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By Ms. G, August 7, 2017 12:28 pm

Mark Kurlansky, Paper, 2016

I don’t necessarily read a Mark Kurlansky book about “something” to learn stuff about that thing. I prefer all the other things I learn along the way. In that sense, Paper didn’t disappoint. The journey included interesting stops on the topics of Egyptian papyrus, Chinese calligraphy, the Reformation, the American Revolution, the industrial process (which I am really into right now), the rag trade, and of course the printing process.

Years ago I read Kurlansky’s Salt (2002) and thoroughly enjoyed it. It was probably my first “commodity biography”, or book about a certain thing. From then I went on to acorns, soil, cochineal (little red bugs that make ink), cotton, and various other things that I can’t recall anymore. I do recall enjoying this type of historical tourism – learning a bit of this, a bit of that as I vicariously travel the globe. One more reason why I don’t need to travel in real life.

Perhaps in the subsequent years I have come to expect more of a narrative linking the tourist sites (or topics) together. Though I really like Kurlansky’s thesis, I think he only threw it in when he remembered it was important.

The narrative arc that is supposed to join the book together is what he calls the ‘technological fallacy’: “Technological inventions have always arisen from necessity. … Studying the history of paper exposes a number of historical misconceptions, the most important of which is this technological fallacy: the idea that technology changes society. It is exactly the reverse. Society develops technology to address the changes that are taking place within it.”

I totally agree with this. From my somewhat Luddite standpoint in this technologically obsessed world, I wish people would recognize that the technology they use doesn’t have to drive them. Oh well, seems I’m a total loser on that one.

I agree with Kurlansky that, in historical comparison, we are not living in the most change-driven era ever. Certainly the era of the 1790s to the late 1800s was seeing much more change in daily life than we are. And the changes were far-reaching in their impact, at home where the machinery may have been putting people out of work, and abroad where slavery and imperialism were working hand in hand to entrench the use of non-white people as labour to feed the white industrialized world. That is the thesis of Empire of Cotton by Sven Beckert (2015), an incredibly well researched, thorough book that holds onto its thesis very tightly. Perhaps in that sense I’m a bit disappointed with Paper because it’s more of a journalistic effort than a true history. But it’s not really a fair comparison.

Paper is still as ubiquitous as ever, despite the so-called digital revolution. Everyone should have a sense of its history. I recommend Paper, whether you read it on a e-reader or in book form. No big shock that I only read books on paper. Otherwise my library would be physically empty.

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By Ms. G, July 20, 2017 12:00 pm

No, not the animal. GOAT – greatest of all time. Roger Federer? While he has now won eight Wimbledon titles and 19 majors overall, he may be a contender. It’s hard to imagine him self-labeling as GOAT. I don’t know him, of course, but he doesn’t seem the egotistical type.

(ATP World Tour photo)

The most famous of all should be Muhammad Ali, the boxer, not the Egyptian khedive (for those of you who are history-minded). Ali appears to have first used this phrase to describe himself, though not necessarily the acronym which seems to be a more recent phenomenon.

Full disclosure: I hate boxing. However, I was thoroughly engrossed in David Remnick’s 1998 partial biography King of the World: Muhammad Ali and  the Rise of an American Hero. It’s more of a social history  – my favourite – than a boxing tale though it certainly does have some colourful descriptions of his most famous matches with Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson. Much in the same vein as Ken Burns’s documentaries Jazz and Baseball opened the door on segregation in the US, especially in the northern states where one might not have expected it to be so strong, King of the World reveals the boxing world of early to mid-1960s in its all its grittiness. In today’s parlance, we might say it was a highly racialized playing field. Ali, with his ties to the Nation of Islam (or Black Muslims as they were derisively known by Ali’s critics), was a crucial figure in trying to recast the Black boxer as an independent figure. Not the white man’s Black man, not the Black civil rights integrationist hero.

Since Ali died in 2016 there have been many tributes and documentaries that have portrayed him as the ultimate American hero, most notably as the final torch bearer at the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games opening ceremony. However, it’s important to remember that he wasn’t always perceived as a hero by the American public, thus the “rise of an American hero” in Remnick’s title. Because he associated with Malcolm X (before breaking off ties with him as per Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad’s wishes), because he out-rightly expressed his desire not to integrate but to remain separate, at this stage of his career Ali faced a huge public backlash. Certain sports columnists refused to even refer to him as Muhammad Ali.

At least at the stage of his career highlighted in this book, Ali was a complicated character, at once a professional athlete with excellent training habits and a fast-talking provocative player with a mouth as big as his talent.

I urge readers to pick up the book and find out for themselves what Ali – one of the world’s most celebrated heroes – was really like. It won’t hurt that Remnick, New Yorker editor, is a fabulous writer.

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By Ms. G, July 14, 2017 11:24 am

I just bought this book, and I just finished this book. Usually I am not a quick reader; in fact, I am reading four other books right now. On so many levels I just could not put it down.

Absolute kudos to Helen Macdonald, an absorbingly beautiful nature writer. I love nature (to look at it) and I love birds: What a wonderful combination in the hands of Macdonald. Weave in some psychology, history and literature and you have an enthralling story. Fellow history person (she is a teacher of history and philosophy of science at Cambridge University), Macdonald was, from a young age, obsessed with hawks and became a falconer. The book tells the story of how she trained a goshawk after the sudden death of her father, a very special person in her life. So yes, it is a psychological tale of coping with grief through depression.

There are many reasons why I wouldn’t like, or even want to read, this book. Admittedly the goshawk is a bird I had never heard of. I looked it up in our birding books at the cottage. My closest experience is with “Ossie”, the osprey that visits the tallest branch of the tree at the cottage next to ours. Ospreys are related to eagles, not hawks. Both eat meat (well, ospreys eat fish). The book contains many vivid descriptions of hawks tearing apart rabbits or being fed baby chicks. More correctly, during the training process, Mabel the hawk would catch the rabbits and Helen the trainer would kill them. Not exactly a book for vegans, one would think.

The other reason the book wouldn’t seemingly be fit for me is that it is a literary exploration of falconry through the ages, and I, directly, don’t do literature. In particular, Macdonald weaves into her personal story the biography and work of TH White, author of The Once and Future King, the source material for the play Camelot. I know nothing about King Arthur and Merlyn and all that stuff. Have no interest in it whatsoever. However, Helen Macdonald does a masterful job of making the reader care about this complicated character, even a misfit,  who also tried to train a goshawk.

Now on to finish David Remnick’s King of the World: Muhammad Ali and Rise of an American Hero which I started a few months ago at the cottage. Ali (then still Cassius Clay) is about to win his first big fight against Heavyweight Champion Sonny Liston. From great nature writing to masterful sports writing.

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By Ms. G, January 31, 2016 5:48 pm

Elizabeth Kolbert’s book was a welcome Christmas gift from Mr. Mahoney. He knows I like science and the environment and good writing. I promptly read it in a few days after Christmas was over when I was recovering from eating so much.

Reading Kolbert’s book on mass extinctions of species, one must wonder whether the earth will ever recover from humans’ folly. Or rather, will species, who, through no fault of their own, find themselves out of luck, out of habitat, out of oxygen, out of adaptation techniques, whatever.

Ask the bats of North America, frogs and toads throughout the world, long lost mastadons, or coral in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Kolbert chooses an interesting array of animals and plants to survey in her quest to verify if we really are in the midst of another in a series of mass extinctions that have occurred throughout earth’s history. Accordingly, as a science journalist, not a scientist, she must seek out the advice and guidance of many leading scientists, including a lot of geologists.

I particularly appreciated the geologic angle given my interest in Charles Darwin. Darwin, the father of evolution by means of natural selection, was influenced by the work of Charles Lyell. Lyell was an early geologist that proposed that earth changes slowly over time. Kolbert brings him into the extinction argument as he was one of the first people to propose a theory of how extinctions actually work. She spends a lot of well worth it time tracing the history of the theory of extinction. One wouldn’t think that was interesting but it was.

I feel guilty about saying that I enjoyed this book immensely. A resident of this current world should not be happy about a book that makes it clear how much we have changed it, for the worse. While Kolbert doesn’t focus in on climate change specifically, she does give a lot of attention to ocean acidification, a topic not too many of us know about, and one that is a sort of correlation to climate change. I was never particularly interested. Now I’ll definitely want to watch David Attenborough’s Great Barrier Reef, recently on CBC.

