Category: Reviews

This is the first full biography of Arthur Erickson, one of Canada’s most famous, though controversial, architects.

The author, David Stouck, lives in Vancouver where Erickson had his home base.  Now Professor Emeritus of English at Simon  Fraser University, Stouck has written biographies of Ethel Wilson and Sinclair Ross. With Erickson, he had a chance to check his material between 2005 and 2009, when Erickson died. The result is a fascinating look at some of the criticisms surrounding famous buildings such as Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto, Simon Fraser University and the Canadian Chancery in Washington.

Erickson was born in Vancouver in 1924, when the city numbered barely 117,000 people. At school he quickly showed talent in drawing and sketching and was taught by Lawren Harris, who recognized his talent. He went on to the McGill School of Architecture where John Bland was the distinguished director, and Gordon Webber a brilliant professor. He won a travelling scholarship and set off for Europe as well as the Middle East where he never forgot the beauty of Greece’s Parthenon or Istanbul’s Hagia Sofia.

This book takes a fair look at Erickson’s considerable ability and personal charm. He gained fame around the world but this was shattered by a high-living life style that eventually left him broke. There are excellent photos of his work, as well as his famous friends. It is a sympathetic look at many sides of a genius.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

This is a new edition of Ernest Hemingway’s 1935 book on a hunting safari in East Africa. He travelled with his wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, whose own experiences are recorded here for the first time.

Green Hills of Africa gives a wonderful description of both the beauty of the countryside, and the thrill of the chase. Hemingway tries to explain this thrill at a time even then, when the animals were being threatened by the incursions of man. His wife writes more fully on the lives of the Africans they got to know; their music and dancing and festivals of life.

There is also a personal foreword by Patrick Hemingway, the author’s sole surviving son, who spent many years as a professional hunter in East Africa, as well as a new introduction by Sean Hemingway, grandson of the author. There are photographs of Ernest Hemingway with the safari crew and rhino they killed as well as Hemingway with his lion on the Serengeti Plain. There are also copies of his list of trophies, i.e. the animals killed, and some pages from his original manuscript, showing changes he marked.

Hemingway’s books, The Sun also Rises and A Farewell to Arms established him as one of the leading literary lights of the 20th century. He won the Pulitzer Prize for The Old Man and the Sea and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. This edition of an earlier book shows how his writing developed.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

Alexander McCall Smith is well-loved for his series of books, starting with the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series set in Africa, and followed by the Isabel Dalhousie series, the Portuguese Irregular Verbs, the Scotland Street series and the Corduroy Mansions series.

Just out is a new Isabel Dalhousie story.  She is the philosopher who lives in Edinburgh with her husband, Jamie, and young son, Charlie. Isabel spends part of her time editing The Review of Applied Ethics, with articles from all over the world. As well as that she is often approached by friends who have a mystery they can’t solve right in Edinburgh. Isabel can’t resist these problems and this book tells the story of a small boy who insists he had an earlier life and knows exactly what island off the coast of Scotland was his home. Isabel meets his mother, and also makes the trip to the island with her own family.

She gently uncovers the mystery and we get to spend time in kindly, sociable (and beautiful) Scotland, with a writer, unlike many today, who watches for the upbeat and leaves us happy. McCall Smith is professor emeritus of medical law at the University of Edinburgh. He was born  in what is now known as Zimbabwe and taught law at the University of Botswana. He now lives in Scotland.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

There’s a lot of discussion about Harper Lee’s new book, Go Set a Watchman, and no wonder.

The fact is, it was written decades before Lee’s famous To Kill a Mockingbird of l960, but wasn’t discovered until much later. The author apparently considered it a draft version of the later prize-winning novel, and put it away.

The new book tells what happened 20 years after the events described in Mockingbird. While we all loved Atticus Finch, Scout and Jem, I think the real reason for Mockingbird‘s success is that we were satisfied with what we learned about them at the time and don’t really need upgrading to the story.

In the new book there continues a brilliant up-close picture of Maycomb Junction in the South. Harper Lee was born in l926 in Monroeville, Alabama. It brings back the values that get thrown into doubt, both then and still today. Harper Lee’s writing remains precise and wise.

Maybe Go Set a Watchman should be sold to schools and colleges with English departments, teaching writing, as an illustration of how a first draft can be developed into a best-seller.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

The Franco-Czech novelist, Milan Kundera, has long been loved for his sly, witty books on modern life, some of the best-known being: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,  Ignorance,  and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It’s 15 years since his last book and critics suggest this may well be his final summing up.

The new book is the story of the friendship between four men living in Paris.  They are an odd collection: Ramon is in his 60’s and retired from teaching in a university; Charles is in his 40’s and caters for parties; Caliban is an actor looking for work; Alain is younger and still trying to reach his mother, who abandoned him in childhood. The women are mostly absent and pretty unappealing. But for the men, their friendship is sacred and Kundera, a famous ironist, is completely sincere when he writes about this.

There are a couple of heavy dream sequences but on the whole the book is short, without the eroticism of Kundera’s earlier novels but rather a look at a bruised male unease. The point is really summed up by Ramon’s hymn to insignificance, the world that is just itself  “in all its obviousness, all its innocence, in all its beauty.”

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

A number of stories have come out of the famous Buckinghamshire mansion called Bletchley, where Britain housed its code-breaking team during World War II. The best-known is that of Alan Turing, a key code-breaker who is widely regarded as a father of the modern computer.

No real account, however, has been given of the work of the girls at Bletchley who, by l944, had outnumbered the men by three to one. Tessa Dunlop tackles this subject in her current book, The Bletchley Girls, and she does so as a qualified historian. She received the Gertrude Easton History prize at Oxford University and has been awarded a PhD scholarship at Sheffield Hallam University.

She picks fourteen women, still alive in their nineties, and gives a detailed account of how they all wound up  in the code-breaking organization. It turns out it was young girls who operated the unwieldy machinery, made sense of wireless sound waves and sorted the decoded messages that would eventually help lead the Allies to victory and the world into the information age. They had all signed the Official Secrets Act, and so for years none really knew what they had done.  Tessa Dunlop tells how Bletchley was dependent on radio interceptions. Scattered across Britain with international outposts as remote as New Delhi and Columbia, Y-stations, big and small,  were the nerve centres of an eavesdropping operation, intercepting the gobbledygook messages to pass on to Bletchley Park. Some 8,500- 10,000 people worked at Bletchley Y-stations. This is a fascinating account of what they achieved.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

This is a book by a man who is an author himself, has worked in a bookstore selling books and now edits them and writes reviews.

Andy Miller is 37  years old and lives outside London with his wife and young son. You get the impression that books fill his life almost entirely. He calls The Year of Reading Dangerously a work of literary criticism but adds it is also a memoir and a confession. He had come to the point in his life where he felt he must tackle a list of the most famous books in the world. He calls this The Hundred Books which influenced me most. But the book he writes is based on The List of Betterment and these are the fifty books he describes here.

He puts two or three books together for each chapter, sometimes a funny combination,  e.g. Hilary Mantel, George and Weedon Grossmith, and Charles Dickens…or Herman Melville (Moby Dick) and Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code)  or Leo Tolstoy and P.G. Wodehouse.

He is frank and funny about his own tastes and it makes for an amusing and original book and a new slant on the authors he writes about.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

James Wolfe and Louis-Joseph Montcalm both came from families who for centuries had served in their country’s armies: the Wolfes in Wales, Ireland and finally England; the Montcalms in France. When these two men faced each other on the Plains of Abraham, they had a lot riding on the outcome.

In this book, Roch Carrier gives us careful background details of the events leading up to the famous day in September l759. The Seven Years War had seen fighting between the French and English including Wolfe’s success in taking Louisburg. The question was how to take Quebec City. For some time the Governor General Vaudreuil, who was in charge of the troops in Quebec, had not got along with the commander from the troops sent from France, Louis-Joseph Montcalm. In the most exciting part of this book, Carrier describes Wolfe’s decision to scale the tall cliff overlooking a farmer’s field owned by Abraham Martin and allow the rest of the British army to climb the cliff behind and attack the French troops under Montcalm who was not prepared for these tactics.

Carrier describes the two warriors: Wolfe very tall and skinny and often ill, especially from sea-sickness, attached to his mother for remedies; Montcalm steadier, with a family waiting for him in France. Carrier himself is one of Canada’s finest writers as novelist, playwright and children’s author. He is also the former director of the Canada Council for the Arts and the National Librarian of Canada. The translator, Donald Winkler, has won the Governor General’s Award for French to English Translation three times. In this book, they have a winner.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

David Suzuki is an internationally famous geneticist and environmentalist with some forty books, and numerous prizes, to his name.

In this book he takes quite a different line and writes letters to his two sets of grandchildren that are warm and touching in the memories he shares. His family (grandparents) came from Japan between 1904 and 1908 and settled in Vancouver. They had left extreme poverty and were making a living in B.C. until World War ll broke out and the government incarcerated all Japanese for the duration. One set of grandparents returned to Japan after the war only to die within the year in Hiroshima. David Suzuki made it, however. He showed keen interest in all his academic studies with his marks enabling him to study medicine. By this time he had fallen in love with genetics and he would pursue this, along with a passion for the environment, that has made him world-famous.

In these letters he writes to two sets of grandchildren. When his first wife died, he married into a Haida First Nations family. He met “elders” for the first time and then became an elder himself, of which he is very proud and writes of the importance for families to keep close and share their wisdom. He urges his grandchildren to find their goals and stick to them. He calls them the legacy of which he is most proud and happy. It is altogether a charming book.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

Donna Leon knows Venice so well that her mystery novels always give a different aspect of life in that enchanted city. In this one it is opera. She is in fact returning to her very first book Death at La Fenice which dealt with Italy’s finest living female soprano. In this new book she gives a menacing account of what this soprano is threatened with this time.

The detective is once again Commissario Guido Brunetti. We have gotten to know Brunetti in the thirty books Leon has written about him, as well as his sharp-witted wife, and amusing children. Leon concentrates on the musical world, however. She has lived for thirty years in Venice and knows a lot about the pressures of producing opera and takes us backstage for much of the time.

Donna Leon has won many awards for her detective stories. The Commissario Guido Brunetti mystery series is internationally known. This is another one to enjoy.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall