failed chicken farmer, occult believer, homophobe and anti-Semite—managed to achieve power in Nazi Germany second only to Hitler’s. He was as responsible for repressing domestic dissent as he was for the Holocaust. Despite his key role, however, Himmler has never been the focus of a comprehensive biography before this massive effort by Longerich, a distinguished German historian.

That has its upside, of course. A few decades ago, a psychoanalytic approach would surely have grounded Himmler’s destructive life in childhood trauma. Longerich, despite an appropriately keen interest in his subject’s personality, is having none of that. Yes, Himmler was emotionally inhibited and socially backward, especially with women, and that did make the all-male paramilitary world of the Nazis all the more appealing. But his real interest in military life and in violence as the first, best response to any issue stemmed from the fact that—like many early Nazi enthusiasts—Himmler (born in 1900) was just a shade too young for First World War service. His view of war and its cleansing potential was as absurdly romanticized as his desire to return to a racially purified, fantasy Germany. And just as deadly.

Himmler combined his utopian fantasies with the genius for vicious power politics that marks all successful players in totalitarian systems. He always emerged from internecine struggles and betrayals with enhanced powers, and for all Hitler’s absolute centrality to his regime, the way Himmler wove together the tools that came to his hand—the police machinery, the settlement policy, the camp system, the forced labour programs—was also crucial to creating the violence and chaos that defined Nazism. Not the least example of Himmler’s destructive capacity was intense repression of all dissent right up to the war’s last days, aimed to prevent another Great War-style collapse on the home front. That Germany continued to resist long after its cause was hopeless, Longerich argues, “was the work of Heinrich Himmler.”

REVIEW: Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Death of Mao’s China

By Brian Bethune - Monday, January 9, 2012 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

The Chinese have many sayings about heaven and earth, and the relationship between divine and mundane order. One of them is encapsulated in the title that Palmer, a perceptive British writer living in Beijing, gives his study of 1976 China, the year the bloody chaos of the Cultural Revolution finally ended. With Mao Zedong on his deathbed and his would-be successors jockeying for power, Chinese heaven—political and social order, in other words—was metaphorically cracking. And then the Earth literally shook. On July 28, a quake flattened the city of Tangshan and its outlying villages, killing half a million people in perhaps the deadliest 23 seconds in human history.

The era’s corrosive politics had even seeped into earthquake science. Weeks before the disaster, Chinese seismologists, alarmed by warning signals in the region—a drop in the water table and high levels of radon in the water—were attempting to get national officials’ attention. But they were hampered by the fact the Communist party’s man at the seismology bureau, their pipeline to the country’s rulers, had just been denounced as a “capitalist roader.” It’s doubtful, though, that any warning could have saved many from a quake that struck at the worst time (the middle of the night) and worst place possible (directly under a city of one million).

It was the aftermath that enraged the populace: the panicked militia shooting “looters” (people trying to find food in public granaries), the refusal of foreign help, the concentration on Tangshan city (some villages received no aid for months). The Communist state’s inept and callous response proved too much for a population already boiling over in resentment at the Cultural Revolution’s excesses, and 1976 became the revolutionary year in which China began its transformation into a modern superpower. And in his epilogue, Palmer nicely captures just how far China has come over the last 35 years. Today’s Beijing is rife with Cultural Revolution kitsch, including theme restaurants with singing waiters dressed as Red Guards, who address delighted diners as “comrade,” now a slang word for “gay.”

REVIEW: Gossip: The untrivial pursuit

By Anne Kingston - Friday, January 6, 2012 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments

Reading Gossip, it’s hard to decide what is more intriguing: the book’s clever insights into gossip’s workings or the volume of scuttlebutt shoehorned into its 219 pages. Epstein’s narrative bristles with items about the identity of Annie Leibovitz’s sperm donor, Harold Pinter’s “pukey little poems,” Elizabeth Taylor’s paranoia about her pubic hair, and sundry stories of adultery, incest and plagiarism. There’s even a tepid, recycled nugget about Conrad Black on page 19 that unintentionally illustrates Epstein’s theory that gossip’s power is diluted when spread.

Epstein gossips about gossip with the same elegant erudition that animated his earlier studies of snobbery, ambition and friendship—less concerned with profundity than entertainment. The author, unsurprisingly, is a defender of gossip, or what Earl Wilson, the granddaddy of American gossip columnists, called “hearing something you like about someone you don’t.” Gossip is often false and malicious, Epstein avers, but it’s also “a species of truth,” which is why oppressive regimes block it. It serves as a social connector and occasionally even provides useful information. By exposing behaviour people want hidden—vanities, foibles, hypocrisies—gossip enforces community norms. That we see in his profiles of “great gossips of history,” who include Saint-Simon, the gossip laureate at Versailles during the court of Louis XIV, and Matt Drudge, who calls gossip “unedited information.”

Epstein is not an unequivocal gossip cheerleader, however, recognizing that it’s a distraction that increasingly dumbs down intellectual life. He’s also not pleased about the extent to which it now informs media coverage of news, as leaks, or “well-aimed gossip in political dress,” have new power. The Internet also intensifies gossip’s reach and harm—abetted by a celebrity culture that churns out temporary deities to dish about.

Epstein, who’s more at ease discussing Walter Winchell than Perez Hilton, doesn’t plumb the complexities of gossip as modern marketing tool. But his own name-dropping “diary” woven through the text shows how gossip can be marshalled to elevate one’s insider status and, better, pave the way to a book about gossip destined to be gossiped about itself.

REVIEW: The Unconquered

By Peter Shawn Taylor - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

In 2002, Brazilian explorer Sydney Possuelo set out to locate the mysterious flecheiros—Arrow People—thought to be living deep in the Amazon rainforest and one of the last uncontacted tribes left in the world. He never saw them. And he considered his expedition a complete success because of it.

Possuelo was then head of Brazil’s Department of Isolated Indians and author of a unique national policy that sought to protect long-lost tribes. Even the most benign contact, he realized, inevitably brings hardship and death, often by introducing diseases for which natives have no natural defences. Possuelo sought to protect their way of life by creating a sprawling native homeland, Terra Indigenas, off limits to outsiders. To do this, it was necessary to establish the limits of flecheiros territory. Accompanying Possuelo on this arduous three-month journey by riverboat, dugout canoe and foot is National Geographic writer Wallace, who describes the trek in vivid, if unsettling, terms. Both river and jungle provide a seemingly inexhaustible supply of hidden horrors: from poisonous caterpillars to anacondas lurking just below the waterline. The Amazon, writes Wallace, is “an enormous laboratory where the process of evolution continued to unfold by the minute, spawning a mind-boggling array of deadly creatures and toxic plants.”

Humanity proves to be just as hostile. The river system is rife with poachers, drug smugglers, illegal gold miners and violent tribes already acquainted with the dangers of modern life. Then there’s the gradual disintegration of social order within Possuelo’s party, as the group tromps its way into its own heart of darkness. Surviving the trek, if barely, Possuelo finally locates a flecheiros village. It is empty, although they’re likely watching his every move from the jungle. Only later, while flying over the route, does Possuelo actually see the Arrow People, watching as his strange craft buzzes overhead. “I prefer to keep things this way,” he says. “We will never know each other.”

REVIEW: Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Light

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 8:15 AM - 0 Comments

At the outbreak of the Second World War, neutral Portugal was an impoverished authoritarian state on the fringe of global events. Then, almost overnight, its capital, Lisbon, became the place where Allies and Axis kept an eye on each other. That suited the Portuguese dictator, Antonio Salazar, who knew the risks of joining either the Allies (German or Spanish invasion) or the Axis (losing Portugal’s colonies to Britain). The belligerents also accepted the status quo. The Allies in particular desired an escape hatch from the Nazi-dominated continent, and thousands of refugees passed through Lisbon. Toss in the spies (including Ian Fleming, who based Casino Royale on Lisbon’s chic seaside casino in Estoril) and the exiled royalty (including the duke and duchess of Windsor) and Lochery is right: Lisbon was “like Casablanca, only 20 times more.”

And then there was the wolfram, the rare hard metal vital to modern armaments. Portugal was its main European source. Just as the Allies took over an Azores island for an air base (the price of Portuguese neutrality), the Germans made it clear that peace depended upon access to wolfram. That too suited Salazar, who played, in Lochery’s retelling, his limited cards skilfully. The tungsten was forthcoming, but only in exchange for gold, which the Nazis obtained by looting Europe. Portugal ended the war with at least 124 tonnes of German-paid gold (and almost certainly much more), three-quarters of which U.S. negotiators believed was looted.

But those negotiators, who succeded in forcing the return of stolen gold by other neutral nations, were hamstrung by their own government’s desire to keep the Azores base for the new Cold War. In the end, the Portuguese returned just four tonnes. The rest remained as an integral part of Portugal’s slow transition to a modern economy, and as one more of the war’s still-open wounds.

REVIEW: Tolstoy: A Russian Life

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, December 20, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

Count Leo Tolstoy—novelist nonpareil, Christian mystic, proto-Communist, mad aristocrat and very embodiment of Mother Russia—may have lived until he was 82, but he has always left the impression that his lifespan was twice as long. One reason is caught in Bartlett’s subtitle: Tolstoy’s wildly eventful 19th-century life (1828 to 1910) spanned all the changes in pre-revolutionary Russia that would make it one of the most important nations of the 20th century. Born in a land without railways, he was eventually filmed by movie cameras wielded by celebrity-hunting American journalists. He died only seven years before the Bolshevik Revolution, but his father was a veteran of the war against Napoleon. At Tolstoy’s birth, the Russian nobility controlled serfs as though they were slaves—his grandparents gave his father a peasant girl when he was 16, for his “health.” Tolstoy abused his female serfs too after he became a landowner at 19, before he squandered his inheritance on gypsy singers and gambling.

Later, after a spiritual crisis in the 1870s, Tolstoy emerged as a Christian heretic opposed to violence and property, and a champion of peasants. (Of interest to Canada, he published his last novel, Resurrection, in 1899 to enable members of the Doukhobor sect to emigrate here.) A later influence on Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Tolstoy the political-religious thinker was also the subject of articles by Lenin. Like most great artists, he matters to most people precisely because of his art, but Bartlett makes a case for the rest of Tolstoy’s life too, and for the real possibility that he would be remembered now, even if he hadn’t written War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

Yet he did write them, and in the end that does matter most. Between the aristocratic excess and the ascetic zeal, Leo Tolstoy, for all his imperiousness and focus on large ideas, demonstrated a genius for observing and describing the smallest changes in human consciousness that has awed his readers ever since.

What’s on our pundits’ wish lists for 2012?

By macleans.ca - Friday, December 2, 2011 at 12:57 PM - 0 Comments

Over in that other Cree community, “snail’s pace” progress

By John Geddes - Thursday, December 1, 2011 at 8:57 AM - 0 Comments

The sorry situation in Attawapiskat, Ont., that’s drawing so much attention this week is, of course, nothing new. It follows much the same pattern as the fall 2005 crisis Kashechewan, another remote Cree community on the Ontario shore of James Bay.

As many will recall, the Kashechewan story was portrayed as a severe water-quality problem. The filtration plant at the reserve community of about 1,900 wasn’t working properly, briefly resulting in dangerous E. coli bacteria levels in the water. Chlorine used to kill the bacteria was then blamed for aggravating skin problems, although doctors I talked to at the time thought the lesions and rashes were caused by chronic overcrowding in abysmal housing and doubted chlorine levels mattered much.

So the truly urgent problem was, as it is in Attawapiskat, lousy housing. I wondered if anything was ever done about it, and whether Kashechewan’s experience holds any lessons for Attawapiskat. So I called Jonathan Solomon, Kashechewan’s current chief, to find out.

Solomon explained that soon after the wave of media attention that crashed over his community in fall 2005, the federal government approved a project to renovate at least 60 houses. That project went well, initially (and even won an award). Not only did it provide some decent shelter, the renovation contractors also trained local residents in valuable dry-walling and plumbing skills.

“We certainly made progress at the beginning,” Solomon said. “We did build. But for the past two years we’ve been struggling to get funding. We are told there’s no money.”

It’s not that demand has eased. Solomon says five families with children are living in “shacks” in Keshechewan, as are about 12 single adults. He would like to renovate 80 of the community’s about 200 houses. Some work is on the horizon: the federal government recently approved $450,000 for retrofits, perhaps enough to fix up another 10 or 12 homes. “We’re moving at a snail’s pace.”

It seems that keeping up real momentum is the problem. There is, however, a glimmer of hope in Kashechewan. The community’s water filtration plant—where malfunctions in 2005 led to the evacuation of a quarter of the community at an estimated cost of $16 million—is now running up to provincial standards.

REVIEW: The Anatomy of Israel’s Survival

By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, November 30, 2011 at 1:30 PM - 0 Comments

This book explains why Israel has survived, argues why it will continue to do so, and warns of the kind of country it risks becoming unless it stops occupying Palestinian territories. Goodman, an Israeli scholar and journalist, addresses the dangers that Israel faces from nearby states and judges none of them to truly threaten the nation’s existence—even those from a nuclear Iran. Indeed, these threats have driven Israel’s innovation in military technology and strategy, which both makes it stronger and benefits its civilian economy. Unlike many in Israel, he is encouraged rather than worried by the upheavals of the Arab Spring, believing democracy’s spread will ultimately benefit everyone in the Middle East, Israelis included.

Israel’s more serious challenges are internal. Ultra-orthodox Jews are growing in number and remain, by and large, separate from the rest of Israeli society, as are Israeli Arabs. Both groups must be better integrated.

Because of higher birth rates among Palestinians, there will soon be more Muslims and Christians living in all the territory Israel controls than there are Jews. “The choice is blatantly clear: between Greater Israel or Democratic and Jewish Israel,” writes Goodman. Israel must shed territory and disengage from land it has occupied since 1967—ideally by striking a peace deal with West Bank Palestinians, unilaterally if necessary. (The most that’s achievable with Hamas in Gaza, says Goodman, is a long-term truce.)

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REVIEW: Van Gogh: The Life

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

In the modern Western imagination, Vincent Van Gogh is the very embodiment of the tortured artistic genius, able to express that genius—in his case, on canvases that are now among the best-loved artworks in the world—precisely because he was tortured, a man who eventually died young (only 37) by his own hand (of course). All very tragic, if undeniably romantic. And all profoundly mistaken, according to Naifeh and Smith, authors of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Jackson Pollack, about another volatile painter who died young. The truth, in fact, is far more authentically tragic. Van Gogh was enormously productive and incandescent with inspiration when he was feeling well, and unable to take up his brush during his bouts of mental illness. With a final blow to the mythic Van Gogh, the authors argue he didn’t even kill himself, but fell victim to a couple of boys with a misfiring revolver.

Naifeh and Smith are persuasive in that conclusion, as they are in everything else in this magisterial biography. Writing with the co-operation of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, they didn’t have just the beautifully written letters exchanged by Vincent and his beloved brother Theo, but also previously unpublished family correspondence. The man who emerges is not someone most people would enjoy having for a relative. (Theo was a long-suffering brother.) Vincent was as dedicated to violent quarrels as he was to investigating the surprises provided by his own troubled psyche. Yet he had courage and integrity that is humbling to encounter.

After the death of his father in 1885, Van Gogh lost his religious faith, a loss with which he never really came to terms, according to Naifeh and Smith. As Van Gogh himself wrote, only art was left: “Illusions may fade, but the sublime remains. My aim in life is to make pictures and drawings, as many and as well as I can, and then passing away thinking, ‘Oh, the pictures I might have made!’ ” In Vincent Van Gogh’s heartbreaking story, there’s really nothing more to add.

REVIEW: A Natural History of the Piano: The Instrument, the Music, the Musicians—from Mozarts to Modern Jazz and Everything in Between

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 8:10 AM - 0 Comments

Which is more important, the piano or the pianist? In his study of the world’s most versatile and bulky musical instrument, Isacoff seems to come down on the side of the man (and occasionally, woman) who plays it. He notes that the piano caught on in the 18th century, obliterating the harpsichord, because of its usefulness as a piece of mechanical engineering: other keyboards “couldn’t simply respond to changing finger pressure, the way a piano does.” But what it really did was allow virtuoso players, from the classical to the jazz era, to create different types of sound. Isacoff divides pianists into categories depending on those sounds. “The Combustibles” are noted for extroverted noisy energy; “the Melodists” emphasize attractive tunes; “the Alchemists” are the ones who, like Claude Debussy or bebop players, conjure up unusual sound-worlds; and finally, “the Rhythmitizers” gave us ragtime, rock ’n’ roll, and international influences.