It’s not a book that offers solutions. For that, readers might want to follow up with something like Mike Berners-Lee’s How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything.  For a vegan such as myself, the book that really got me on the road to thinking about how the environment affects my daily life through food is Michael Pollan’s 2006 masterwork, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I’m not critical of Kolbert for not suggesting how to solve our problem. What she is doing is changing attitudes, something that is absolutely necessary before behaviour can be changed. Near the end of the book she tells the sad stories of a certain raven and a very particular rhino. You really have to read the book to appreciate how poignant they are.

Like Mary Roach, author of Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, an investigation into the human digestive system (previously reviewed on this blog), Elizabeth Kolbert knows how to use her talents as a writer along with her skill as a researcher to bring a subject alive (no pun intended in this case).

The Sixth Extinction: highly recommended.

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By Ms. G, July 20, 2015 9:17 am

Cool Gray City of Love by Gary Kamiya

Bloomsbury, 2013

I don’t tend to read happy or uplifting books. So it should come as no surprise that the gem of a book I just finished was not self-selected. Val got it as a gift from a friend of his who is currently living in San Jose, California. The book is a collection of 49 ‘sketches’ of San Francisco. I took posession immediately after it arrived in the mail a few days ago.

Before getting into the book, I want to contrast it with my usual types of books. Right now I am also reading (a.k.a. plodding through) Anne Applebaum’s Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956. I have been reading it on and off for about two or three months – it is that heavy. Though Applebaum is an amazing writer and fills her book with meticulous details about the events that brought Poland, East Germany and Hungary under Soviet control, she also fills her books with horrors. However interesting the stories are, they are sad and they just go on and on. It is for that same reason that I couldn’t finish her earlier book, Gulag: A History.

No wonder I grabbed Cool Gray City of Love and didn’t put it down until I finished it.

I was also deeply attracted because I have a thing for San Francisco. Most people know I’m not much of a traveler, yet I have been to the city by the bay four times (I know this is not much in the annals of travel but it is for me). Each time I’ve stayed somewhere different: touristy Union Square in a posh hotel, shoppy Union Street in a potentially seedy motel, upscale Cow Hollow in a nicer motel a block away from a granola-style restaurant, and Emeryville in a standard Hilton Garden Inn (doesn’t really count – it’s across the bay at the end of the Bay Bridge). Last time Val and I were in San Francisco, only for a day, it was a wonderful day. We picked one thing to do, walk up Telegraph Hill, and it happens that it’s Kamiya’s favourite place in San Francisco. Apparently there’s a lot more to it than the views.

Kamiya is one of those writers who fills his chapters with apropos literary references, few of which I get because I’m not a fiction reader. However, he mostly paints city pictures with his own cheeky little prose style. He meshes his personal experiences, either familiar recollections or new tours with experts both geological and historical, with the rather odd history of the city.  Socrates would have loved this guy having been a fanatical city dweller himself. What’s particularly nice and quite informative is that he goes back to the times when the Yelamu Indians lived on the peninsula and is very respectful of these now-disappeared people’s history.

The book’s genesis lies in Kamiya giving himself the task of ‘learning’ his own city, bit by bit, neighbourhood by neighbourhood. It surely didn’t hurt that he was also quite familiar with it through his years as a cab driver. What a way to learn a city, not just its places but its people. His cabbie stories don’t disappoint, especially the one about luring a gay fare away from a fellow driver. This view of the city gives him an ‘if these walls could talk’ advantage.

The other advantage Kamiya has is his sheer love of his city, warts, guts, glories and all. Natural and man-made, touristy and off the beaten path, he loves it all. He loves the mix of inspiring landscapes and spirited people. He loves their struggles to keep San Francisco unique and non-conformist. And he’s honest about the times when battles have been lost such as in the demolition of entire neighbourhoods in favour of highrises. The story of a neighbourhood called the Western Addition, which was home to Japanese families before they were forced to leave the west coast because of World War Two internment, is quite poignant. When the Japanese left, African Americans moved in. While not all the Japanese returned after the end of the war, some did and the question became what to do with them now that they were back and their homes and businesses were occupied. It reminds me of the story my grandmother used to tell of living in wartime Vancouver: all those nice Japanese people just disappeared.

Kamiya is critical of his city and some of its past decisions; he is not a booster in the 100% unquestioning sense. I can relate to this. I consider myself to live in the epicentre of a beautiful and functioning city. But that’s the view from where I am at Broadview and Danforth in my comfortable life. I don’t sit in traffic for two hours a day. I walk two minutes to the subway when I want to get somewhere downtown.

Toronto may not be knowable in the same way – it’s such a huge sprawling city and so much larger in population. Maybe the old City of Toronto (in which I live) could be approached this way.

The reason that Stephen W. of San Jose (formerly of Toronto and Kitchener) sent this book to Val is that he knows Val is a Toronto-lover. He thinks Val could write the Toronto version of Cool Gray City of Love some day. Val used to write a column on Torontoist.com about hidden places in Toronto. I can think of more than a few times when I’ve benefitted from his knowledge. When we first met he took me on a hike on the Don Valley trails – not the well-worn paths but places that were unknown, at least to Risa from North York. A few years ago he lead a bike tour through the laneways of the east side. A little history, a little geography, a big city made little.

A lot of Val’s love of the city has rubbed off on me. I feel like I know Gary Kamiya and I appreciate where he is coming from. I don’t mind that each one of the 49 chapters ends with his unabashed, almost embarrassing love for his city.

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By Ms. G, August 10, 2014 4:17 pm

It is odd that I picked up a book called Tobacco (2001). I hate tobacco in all its forms. It is a vile substance in my estimation.

So, oddly, I just finished Iain Gately’s Tobacco which had been sitting on my pile of cheap books for a while, at least two years. I like books about single subjects –  acorns, salt, cochineal beetles – because they reveal so much about social history. Tobacco is no different. Covering a very wide time span, from the Spanish conquest of the “New World” to the heyday of anti-tobacco law suits in the 1990s, the book tells the stories of fads, motivations, restrictions, gender roles, class differences, cultural preferences, advertising motifs and pure old dependence.

Gately has a very English style of understatement that made me laugh out loud quite a few times. He says this of the early Spanish conquest: “Relations between the Spaniards and Americans were limited to exploitation and sex.” I probably would have put the book away for another two years if I hadn’t stopped to read that line over a few times, now aware that Gately is capable of succinct mockery. As one who teaches this horrible period in human history I do appreciate the reference.

Hitler hated tobacco. Duke University was so-named after a gift of millions of dollars to Little Trinity College by Buck Duke, founder of the American Tobacco Company. Smoking jackets were designed so that weak women wouldn’t have to smell tobacco on their aristocratic husbands. Prohibition was a great boon to smoking. The book is full of interesting little nuggets like this. It is a quick trip through American and British popular culture.

What I didn’t like about the book was the ending. Gately seems to have succumbed to his own sub-title: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization. In the end he is seduced by the allure of tobacco, good and bad: “Many great men and women have left elegant testimonies to their tobacco habits, which will be joined, I believe, with others made in centuries to come.” I don’t know if he’s a smoker or not, cigar or cigarette, but as a vehement anti-smoker I don’t have any sympathy for smokers whatsoever and I certainly don’t think their stories are elegant. More recently it seems Gately has taken up the subject of alcohol (2008’s Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol). As a non-drinker I will not be imbibing.

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By Ms. G, August 3, 2014 12:16 pm

Thunderstruck, by Erik Larson, is another in his historical murder series. Having previously read The Devil in the White City I knew to expect two intertwining stories set in a beautifully described city; this one involves Marconi and his development of wireless telegraphy plus American doctor Hawley Harvey Crippen who gruesomely murders his annoying wife. The city is London in the Edwardian period. Certainly this book is not as exciting or gripping as The Devil in the White City but it does have the same easy to read yet not trite writing style. I enjoyed the descriptions of London’s neighbourhoods so much that I have determined to go there next summer. The two plots come together when the wireless telegraph is used to capture Crippen and his disguised lover on their way to Canada aboard a a Canadian Pacific steamer.

One of the difficult aspects of this book is the character of Marconi. He is awful: socially obtuse, ego-maniacal. Yet he is not the murderer in the book. Larson makes no bones about Marconi’s dislikeable character. Perhaps he is so accurate in his description that he leaves the reader disinterested and morally disgusted. I couldn’t wait for the Marconi chapters to be over. I knew that mild-mannered Dr. Crippen was going to turn out to be a murderer yet I enjoyed the descriptions of him so much more. Seemingly patient in putting up with his demanding wife, Dr. Crippen turned out to be driven to the wall, poisoning and dismembering his wife. His turned out to be one of the most famous murder cases in British history. I knew nothing of it.

Oddly, it turns out that Marconi’s chief rival, Tesla, who does not figure in this book, was severely lacking in social skills as well. He ended up befriending pigeons. Marconi did marry, twice.

