Category: Reviews

With the city of Baltimore high in the news these days because of tension between the police and African Americans, it is strange to read a book by an American writer in which there is no mention of this Baltimore situation. The book takes quite another angle.

Anne Tyler has written twenty novels, the eleventh, Breathing Lessons winning the Pulitzer Prize in l988. She was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, but has lived for some time in Baltimore. She specializes in writing about families. In this book the Whitshanks live in a fairly prosperous section of Baltimore which, like any city, is divided into different kinds of neighbourhoods. The Whitshanks are a family of four who remain very close through the years in spite of dark secrets we learn about in this novel.

Tyler brings this family and their friends very close to our hearts. In fact she writes with insight and humour which makes this an unsentimental story in praise of family with all its emotional complexity.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

This is a thrilling account of the sinking of the Lusitania – how it happened and the people it affected.

The author, Erik Larson, has already published four best-sellers in which he fuses history and entertainment to give a vivid account for what took place. In Dead Wake, the fastest liner in service set sail from New York bound for Liverpool on May 1, 1915, when World War I was entering its 10th month.

Larson explains that the passengers on board were not anxious about the war even though Germany had declared the seas around Britain to be a war zone. The captain of the Lusitania was confident that the gentlemanly strictures of warfare, which forbade the attacking of civilian ships, would hold up as they had for a century. Germany wanted to change the rules and the captain of one of their U-boats was happy to oblige.

As the Lusitania and the U-boats made their way to the shores of Ireland, Larson introduces us to some of the passengers: a famous Boston bookseller, a woman architect, and President Woodrow Wilson among others. The liner was also carrying a record number of children and infants. When the sinking comes we are completely involved in the people aboard and the actual event is unforgettable. It gives Erik Larson another fine book.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

This is a charming book about bookstores across the United States that are favorites of some of the best-known American writers. There are 36 states in all represented, with delightful illustrations of each bookstore described here.

John Grisham, for example, lives in both Virginia and Massachusetts but chooses to write about “That Bookstore in Blytheville” which is in Blytheville, Arkansas. This is near the town where Grisham was born and when he came to introduce his own first books, the owner gave him a welcome which he has never forgotten.

Another best-selling author, Simon Winchester, lives in New York City and Massachusetts. He writes about “The Bookloft” in Great Barrington, Mass., which he loves for its highly knowledgeable staff and huge selection of books.

This book is about American bookstores but writer Richard Russo mentions Canada in the Introduction when he says: “independent booksellers always get the word out, and with their help great young writers you don’t know about yet will take their place on shelves next to their heroes, from Margaret Atwood to Emile Zola.”  In the Afterword, writer Emily St. John Mandel, who spent part of her childhood in Victoria, British Columbia, writes “when I was a child I was in love with Laughing Oyster Bookshop, the wonderful independent bookstore that’s still my favorite shop on all of Vancouver Island.” It would be nice if someone wrote about bookstores in Canada; then we could discover who declares “Books on Beechwood” their favourite.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

At the Water’s Edge is a novel contrasting the rich, privileged life of Philadelphia in l944 with the struggle for existence in a remote Scottish village where the war affected everyone’s lives.

The story focuses on Madeleine, a young woman from Philadelphia who recently married a draft dodger named Ellis. He had enraged his father, who cut him off financially. Along with their friend Hank, they decided to make the trip to Scotland and try to find the Loch Ness monster, which his father had failed to discover.

The three of them settled in an isolated inn in the Scottish Highlands, where the locals are short of food and fuel, and hold the visitors in contempt. Gradually Madeleine makes friends and helps with the work at the inn. She discovers quite different values in the people she gets to know and falls in love with the beauty of the country as well as the courage of its citizens.

It’s a well-written book by Sara Gruen, who has also written the best-selling Water for Elephants, Ape House, Riding Lessons and Flying Changes. She lives in North Carolina with her husband and three sons.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

For sheer escape, here is another delightful Hamish MacBeth mystery, set in the little town of Lochdubh in the Scottish Highlands.

This tall, modest police sergeant is now well-known through some thirty stories by Beaton. MacBeth loves his posting, where he keeps a small number of farm animals, as well as a dog and cat who follow him everywhere. He has avoided promotion, in spite of a fine record of successful arrests. In this book, however, there is word that his own police station, along with many others, may be closed for economic reasons. When murders turn up this time, MacBeth is more keen to take the credit he deserves in solving them.

In an area where he is widely loved, MacBeth does have an enemy in Detective Chief Inspector Blair who resents MacBeth’s success in solving crimes and would like to have him moved. He gets a keen young officer to visit the town of Lochdubh and follow MacBeth. When this officer is suddenly found murdered, there are complications all round.

M.C. Beaton knows and loves Scotland and particularly this northern area. The characters are vividly drawn and the story completely absorbing. This author has written another series, the Agatha Raisin books. She has been called a master of outrageous black comedy.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

This is another ambitious and successful novel by the Irish writer, Colum McCann.

Called Transatlantic, it moves between two continents and across three centuries. We see the black American slave, Frederick Douglass, coming to Ireland in l845 to champion the ideas of democracy and freedom. Then in l9l9 two brave airmen pilot the first non-stop transatlantic flight from Newfoundland to the west of Ireland. Finally, in l998, the American Senator George Mitchell crosses the ocean to help Northern Ireland’s difficult peace talks to an uncertain conclusion.

Running alongside and through these major stories are the lives of four women, whom we get to know and love. One reviewer writes that the uncanny thing about McCann is the way he finds the miraculous is inseparable from the everyday. Lives are made amid and despite violence. He threads together public events and private feelings.

McCann was born in Dublin, Ireland but is now living in New York and teaching writing at Hunter College. He has written six novels and two collections of short stories. He has won several major international awards and his work has been published in more than thirty-five languages.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

Alexandra Fuller has written several books on her life in southern Africa. This one describes her marriage to an American and her home in the new world.

Fuller was born in England in l969, but moved with her family to a farm in what was then Rhodesia, when she was four years old. Her parents were a courageous but eccentric pair, firm supporters of the colonialism in their adopted country.  So were Alexandra and her sister.

This took a rude shock when Alexandra fell in love with an American guide and went with him to live in Wyoming. The book takes us back and forth between visits “home” (to Africa) and the struggle to maintain her new family and children in the U.S. Fuller is candid about the effect of her father’s spoiling and her own ability to run her life. She also misses the beauty and grandeur of Africa. She writes honestly about her struggle to maintain her marriage, and her sadness when she fails. It is altogether a colourful and brave book.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

 

This is a well-written account of the man we all know as Lawrence of Arabia – but from a special point of view. The London award-winning journalist, Anthony Sattin, looks at Lawrence’s early life and what drove him to the Arab world.

He grew up in a household in Oxford, with four brothers and a dominating mother. He was a shy, introverted boy but loved all aspects of archaeology and was fascinated by the medieval world and loved the monuments of crusading knights. He worked with glass and pottery which he dug up from the streets of Oxford. He set out on a walking tour – by himself – through Syria, checking Crusader castles. In l909 he won a scholarship to study Crusader architecture in the Levant. When war came in l9l4 he wanted to raise Arab fighters and free Arab lands from Ottoman control. He wanted to see a Commonwealth of free peoples, an Arab Dominion initially under British sovereignty but ultimately independent.

Lawrence wrote his classic autobiography Seven Pillars of Wisdom and we learn of his disappointment when things didn’t turn out as he had hoped. This book is especially relevant today, given the state of affairs in the Near and Middle East.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

John Ralston Saul has included Canada’s First Nations in many of his books and articles on this country. In this book he looks at the comeback of these people in numbers and influence.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the population of the First Nations and Metis people had shrunk from as many as 2 million people (when the Europeans arrived) to approximately 150,000.  In spite of endless Treaties, they had lost much of the land they had used for food sources, had picked up many European diseases, and altogether lost much of their way of life. The Canadian government had made bad mistakes, in setting up residential schools to try to break down the families, in forbidding the potlatch (a beloved and religious ceremony) , and in taking away their right to vote. The population today is back to 2 million.

This book shows how the Idle No More movement illustrates a difference in Canadian relationships. Both sides realize citizens’ rights must be recognized. Saul includes many letters and speeches from First Nations chiefs and the effect these have had on improving relations. The last one is from a chief in Manitoba, now a professor at the University of Manitoba. He says he is a man who quit drinking when his grandson was born, to give this little boy the greatest gift he could give – love. He says all of us in Canada can do more, if we listen to each other and give each other gifts of responsibility.

Saul is one of Canada’s leading public intellectuals. He is president of PEN International, and has published fourteen works, translated into twenty-five languages.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall

This is a companion novel to Rachel Joyce’s earlier book The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. In that novel Queenie Hennessy had sent a letter to Harold Fry, a former colleague, telling him she was dying and would like to see him. Somewhat to her surprise he replied that he would walk from his home in Kingsbridge, South Devon, to her hospice in the north of England at Berwick-on-Tweed. He stressed that she should wait for him.

This book, The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy, is Queenie waiting for Harold. While she waits, Queenie tells the reader her own story: her bad marriage, the loss of a child, and her job in the same brewery as Harold Fry. Although Harold was married and had a son when she knew him, Queenie still fell in love with him but kept it a secret and eventually left her job at the brewery to make a new life in the north of England. In this book she undertakes to tell Harold the truth before he gets to her bedside. It is a touching and harrowing tale, but just as moving as the story of Harold’s own pilgrimage.

Rachel Joyce has won awards for her books as well as original plays and classic adaptations for BBC Radio 4.  She lives with her family in Gloucestershire, England.

Reviewed by Anne McDougall