Isacoff includes quotes and mini-essays by many famous musicians, who sometimes confirm his idea that high and low music are connected: Billy Joel is quoted saying he can “discover secrets about music by what I call ‘breaking the Beethoven codes.’ ”

Inadvertently, the book seems to suggest that the great age of the piano is over. The author says that the creative range of the piano “is still expanding, as composers explore the instrument’s endless possibilities.” But many of the pianists he quotes seem to contradict this, with the classical pianists talking about yet another Tchaikovsky concerto performance and the jazzmen waxing nostalgic about older jazzmen. The one ray of hope, as often in music, is Asia; China has “mushrooming piano schools filled with millions of students,” who might go on to expand the international piano repertoire. Or, on the other hand, they might just play a lot of music written when the piano was still a new instrument.

REVIEW: 11/22/63

By Brian Bethune - Monday, November 28, 2011 at 9:05 AM - 0 Comments

Opinions vary (and how) about the literary quality of Stephen King’s vast output—more than three dozen novels alone—but no one denies the man can tell a story. Or that he has an authentic channel to the zeitgeist, both capturing baby boomer pop culture and contributing to it: who can imagine a prom gone wrong without recalling Carrie, or notice a dog acting strangely without thoughts of Cujo? So it comes as no surprise that when King, 64, wanted to write a time-travel novel, its plot would pivot on his generation’s watershed moment, the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

Jake Epping, a young Maine schoolteacher, takes up the mission bequeathed him by Al Templeton, the owner of a local diner who discovers that his pantry offers a portal to the age of Ike and Elvis, to 11:58 a.m., Sept. 9, 1958, to be precise. Al has learned that every time one of us visits 1958, it’s like the first time: everything he has done on previous visits has vanished as though it had never been. So Al, dying of lung cancer, needs Jake to go and live back then permanently, or at least long enough—five years—to accomplish a mission both consider vital: the portal doesn’t extend back far enough for Jake to kill Hitler, so he had better save Kennedy.

Al offers a summary of the expected benefits of erasing that bad day in Dallas, succinct enough not to bog down readers and persuasive enough to convince Jake, before King starts tackling just about every classic conundrum ever raised in sci-fi’s time-travel subgenre. Some are disposed of quickly—what would happen should he kill his own grandfather, Jake wonders aloud; “Why the f–k would you do that?” Al retorts. Others unfold more slowly over the novel’s 842 pages. Time is “obdurate,” and resistant to change, Jake soon learns; only later does he realize that’s a good thing, in a story that’s as ingenious as it’s compulsively readable.

REVIEW: Trudeau Transformed: The Shaping of a Statesman

By John Geddes - Monday, November 28, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

An enduring element of his myth has it that Pierre Trudeau was a dilettante well into adult life. The image of the future prime minister indulging in a motorcycle-riding, beard-growing, job-hopping arrested adolescence has been cultivated both by admirers—it makes him more fun—and detractors—it confirms his lack of seriousness. The Nemnis, a husband-and-wife writing team devoted to burnishing their subject’s memory, set out to demolish the image of an aimless Trudeau.

And they largely succeed. In a previous volume, 2006’s Young Trudeau, they revealed the narrowness of his early thinking, which shockingly featured pro-Fascist sympathies. Now they trace his 1944-47 postgraduate education from Harvard to Paris’s Sciences Po to the London School of Economics. Their painstaking study of his notes, letters and journals shows how Trudeau systematically acquired democratic ideas centred on individual rights and absorbed economic theory.

Previous biographers have viewed his celebrated travels through Asia after his university years as evidence of rootlessness. The Nemnis cite a letter to his mother in which Trudeau writes of setting out “to understand the world’s politics,” and argue that his itinerary shows he followed through. They pounce on evidence that Trudeau later sought out, rather than stumbled into, his key first experience in Ottawa as a junior bureaucrat.

In their telling, Trudeau’s rise in the 1950s as a public intellectual in Quebec—a blur of writing, editing, lecturing and organizing—flows naturally out of what came before. So does his 1965 jump into federal politics, which closes this instalment of their multi-volume project. Of course, the anti-Trudeau camp now ascendant in Canada needn’t buy this laudatory version. But to go on dismissing him as gifted but undisciplined, charismatic but shallow, has just gotten that much less plausible.

REVIEW: The Lives of Conn Smythe

By Charlie Gillis - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

Forgive fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs a longing glance back at their founding father, who brought home eight Stanley Cups over 34 years as owner and sometime manager of the fabled hockey club. Conn Smythe’s ideal players were “hard-nosed warriors, as skilled with their elbows as they were with the puck,” writes author McParland. While current management pays lip service to this creed, the paucity of parades down Yonge Street leads one to wonder: what did Smythe have that today’s bunch lacks?

Determination, it would seem, and fear. The humiliating poverty of Smythe’s childhood manifested itself in relentless ambition and an insecurity he never quite shook. His iron-fisted rule of the Leafs was rooted partly in his paranoid sense that others were plotting to push him out of the organization, and he was not the sort of man to go quietly. Such qualities made him a champion, McParland notes, and an awfully hard man to work with.

Smythe rose above his flaws, however, and not just in hockey. He forged ahead with the construction of Maple Leaf Gardens during the height of the Great Depression, bequeathing to Toronto a civic landmark, while bringing well-paying jobs when the city most needed them. A decade later, he almost single-handedly shamed the King government into sending properly trained and equipped soldiers overseas during the liberation of Europe in 1945—activism for which McParland accords overdue credit.

As for his success as a hockey executive, well, that’s harder to explain. Like many of the best, Smythe was guided by mysterious instincts about players (he spoke often of “bloodlines,” though he really meant character). Yet his intuition yielded the greatest NHL franchise of the 1930s and ’40s, featuring icons like King Clancy, Busher Jackson and Turk Broda. And while he’d have been lost in today’s world of salary caps and $100-million contracts, only a fool would bet against him for long were he in charge of today’s Leafs. If McParland’s entertaining and thorough account is any guide, Smythe wouldn’t have quit working until he found a way to win.

REVIEW: Jerusalem: The Biography

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

“The romantic image is far more vivid” than any verifiable facts. Montefiore is talking about Jerusalem in the time of King David, but it could just as easily apply to all of Jerusalem, the story of the world’s most legendary city from Biblical times to the Six Day War of 1967. Though it’s a linear history, the book frequently changes perspective depending on whose story dominates Jerusalem at a given time: early Jews, Christians or Muslims. Entering the 20th century and the Zionist era, we see how the city has been central to religion and politics for hundreds of years.

Since Jerusalem is so closely bound up with those three great religions, early sections of the book sometimes leave a lingering doubt about which stories are real; as Montefiore notes, the Gospels are the only source for the story of Jesus’ crucifixion, although “no faith is required to believe in the life and death of a Jewish prophet.” And yet the legendary aspect of Jerusalem is what shapes the history in the rest of the book; “The writers of the Bible created their narrative of Jerusalem,” Montefiore writes, and that narrative became the thing that people around the world fight, crusade and die over.

Montefiore has so much ground to cover that complicated stories like the Balfour Declaration take place in only a few pages. But the fast pace helps convey just how quickly things change in the city, and how many times the balance of power has swung. Because the book rarely lingers on one movement or religion for very long, it has a more objective feel than most books about Israel; the main character, as the term “biography” suggests, is the city itself.

REVIEW: Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life

By Anne Kingston - Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 8:10 AM - 0 Comments

Just who was Pat Nixon, the proper, self-contained wife of America’s most reviled and disgraced president? Of her inner life—her hopes, her regrets, what was running through her head as her family boarded that plane to California in ignominy—there is scant knowledge. Born Thelma Ryan in 1912, Nixon was one of the few first ladies never to pen a memoir; the closest we get is Pat Nixon: The Untold Story, a chirpy biography written by her daughter Julie Nixon Eisenhower.

Now Beattie, famed for chronicling the cynical post-Nixon generation in fiction, unwraps the hermetically sealed “generic president’s wife” in an intriguing, playful piece of literary performance art that melds fact with fiction to explore her own creative process.

Anyone seeking a fully fleshed “reimagining” of Pat Nixon in the style of American Wife, Curtis Sittenfeld’s portrait of Laura Bush, will be disappointed—and perplexed by such chapter titles as “Mrs. Nixon Reads The Glass Menagerie” and “Mrs. Nixon Gets the Giggles.” Beattie, who teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Virginia, explores Pat Nixon less as a person than as a textual conundrum: “Writing fiction about a real person tests my unexamined assumptions,” she explains. She ascribes thoughts and opinions to her subject, offers alternative scenarios to actual events, and even injects herself into a story that may or may not be fiction.

More, she cleverly reveals writers’ habits (poets sleep most, she claims) and her own writerly bag of tricks. Metatextual references abound. One chapter depicts Richard Nixon’s marriage proposal in the style of an F. Scott Fitzgerald story. Another echoes James Joyce’s “The Dead,” rendering Halloween circa 1990 at the Nixons’, where the ex-president greets trick-or-treaters wearing Richard Nixon masks.

A writer of less stature and skill would be branded self-indulgent for eclipsing her subject so boldly. But expect Beattie to be lauded for rescuing Mrs. Nixon from her fate as a Watergate footnote. And she has, in this genre-bending memoir-novel-biography hybrid: now the still-enigmatic Mrs. Nixon is a literary footnote as well.

REVIEW: Seriously…I’m kidding

By Joanne Latimer - Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 8:05 AM - 0 Comments

Since her last book, The Funny Thing Is, in 2003, much has happened to Ellen DeGeneres. She hosted the Oscars, married Portia de Rossi, started a record label, debuted on Broadway, became a talk-show host and a spokeswoman for Covergirl—a 50-year-old cover girl and an openly gay cover girl, at that. Most readers of her new book will be fans of the show, hoping for more of Ellen’s loopy charm.

As an extension of her talk-show personality, Seriously . . . I’m Kidding is a success. It has funny rants about meditating, gambling, Portia’s addiction to hand lotion, their pets and punctuality. As a book about the last eight years of DeGeneres’s life, it’s an artful dodge. She tries too hard to entertain readers, and forgoes thoughtful reflection. The substance of the book is supposed to be advice from DeGeneres about how to be happy. She throws out predictable chestnuts like enjoy every day, accept yourself, get a mammogram and colonoscopy and think positively. What are missing are personal stories. The result feels less intimate than an episode of her show. Some chapters are so empty generous readers will suspect they’re satirical—Ellen’s spoof on the genre of comedy autobiography.

Still, a few chapters nearly redeem the entire project. Her “Letter to Mall Security” is priceless, as is her riff on endorphins. She speaks honestly about the difficulty of hosting a daily talk show and being a gay role model. “[When I came out], there were extreme groups that didn’t think I was gay enough. There were other groups of people who thought I was too gay. It didn’t occur to me that when I announced I was gay I would have to clarify just how gay I was.” DeGeneres also speaks openly about her and Portia’s decision not to have children. These candid moments are too few. Ironically, Ellen could take a page from Portia’s book, The Unbearable Lightness, which is more accomplished, personal and entertaining.

REVIEW: King

By Brian Bethune - Monday, November 21, 2011 at 9:15 PM - 0 Comments

Once upon a time, Canadians objected to the notion that William Lyon Mackenzie King, our longest-serving prime minister, was the embodiment of the nation—“the Canadian as he was first formed in the mind of God,” to adapt a phrase from poet Frank Scott—in his po-faced blandness and fearful caution. (A man who “did nothing by halves that he could do by quarters,” as Scott actually did write of King.) Since then, of course, it has emerged, the real reason for Canadians to recoil from the idea was that in his interior life King was flat-out crazy, a mother-obsessed bachelor who scrutinized his shaving cream for omens and communed with the dead, including Sir Wilfrid Laurier, via mediums.

But until now no one has ever done as magisterial a job as Levine in fusing King’s many parts into a complex but comprehensible whole, and thereby demonstrating—however much we might cringe from the thought—that King may well be us personified after all. He did have his share of good fortune, in his enemies—one unappealing or hare-brained Tory leader after another—and in a quiescent press culture. He wasn’t that secretive about his spiritualism: at a 1945 Christmas party King told the startled governor general about a conversation he recently had with FDR, dead the past seven months. Many people were aware of the PM’s beliefs, but none outed him during his lifetime.

But he was also a politician of genius, as Levine convincingly argues. He was unafraid to appoint strong ministers and broker between them. He was instinctively attuned to Canadian fears, hopes and ambitions. King was as obsessed with national unity as he was with communicating with his dead dogs. He understood Canada’s simmering regional tensions better than any other prime minister—his only possible rivals in that regard, Laurier and Sir John A. Macdonald, had less complex Canadas to govern. And if his own deep-rooted insecurities helped keep him to the maddening maybe-yes, maybe-no approach that saw the country safely through the Second World War’s conscription crisis, well then, he was the right crazy prime minister at the right time.

REVIEW: The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas

By Brian Bethune - Monday, November 21, 2011 at 9:00 PM - 0 Comments

This eye-popping manuscript represents an attempt by a 17th-century French Jesuit, Louis Nicolas, to capture the life of the New World—flora, fauna and human—in writings and 180 pen illustrations (often watercoloured) of plants, fish, birds and 15 individuals, mostly tattooed and pipe-smoking, from woodland First Nations communities. Most of the illustrations are identifiably realistic, especially the birds and plants, and some—notably the unicorn—are not, but they are all part of a pre-modern European’s attempt to come to grips with the strangeness of North America.

The history of the manuscript is as mysterious as its author’s imagination. It was already 250 years old when it first emerged in 1930, entirely without provenance, in the possession of a Parisian bookseller. Within four years it disappeared again, not to re-emerge until 1949 when it was bought by Thomas Gilcrease, an eccentric Oklahoma oilman with a mania for collecting Americana. (And that is why one of the most beautiful and informative of Canadian artifacts resides in a museum in, of all places, Tulsa, Okla.)

It was not until the 1960s that Canadian scholars were able to tie the work to Nicolas, who travelled widely in New France between 1664 and 1675. He was not, as Gagnon dryly remarks, “your ordinary Jesuit.” He got into trouble with his brother priests for training two bears to perform circus tricks on the grounds of the Jesuit compound near Quebec City, and he seems more interested in the manners and customs of native peoples than in their souls.

Nicolas lived at a moment in Western history poised between old learning and modern science. He could believe in unicorns precisely because of the new emphasis on direct observation. Which was to be preferred, Nicolas wrote: the reports of brave travellers “who have seen rare things” or the scoffing of savants who had “never lost sight of their parish church tower”? The former, for a man who thought anything was possible after the marvels he himself had seen and so wondrously recorded.

REVIEW: The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

In the aftermath of 9/11, FBI special agent Soufan was one of the American intelligence agents ordered to use “any means necessary” to make terror suspects talk during interrogation. For Soufan, now retired from the bureau, the necessary means were the ones that worked: guile, deep knowledge of al-Qaeda and the person he was questioning, and compassion. He forged bonds with men who sought to kill his fellow countrymen, ordering their shackles to be removed when he spoke with them and procuring a satellite phone for one detainee to call his wife. He once held ice to the lips of a gravely wounded suspect fighting for his life. He debated religion with detainees, as well as American history and Hollywood films. He drew out their co-operation. He outwitted them.

Soufan says it was “odious” to sit and laugh with committed terrorists, but his tactics produced results. They were scorned and rejected, however, by those in the CIA who endorsed “enhanced interrogation techniques”—aggressive questioning employing methods such as sleep deprivation and waterboarding. Soufan methodically unravels the lies of those who claim those abuses produced good results. Even with sections of the book redacted by CIA censors, it makes for devastating reading. Soufan’s chronicle should end the debate on whether torture is ever justified, but probably won’t.

Soufan’s book is most illuminating for the light it shines on America’s interrogation program, and the painfully consequential lack of information sharing between the FBI and the CIA. It’s also revealing as a history of al-Qaeda and its war with America. Soufan has tracked the organization since the mid-1990s, and was intimately involved in investigating many of its crimes—notably the attack on the USS Cole. His experience shows. Even without endnotes, his book deserves to be widely read.