Category: Reviews

If the U.S. political game is beginning to pall – or even our own hockey season – there’s a new book out that brings something entirely new and exciting.

Gavin Menzies has already startled historians with his books on China and its part in discovering America. He developed his interest in history from his own career in the Royal Navy where he served for twenty years, becoming a submarine captain.

In “The Lost Empire of Atlantis” he sets out to show that it was the Minoan civilization operating some 3,000 years B.C. that sailed from its base on Crete in the Mediterranean to bring in copper and tin from spots as far away as Spain and Portugal, the south coast of India, up to Stonehenge, and the Hebrides and eventually across the Atlantic to a corner of Lake Superior which had the richest bronze in the world. Menzies has himself made trips to most of these spots and the book includes photographs of a rich collection of drawings and etchings, textiles, flat copper axes and pottery, all of which the Minoans are thought to have brought with them.

Menzies checks with many other historians and archaeologists who have struggled with Plato’s myth of Atlantis. His own discoveries of treasures from the famed Bronze Age show that Atlantis might very well be the ancient Minoan civilization, which was wiped out in l450 B.C. by a massive volcano/tsunami.

Menzies lives in London, England. He is widely recognized on both sides of the Atlantic as a historical detective, as well as a scholar.

Review by Anne McDougall

Naomi Griffiths is an excellent person to write the story of our 25th Governor General, Romeo LeBlanc. She met him first in l954, at the very beginning of both their academic careers, and remained a friend until the end of his life when she last saw him in New Brunswick, in 2004. More importantly, Griffiths herself is the acknowledged authority on Acadian history, the part of the world that Romeo LeBlanc hails from.

She titles her book from the period LeBlanc was most active in the world of politics in Ottawa. Most particularly he was known and admired as the long-standing fisheries minister in Trudeau’s cabinet (l974-l982). But LeBlanc was the 7th child of an old-established farming family living in the valley of the Memramcook River, one of the centres of Acadian culture. When he had finished school, his sisters and friends collected the fees to send him to the University St. Joseph, which played a major role in his life, making it possible for him to go to Paris and study at the Sorbonne, which is where he met Naomi Griffiths who had come over from England.

LeBlanc returned to New Brunswick to teach and eventually worked as a journalist, with postings to Washington and London. He eventually entered politics in Ottawa. Griffiths was teaching history at Carleton and they maintained their friendship. As Dean of Arts she invited him to address the Canadian Institute of Canadian Studies.

LeBlanc never forgot his roots, returning constantly to his home in New Brunswick. Griffiths shows how his loyalty to the Acadians influenced his treatment of other people. He was down-to-earth but saw the humour in any situation, hard-working but open to every point of view. These qualities were recognized by Jean Chretien (who writes a fine introduction to this book) and led to his choice as Canada’s first French-Canadian Governor General in l995). This book is an outstanding portrait from every point of view.

Review by Anne McDougall

If you are already a fan of Alexander McCall Smith, this is another charmer in his Isabel Dalhousie series. If it’s your first time, it’s hard to believe you won’t enjoy this gentle yarn, set in Edinburgh where this beloved author lives.

McCall Smith was first recognized by his best-selling No. l Ladies’ Detective Agency which was set in Africa where he lived at one time. Since then he has pursued his career as professor of medical law at the University of Edinburgh and written short novels on the side. Part of their appeal is his obvious love of the city and his walks and jaunts through every part of the old town’s upper and lower towns, castles, pubs, meadowlands.

The stories about Isabel Dalhousie feature an attractive Edinburgh woman who considers herself a philosopher — by both training and practice. She publishes and edits a journal called “The Review of Applied Ethics”. She is also living with her partner, a musician, and looking after their 2 year old boy while planning to marry, which she does in this book.

McCall Smith winds a number of complications into their lives. Isabel is sought out for help by an adopted woman seeking her real father. The discoveries are provocative and the story grabs your attention. The Los Angeles Times calls the book “a genteel, wisdom-filled entertainment”. It is also light-handed, and funny.

Review by Anne McDougall

This is a charmingly-produced memoir about a professor’s life, written by one of the most distinguished historians of our time.

Michael Bliss grew up in small-town Ontario and then moved on to the University of Toronto. Here he first studied science and mathematics, then theology (he was going to be a United Church minister) and finally philosophy and history. With the last he found his home and was soon lecturing as well as writing for journals across Canada. Bliss shares his experience in teaching and also the influence of men like historians Kenneth McNaught, Donald Creighton and Ramsay Cook.

His own interest in Canadian public life led to meeting and writing about many of the politicians of the day. An interesting section is his encounter with Pierre Trudeau. Eventually he found himself drawn to an earlier love, science. He took on the stories of doctors Banting and Best and wrote “The Discovery of Insulin,” a highly successful book to this day. He followed this with a biography of Sir William Osler and that in turn led to an investigation and book on the man who had first written about Osler, Harvey Cushing, famed neurosurgeon.

Bliss writes candidly about the combined pressures on a professor’s life of teaching and writing. He has had an exceptionally happy family life in suburban Toronto, which we see here in a number of photographs. He shares with us the importance of this happiness. It makes for a fascinating account.

Review by Anne McDougall

This is a surprising book.

Rosamond Bernier is a journalist as well as hostess extraordinaire. Born to a wealthy Jewish Pennsylvania family, she had an English mother which meant many trips to London and time in an English school. Her father, a lawyer, was involved in the music scene in Philadelphia and Rosamond grew up meeting many of the conductors, and soloists, of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Sergei Rachmaninoff, Walter Gieseking, Eugene Ormandy, all came to her house, as well as Leopold Stokowsky, Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland who became close friends.

Her first marriage took her to Mexico where of course Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo entered her life. Bernier writes of intimate moments with these artists but she does much more than simply name-drop. She is graceful and witty herself, with a fine taste in dress, and not conceited about her contacts. The result is we get much closer to these artists that we otherwise would.

Bernier’s life takes her to New York, where she writes about fashion for “Vogue” and eventually goes to Paris where another world of visual artists opens up, i.e. Henri Matisse, Picasso, Miro. She co-founds the art review “L’Oeil” and built an excellent reputation for herself in both research and interviews. Back in the U.S. she became well-known for her lectures at the Metropolitan Museum, as well as museums all across the country. She had the wit to be original – but brief.

Calvin Tomkins calls her book “pure pleasure – a brilliant life, beautifully evoked” and John Guare calls it an “exhilarating hopscotch through 20th century art.”

Review by Anne McDougall

Most newswriters who say they are telling it like it is are keeping something back. Not Craig Oliver.

His book “Oliver’s Twist” is a racy frank tale of major political figures across this country, as well as some extraordinary stories from his own life. Well-known today as the chief Parliamentary correspondent for CTV news, based in Ottawa, Oliver has covered every kind of story ever since he broke gently into CBC radio as a student in Prince Rupert, B.C. He learned early to take chances whenever they turned up. The only child of alcoholic parents, he had spent his growing-up years in the houses of strangers. Only at school did the occasional teacher give him a chance to practise his writing with which he showed talent. After the job with the CBC in Prince Rupert he was able to move to Toronto and eventually Ottawa, Washington and Central America.

Oliver has a natural charm and talent, beloved by anyone who watches him on television. He is also loyal, even to the mother who often had to give him up for care, but to whom he dedicates this book. He has followed the lives of politicians in this country for four decades and his insight has led to some amazing anecdotes which are found in this book.

Apart from his profession, Oliver had a passion to go on canoe-trips on some of Canada’s wildest wilderness rivers. He did this with a distinguished group including Tim Kotcheff, Eddie Goldenberg and Pierre Trudeau. He has managed all this while being declared legally blind for more than a decade. His book is a treat, Christmas or any time.

Review by Anne McDougall

The CBC Massey Lectures are fifty years old this year. To celebrate them we have a fascinating book called “Winter” – a collection of five essays by the best-selling writer Adam Gopnik.

He looks at the Romantic side, beloved by painters, poets, even musicians (and the book has some excellent illustrations); next the Radical winter, made famous by expeditions to both North and South poles by men whose names have become legendary because of their bravery. Gopnik looks at the making of the modern Christmas with some surprising adventures by Santa Claus. Another chapter covers Recreational winter, with fine bits on hockey, and finally Remembering Winter, showing winter stress making summer sweetness.

Gopnik confesses winter is his favourite season. These essays provide a welcome lead-up to the year’s coming cold days. The lectures themselves are given in November, 20ll. Gopnik was born in Philadelphia but raised in Montreal, where he went to McGill University (and to the Forum to watch hockey). He has been a staff-writer at “The New Yorker” for twenty-five years and is the author of “Paris to the Moon” and other collections of essays, as well as novels.

Review by Anne McDougall

This is “an irresistible novel”, as Alice Munro says, by one of Canadian Literature’s early writers.

Jack Hodgins lives and writes in British Columbia. Since “Spit Delaney’s Island” (stories) he has produced twelve books including novels, books for children, a travel book and a guide for teaching fiction.

“The Master of Happy Endings” is now out in paperback, and you can enjoy the story of Axel Thorstad, a tall, 6 foot eight inches, Norwegian, retired school-teacher, who lives in a cedar shack on an island in the Georgia Strait, off Vancouver Island, where he plunges into the ocean to swim every day and tries to get over the loss of his beautiful wife, Elena. His hermit’s life was beginning to pall when he hit on the idea of running an ad in the B.C. papers advertising his services as a tutor.

His reputation as a superb teacher brought in some interesting results, and he found himself on the way to Los Angeles to tutor a boy who had been offered parts in a television series but was failing at school. The story is fascinating and Thorstad more than holds his own with Hollywood operators. While finding his way around this tinsel world he is not fooled, and returns to his cedar shack. Who knows what next? The offers keep coming in. As one reviewer notes Thorstad is the kind of man a reader might want to spend time with.

Review by Anne McDougall

From the moment eleven-year old Michael Ondaatje climbs on board the luxury liner “Oronsay” to sail from Ceylon to England there is a feeling of adventure that makes “The Cat’s Table” a sheer delight to read. The reviews are pouring in, and they all say the same thing. People who loved “The English Patient” and
“In The Skin of a Lion,” but found later Ondaatje books a bit obscure, are thrilled with the fast pace, sense of magic and mystery, that fill this new book.

Ondaatje takes a true happening from his own life; he did leave Ceylon as an ll-year old to meet up with his estranged mother in England: a trip of 2l days on a 7-storey liner holding 800 other passengers. When he told his own children, many years later, about this trip, they were so full of questions that he turned back and decided to use the trip for a fictional account of three young boys, travelling alone, and their close meetings with adults, romantic, dangerous, sometimes terrifying.

The cat’s table referred to the least prestigious spot in the ship’s large dining-room, the farthest away from the Captain’s Table. This did not mean it did not have some fascinating members: the musician, retired from a jazz band, who played with the ship’s orchestra and was full of ribald lyrics; a mysterious spinster who wore a jacket with pockets to carry live pigeons, a retired ship dismantler who had the complete run of the ship and got the boys into forbidden spots in the engine and furnace rooms as well as the lifeboats where they hid for hours eating stolen fruit from the First Class.

Michael, nicknamed Mynah, finds his l7-year old cousin Emily on board ship, and has a very touching visit catching up and reaching an intimacy he had not known before. As the book, and the journey, progress, and Aden and Port Said are reached, Ondaatje flashes forward to his later life, remembering how his discoveries on shipboard affected his own emotions. In England he picks up with the boys he knew on board. He even tracks Emily down on the west coast of British Columbia.

Because Ondaatje is so frank in sharing what is true, and what is fiction, we get a quite inspired story of youth and age, of growing up, snatches of life in Ceylon versus life in England. Ondaatje is generous, as well a polished and graceful writer. This is a wonderful book.

Review by Anne McDougall

This is a scholarly look at a fascinating period in Canadian History – the beginning of the Canada Company and the settling of the Huron Tract in Ontario.

This company had its base in England and was responsible for settling over two million acres of land in what was called Upper Canada. It turned up a lot of colourful characters with different visions as to how this should be done. Among them were John Galt, the Scottish author of novels like Annals of the Parish, beloved by generations of Scots – who sometimes paid more attention to the needs of the settlers, such as buying seed for their crops, than to the books of the Company he was charged with starting. Also Tiger Dunlop, a medical doctor who became Warden of the Forests. Very concerned with Britain’s position was the lieutenant governor, Sir Peregrine Maitland; also very involved were the Bishops Macdonell and John Strachan.

This is a picturesque part of Ontario and there are excellent descriptions (and good photographs) of the founding of the cities Goderich and Guelph. This period has been described in a number of previous books and pamphlets, but Robert C. Lee writes a particularly vivid account because his family came from England to Goderich as early as l834 and later descendants served as mayor of that city and ran businesses there. Bob Lee studied history at Bishop’s University and later wrote his masters degree at the University of Guelph on the Canada Company. Lee later joined the Canadian Foreign Service, posted to the U.S., Yugoslavia, Japan, Korea and Indonesia. He now lives in Ottawa.

Review by Anne McDougall