Category: Reviews

Another trip to the north of Scotland  in M.C. Beaton’s “Death of Yesterday”.

In the Hamish MacBeth story there are three murders this time. But they slip into the everyday life of the beloved constable. We end up just as interested in his pets, one wild cat, a dog and some hens and his gently shifting home life as we are in the odd facts that make up the murders.

Hamish MacBeth has already had plenty of success with solving murders in his career. But for him, he is so fond of his life in a small charming Scottish village that he does not want to be promoted and moved to a bigger industrial centre! Beaton makes his village of Lochdubh so loveable that all his readers know exactly how he feels. This readership has expanded to include a huge collection of addicts in the United States. Like all the Hamish MacBeth stories, this book shows why.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

This is an exhilarating book to read and gives an insight into our planet that we haven’t had from radio or television shows to date. The reason is Chris Hadfield’s wit and eloquence in describing his incredible adventures.

Hadfield is world famous as the recent Commander of the International Space Station. He conducted a record-setting number of scientific experiments and oversaw an emergency spacewalk. He also took some amazing photographs and videos about life in space, some of the photos are in this book.

Hadfield was 9 years old on July 20, 1969 when he watched the Apollo moon landing from his family’s cottage in Ontario. He knew then that he wanted to be an astronaut. He also knew that Canadians couldn’t even apply for the job; we didn’t have a space agency. And so this is the story of his gradual training, with basic jet training with the Canadian Forces, then the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School in California in 1988. In 1991 Canada had its own space agency which took out an ad in the newspaper: Wanted: Astronauts. There were 5,329 applications and Hadfield won.

The rest of the book describes his learning career. He ran 25 Shuttle launches and also served as Director of NASA Operations in Star City, Russia from 2001-2003. He made two close Russian friends and the book vividly describes the small Soyuz capsule in which they spent five months on the International Space Station before returning to Earth.

Hadfield had a very happy marriage and three children. He talks about his philosophy, i.e. anticipating problems and figuring out how to solve them which he claims is the opposite of worrying: it’s productive. It certainly has been for him and this book is a generous way of sharing this.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

Denise Chong is a first-rate reporter who lives with her family in Ottawa and has written three books before this current Lives of the Family.

In this one she writes intimately of the Chinese who immigrated to towns in Canada to escape perilous times in China, that include the war with Japan and the Communist takeover. She concentrates on the Chinese who came to Ottawa, and smaller towns such as Perth, rather than the Chinatowns of centres like Vancouver, Toronto or Montreal.

The result is an up-close look at these quiet, brave people who usually ran cafes or the local laundry. They were often sending money back to China, to help bring other members of the family to Canada. It meant working almost full-time. During the 20’s and 30’s of the last century, there was no Chinese radio, or TV, or cinema. They turned to each other for company, although the book also tells of the kindness and sympathy from Canadian neighbours when they realized the situation.

By 1975, the Ottawa Chinese Community Service Centre (OCCSC) had opened and Chong acknowledges their help in writing this book, which also has photos of the families as they got started. Chong’s earlier books are: The Concubine’s Children, The Girl in the Picture and Egg on Mao. Chong quite often gives talks in Ottawa. She gives and unusually vivid picture of the Chinese who live here.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

Penelope Lively is a beloved British writer of fiction, and children’s literature, with the Man Booker prize and numerous awards piled up for her 80 years of production.

Dancing Fish and Ammonites is what she calls a memoir and then qualifies it to “the view from old age.” It is unusual for a writer to share so intimately the things that made her write. One reviewer says: “Her candor is refreshing, and reminds us that you don’t have to lie to yourself to live life finely until the end.”

Lively was born in Egypt where her father was posted. An only child, she later faced a lonely boarding school in England. Very early on she had and interest in archaeology, and her title refers to fossils picked up on a beach in Dorset. She turned to writing however and this book tells of the events “by which she felt most fingered,” i.e. the Suez Crisis, the Cold War, the seismic change in attitudes of the late 20th Century.

She includes her happy marriage, her children, and finally her turning to books and reading for companionship. The end of the book tells us of six objects she had picked up and kept by her as a part of her history. She lives in London.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

Readers will recognize Robert C. Sibley as the author of The Way of the 88 Temples, which came out in 2013 and tells the story of his pilgrimage around one of Japan’s four main islands.

In this book he takes us on an earlier pilgrimage he made along the famous Camino de Santiago. This crosses northern Spain and leads to Santiago de Campostelo on the coast. It crosses the Pyrenees, the green valleys of Navarre and Rioja, the plains of Castile and Leon and the alpine mountains of Galicia. It is a trip of five hundred miles and Sibley walked it in five weeks.

The result is an intriguing book, full of the people he met, the beauty of the countryside, unusual plants, unknown birds, lovely old towns with their cathedrals and long views. In spite of some difficult days of blisters and very sore leg muscles (which disappeared as he got  used to walking) he found it “one of the most satisfying travel experiences of [his] life.” He loved the periods of solitude which brought back memories he hadn’t thought of for decades. He was not seeking for a renewal of his religious beliefs but there were many times when the beauty and mystery of creation brought these back to him.

At the end he says the real gift of the Camino was to give him a place in his imagination he could return to and recreate a heightened awareness of the world – an awareness that disappears in our world of technology, rush, and consumerism.

Sibley is an award-winning Senior Writer at The Ottawa Citizen, and Adjunct Professor in political science at Carleton University.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

Patrick Leigh Fermor was a famous British travel writer whose two books, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water describe the time he walked across Europe, 1933-35. But they only get part of the trip. The end section, from the Iron Gates of Rumania to Constantinople remained unwritten at the time of Fermor’s death in 2011.

Fermor went to war in 1939, serving in occupied Crete where he won the DSO. He lived a good part of his life in Greece, and wrote books and articles for U.S. and U.K. publications. He had planned all along to finish the third book on his boyhood adventure and by the 60’s had a typescript almost ready. It was not until his death, however, that two of his literary executors brought the work up to date. The result is a fascinating book by this beloved writer who spun his pound-a-week allowance into amazing encounters, from sleeping in the bush to the occasional luxurious stay in friendly embassies along the way.

The editors note that “in retrospect it seems as if the whole continent through which he travelled was sleepwalking towards disaster. The Balkans were still in the grip of the Great Depression, and of deep peasant misery. The twin behemoths of Nazism and Bolshevism were already looming huge. In Germany, Hitler had come to power the January before, and many of those whom Paddy encountered – the dashing aristocrats, the Rumanian Jews, the Gypsies – seem marked, in retrospect, by foreboding.” All in all it makes for a wonderful read.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

Mary Lawson has been called an old-fashioned story-teller. Her ability has won many prizes for her first two novels. She has done it again with her new book, Road Ends.

Born in a small farming community in Ontario, Lawson grew up with winter storms such as we’re getting this year in Ottawa. You get a vivid picture of families buried in deep snowbanks. She also has a strong feeling for these families, one in particular, and for the tragedies, the shocks, for the capable members and the ones that let everyone down.

Part of the story takes place in London, England, where Lawson herself is living now. The daughter who has left home finds her way in swinging London of the 1960’s and tension builds as she has to choose her own future.

Mary Lawson’s first novels were Crow Lake and The Other Side of the Bridge. In the new one you get a real feeling for life in Canada (where she still spends a lot of time). It makes a good Christmas page-turner.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

Another book from Alexander McCall Smith and from perhaps his most beloved series, The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency.

This novel comes just in time for Christmas and is full of good news for almost everyone involved in this Detective Agency: Precious Ramotswe, who runs it, her assistant who has a baby boy, her husband who runs his own garage business, and even his philandering assistant, who takes a surprise turn. The characters in the book who don’t get good news are the ones Precious Ramotswe is asked to look into. There may be one false impersonation. And there are threats against the Beauty Salon of the title.

Alexander McCall Smith is once again in Botswana, where he grew up before returning to Scotland, and a career teaching medical law at the University of Edinburgh, where he now lives. There is a vivid picture of gentle, sunny Africa and the traditional haunts and patterns of living found among its people. One reviewer writes: “The pleasure of these sweet books lies in the clarity and gravity with which the characters reason through everyday dilemmas.” This is another example.

Review by Anne McDougall

With the coming next year of the 100th anniversary of the Great War (1914), there are already a number of books marking this date. One of the best is Margaret MacMillan’s The War That Ended Peace.

MacMillan is a Canadian who studied at the University of Toronto before getting her PhD at Oxford. She is now a professor of international history at Oxford, where she is also the warden of St. Anthony’s College. She has written a number of prize-winning books, including Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World. Her skill in both writing and teaching makes her a brilliant storyteller. The result is popular history with a solid backing of research.

This new one gives a picture of Europe in the century after the end of the Napoleonic Wars when peace settled across the countries and for some time they enjoyed a Concert of Europe and managed to pull back from military force in 1905, 1908, 1911, 1912 and 1913. Eventually the tug of shifting alliances, colonialism, complex personalities and rivalries strained relations. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, killed the one person close to the Emperor who counseled peace and so war broke out.

By this time, MacMillan has given us a close picture of the people involved. Winston Churchill becomes First Lord of the Admiralty in 1913. She also notes the intensity of the arms race which, between 1908 and 1914, went up by 50%, with the exception of Italy.

This is a heavy book to hold – 700 pages – but not to read.

Review by Anne McDougall

Robert C. Sibley is well-known to Ottawa readers as an award-winning Senior Writer for The Ottawa Citizen – often writing on religious topics – as well as the author of The Way of the Stars: Journeys on the Camino de Santiago.

In this new book, he undertakes a famous pilgrimage in Japan. Called the Henro Michi, it covers a circuit of 88 temples around the perimeter of Shikoku, the smaller of Japan’s four main islands. Sibley was seeking some form of belief beyond modern secularism. For two months he was the only non-Buddhist to cover the 870-mile route. The experience gave him a new attachment to the spiritual life which he discovered day by day in the beauty and tranquility of the temples and their surroundings.

The Shikoku is probably the best-known of Japan’s hundreds of pilgrimage routes. These days an estimated 150 000 people take the pilgrimage by foot, car, or bus every year. Sibley walked the whole distance, enduring considerable hardships, with a too-heavy pack, blisters, sore leg muscles and sometimes a rock-strewn slope that almost defeated him.

But he also enjoyed the beautiful green valleys, panoramas of sea and sky, as well as traditional Japanese inns with sculptured trees and babbling ponds. He met friendly people, surprised by a foreign pilgrim but helpful with his limited Japanese language. He made lasting friends and shared their lives to the end.

He felt the pilgrimage became more than an adventure, but instead sank many of the spiritual dimensions into his heart forever. He had followed in the footsteps of Kobo Daisha, the 9th century ascetic who followed the Shingon sect of Buddhism. Over the two months, he learned that enlightenment is possible in this life and shares this in his book.

Review by Anne McDougall