Category: Reviews

There are few new ways to praise the books by this author: witty, gentle, Scottish, loveable. The new one is all of these with the added dimension of a first-rate mystery plot.

The book falls in the Isabel Dalhousie series. McCall Smith is a retired professor at the University of Edinburgh. Readers will recognize books from the No l. Ladies’ Detective Agency series, the Portuguese Irregular Verbs series, the 44 Scotland Street series and the Corduroy Mansions series. In this one, we follow Isabel, the attractive young mother, as she edits her journal on ethics, cares for her musician husband and 3-year old son, Charlie. Into this busy life steps a request to help find the thief who stole a valuable Poussin painting from an old Scots household.

Isabel gets close to danger when she agrees to meet “accomplices of the thief.” Through clever questioning on her own, however, she manages to avoid serious trouble with the police, etc. We are left with a satisfactory ending that only McCall Smith could dream up. It makes for a very good read, Christmas-time, or any time.

Review by Anne McDougall

This is a long biography of one of our most distinguished poets, written by a professional friend who gets very close to P.K. Page’s life.

Page was born in England where her father served overseas in World War l. He decided to move his family to Canada, where he also had a military career. Both he and his wife were artistic, writing poetry and drawing respectively. Their daughter followed suit and got an audience for her poems at an early age.

Sandra Djwa has been professor of English at Simon Fraser University, and also published two books: “The Politics of the imagination:A Life of F.R. Scott” and “Professing English: A Life of Ray Daniells.” She was in a good position to accept P.K. Page’s request to write her biography, knowing well the literary circles across the country. She gives an excellent account of the exceedingly hard work that went into the developing of Page’s talent, after she decided to make writing her career – first in Halifax, then Montreal, Ottawa and finally Victoria, B.C. In Montreal, in particular, her name started appearing in poetry magazines more and more often as they started making their appearance in Canada.

It was in Montreal that she first met the Preview group in l94l. They were a group of poets who met and mimeographed their works; they included the poet and professor of law at McGill University, F.R. Scott, Margaret Day, Bruce Ruddick, Neufville Shaw and Patrick Anderson. Page was invited to join. She would meet most members of the avant-garde in Montreal, artists as well as writers. She would also fall in love for the first time, with a married man, F.R. Scott.

Djwa tells of Page’s eventual happy marriage to Arthur Irwin, legendary editor of Macleans magazine and head of the National Film Board. He was posted with Canada’s diplomatic corps to Australia, Brazil and Mexico. His beautiful wife was a great asset; she continued writing and eventually painting. When retired, Irwin took a post on Victoria’s newspapers, and they settled in that city. P.K. spent her latter years reading poetry in cities all across Canada where her stunning performances were as memorable as the poetry itself.

Review by Anne McDougall

This is a delightful and skilful memoir of Gordon Pinsent, one of Canada’s best-loved actors, written with the help of George Anthony, an entertainment editor who has worked in film, television and journalism. Together they have produced a very funny and impressive story of Pinsent’s life who today, at the age of eighty-two, is still in the business of acting.

Born in Grand Falls, Newfoundland, Pinsent was the last of six children, and was very often left to make up his own dream world. After he discovered movies at the weekly matinees of the Nickelodeon Theatre, he decided to be an actor. He was already good at sketching, and later poetry, but never had an acting lesson – which did not stop him from working his way to Toronto, doing odd jobs, later a stint in the army from which he was discharged in Winnipeg. Here he met the actor John Hirsch, got some parts, and was on his way.

Pinsent tells of his adventures in Hollywood, his encounter with Christopher Plummer at Stratford, and eventually the whole roster of Canadian actors. Most significant of these was the Toronto star, Charmion King, who became the love of his life. They were happily married for forty years until her death in 2007.

Pinsent has played major classical roles across the country on both televison and film and is remembered for The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), The Shipping News (2001), The Rowdyman (1972) and John and the Missus (1987). He won a Genie award for best actor in Away from Her (2006) and recently made his songwriting debut on the Warner Music CD Down and Out in Upalong.
This book is almost as entertaining as watching him act.

Review by Anne McDougall

This is the most complete biography so far of the controversial Canadian doctor, Norman Bethune.

Written by the Toronto history professor, Roderick Stewart and his wife Sharon, it includes new research into Bethune’s medical adventures in Spain, as well as China. Born in l890 in Gravenhurst, son of a Presbyterian minister, Norman Bethune went to World War I, the tenth man in Toronto to enlist, was wounded at Ypres, but returned to join the British Navy. In civilian life, he practised medicine in Montreal. As a surgeon he was quick and ruthless, often antagonizing fellow doctors and shouting at the nurses.

In l935 he went to a congress in Russia and came home determined to get medicare into Canada. In l938 he went to Spain to fight the fascists. Later that year he left Vancouver for China, where Japan had invaded that country. It was in China he drove himself to death, operating where there was no one to watch him but the sick and wounded and no word from an outside world to tell him he was not fighting a lost cause. He got an infection and died, aged forty-nine, in November, l939, two months after his own world had gone to war.

People who knew Bethune in Canada found him so eager to change the world that he broke all rules of human behaviour. In China, on the other hand, they found him a hero, one of only five national heroes in that country.

It is a provocative story that Stewart has told in two earlier books on Bethune and should become the definitive basis for all serious discussion on Norman Bethune.

Review by Anne McDougall

The American writer, Jennie Fields, has written an intimate novel on the love life of one of America’s most famous women writers, Edith Wharton.

She says in her Introduction: “I hope that, as a novelist, the very private and proud Edith looks down on me with indulgence..” In fact, while Fields does base her story on Wharton’s diaries and letters, she is also very imaginative and frank in writing of the love Wharton never had in her marriage but sought outside it.

The period is turn of the century, the early l900s, and much of the story takes place in Paris salons where famous literati and artists – including particularly Henry James who is a close friend of Edith Wharton’s – gather to exchange ideas. Wharton’s book The House of Mirth has just gained huge popularity. Meanwhile, Wharton divides her time between Paris, where she longs to be, and her large country house in Lenox, Massachusetts where she lives a separate emotional life with her American husband. Also included in her life is a childhood governess, secretary and close friend, Anne Bahlmann. She has her own story of emotional fulfillment. Altogether we get a tender, up-close look at the two women, their lives of combined affluence – dozens of servants and comfort everywhere – combined with emotional starvation.

Jennie Fields has written three novels. She also spent twenty-five years in New York as an advertising creative director. This is a provocative but compelling book.

Review by Anne McDougall

“Because it’s there” became the famous quote of the climber, George Mallory, whenever he talked of being the first man to conquer Mount Everest.

This book tells the real story behind his adventures as well as the very deep love story that came second only to the call of these adventures. Tanis Rideout has done impressive research to make “Above all Things” the excellent book it is.

Set in England, it tells how George Mallory, highly educated, part of the Bloomsbury Group, came to love climbing above all else. Expeditions in the early l920’s to conquer Mount Everest had failed. This book goes into detail as to how the l924 Expedition came to be formed. This all runs parallel to Mallory’s deep love for his wife, and their three small children. In fact, much of the book is written from Ruth’s point of view and we get a vivid picture of the agony of her waiting.

The author was born in Belgium but now lives in Toronto. She has been part of the environmental advocacy group Lake Ontario Waterkeeper to help promote environmental justice on the lake. “Above all Things” is her first novel.

Review by Anne McDougall

This novel is indeed an unlikely story of how to resolve human relationships. But it is original and highly entertaining.
The reader follows Harold Fry closely from the moment he sets out to walk from his house in Kingsbridge in the southern tip of England on the English Channel, to a hospice in the very north of England in Berwick-upon-Tweed at the Scottish border.
For one thing, Harold Fry is a loveable character – unsure of almost everything he ever did, except falling in love with his wife and then, at this point in time, deciding to make this walk. There are family tragedies that became more than he could live with. When an old friend from work wrote from the hospice, he was struck by the idea that walking to see her would keep her alive. It did more than that. His wife came back from her own private hell of misery and drove up to see him. Many hundreds of people along the way heard of his walk, and came out to confess their own stories and in fact join in the pilgrimage. It remains Harold’s private story, however, and Rachel Joyce does a brilliant job of making it believable.
Joyce has spent twenty years in an acting career as well as writing award-winning plays for the BBC Radio 4. She lives on a farm in Gloucestershire with her husband and four children and is now working on her second novel.

Review by Anne McDougall

This is a rather grim historical novel, very well written by the Nobel prize winner, Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa.

It tells the story of Roger Casement, a member of the British diplomatic corps, who spent his life revealing and trying to improve the desperate plight of oppressed peoples in countries such as the Congo and the Amazon. Born in Ireland in l864, in a Dublin suburb, he spent a number of years in Africa before being asked to report on the rubber plantations. Here he discovered the abuse and torture suffered by the Africans as they were forced to gather rubber for the big Belgian company.

His second assignment was to examine another big rubber company, this time in Amazonia and run by the British. If anything the conditions were worse. As he reported on these things, Casement often thought of his own country, Ireland, and what he considered the oppresssion of the British. It was the middle of the First World War when he decided to try to help with an uprising in Ireland, to push the British back. His activities were considered treason, and he was put in prison, refused pardon, and hanged. This book in fact is written from his prison cell, with his ruminations on a life dedicated to helping others and ruined by an unacceptable decision of his own.

Mario Vargas Llosa is Peru’s foremost writer and won the Nobel Prize in 20l0. This book is well translated by Edith Grossman. It brings a controversial man to life and also gives some insight into the troubles that still plague the Congo.

Review by Anne McDougall

This is a small but fascinating book about three well-known figures in political history. Lord Beaverbrook and the Kennedys were famous in both Britain and the United States. But it is in New Brunswick, Canada, that they came together in a most unusual way.

Telling the story is James Downey, a Newfoundlander and professor of English who once taught at Carleton University but then, as he says, “fell from grace into academic administration” and became president of Carleton, the University of New Brunswick and the University of Waterloo, where he is now President Emeritus. It was his l0 years at UNB (l980-l990) that led him to write this book.

The protagonist is Lord Beaverbrook, who grew up in New Brunswick but pursued his business dealings to England where he got into journalism, built the “Daily Express” into one of the most successful newspapers in the world and was also elected a member of parliament and made a peer. Max Aitken became Lord Beaverbrook. One of his friends at this time was Joe Kennedy, American ambassador to the U.K.

In the Second World War, Prime Minister Winston Churchill made him Minister of Aircraft Production, where he helped greatly in the crucial Battle of Britain. Later, Churchill sent him as a go-between with President Roosevelt to gain support for Britain’s war effort.

The book shows (with good illustrations) how these relationships led to close friendship with the Kennedy family. In later years when first Jack, then Bobby Kennedy were invited to speak at the University of New Brunswick, in spite of their heavy loads at home both accepted. The speeches are reproduced here and Downey points out the rhetorical skill and craft, as well as what he calls “the American tradition of public oratory which they draw upon.”

Altogether we get an up-close look at an endlessly absorbing period of history, of our country as well as the U.K. and U.S. An unusually good book.

Review by Anne McDougall