Posts Tagged ‘book reviews’

How humans will survive a mass extinction

By Bookmarked and Brian Bethune - Friday, May 24, 2013 - 0 Comments

What makes life on Earth, our only home (so far), so lively is exactly what makes it so deadly: the planet’s inherent instability. Over its 4.5-billion-year history, Earth has been smothered in greenhouse gas emissions, choked by ice, bombarded by cosmic radiation, split open by megavolcanos, and—as if the planet’s own dangers weren’t enough—hammered by the neighbours, too, in the form of that dino-killing asteroid 66 million years ago. In the last half-billion years alone, there have been five mass extinction events. Each time 75 per cent or more of all species died out in less than a million years, a geological blink of an eye. In one, the cheerfully named Great Dying, the species death toll hit 95 per cent 252 million years ago. One way or another, rapid climate change, too fast for most creatures’ adaptive reactions, was always the culprit.

Ninety-five per cent, however, is not 100, as Newitz stresses. There have always been survivor species, and from our earliest evolution humankind has borne the marks of one. Like sharks, another great survivor, we are natural wanderers (the Scatter of the title); who will “eat any old crap,” as Newitz sums up the human and shark diets (Adapt). Lately—the last 100,000 years or so—we’ve added something even more useful to our survival kits: memory. We know what’s happened before and what will surely come again.

And that’s where this engaging account of past catastrophes becomes arresting. If we’re going to last long enough to get off this murderous hunk of rock—the ultimate scatter—we will need to give up our mindless fossil-fuel addiction and our ecological dreams of restoring untouched nature (since it’s nature that’s trying to kill us). We have to actively manage the planet, argues Newitz. And from geoengineering to regulate sunlight to crafting living cities, half-constructed and half-natural, we’d better get going.

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  • On the making of the Mary Tyler Moore Show

    By Bookmarked and Jaime Weinman - Friday, May 24, 2013 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

    Many people have written about The Mary Tyler Moore Show, but Armstrong, a former Entertainment Weekly staff writer, is the first to put it all into a concise, readable popular history of arguably the most influential U.S. sitcom of all time. Not that it started as a sure thing. Moore was returning to TV after a disastrous attempt to become a film and theatre star. But arriving just when TV was desperate for smarter stories and younger demographics, the show wound up as one of the first to feature a woman as “a strong, independent single lead character.”

    The book is told largely from the point of view of a few key people, particularly Treva Silverman, the first of several female writers hired by creators Allan Burns and James L. Brooks to provide the perspective of a modern single woman. The downside of this approach is that it sometimes neglects other key people or even whole seasons of the show after Silverman left. And Armstrong, anxious to tell a story of how the series “helped usher in a more woman-friendly era in the television industry,” treads lightly around facts that don’t fit the narrative, such as the virtual disappearance of women from the writing staff in the final three seasons.

    Still, Armstrong has gathered many of the most interesting stories, including the show’s multiple brushes with cancellation in its first season. She’s at her best creating portraits of the behind-the-scenes people, particularly the young female writers like the future Saturday Night Live innovator Marilyn Suzanne Miller, who cold-called Brooks with the greeting “Hi, I’m 22, I’m in Monroeville, Penn., and I’d like to send you a script.” If Armstrong can’t quite make the case for The Mary Tyler Moore Show as a feminist work, she at least makes it clear how exciting it was that, for the first time, there was a show on TV in which intelligent young women could see themselves.

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  • We’ve got your weekend covered

    By Bookmarked - Friday, May 24, 2013 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

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  • Permanent Present Tense: The Unforgettable Life of the Amnesic Patient, H.M.

    By Bookmarked and Ken MacQueen - Friday, May 24, 2013 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

    The title of this gripping book pretty much says it all about the “tragic mistake” by a brain surgeon that left 27-year-old Henry Molaison unable to remember new experiences for the remaining 55 years of his life. Athletes often credit success to “living in the now” during an event. But what if “now,” and memories of a distant past, are all you’ll ever have?

    Molaison was born in 1926 in Manchester, Conn., blessed with sly wit and above-average intelligence; cursed with debilitating epilepsy. In desperation a neurosurgeon tried a targeted lobotomy in 1953, curing his epilepsy but erasing all future memories. Consider the horrible implications of this: losing your job because you can’t remember the task you started; unable to walk alone because you can’t find the way back.

    No one was better suited to be his memoirist than Corkin, a neuroscientist at MIT. She was a young graduate student at McGill University when she first met Molaison in 1962 as he underwent tests at the Montreal Neurological Institute. It began an almost five-decade relationship as Corkin, among others, used insights into the wounded mind of H.M. (as Molaison is known in countless neurology texts) as keys to the mystery of the brain. H.M. was both patient and friend to Corkin, though he’d forget their many conversations within seconds and she would remain a vaguely familiar presence, perhaps a high school friend, he figured. “We watched one another age over the decades, although he did not know it,” she writes a bit wistfully.

    Above all, Corkin is a scientist. She recounts in chilling, clinical detail the elaborate autopsy after his death in 2008 at 82. “Seeing Henry’s precious brain in the safety of the metal bowl was one of the most memorable and satisfying moments of my life,” she writes. The research lives on. His brain, perhaps the most studied in medical history, is sectioned in 2,401 slices. Corkin delivered a tender eulogy at his funeral. “In loving memory” is etched on his urn. He is gone, but, ironically, never to be forgotten.

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  • Pepper: A History of the World’s Most Influential Spice

    By Peter Shawn Taylor - Friday, May 24, 2013 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

    Here’s another thing you can blame on Christopher Columbus. Not only did the explorer bring colonialism to the Americas and famously misname Caribbean natives as “Indians” (thinking he’d arrived in India), he also created endless confusion in the kitchen by alleging the chili “peppers” he found there were related to the valuable spice “pepper” he was in search of. In fact the two peppers share nothing in common.

    The key role played during the age of discovery by the pepper you put in a pepper grinder is the main focus of Shaffer’s book, which is being marketed as something of a companion piece to Mark Kurlansky’s popular 2002 work Salt: A World History. (With this much attention paid to dinner table fixtures, can a history of the paper napkin and its role in world affairs be far behind?)

    While the dream of finding a new and faster route to the spice islands of the southeast Pacific motivated Columbus and others to set sail into the unknown, pepper alone can’t explain it all, as Shaffer occasionally acknowledges. Nutmeg and cloves were far more valuable by weight. And textiles and tea eventually became much more important to international trade. Nonetheless, pepper was, and still is, the world’s most popular spice.

    Shaffer’s tale is at its best during the early years of the spice trade, when pepper-hungry European nations were not yet world superpowers. Arriving in what is now Indonesia on rickety ships with half-dead crews after year-long voyages, Western sailors often found themselves humbled before the riches of the islanders and competing with each other, as well as Chinese and Muslim traders, for a chance to bring home some pepper.

    In 1601, for example, four English ships sailed to Aceh Banda, a magnificent city-state on the northern tip of Sumatra, with a hand-written letter from Queen Elizabeth I pleading that the sultan sell his pepper to her representatives, and not their competitors; the virgin queen promised “that love will flow from trade.” Full-blown colonialism was still centuries away.

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  • Book review: La Historia del Español: The Story of Spanish

    By Bookmarked and Brian Bethune - Thursday, May 23, 2013 at 8:00 PM - 0 Comments

    Despite becoming a world-spanning language, and the means of cultural expression for tango, flamenco and Gabriel García Márquez, Spanish has always had more speakers than admirers. Even in its Iberian homeland, the locals for centuries thought their quirky version of late Latin was too uncouth for serious purposes—one 13th-century Castilian king had to force his bureaucracy to draft charters in its native tongue rather than in the more prestigious Arabic. But the language—known as Spanish to most of us but, as often as not, as Castilian within Spain, where Catalans and Basques dispute its right to take the national name—now approaches a new prominence, according to Canadian husband-and-wife team Nadeau and Barlow. The reason: its growing clout in the U.S., where the Hispanic population is winning second-language students by its burgeoning numbers and the appeal of its pop culture.

    A good moment, the authors reckon, to profile a language with an astonishing array of historical layers, something they illustrate by the origin of its name. Phoenicians were the first to leave written records about a land where one prolific creature fascinated them. I-shepan-ha, later run through Latin to become Hispania and Greek to become Spania, means “land of rabbits” in Phoenician. And everyone who later rampaged through a much-invaded peninsula also left a linguistic mark. A millennium ago, when a northern fringe of Christian kingdoms faced an imposing Islamic state to the south, a variety of what linguists call Iberio-Romance tongues were spoken. The variant in Castile was one of the oddest. The influence of Arabic and neighbouring Basque is strong: Basque has no letter f, and dozens of Latin-origin words that still begin with f in other Romance languages begin with h in Spanish. More subtly, border Castile was home to all kinds of Christian refugees from the Arab realm, resulting in a simplified common Romance language that remains Europe’s most phonetic.

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  • Looking to host a dinner party?

    By Bookmarked and Jessica Allen - Thursday, May 23, 2013 at 11:42 AM - 0 Comments

    With a constant flux of food-related books, TV shows and celebrity chefs bombarding us with the notion of how great cooking is, do we really need help when it comes to hosting a dinner party?

    If the advice is from Corey Mintz, then yes. “Fed,” the author’s popular Toronto Star newspaper column, was born after he served former Gourmet magazine editor-in-chief Ruth Reichl a GLT—a guanciale, lettuce and tomato sandwich. Rule number one, Mintz writes: “When you really need to impress someone, choose the simplest thing and make it well.”

    After 150 dinner parties, Mintz is well equipped to dish out advice authoritatively—without ever being pedantic—and with good humour. “If your friends are vegetarians make the meal vegetarian,” he writes. “If your friends are vegans, get new friends.”

    With a thoughtful introduction by Sarah Polley (a friend of Mintz’s), lively illustrations by Steve Murray and several dinner party-appropriate recipes, the book is beautifully laid out in 10 chapters. Mintz covers everything from guest lists and seating arrangements to organizing grocery shopping lists and how to say goodbye. There’s even a lateness timetable: five minutes late? “Not worth mentioning.” Thirty minutes? “Expect your host to be upset, though he or she should not show it.”

    Advice is often illustrated with witty anecdotes from Mintz’s past, including a Moroccan-themed dinner party prepared by a good friend who’d never tasted–or made–Moroccan food before. “This is like deciding to build a Lord of the Rings-themed bookshelf before learning to make a bookshelf,” he writes. “Doing things well should always take priority over fanciful ideas.”

    And because this is a how-to guide for the digital age: Unless you’re a doctor on call, then no cellphones on the table please. And if you’re emailing a group of people, don’t hide the addresses in the bcc line: “When I receive an invitation with all the other guests in the bcc line,” writes Mintz, “I wonder if I’m being invited to the final scene in an Agatha Christie novel, where I’ll be one of 10 strangers, each with a plausible motive to have murdered Lord Snoothington.” Seasoned hosts will holler “hallelujah!” when Mintz touches upon common kitchen vexes, like the meddler: “Guests need to know that the kitchen is a workplace and that they should not get in the way.”

    Most importantly, readers will want to strap on an apron—one that covers your upper body, Mintz suggests—and prepare a meal to share with friends.

    Watch author Corey Mintz demonstrate five don’ts for dinner party guests:

  • We’ve got your weekend covered

    By Bookmarked - Saturday, May 11, 2013 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments

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  • A biography of Robert Ripley, believe it or not

    By Matthew Hays - Friday, May 10, 2013 at 1:30 PM - 0 Comments

    Reading this seasoned biographer’s spicy take on the life of Robert Ripley—the man behind the long-running, sensational newspaper column—leaves one wondering why no one had thought to write up the man’s life before.

    It’s every bit as crazy as one might expect, given Ripley’s penchant for all things bizarre. As a child in small-town California, he was an outsider, a misfit who escaped into drawing and a fascination with print media. Among the dramatic events that shaped Ripley’s world view was the carnage from the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.

    Ripley went from being an illustrator of sports events to creating Believe It or Not, a cartoon that featured the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction content that became legendary. Just as the world was entering into a phase of rapidly shifting technologies—“radio, moving pictures, vacuum cleaners, electric razors”—audiences gained a taste for Ripley’s esoteric bravado. If you took a small bundle of spider webs and straightened it out, it would span 350 miles. What was the shortest letter Victor Hugo ever wrote? It was a query to his publisher, consisting of one question mark: “?” The reply was an exclamation mark.

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  • Why Russians are disappearing

    By Bookmarked and Brian Bethune - Friday, May 10, 2013 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

    Foreigners think they know how much Russians drink, but you really have to be there, writes Bullough, to see an alcoholic society—and its effects—in action. Bullough, a Briton who spent seven years as a Reuters correspondent in Russia and other former Soviet republics, reels off a series of statistics and personal accounts that reach far beyond the journalistic cliché of “sobering.” Russians have been on a 50-year bender, and not just men: anyone riding the Moscow subway can see well-dressed young women drinking beer from cans on their way to work. And the more Russians drink, the quicker they die and the less they replace themselves.

    Russian life expectancy hit a high in the mid-1960s—69 years, the same as in the contemporary West. Since then, Westerners have added about a decade and a half to their average lifespans, while Russian life expectancy for males has shrunk to 63 and Russians of both sexes are five times more likely to die of “external” causes—murder, suicide, drowning, car crashes—than West Europeans. Birth rates cratered along with the Soviet Union; there were 148 million Russians in 1990; now there are 141 million. The country, Bullough argues, is dying from within.

    What distinguishes The Last Man is the way Bullough searches for why, which he does by tracing the story arc of a dissident Orthodox priest under Communism. As much as Dimitry Dudko preached the saving message of the Gospel, he also ceaselessly urged Russians—thousands of whom attended his 1970s sermons—to fight state attempts to divide and break them, especially along ethnic lines, and to form communities of trust, however small, in which no one had to fear that everyone around him was a potential informer. But the KGB eventually got to him too, and Dudko appeared on TV in 1980 to say the Kremlin was right all along: the Jews and enemy spies were to blame for everything. In Bullough’s retelling, Dudko’s story is Russia’s: a broken man representing a broken nation. “If you deny people hope and love and friendship, then they sicken and despair,” he writes. “They drink themselves to death, and they stop having children.”

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  • Book review: A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

    By Bookmarked and Richard Warnica - Friday, May 10, 2013 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

    It’s hard to say whether now is a great or a terrible time to publish a novel about Chechnya. On the one hand, more Americans than ever before probably know where Chechnya is. On the other, few of them are likely to view Chechens in a particularly favourable light. The Boston bombings—and the Chechen immigrants accused of pulling them off—seem bound to hang over Vital Phenomena. Which is too bad. Set in the Chechen countryside in the war years between 1994 and 2004, the book is strong enough to be judged on its own merits.

    Marra, a recent M.F.A. graduate now on a fellowship at Stanford, has pulled off a difficult trick for a debut novelist. His characters occupy a world foreign to his own, yet he makes them believable. The story stretches back over the two Chechen wars, but its main plot spans just five days in 2004. It centres on: Akhmed, the worst doctor in Chechnya; Havaa, a young girl left in his charge after Russian soldiers kidnap her father; and Sonja, a London-trained surgeon drawn back to Chechnya when her sister disappears.

    The book encompasses torture, infidelity, heartbreak and human trafficking, but also love, friendship, family and humour. Marra doesn’t gloss over the horrors of the Chechen wars. But he doesn’t dwell either, and despite the subject matter, this is not an exclusively dark book. In his afterword, Marra acknowledges a debt to Michael Ondaatje. Like Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, Vital Phenomena is about the gaps left behind by the forcibly disappeared. It’s a difficult subject for fiction, but one Marra manages with a voice that approaches something like the gauzy beauty of Ondaatje’s prose.

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  • Book review: Life in a Marital Institution: Twenty Years of Monogamy in One Terrifying Memoir

    By Joanne Latimer - Friday, May 10, 2013 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

    Braly and his wife (he calls her Jane in the book) run through 13 marriage counsellors before deciding to separate. The journey, as told by Braly, is hilarious and raw, full of self-excoriating stories and internal monologue. Readers who miss the late Spalding Gray will cheer on Braly, wondering if his relationship with Jane is anything like Gray’s complex entanglement with Renée Shafransky and his last wife, Katie Russo. Not so much. Braly’s marriage is a unique mess, and the description of its undoing has much to say about monogamy, celibacy and parenting.

    When Braly first met Jane in a university café, she took it upon herself to edit a poem he was writing and criticize his handwriting. He was hooked. Struggling to impress Jane—an older, worldly masters of divinity student—he had to find his place among her seminary friends. “Salving the hurt feelings of a waiter, or a spurned bisexual predator—that’s my strength,” he deadpans. The next 15 years were a power struggle. In places, the book reads like a rollicking monogamy farce, intercut with fights about breastfeeding, organic food and burying placentas. “Sometimes my facts are no substitute for Jane’s feelings,” he finally realized.

    It takes a move to upstate New York to actually trigger the separation. He mocks their new neighbours, Jane’s friends, for being “pussy-whipped beta farmers who’ve been ground into the soil of the organic Luddite psycho-matriarchy.” Even so, Braly never takes any cheap shots directly at Jane. That’s an endearing quality in a marriage memoir. If anything, the book contains one too many loving tributes to her force of personality. This is the book he felt he could write. I’d also like to read the first draft—the book he knew he couldn’t.

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  • Book review: All That Is

    By Sarah Murdoch - Thursday, May 9, 2013 at 8:00 PM - 0 Comments

    Salter has long been regarded as among America’s greatest yet most overlooked writers, a crafter of the most luminous sentences in modern letters. Until recently, his name might have rung a faint bell with only the most diligent readers, but now, with the publication of his sixth novel, his first in 34 years, he is everywhere, including a profile in The New Yorker. The two other things you need to know about this suddenly celebrated writer is that he is 87 years of age and he is famous for writing deliciously on the subject of sex.

    This must be a gratifying episode in the life of a man for whom episodes seem to be important. Indeed, most of the book’s 31 chapters, and frequently passages within them, can be read as entirely satisfactory short stories, frequently with a strong whiff of autobiography and recollected anecdote.

    We follow Philip Bowman, the subject of this odyssey, beginning in 1944 as a young Navy lieutenant in the Pacific. He establishes himself as a presence in New York’s publishing society, marries then divorces a privileged young woman with whom he has nothing in common, gets in some travel, attends fashionable dinner parties and, most importantly, sustains relationships with several women.

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  • Saving Italy: The Race to Rescue a Nation’s Treasures from the Nazis

    By Jessica Allen - Thursday, May 9, 2013 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments

    On May 10, 1945, a young American officer in Italy, Fred Hartt, drove from Tuscany to the northern region of Alto Adige. There, in a mountain hamlet jail, nestled away in damp cells and stacked side by side with little protection were some 300 paintings by the likes of Caravaggio, Titian and Botticelli.

    How the masterpieces—worth about $500 million—ended up there is just one of the fine art adventures chronicled in Saving Italy, Robert M. Edsel’s third book to document the Nazis’ plundering of Western art’s greatest cultural treasures and the Allies’ race to rescue them.

    This time, the author tells the story through two Monuments Men, the nickname given to the group of 24 American officers and enlisted men created in 1943 and assigned to help preserve Europe’s art and architecture: Capt. Deane Keller, a 42-year-old professor at Yale and an artist, and Hartt, a rising art historian, who went on to write a definitive text on Italian Renaissance art.

    While the Nazis dished out propaganda to then-Fascist Italy about the Allies removing precious works of art from their country to London they were quietly scheming to clear out the Vatican of its archives and art treasures, not to mention stealing priceless paintings from their wartime resting place in Tuscan country villas and stowing them in labyrinth-like mines closer to German borders, many destined for Hitler’s Führer museum. The Monuments Men not only took inventory of what was missing but also produced field reports detailing the damage done by Allied bombing. In 1943, Milan suffered “all manner of hell” as Churchill promised: the La Scala opera house was gutted and the roof and east wall of the Santa Maria delle Grazie’s refectory destroyed. (Miraculously, the north wall—with Leonardo’s painting of the Last Supper—survived.)

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  • Time for spring reading

    By Bookmarked - Friday, May 3, 2013 at 10:41 AM - 0 Comments

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  • On out-of-control border patrollers

    By Bookmarked and Martin Patriquin - Friday, May 3, 2013 at 9:30 AM - 0 Comments

    There is a grim satire to the Minuteman movement, that cabal of self-appointed patrollers of America’s borders. They are a breed of what Hunter S. Thompson used to call “flag-suckers”: self-righteous, blindly patriotic and often heavily armed, Minutemen are convinced that most of what ails America sneaks, huddled and hungry, across its 3,000-km border with Mexico. In the overheated economy of the mid-2000s, these “illegals,” the least offensive Minuteman epithet, often did the work Americans themselves eschewed, but no matter. Dressed in their army-surplus best, their guns loaded and polished, the Minutemen sought out this apparent scourge. Even at this, as Neiwert convincingly argues, the Minutemen were rather hopeless, more likely to shoot one another than catch any border-crossers. And like many blindly self-righteous groups, they attracted strays—dangerous strays in their case: neo-Nazis, military cast-offs and other often criminal reprobates.

    Chief among them was Shawna Forde. A petty criminal with a litany of criminal charges and failed marriages to her credit, in 2006, Forde latched onto Minuteman right-wing, nativist ideology like a drowning swimmer, becoming one of its luminaries. She arrived on the scene as the movement was splintering, becoming more radical, and Forde took full advantage, traipsing about the desert in high heels and a loaded gun for the hordes of media, and talking openly about robbing drug dealers to finance her own Minuteman chapter. Tragically, she followed up on her words: she and accomplices, posing as immigration officers, stormed the house of an Arizona drug smuggler, killing him and his nine-year-old daughter. And Hell Followed With Her draws a direct line between the dangerous, dehumanizing Minuteman rhetoric, the broadcasting of it by cheerleading media, and the senseless murder of a father and his daughter. The case, as well as the economic slump, drew much of the air out of the Minuteman movement. May it never come back.

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  • Book review: Math on Trial: How Numbers Get Used and Abused in the Courtroom

    By Peter Shawn Taylor - Friday, May 3, 2013 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

    Was it a successful purse-snatching or an abomination of math? In 1964 Los Angeles, an elderly lady had her handbag grabbed by a young, blond woman who then ran down an alley and got into a yellow car driven by a black man. No one saw the thief’s face, or got a clear look at her driver.

    Diligent police work soon identified a likely couple: young, blond Janet Collins and her husband, Malcolm, who was black and owned a yellow Lincoln. Lacking any physical evidence to tie the pair to the robbery, however, the prosecution was initially stymied.

    In a now-infamous stroke of inspiration, prosecutor Ray Sinetar decided to enlist math as his crime-fighting partner. He assigned probabilities to each identifying characteristic. Yellow car: one in 10, white woman with blond hair: one in three, black man with a beard: one in 10, interracial couple: one in 1,000, etc. By the time he was done, Sinetar claimed he had proven there was a mere one-in-12-million chance Janet and Malcolm were not the perps. The jury was impressed enough with this computational approach to law that they found the pair guilty of second-degree robbery.

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  • Book review: A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind

    By Bookmarked and Brian Bethune - Friday, May 3, 2013 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

    Over the past two decades, neuroscience has become the new social explain-all, replacing previous behavioural Rosetta Stones that failed, from original sin to psychoanalysis as a hard science. (Burton, a physician, novelist and former chief of neurology at a San Francisco hospital, reminds readers of the days when schizophrenia was attributed to overbearing mothers.) Today, fuelled by advances in imaging techniques that light up brain areas associated with various human passions, from religion to sex, neuroscience is expected to tell us the real story about everything from stock market crashes to criminal behaviour to the workings of consciousness itself.

    Except it won’t, Burton argues soberly, because it really can’t. Using our minds to study our minds is like using a second-hand, scratched and smudged microscope to examine bacteria. Amazing contraptions as our brains are, they are “hard-wired to experience unjustified feelings about ourselves, our thoughts and our actions”; our curiosity and desire to understand are so overwhelming, we are brilliant in detecting patterns in the data our senses provide, even when there is no pattern to perceive. When humans train their inquiring minds on the outer universe, we have ways of correcting for our biases that don’t work when we look inward, Burton says. Understanding the brain’s mechanics is a spectacular and useful achievement for medical science—this part controls speech, that part lights up when the object of desire comes into view—but tells us nothing of what is consciously experienced.

    For readers comfortable with a neurological mind map that resembles a series of your-guess-is-as-good-as-mine Rorschach inkblots, the Skeptic’s Guide is a delight. Burton’s tour through the latest brain research demolishes certainty like a daisy-cutter bomb. By the time he points to a study indicating that brain images themselves are a potent factor in convincing people of neuroscience’s new claims—our brains are impressed by the elegant shapes and ethereal colours—he has us. We have seen the pattern, even if Burton keeps begging us to distrust it.

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  • Book review: ‘Country Girl: A Memoir’

    By Patricia Dawn Robertson - Thursday, May 2, 2013 at 8:00 PM - 0 Comments

    Country Girl: A MemoirIrish writer O’Brien’s first novel, The Country Girls, was written in three short weeks. It poured out of her from the safe distance of her London digs. The sexually explicit story of two Irish girls coming of age was set in the 1950s and published in 1960. Public reaction back home in County Clare was swift and merciless. The Irish censor banned the book, O’Brien’s parents were ashamed and the parish priest burned it. The die was cast: Ireland had given birth to its first heretical female scribe. (Irish poet Thomas McCarthy has since dubbed O’Brien the “Solzhenitsyn of Irish life.”)

    In this lively and lyrical memoir, which took three painful years to write, O’Brien outlines her life story with the mordant detachment of a trained observer and the eloquence of a novelist. O’Brien, who once told an interviewer that “unhappy houses are a very good incubation for stories,” proves her maxim as she tracks her bumpy journey from country girl to Chelsea matron.

    The most compelling material in the first half is her elopement with writer Ernest Gébler. As marriages go, it was a Shackleton expedition. Gébler, less than thrilled with The Country Girls’ success, proclaimed his wife’s talent “resided in her knickers.” That didn’t stop him from cashing her publisher’s cheques.

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  • ‘Salt Sugar Fat’: The seductive powers of processed foods

    By Jonathan Chevreau - Thursday, May 2, 2013 at 8:00 PM - 0 Comments

    Walk into any grocery or convenience store and you’ll be confronted by the unholy trinity of the processed-food industry: salt, sugar and fat. These are the not-so-secret ingredients most human beings can barely resist. They’re also the basis of enormous profits for Kraft, Kellogg, Nestlé and PepsiCo. Once tasted, readers may also be unable to resist Moss’s book, subtitled How the Food Giants Hooked Us.

    The Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter at The New York Times interviewed most of the captains of this industry, discovering that many “go out of their way” to avoid eating their own products. Clearly, they know something the rest of us do not. Until now. Moss’s book is a consumer manifesto to guide the unwary away from the shoals of the processed-foods industry. The moment you leave the fresh-produce section of the grocery store, says Moss, you enter this unhealthy netherworld of slick packaging and advertising.

    Behind such legendary advertising slogans as Lay’s Potato Chips’ “Betcha can’t eat just one” lies a concerted effort by food scientists to craft the perfect “bliss point,” one that renders the average person incapable of resisting. Sugar and fat exert the same addictive pull as heroin does for drug addicts, while salt transforms bland to savoury. Some products, like s’mores, combine all three with devastating caloric consequences. To fight back, Moss says, consumers need to scrutinize the labels and fine print on packaging. Far easier to resist at the point of sale than when these concoctions find their way into the larder and refrigerator.

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  • Why sports fans fall so deeply in love

    By Bookmarked and Jonathon Gatehouse - Thursday, May 2, 2013 at 11:50 AM - 0 Comments

    For millions in this country, spring is the season of false promise. The stirrings of hope followed by a few weeks of joy, then, almost inevitably, heartbreak and mourning. In the 20 seasons since a Canadian NHL club captured the Stanley Cup, hockey fans have become accustomed to the disappointment. But it hasn’t stopped them from caring—sometimes beyond all reason—about the accomplishments and failures of their home teams.

    That irrational attachment to a bunch of millionaires playing a game for the profit of of billionaires is most often explained away as a national obsession, or maybe something akin to a religion. But as Simons points out, what motivates passionate sports fans is a lot more complex than what happens on the field or at the rink. “The first great power a team has is to grant us the answer to the who-am-I question, to give us that pride in ourselves, even when other parts of our lives aren’t okay. But the even better power they have is to confirm our identity and turn our pride into self-esteem.”

    In his quest to unravel just why that is, Simons—a committed fan of the California Golden Bears and the San Jose Sharks—delves deep into the science of fandom. What he finds is a nexus of almost everything that makes humans tick, from hormonal reactions to questions of identity, and even romantic love.

    Continue…

  • How Stalin started the Cold War

    By Bookmarked and Katie Engelhart - Wednesday, May 1, 2013 at 9:30 AM - 0 Comments

    Stalin's curse: Battling for Communism in war and cold war

    For decades, Cold War scholarship focused on a single question: whodunit? In the ’40s and ’50s, historians blamed the Soviets. In the ’60s, however, a wave of revisionism washed ashore. New scholars argued that the postwar East-West escalation was, in fact, a product of American bullishness—rooted either in America’s “foreign policy idealism” or its “military-industrial complex,” depending on the interpretation.

    In his masterful new account of the early Cold War period, historian Robert Gellately takes us back to square one. Whodunit? Stalin. “Moscow made all the first moves,” writes Gellately, a proud Newfoundlander who teaches at Florida State University. The West’s main crime was complacency. Gellately takes aim at FDR, who believed for too long that he could soften Soviet ambition with kindness. In meetings of the “Big Three,” Roosevelt often sided with Stalin, at Churchill’s expense. Gellately recounts a famous episode at the 1943 Tehran conference. At dinner one evening, Stalin joked that the Allies should execute 50,000-100,000 German Army leaders outright. Roosevelt joked back that the number should be set at 49,000. Churchill rose from the table and stormed away

    Still, Churchill does not get away unscathed. Both Britain and the U.S., increasing fearful of Germany, ignored Soviet acts of barbarity—like the 1941 Katyn massacre, which saw some 22,000 Poles slaughtered by Russians. Soon after news of the massacre broke, British officials instructed the BBC to praise the Kremlin for its wartime “co-operation.”

    But Gellately’s account does not get lost in high-level diplomatic machinations. It is also noteworthy for its grim rendering of life in Stalin’s backyard. Gellately uses a mass of archival material, released from Soviet archives in 1992, to account for the estimated 25 million Soviet lives lost to the Communist experiment—and to the exporting of Stalin’s revolution. The book ends in 1953: when Stalin died, “in circumstances that are still subject to controversy.” For four cold decades, his war lived on.

    Visit the Maclean’s Bookmarked blog for news and reviews on all things literary

  • Book review: The Woman Upstairs

    By Bookmarked and Anne Kingston - Tuesday, April 30, 2013 at 9:10 AM - 0 Comments

    The Woman Upstairs

    Lonely, single female teachers who yearn for emotional connection are fixtures in fiction—from Muriel Sparks’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal. To that list we can now add Nora Eldridge, the 42-year-old narrator and protagonist of Claire Messud’s compelling new cerebral melodrama.

    Nora, who is 37 when the story begins, teaches third grade in Cambridge, Mass. She’s a self-described “good girl,” a reliable, invisible “woman upstairs” who lives alone and takes pride in never inconveniencing anyone. With middle-age encroaching, however, Nora is a cauldron of rage and self-loathing for always sublimating her needs and artistic aspirations to those of others—foremost, her sick mother whose death meant no one in the world “loved her the most.” Her greatest sense of betrayal, however, stems from her doomed relationship with the cosmopolitan Shahid family newly arrived from Paris: her student, Reza; his mother, the Italian-born installation artist Sirena; and his father, Skandar, a prominent academic now visiting Harvard.

    Besotted by the bunch of them, the childless Nora ingratiates herself into the household—babysitting Reza, sharing a studio with Sirena and striking up a friendship with Skandar. Mistaking kindness for intimacy, she constructs a rich, line-crossing fantasy life in which they offer her escape: “I wanted a full and independent engagement with each of them, unrelated to the others,” she recounts. “I needed their family-ness.” It’s not a spoiler to say Nora’s needs aren’t met.

    Messud is a sharp, nuanced storyteller, able to compel the reader even when the narrative bogs down. Comparisons to Ibsen’s A Doll House are also heavy-handed—from Nora’s name to her doll-house-size dioramas depicting rooms of famous women artists. Still, Messud’s Nora is an original—a caustic vessel for exploring obsession, dependence, loneliness and creative expression. And while the novel’s resolution is a long time coming, it packs a quiet, shocking, but satisfying wallop.

  • Book review: Just What Kind of a Mother Are You?

    By Bookmarked and Anne Kingston - Monday, April 29, 2013 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

    Just what kind of mother are you?

    Paula Daly gets the action moving on the first page with a creepy man watching young girls on their way home from school. You just know nothing good will come of this. This taut page-turner of a novel, set in England’s fabled Lake District, home to twee villages, Beatrix Potter bunnies, and dreamy Wordsworth poetry, torques every parent’s nightmare.Everyone’s attention is suddenly diverted from their Kendal Mint Cakes when Lisa, harried working mother of three, messes up big time: her chaotic life screeches to a heart-thumping halt when a child—not hers, but her best friend’s—disappears on her watch. Oh, and there’s a serial rapist on the loose.

    Lisa makes a bit of a hash trying to set things right, enduring public humiliations and private recriminations. None of us want to be in her Wellies, and while we can’t resist the itch on the brain that asks, “What sort of a bonehead loses someone else’s child?”— deep inside we know perfectly well that we could all be that sort of bonehead.

    Daly has a gift for realistic, snappy dialogue, She shifts the action between a series of well-drawn female protagonists and moves the narrative from first-person to third-person to keep the reader slightly off balance. Gradually, the veneer of perfection and capability that underlines this tale gets destroyed by an infestation of lies.

    This story is as much about cornering a criminal as it is about aiming a light on the human knack for acquiring martyr complexes, an affliction that sticks to all the characters in varying degrees. During the course of her bumbling attempts at finding missing Lucinda, Lisa uncovers something far more pernicious, something you don’t see coming. As one character admits, “We all want everyone to think our family’s perfect, that we got it right.” To what length would any of us go to to prove that?

    Visit the Maclean’s Bookmarked blog for news and reviews on all things literary

  • Book review: The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and Their Enduring Power

    By Bookmarked and Brian Bethune - Sunday, April 28, 2013 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

    The art of controversy: Political cartoons and their enduring power

    In 1984, Navasky, then publisher of the leftist magazine The Nation, decided to publish a cartoon by David Levine, depicting Henry Kissinger in bed, under an American flag and on top of a naked woman who had a globe for a head. The message was obvious enough and, in Navasky’s mind, surely congenial to Nation writers and editors: the United States, as personified by its former secretary of state, was engaged in “screwing” the world. Two hours after Navasky okayed the drawing, he was presented with a petition signed by 25 staff members—out of a work force the puzzled publisher thought totalled only 23—denouncing the image’s sexism. That experience, reinforced by the deadly riots over the Danish Mohammad cartoons of 2005, set Navasky to searching for the reasons behind the galvanizing emotional impact of political images.

    He investigates the three leading theories. Content is the obvious choice, except the same message expressed in words doesn’t seem to have a fraction of the impact. Content, in fact, looms largest when it’s misinterpreted: New Yorker cover illustrator Barry Blitt was mocking Obama caricatures, not Barack and Michelle Obama themselves, in 2008 when he portrayed the presidential candidate and his wife dressed in terrorist garb and doing a fist bump, but it was Obama supporters who poured vitriol on the magazine. Second, the image theory: simply to draw something is to make it come alive in a way it wasn’t before (the cartoonist as creator of what he is mocking). Finally, neuroaesthetics: some scientists believe our facial recognition hardwiring responds more powerfully to caricatures than to the real thing, because the former exaggerates the very features we use to distinguish one face from another. In other words, if you harbour strong feelings about Richard Nixon, you will respond more quickly and forcefully to a caricature of the former president than to a photo.

    There’s something to be said for each theory, Navasky suggests, but explanations are clearly of less interest to him than the rich survey he offers: exquisite samples from two centuries of political caricatures, from Hogarth to Levine.

    Visit the Maclean’s Bookmarked blog for news and reviews on all things literary


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