Author: Hilary

David Suzuki is an internationally famous geneticist and environmentalist with some forty books, and numerous prizes, to his name.

In this book he takes quite a different line and writes letters to his two sets of grandchildren that are warm and touching in the memories he shares. His family (grandparents) came from Japan between 1904 and 1908 and settled in Vancouver. They had left extreme poverty and were making a living in B.C. until World War ll broke out and the government incarcerated all Japanese for the duration. One set of grandparents returned to Japan after the war only to die within the year in Hiroshima. David Suzuki made it, however. He showed keen interest in all his academic studies with his marks enabling him to study medicine. By this time he had fallen in love with genetics and he would pursue this, along with a passion for the environment, that has made him world-famous.

In these letters he writes to two sets of grandchildren. When his first wife died, he married into a Haida First Nations family. He met “elders” for the first time and then became an elder himself, of which he is very proud and writes of the importance for families to keep close and share their wisdom. He urges his grandchildren to find their goals and stick to them. He calls them the legacy of which he is most proud and happy. It is altogether a charming book.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

Donna Leon knows Venice so well that her mystery novels always give a different aspect of life in that enchanted city. In this one it is opera. She is in fact returning to her very first book Death at La Fenice which dealt with Italy’s finest living female soprano. In this new book she gives a menacing account of what this soprano is threatened with this time.

The detective is once again Commissario Guido Brunetti. We have gotten to know Brunetti in the thirty books Leon has written about him, as well as his sharp-witted wife, and amusing children. Leon concentrates on the musical world, however. She has lived for thirty years in Venice and knows a lot about the pressures of producing opera and takes us backstage for much of the time.

Donna Leon has won many awards for her detective stories. The Commissario Guido Brunetti mystery series is internationally known. This is another one to enjoy.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

With the city of Baltimore high in the news these days because of tension between the police and African Americans, it is strange to read a book by an American writer in which there is no mention of this Baltimore situation. The book takes quite another angle.

Anne Tyler has written twenty novels, the eleventh, Breathing Lessons winning the Pulitzer Prize in l988. She was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, but has lived for some time in Baltimore. She specializes in writing about families. In this book the Whitshanks live in a fairly prosperous section of Baltimore which, like any city, is divided into different kinds of neighbourhoods. The Whitshanks are a family of four who remain very close through the years in spite of dark secrets we learn about in this novel.

Tyler brings this family and their friends very close to our hearts. In fact she writes with insight and humour which makes this an unsentimental story in praise of family with all its emotional complexity.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall