Category: Reviews

Madeleine Thien’s new book tells the story of two musical families in revolutionary China and how they survived. It stretches from Shanghai in the 40’s to Mao’s Cultural Revolution and then from 1980’s Beijing and the Tienanmen protests up to today where the heroine of the story lives in Vancouver.

This woman is grieving her father’s death by suicide in China. We learn of three particular musicians who were brutalized by the government and told their art was a shameful indulgence. Shostakovitch’s music comes into the story and the trouble it ran into in Communist Russia where it was condemned as dangerously bourgeois.

Madeleine Thien is the daughter of Malaysian-Chinese immigrants to Canada. She spent some years in Vancouver and now lives in Montreal. Her previous works, Simple Recipes, Certainty, and Dogs at the Perimeter, have won prizes in North America and Berlin, and have been translated into twenty-five languages. She gives a very up-close picture of living in China where sensitive artistic emotions are blocked by the relentless tide of the Cultural Revolution.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

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This is the latest in Donna Leon’s beloved mystery series set in Venice. The American has spent thirty years in Venice and her fans will recognize not only her sharp portrait of Commissario Guido Brunetti and his family, but the haunting beauty of Leon’s chosen city and the up-close lives of people she has come to know.

The case Brunetti is asked to solve is a touching one. A young girl, unable to swim, fell into a canal late at night. She was drowning when a nearby man, an alcoholic, pulled her out and saved her. By that time she had suffered  brain damage which left her unable to develop and grow up. The man said he saw someone throw her into the water, but the next day he couldn’t remember anything about it.

Brunetti stuck to the case and it has a surprising ending. This is Donna Leon’s thirtieth book. She now divides her time between Venice and Switzerland. It is hard to believe we won’t hear from Commissario Brunetti again.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

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James Bartleman has already written seven books on his extraordinary life as a part-Indian child from Muskoka who grew up to hold Foreign Service posts in some dozen countries, and also serve as Lieut-Governor for the Province of Ontario.

This book has further highlights from this amazing life and gives us all hope in the days of trying to reconcile injustices done to Indigenous people. Bartleman’s mother belonged to the Chippewas of Rama First Nations. His father was white, a steelworker from Welland, Ontario. When James was six, in 1940, the family of four spent the summers in a tent near the village dump in the small Muskoka village of Port Carling. James loved the outdoors life and still dreams of it, in spite of some prejudice against the Indigenous families.

He got his big break when he was sixteen and just finished grade twelve. A businessman for whom he’d done odd jobs, asked if he could help him pay to get his senior matric and go on to university. Bartleman graduated from the University of Western Ontario in 1963. The rest of this book tells how he joined the Foreign Service, was ambassador to two hot spots, Cuba and Israel. He served as ambassador to the North Atlantic Council of NATO, and was high commissioner to South Africa, Australia, and ambassador to the European Union. In 2002, Prime Minister Jean Chretien appointed him Ontario’s Lieut-Governor. In his later years he writes he has been giving  back to society by establishing libraries in Indigenous-run schools, a book club for 5,000 Indigenous children, creative writing awards and summer reading camps for marginalized Indigenous children in Northern Ontario. This is indeed a book of hope.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

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This is a short but amazing book by a ninety-nine year old English writer who shares some of her most intimate experiences.

This is Diana Athill’s sixth book of memoirs. She spent her life in London in writing and editing. She helped Andre Deutsch start his own publishing company and worked there for four decades. She never married, but at the age of forty-three got pregnant. In this book she describes the experience of losing her baby and in fact almost losing her life. “Alive, alive oh” is how she feels about surviving. In this book she looks back at some of the things that have stayed at the top of her memories.

There is a lot of beauty in the book. Athill grew up in comfortable circumstances and there are lovely descriptions of her grandparents’ house and garden which was actually a large park. She writes with humour and honesty about the First and Second World Wars, as well as her trips to Europe as a young woman. She is often frank, as well as wise and funny. It is an unusual memoir, to say the least.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

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This is the story of the pretty town of Rye on the east coast of England, and the peoples’ lives up to the outbreak of World War I. We meet a happy group, enjoying their titles and servants, whose most serious concern is an attractive young woman who has been hired as the new Latin teacher in the school where no women have held such a post.

Needless to say, this issue gets lost in the shocking changes that come with the Declaration of War. Helen Simonson was born in England and grew up in a small village in East Sussex. Although she moved to the United States three decades ago, she has never forgotten her English roots and is the author of the best-selling novel Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand. This book too, gives an up-close picture of British life. Simonson describes in touching detail what happens to all her characters as they quickly realize what it means to fight for their country.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

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Shirley MacLaine is the legendary Hollywood actress who has played in more than fifty films and won endless awards including the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award, the highest honour for a career in film. She has also written ten international bestsellers. Above the Line is her latest evocative memoir and refers to creative people, working in film, who are supposed to be unburdened with unpleasant financial problems.

She wrote the book while working on a film Wild Oats on the far-off Canary Islands off Spain. The whole crew faced uncertain financing every minute of the shoot but carried on regardless, often using their own money. But MacLaine also came up against the mystery of the location, which was the remaining elements of the mighty lost continent of Atlantis.

MacLaine has always believed in meditation and this time it leads her to a new understanding of why Atlantis fell (greed and power replacing spiritual values). She looks at our time and questions our values and where we may be heading. She has a funny, feisty style of writing which she uses to describe the tricky world of film-making. As well as that tale we get a look at an age-old mystery, Atlantis. It makes for a fascinating book.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

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The prize-winning author, Elizabeth Strout, has done it again in her new short novel,  My Name is Lucy Barton.

It’s the story of a New York housewife (and successful writer) who is lying in a hospital bed when her estranged mother pays her a visit. Lucy Barton is gradually recovering from an unsuccessful appendix operation. Her mother arrives unexpectedly, and spends five nights dozing in a chair in her room. They gently reminisce to the point where mother and daughter finally get somewhat closer.

Lucy Barton herself is interesting. Brought up on a poor farm, she discovers books at school, as well as some helpful teachers who see her ability and get her into achieving high marks that pave her way to university. She married a successful man and has two daughters whom she adores. They move to New York city and here she sells articles to magazines and newspapers.

There is nothing sensational in her life, but Strout has a gift with the emotional details. She brings Lucy to life in such a way that we feel very close to her as her apparently perfect life gently unravels. Strout has won the Pulitzer, as well as other national prizes, for four earlier books. She lives in New York City.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

Stephen Le’s parents immigrated to Canada from Vietnam in the 60’s. He was born and grew up in Ottawa and lives here now where he is professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Ottawa.

He visited Vietnam for the first time when he was twenty-five and by that time had developed an interest in diets. When his mother died of breast cancer at the age of sixty-six, Stephen was finishing his doctoral studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He decided to focus on researching ancestral diets and lifestyles and learning about the risk factors behind breast cancer and other diseases commonly associated with Western civilization. He spent two years researching food and food-related illnesses around the world.

This book gives fascinating examples of what our ancestors ate. Apart from Vietnam,  Le traveled to India, China, Kenya, Australia, as well as Canada and the United States. The diets range all the way from insects, (made bearable by fish sauce), to wild animals (in California) such as deer, antelope, mountain sheep and black bear.

One chapter, The Temptation of Meat, recognizes that cooks around the world realize that great food depends on the glories of fatty meat or some other kind of fat. He points out the dangers this brings in obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Another chapter looks at The Paradox of Fish. Le sums up what he has learned with three tips for the way we should try to live, based on how our ancestors managed, i.e.: Keep moving;  Eat less meat and dairy when younger; Avoid sugar and deep-fried foods; Eat traditionally.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

Margaret MacMillan is well-known for her prize-winning books on history.

She has been the provost of Trinity College at the University of Toronto, and is now the warden of St. Antony’s College, a professor of international history at Oxford University and a professor of history at the University of Toronto. But it is her writing ability that has earned her reputation. Her books include The War that Ended Peace, Nixon in China and Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World.

This one takes a special look at the importance of certain figures in both their own history and the times that came after them. She examines William Lyon MacKenzie King and the part he played in the Canadian Federation; she looks too at Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the bringing of a unified United States into the Second World War. Apart from well-known figures, she has sections of the book on the dreamers, explorers, and adventurers who defied their own societies (and are not so well-known), and finally the observers, many of whom kept notes and diaries that bring the past to life. There is an excellent section supplying key readings for all these chapters.

The book is subtitled Personalities and the Past and it does take a fascinating look at the complex relationship between biography and history –  something that has intrigued Margaret MacMillan from the beginning of her writing.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

This is a racy novel about the Beatle, John Lennon, and his escape to Ireland to find peace and tranquility.

It is by a currently famous Irish writer, Kevin Barry, whose first book,  City of Bohane, has taken prizes all over Ireland and Europe. He has an original way of writing, blending fantasy and reality. This suits the famous Beatle, who had some Irish blood himself although he grew up in Liverpool. In this story he wanted to get as far away from New York City as possible, and leave behind problems of domesticity and a current writer’s block. Lennon had in fact bought a small island, off the west coast of Ireland, some years earlier. He yearned for what he hoped would be peace and quiet.

His trip turned out to be anything but peace and quiet. Barry’s high-flying style of writing turns the story into something like a magical mystery tour of its own – what one reviewer calls “a high wire act of courage, nerve, and great beauty.” It also gives a rare picture of ancient Irish mythology.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall