Books On Beechwood

If you’ve ever wondered about what really happened in the Gold Rush, the Klondike, and Dawson City, this is the book to set you straight.

Biographer/historian Charlotte Gray has done a wonderful job of bringing these legendary spots to life. She takes six characters and follows their lives as the north beckons and gold may or may not fill their pockets. There are good clear maps and we can follow the miner as he backpacks ever further north; the saintly priest who keeps his “church” going long before any building was put up; the young writer Jack London who kept notes for his later books even though he could hardly stand up from scurvy. There was the spit ‘n polish Mountie and two unusual women: one a feisty business woman who wore starched blouses and ran a hotel, the other an imperious British journalist from The Times.

In the late l800’s these people first followed rumours of gold up in the Chilkoot Pass. Later they stampeded further north to what soon became Dawson City. The trail was horrendous; they had to carry in a year’s worth of food, clothing, equipment. Gray herself rafted down a section of the wide Yukon river in 2008 and gives vivid descriptions of the majestic countryside. There are also good photographs of the wild, muddy boom town that Dawson City became.

The Gold Rush produced many myth-makers, apart from Jack London, including Robert Service and the Canadian writer, Pierre Berton who was the son of a Klondike stampeder and spent the first ten years of his life in Dawson City. Like Charlotte Gray’s other books on historical figures in this country, this does not feel like myth – but rather the true story, and quite fascinating.

Review by Anne McDougall

Robertson Davies once said: “Don’t try to analyse Stephen Leacock”. Margaret MacMillan avoids this, but she does give a sympathetic, as well as provocative picture of perhaps the most extraordinary Canadian in this series.

She is of course the renowned writer/historian now warden of St. Antony’s College, Oxford. In his introduction to this book, John Ralston Saul says she is a master of the imperial mind, being a descendant of Lloyd George and equally at home in both the UK and Canada. Leacock was born in England, coming to Canada as a young boy in l870. For a long time England was “home” in all his public lectures, although he would change that as time went by. MacMillan understands his point of view – in both his professional life as a professor at McGill of Political Science and his humourous books, full of satire on Canadian life.

Leacock first discovered his ability to make people laugh when he published, at his own cost, “Literary Lapses” in l9l0 and “Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town” in l9l2. They took off in the UK and then around the world. Leacock said the best humour is dignified and gentle, about the incongruities of life. He also said it is blended with pathos, i.e. both tears and laughter.

MacMillan writes sensitively about Leacock’s private life. He was happily married but lost his wife in l925, when she was 45, he 55. More importantly their only son, born in l9l5, was showing a defect, and did not grow past five feet. Leacock was left to care for him on his own and young Stevie proved a tragic figure, not able to earn his living. Indeed Leacock’s last years were sad ones when he was retired from teaching at McGill and missed the congenial Montreal ambiance. But this is not what the world knows or cares about when chuckling over his books. They show the high courage Leacock displayed til the very end and still provoke laughter everywhere.

Review by Anne McDougall

Kathryn Stockett has written a fine – and original – novel about black-white relations in a Mississippi town. She concentrates on the white women and their household “help”. But she skilfully carries the story far wider than that and we become truly immersed in the deep and troublesome chasm between the races.

The time is the early l960’s :- Martin Luther King, President Kennedy’s assassination, civil rights marches. But in Jackson, Miss. nothing is moving, until a young college graduate, who wants to be a writer, interviews a number of maids who agree to tell their stories.

These of course show the abundant love the nannies give their white charges, only to be shunted out of sight when the children grow up. The stories are quite startling, more so because of the acceptance by the blacks. There is a risk in telling, and later publishing them and the author reveals some of the heartbreaking results.

Kathryn Stockett grew up in Jackson, Miss. herself. Like this journalist she went to work in New York City and now lives in Atlanta with her husband and daughter. She knows intimately of what she writes and the book is both funny and moving, justly called “a stunning debut from a gifted talent.”

Review by Anne McDougall

Anyone who loved Annie Proulx’s “Shipping News” will know her as a versatile writer of novels, short stories and non-fiction.

“Bird Cloud” is her first non-fiction in more than 20 years. The title refers to the cloud in the shape of a bird that hung over a piece of property in the wilds of Wyoming that Proulx fell in love with and knew she had to buy. This book is the account of her acquiring 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie as well as 400-foot cliffs that plunged down to the North Platte River. It also tells us a lot about Proulx herself, the adventures that led to her stories, the constant moving, setting up house, having three sons and, in this book, hoping to find that elusive perfect spot to write, with room for thousands of books, guests, and writing tables.

Her chapters give a rich picture of the wild life all around her, the bird life: she sees pelicans, bald eagles, golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, blue birds,harriers, kestrels, all of which she watches closely for days on end. There is a chapter on the elk, deer and antelope that remind her of the British hunters who discovered the wealth of game in the New World and greedily killed “eighteen stags in ten days’ stalking” and “easily obtained our limit of 800 brace of grouse and blackgame” – finally destroying the game in certain areas.

She tells of the Indian tribes that went back in time and even finds traces of their implements on her land. She writes: “Running through everything these people thought or knew, like the vast root systems of grasses that extend deep beneath the surface, were spiritual filaments that guided behaviour and nourished rich mythologies.”

She also gives some of her own background, interesting to Canadians as her ancestors came from Normandy to Quebec with records of one ,Jean Proulx ,marrying in Quebec City in l673. But this is mainly the story of challenges in building a house in the wild and stormy country that even Annie Proulx admits may not be the perfect house when winter completely closes down her road of entry. A brave, candid, book.

Review by Anne McDougall

Paul Quarrington sang his way off his earth, and he writes about it in this remarkable book.

“Cigar Box Banjo” will mean a lot to people in Ottawa who watch his brother Joel play the double bass in the National Arts Centre orchestra. They are a musical family from Toronto and Joel is part of this story along with a third brother.

It is a marvelous tale of popular music in Canada – rock’n’roll, the blues, folk, country and soul over the last 56 years, which is when Paul died, in January of this year. He actually had a career in both writing and playing music. The writing earned him the Governor General’s award for his novel “Whale Music”, as well as the Stephen Leacock Medal for “King Leary”.

This book zeros in on his musical side and the wild life of writing and playing music in and around Toronto where he grew up. There are vivid, funny stories of the bands he played in, including the cult band Joe Hall, and the Continental Drift. He finally became the rhythm guitarist and singer with the band Porkbelly Futures. When diagnosed with lung cancer he decided to keep on playing. This book is full of songs he wrote and shows he gave from Newfoundland to Nashville. It’s a terrific story.

Review by Anne McDougall

This is a fascinating book about a friendship beween two fighting Irishman, both famous in very different ways.

Jay Tunney is the son of Gene Tunney, the American boxer who left his profession at the top of his fame. World-renowned, he had occasion to meet the great Irish playwright, Bernard Shaw, because of a play Shaw had written on a boxer called “Cashel Byron’s Profession”. It turned out Shaw himself had done a little boxing himself. More extraordinary was the fact that Gene Tunney, growing up poor and uneducated on the lower west side of New York, had from early days taught himself to read and developed a
love for all kinds of literature which he would later discuss with Shaw, often meeting the authors of the books he loved.

Jay Tunney writes candidly but with obvious affection about his handsome father who became a legend in the boxing world not only because of his superlative, but fair-minded fighting style, but because of his insistence on time and place for study. As it happened, the Shaws and Tunneys got together often, for visits to Shaw’s home in England, and for an eventful trip to Brioni, the seaside resort where Mrs. Tunney almost died, and Shaw revealed a caring side that few people ever saw.

The book is full of stories on Tunney’s career as well as the theatre life of many of Shaw’s plays. Famous personalities on both sides of the Atlantic knew one or both men and were often intrigued to be with them together, as friends. It is altogether a very successful double portrait.

Review by Anne McDougall

Diana Beresford-Kroeger is in love with trees. Her new book describes them from every conceivable angle -all the way from holy and mystical to downright scientific and botanical.

Beresford-Kroeger is a botanist and medical biochemist herself, and lives on a farm in Ontario with her husband Christian Kroeger, who did the photos for the book’s jacket. Part of the author’s background is Irish and much of her story-telling resembles the Irish myths from the old country. At a time when we are regaled every day with the perils of climate change, and the danger in cutting down the forests and wasting valuable resources, Beresford-Kroeger writes specifically about the magic in trees (the elderberry and hawthorn were never touched in China and Japan as well as Russia because of extraordinary medical properties). The trees that were once called anti-famine feeders of the globe had fruits and nuts holding first-class protein filled with essential amino acids. They could again be saved with sufficient finances and will to protect them. She writes about the intrasound found in a forest. She describes the “greenhouse effect” which is being damaged by the burning up of carbon reserves.

Finally, she describes the aboriginals of North America whose prophets were called “Fire-keepers”. They kept the legends, and also looked out for care of all trees, lands and forests. This writer puts her faith in the children of today and believes an old legend which holds that the children will save their parents through a dream and hold hands across the planet in their minds.

It’s a wise and eloquent book and the essays pay a beautiful tribute to the forests of the earth.

Review by Anne McDougall