Books On Beechwood

Niall Ferguson is the Scottish professor who teaches at Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford Universities and writes brilliant books on history and economics.

His latest started as a series of lectures for the BBC. It has turned into a searching and provocative book that examines the widespread rot that he claims is threatening our western institutions.

Ferguson looks at four aspects of Western life that he labels democracy, capitalism, rule of law, and civil society. He shows how these institutions in themselves have created great periods in the past. Today, a combination of greed and laziness is causing them to break down. He goes back to the British author Walter Bagehot who, in 1873, noted that: “The peculiar essence of our financial system is an unprecedented trust between man and man; and when that trust is much weakened by hidden causes, a small accident may greatly hurt it, and a great accident for a moment may almost destroy it.”

Ferguson notes that the rule of lawyers has often overtaken the rule of law. Taking education as an example, he shows how over the past 50 years, governments have encroached too far on the realm of civil society. To prevent squandering the breakdown of our institutions, he concludes, will take heroic leadership and radical reform.

Review by Anne McDougall

His name was Kamal Punja – half Indian, half African. He was born in a town south of Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania on the east coast of Africa. His father, the Indian, deserted him as a baby to return to India. His mother brought him up with a close friend who had a daughter called Saida. Kamal and Saida became close and lasting friends, in fact he loved her all his life.

The book gives a good look at many aspects of African life: the changes when the Germans colonized the country; the magic and mystique of Saida’s grandfather, a famous poet. Kamal turned out to be a clever student who went to Makerere University and became a doctor. By this time he had a girlfriend who urged him to accept a position in Canada. They both settled in Edmonton where he was highly successful in medicine, and had two children.

The Magic of Saida tells the story of what was missing. He returns to Africa in search of Saida, and early love and memories. The result is tumultuous. With our world turning all colours, in all places, Vassanji gives a riveting picture of what the chopping and changing feels like. He is an Indian himself who now lives in Toronto. He has written six novels, which have won the Giller Prize twice as well as a series of other prizes.

Review by Anne McDougall

This is a concise, well-written account of what it was like to be Canadian Ambassador to Ecuador during three of its most turbulent years.

John G. Kneale served in that country from 1998-2001, and kept a daily diary. With him were his wife and two teenaged daughters. The title refers to the volcano that was a constant threat and exploded literally above their heads in 1999. It also refers to the wave of discontent that is rising among the marginalized Indian populations.

Like other countries in the region, Ecuador’s economic progress is hobbled by political instability. While he was there, a democratically-elected president was deposed by the army. Seven Canadian oil workers were kidnapped and held for ransom in the jungle. Kneale points out that there is little pressure on our political leaders to deploy our resources to build a safer, more prosperous New World.

He also tells of the beauty of the country, and describes the Andes, the Amazon and the magnificent Galapagos Islands. It is altogether an excellent read, combining a picture of Ecuador with an up-close description of an ambassador’s life and challenges.

Review by Anne McDougall

This is the third  in Jane Gardam’s trilogy on the personnel of the Hong Kong law courts when they were dominated by the British. Like the others, it is full of far-out snobbery from that long-lost British Empire. But it also has  a lot of humour.

This book tells the story of Terence Veneering, who ended up working in law with Sir Edward Feathers (Old Filth, i.e. Failed In London Try Hong Kong) in the Malay States, as they were called. His background was wildly un-British, being the son of a Russian acrobat who had an accident while performing in England and was marooned in the northeast part of the country where he married an English girl. The blond son, Terry Venitski, proved to be a brilliant scholar who entered law, changed his name and was assigned to Hong Kong.

This book takes these two, plus Old Filth’s wife Betty, through the loves and jealousies of their working years and finally back to England where the two men ended up living in the same village. A lot of jealousies were resolved and they were friends, and home, at last.

Jane Gardam is one of England’s most distinguished novelists with a stream of prizes to her name. Her intelligence, plus black humour, are a joy to read.

Review by Anne McDougall

Trains have always had a romance about them, and Alexander McCall Smith explores it in his latest book.

We have come to love McCall Smith for the characters he has created in his beloved series, i.e.: the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, the Isabel Dalhousie series, the Portuguese Irregular Verbs, the 44 Scotland Street series and the Corduroy Mansions series.

This may be different as one of a kind, or it may start a new series. Who knows? At any rate, it’s the story of four passengers on the Edinburgh-London train: three men and one woman. McCall Smith quotes Auden’s Night Mail to show the poetic swing of a train: “This is the Night Mail crossing the border/ Bringing the cheque and the postal order.”

Sure enough, as the train winds down the North Sea and then dips inland, each of the passengers tells bits of his or her life through incidents of a love affair. The men are Scots, English and American; the woman came from Perth, Australia. As they rock down to London, McCall Smith shows how the train brings out that part of us that outweighs any other – our need for love – to give it and to receive it in that familiar battle that all of us fight with loneliness.

“The Scotsman” calls Trains and Lovers the best thing McCall Smith has written so far.

Review by Anne McDougall

Emily Carr has always had a double audience: one for her painting, and the second for her writing.

This little book is a collection of sixty very short stories – really sketches – which Carr put together because she thought they “ornamented life, which would be a drab affair without the little things we do not even notice or think of at the time…”. She originally called the collection Hundreds and Thousands, after the tiny coloured candies sprinkled over birthday cakes. For the last thirty years they have been in the British Columbia Archives. Scholar Ann-Lee Switzer has studied Carr’s writings for some years and in fact lives near the Archives in Victoria.

The jottings were done by Carr in the last two years of her life. She had already published three collections of her stories: Klee Wyck (1941), The Book of Small (1942), and The House of All Sorts (1944). Her great mentor was Ira Dilworth, professor of English at the University of British Columbia, and later director of the Vancouver branch of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. They shared a love of poetry, and of the Canadian West.

These stories are intimate, funny, and show the sharp sensitivity that we have always loved in Emily Carr’s paintings.

Review by Anne McDougall