This is a provocative little book by a Boston doctor who examines the illnesses and deaths of ten famous English writers.

John J. Ross is a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. He has a deep love for the literary output of these writers, and concern for what they suffered at a time before vaccinations, sterilized scalpels, or real drug regimens. He begins with Shakespeare who died in l6l6 at the age of 52. Since writing Hamlet (l600) he had struggled with heavy body shaking that finally made it impossible for him to write. Was this essential tremor, or mercury poisoning? He had lived in London away from his wife, in Stratford, and never got over the death of his only son.

The Bronte sisters led dreary, lonely lives in a remote town in Yorkshire, attending a repressive school, the Clergy Daughters’ School in l825, before getting tuberculosis.

John Milton lost his eyesight but maintained a deep religious faith and wrote in Sonnet XXll:

Yet I argue not
Against heaven’s hand or will, nor bate a jot
Of heart or hope;  but still bear up and steer
Right onward.

It is an altogether sensitive and thoughtful book.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

This is a far-reaching biography of one of Canada’s most distinguished Governor Generals, John Buchan/Lord Tweedsmuir.

Buchan was Governor General from l935-40, years of special significance for Canada. The Statute of Westminster, l93l, had given Canada constitutional equality with Britain which meant special sensitivity in political interfering. Also, tension was building from Nazism and Fascism toward the Second World War and it put Canada in a unique position between Britain and the United States.

Buchan was in his sixties when he became Governor General. Born in Scotland, he had gone to Oxford, later represented a Scots constituency in the British Parliament, served in the Intelligence Corps in France in World War l and also in South Africa for the British Government. All this time he had been writing articles, novels, history, thrillers and was well-known for books like “The Thirty Nine Steps” and “Greenmantle”. In Canada he put cultural life at the top of his priorities and in l937 founded the Governor General’s Awards, still our top prize for literary  achievement.

The book tells also of his extensive travels across Canada, as well as the U.S. He believed Canada should keep its diverse, multicultural society while at the same time embracing national unity. He met many First Nations people, travelled to the Far North, liked to climb mountains and go fishing whenever he could! He met often with President Roosevelt but was particularly sensitive to his own position and refrained from any political interfering.

Many people praise Buchan in this book, including our current Governor General,  the Right Honourable David Johnston. It is a touching and impressive story of a great man. The author, J. William Galbraith, has worked for a number of Canadian federal departments and lives in Ottawa with his wife and three children.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

This is an impressive tribute to a gentle Canadian woman who brought the joy of reading to a generation of African children. The writer is Deborah Cowley, based in Ottawa, with wide international experience as broadcaster and author.

In The Library Tree she is writing about Kathy Knowles and describes how she was living with her husband John (both from Toronto) and their three children in l990, when a job offer came from Ghana for an accountant to a Canadian-owned gold mining company. Ghana had returned to relative calmness after a turbulent time following independence from Britain. The Knowles set off, Kathy expecting her fourth child. They arrived in the capital, Accra, and got settled with a good staff. Kathy liked to sit in the garden under a scarlet Flamboyant tree and read storybooks to her children. Very soon friends of the children crept into the garden too. They had never seen storybooks and were bewitched. Very soon some 70 were coming. Kathy and John decided to turn their spare bedroom into a tiny library to be called the Osu Library, after the name of their street.

From this beginning, the book tells how Kathy negotiated with school and city officials to buy an empty shipping container, and so the library grew. Volunteers from Canada sent more and more books and the children slowly learned to read. After four years years in Ghana,  the Knowles family returned to Canada, to live in Winnipeg. In l994 Kathy was back in Ghana checking on the libraries and pleased the way they had caught on.

Deborah Cowley is a free-lance journalist with wide international experience, based in Ottawa. She had heard of Kathy Knowles’ work and in 2000 had an assignment from “Readers Digest” and flew to Accra. By that time, Kathy was going to Ghana twice a year for five weeks. She met Cowley who would continue her connection and by 20l2 had made fifteen trips to Ghana.  She visited the libraries, which grew in number, watched the children greeting Madam Katty with songs, poems, bunches of flowers. She saw the first community centres built, larger than the early libraries, with a stage for plays and drums for concerts. She also saw Kathy writing a series of storybooks about Africa which are now widely published and distributed to the libraries.

This book has good photographs of this modest, but very effective, story.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall