Author: David Rostenne

This is a story about the fall of Russia’s Romanov empire, written by well-known novelist, Kathryn Harrison.

Set in St. Petersburg, 1917, a lot of it takes place in the lavish imperial palace of Tsar Nicolay and his family. It opens, however, with the murder of the Mad Monk, Grigory Rasputin, who was drowned in the Neva river by the rising Bolsheviks. This notorious healer had grown close to the Tsar’s wife. When he was killed, she persuaded Rasputin’s daughter to move in to the palace and help look after her hemophiliac son.

The rest of the book is their story, of their growing together as they watch their whole world come crashing down. There are many reminiscences looking back to voluptuous days when the Tsar ruled Russia. These “enchantments” give way to a closing down of the palace and eventual execution of the Romanovs.

Harrison is skilled at creating a vivid, imaginary world, based on historic fact. She has done this in novels such as: Thicker than Water, Exposure, Poison, The Binding Chair, The Seal Wife and Envy. She has also written autobiography, biography, and a book of crime.

Review by Anne McDougall

Jodi Kantor is a first-rate reporter and she has done a thoughtful, sensitive job in this book on the Obamas and their life in the White House.

The topic is huge, as we have all watched. Barack Obama has written his own story, before becoming President of the U.S., in two widely-read books: Dreams from my Father, and The Audacity of Hope. Kantor is editor of the Arts and Leisure section of “The New York Times” and has been covering the Obamas since 2007. Her book tells the complex story of what happened to Barack and his wife Michelle and their two young daughters when they move in to the White House and have to deal with the hopes and promises of the stunning campaign of 2008.

The book includes sketches of the layout of the White House and the near impossibility of living a private life, what with the almost constant access of public tours to many rooms. Even the Rose Garden is public. Michelle Obama had always hated the effects of politics on her life with Barack. Here they face the problems together. A fair account is given of the various officials in charge of the Obamas’ public life, while trying to give them as much privacy as possible. We have all read the ups and downs of his legislation: i.e. the stimulus package, health care, etc. The President’s relations with business leaders were difficult at first; they developed considerably as time went on.

The famous couple remains loving, and attractive. Barack retains his reserve and control; Michelle keeps her eye on the things that mattered to him all along: the chance to change and improve things. This book gives reason to both admire and hope for future developments.

Review by Anne McDougall

Many of us have met some of the “boat people” who came to Canada in the early ’70’s, escaping from the Communists in South Vietnam. But I’ve never read or heard as vivid a description of their life at home and the terrible hazards in escaping.

Kim Thuy was a young girl living in a palatial house in Saigon, where her father was a prefect, when the Communists came in l975. The family was forced to flee to a camp in Malaysia, where they slept on the ground. They eventually got to Canada and arrived at Mirabel, overwhelmed by their first sight of a snow-covered world. Thuy describes the kindness they found in Granby, Quebec. Neighbours showered them with gifts, and food. They couldn’t cope with all the Minute Rice, being used to sticky rice in Vietnam.

Thuy doesn’t ignore the filthy jobs that came their way. But her own training took her from being a seamstess, to interpreting, practising law, running a restaurant. The book tells of her return trips to Vietnam. The anecdotes on both sides of the world are beautifully described, the brutality as well as the beauty. She has a crisp, sparkling prose and is today living in Montreal, writing for a living. Ruhas become a bestseller in Quebec, with foreign rights sold to l5 countries around the world. It is really a lullaby for Vietnam and a love letter to a new homeland.

Review by Anne McDougall

Born in Scotland and educated in the U.K., Niall Ferguson is one of Britain’s most renowned historians. Currently attached to Harvard and Stanford universities in the U.S., he has written a number of best-selling books on history and finance, as well as magazine articles all over the world. Witty and concise, he tells a gripping story.

Civilization shows how the West began its rise to power some 500 years ago. Before then, Ming China and Ottoman Turkey had been the main world civilizations. Ferguson looks at the reasons for the West’s grandeur. They include: representative government and the rule of law, with the representation of property-owners in elected legislature; competition; the Scientific Revolution (all the major breakthroughs in mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry and biology happened in Western Europe at this time); modern medicine, including the control of tropical diseases, as well as healthcare; the consumer society brought on by the Industrial Revolution and the demand for better and cheaper goods; the work ethic, back by Protestantism and a stress on savings and capital accumulation.

Ferguson looks mainly at the U.S. and Europe but he tells how the Rest (everyone else), eventually copied these countries, all the while the West began to neglect some of the main points that made it strong in the first place. He quotes Churchill who described civilization as “the subordination of the ruling class to the settled customs of the people and to their will as expressed in the Constitution.”

Ferguson describes how the 1938 barbaric and atavistic forces, above all in Germany, rose from the very civilization with the values that Churchill held dear. He warns that the biggest threat to Western civilization is posed not by other civilizations but by our own pusillanimity, and by the historical ignorance that feeds it. His book goes a long way to clearing up this ignorance.

Review by Anne McDougall