Category: Reviews

In Richard Gwyn’s second volume on Sir John A. Macdonald he shows how this charming and wily politician gave Canada our country.

Opening with Confederation in l867, when Nova Scotia and New Brunswick joined Quebec and Ontario, he describes Macdonald’s National Policy which stood for government intervention in times of public need. Macdonald believed that in such a fragmented country, Canadians had to look out for each other or they would have no nation at all.

With thorough research and a good journalist’s sense of style, Gwyn tells the story of struggle with the Red River Colony amidst constant pressure from Minnesota annexationists to take this part of Canada; Louis Riel’s two rebellions and controversial death; the battle to build the Canadian Pacific Railway, linking the continent, and the Pacific Scandal that almost sunk the whole project, as well as Macdonald’s government.

Macdonald survived all this even though his home life was not easy (his first wife had died after years of illness and the loss of one son) and his second wife, though devoted, had the handicap of caring for a disabled daughter.

Macdonald had an easy, disarming way of approaching people and they voted him back into office against heavy odds. The book includes many of the talented politicians and others who worked with Macdonald up to the young Laurier, who would be another lion in the leadership of Canada. There are excellent photographs backing the story. Gwyn in fact has done just what he did in the first volume, John A.: The Man Who Made Us. Published in 2007, that book became a bestseller and won the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. This one is every bit as good.

Review by Anne McDougall

The widely-recognized British writer Penelope Lively has done it again in “How it all Began” – a subtle novel full of characters you get to know and believe in from the moment they are introduced.

The only violence comes in the first pages and of course sets the story. Friends as well as strangers rally to help the victim recuperate. We meet an aged Academic, retired, Lord Henry Peters, eager to get on TV or radio or even print with what he considers his invaluable Memoirs. There is the Grannie who helps the attractive East European immigrant with his English, only to have him fall in love with her married daughter. In the interior design business one clever operator meets another, only to have her savings nearly wiped out.

Lively shows the coincidences in life that pull people together – or apart. She is believable and delightful to read, with nineteen novels to her credit, including the most famous “Moon Tiger”, as well as three books of autobiography. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a member of PEN and the Society of Authors and a recipient of the OBE and CBE.

Review by Anne McDougall

Alexander McCall Smith was born in a part of Africa that was a British Protectorate. His books are never political. He does however bring out qualities of generosity and humour of this country at its best.

The new book is part of the No. l Ladies Detective Agency series (he has a number of other series, all of which he writes from his home in Edinburgh). His readers know and love the lady detective, Precious Ramotse and her family. In this story there are the usual complications from nearby neighbours. An unusual addition is the arrival of a tall stranger from overseas who turns out to have written the manual on detective work that Precious and her assistant use in their work. He helps right the injustice that Precious had been struggling with and in the process discovers something new about being a good detective.

Like all McCall Smith’s books, this one is “charming and hilarious” – to quote The Seattle Times. Also pure pleasure for a holiday weekend.

Review by Anne McDougall

This is a penetrating biography of one of Canada’s most important dancers, by an author who is a writer as well as dance historian, with degrees in dance history from both Canada and England. She tells Franca’s story with sharp insight and considerable detail. It is an impressive feat.

Celia Franca was born in l92l to a Polish-Jewish family in east-end London. Her parents had very little money to back their daughter when she began dancing around the house and at parties, but her obvious talent did lead to music, then dance lessons. Celia was rather short, with sturdy legs but not the high arch of most ballet dancers. She made up for this with a great sense of rhythm, of drama and showmanship, a long beautiful neck, and a high jump. She won a professional audition, got into Ballet Rambert and eventually Sadlers Wells. By this time she had made her mark outside England, and then came the offer to start a national school of ballet in Canada.

The rest is history and Carol Bishop-Gwyn describes the challenges Franca faced in getting dancers and money for the National Ballet of Canada. The book is full of all the dancers of this generation from de Valois, to Rudolph Nureyev, Margot Fonteyn, Veronica Tennant, and Karen Kain. There were lots of heartbreaks for the determined Franca – but nothing stopped her and her high standards gave this country a fine ballet company. The book is full of photographs showing Franca with her three husbands, but also being feted in countries around the world. She paid the cost of her pursuit, but we see that she had no choice.

Review by Anne McDougall

Pamela Druckerman is an American journalist married to an Englishman. They are living in Paris, both writing books, when they have their first child.
This is the mother’s story of what she learns from French families, where she finds the children sleep all night, eat regular healthy meals and the parents remain relaxed. Druckerman has a funny, honest way of describing all this, which makes for a very amusing book, made funnier when her twin boys arrive.
She watches the French mothers set out a “cadre”, or framework, within which the children must be obedient to certain rules, but after that are free to play as they like, making up their own games without supervision. At meal times great attention is given to regular four meals a day, with the grown-ups, and including a four-o’clock afternoon snack. Apart from that there is no snacking during the day, unlike American families. The result, Druckerman notes, is no obese children in France, unlike her own country. This also meant much more fresh vegetables and fruit and less pasta and hotdogs.
At the “creche”, which is state-funded, the children had the same system of basic obedience but also much free time to explore on their own. When the children did join their parents, they did not grab all the attention but allowed parents and their friends to continue their conversations uninterrupted.
Druckerman shares her efforts at learning to say “non”, and the book gives a fascinating picture of the two cultures, French and American. It may be a bit repetitive – but what book on Bringing up Bebe could not be?

Review by Anne McDougall

In Blitzkrieg and Jitterbugs, Elizabeth Hillman Waterston gives us a very particular picture of what it was like going to university – McGill – while the country had just started World War II.

She entered McGill in September l939, the month war was declared. The first eight months moved slowly with the defeat of Poland, war in Finland, and battles on the sea and in the air. By April l940, Hitler’s blitzkrieg brought the fall of France, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, and ended with the invasion of Russia and Pearl Harbour.

All this time, Elizabeth headed out from Montreal West by bus or street-car to college, where she was sorting out her lectures, getting to know the professors, going to freshie dances, and trying out articles for the student paper, The McGill Daily. Certainly the headlines brought the war news, and students across campus were also wondering which young professors would be joining up, and most of all, which of their family, and men friends, would leave the campus.

The book brings out the strong contrast between the frivolous insistence of youth “to have a good time at college” and the darkening demands from overseas. With diaries and scrapbooks, and a natural ability to report what she saw – and now remembers – Waterston gives a very intimate portrait of these days. It is certainly a pleasure to read for anyone who was at university at this time. She shares photos and newspaper clippings, and altogether brings the period very much alive.

Waterston herself became a Professor of English, and taught at Sir George Williams, the University of Western Ontario, and the University of Guelph, where she is presently Professor Emeritus.

Review by Anne McDougall

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