Short list for Charles Taylor Prize
By Jessica Allen - Wednesday, January 9, 2013 - 0 Comments
The five authors shortlisted for this year’s Charles Taylor Prize are:
- Carol Bishop-Gwyn for The Pursuit of Perfection: A Life of Celia Franca (read our review)
- Tim Cook for Warlords: Borden, Mackenzie King, and Canada’s World Wars
- Sandra Djwa for Journey with No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page
- Ross King for Leonardo and The Last Supper (read our review)
- Andrew Preston for Sword of Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (read our review)
The winner, who will take home $25,000 for penning a work of Canadian nonfiction that ”best combines a superb command of the English language, an elegance of style, and a subtlety of thought and perception,” will be announced on Mar. 4, 2013.
Andrew Westoll won the prize last year for The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary: A Canadian Story of Resilience and Recovery.
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Introducing The Charles Taylor Prize finalists
By macleans.ca - Friday, February 17, 2012 at 3:46 PM - 0 Comments
The five authors discuss the ups and downs of literary non-fiction with Brian Bethune
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Review: The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary
By Marni Jackson - Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 11:25 AM - 2 Comments
Book by Andrew Westoll
The author, who has trained as a primatologist in the South American rainforest, spent several months as a volunteer caregiver for 13 chimpanzees living in a Quebec sanctuary. Director Gloria Grow had rescued the animals from biomedical research labs in the U.S.—the last country to still use primates this way. Although the chimps were still behind bars, the ingeniously designed sanctuary offered privacy, social contact with each other, human kindness, and access to the outdoors. For some, it was the first time they had ever walked on grass.
Westoll’s book tells a strong, simple story well. His job involved a great deal of poop-scraping, an occasional spitball in the face, and the constant low hum of danger; despite the fact that we like to put cowboy outfits on baby chimps and treat them as pets, adult chimpanzees have five to seven times the strength of a human male, and, like some badass humans, they can be mean. “Smoothie Boy,” as Westoll was known to his co-workers, delivered trolleys of hot tea and vegetable smoothies to 13 very distinctive characters, from the Bronx-cheering Binky to Sue Ellen, a fashionista with a thing for bearded men.
Slowly, the author develops a bond with several of them, especially Tom, a placid elder with old-soul eyes and a long history of war wounds. It’s the affecting individuality of his charges that makes the strongest argument that “the moral boundary we draw between us and them is indefensible.” For over a century, Westoll points out, we’ve shot chimpanzees into space, implanted electrodes into their brains, and injected them with the HIV virus, all the while maintaining that a “chimpanzee in a biomedical lab is somehow less ‘endangered’ than its wild compatriots.” But that attitude is changing. In this experiment in empathy, the author’s goal was to learn from the chimps, do no harm, and to pass that revolutionary connection on to us.