I will read another Erik Larson book. The man is a sincerely talented writer.

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By Ms. G, May 19, 2014 11:21 am

Adam Hochschild. To End All Wars: A Story of Protest and Patriotism in the First World War. Pan Books, 2012.

Adam Hochschild is one of my favourite writers on depressing topics. Many years ago I spent a summer reading his chilling history of Belgian imperialism in the Congo, King Leopold’s Ghost. Browsing in my local Book City on the Danforth several months ago I came across his book on World War One, To End All Wars. It was on sale at $7.99 so it sat on my pile of future books to read. Meanwhile, my fascination with World War One – not the actual war but its causes – was satisfied by reading Margaret MacMillan’s The War That Ended Peace. When I started teaching Canadian history for the first time in 15 years I picked up Hochschild’s book from my beside table.

Given the blurb on the back cover, I thought the book would avoid coverage of the battles. And that I was happy about. I didn’t want to read about trenches or artillery. However, I soon found myself immersed in the horror of it all starting with the Boer War. At first I was nonplussed that I had to sit through military details in order to get to the good bits about the pacifists and socialists who did not support the war. I do admit that I was sometimes confused about the need for all the military chapters. Then it hit me (I guess I am slow); the protests and resistance  stand out all the more in the context of the stupidity and suffering of the war.

Many aspects of my personal viewing,  reading and teaching lives have revolved around World War One lately; there’s Downton Abbey and its class divide that weathered the storm of the war; Mr. Selfridge whose London department store found itself in the crosshairs of a procurement scandal during the war (at least fictionally); the above-mentioned Margaret MacMillan; and of course my beloved grade 12 world history course in which my students study the origins of the war quite deeply. Add in Netflix and a few World War One documentaries and the stage is set for complete obsession.

Hochschild’s book offers a completely different point of view from all the others, however. His is the story of those on the other side (in Britain): trade unionists, socialists, suffragists, conscientious objectors, dissenters. Their bravery came in a different, less celebrated form, one less likely to make it into the official or common story of war. As someone just bungling my way through the teaching of Canada at war for the first time in a long time (to ESL students who have very little context on Canada itself) I find it quite refreshing to see the war through these divergent perspectives.

War does things to families. Hochschild’s case in point is the Pankhurst family of suffragette fame. I knew in general terms that many of the most militant feminists became big supporters of the war. I didn’t realize how much of a 180 degree turn it was for the matriarch, Emmeline. She took her ferocity for women’s suffrage and turned it into rabid war support. Her daughter Sylvia, meanwhile, became a war opponent. In the book they are just one family torn apart by war. Brothers and sisters, parents and children on opposite sides seems to be a common theme. In hindsight it’s not so surprising that such a cataclysmic event would have different effects on people’s passions.

The case could be made that World War One did finally usher in the modern era. Big disappointment that has been.

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By Ms. G, August 25, 2013 1:59 pm

An odd pairing: Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire and War in the West Indies by Matthew Parker; and Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach.

I bought Sugar Barons, Val bought Gulp. I started reading Sugar Barons. I needed to put it down so I picked up Gulp which Val had not yet got to. I continue to alternate between them. When the wars, enslavement and debauchery of the English islands of the Caribbean in the 17th century get me down I turn to the lighthearted, comedic romp through flavour and digestion. Mary Roach is a very funny writer; I hope the people she profiles, often scientists obsessed with their niche fields,  appreciate her sense of humour in describing their interesting pursuits. So far I’ve been entranced by the stories of pet food flavouring (dogs devour anything while cats are picky) and saliva. I could actually hear my stomach churning during that chapter. I’m just now getting into the part about actual digestion, so I may  be reading less often. That means my blood will have to boil as I try to fathom the treatment of Africans by their fellow humans, the British slave owners.

I would love to say that I will finish Sugar Barons during the first few weeks of school. After all, for about the last eight years or so we’ve had YM Reads, 20 minutes of daily reading during the school day. Sadly it is now gone and with it the beautiful silence while my students and I read.

Up next I hope to get back to one of my favourite authors, Michael Pollan. I saw him recently on TVO and decided I’d like to give his Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation a try.  I also caught a few minutes of Steve Paikin’s interview with Michael Moss whose Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us sounded right up my vegan alley.

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By Ms. G, August 7, 2013 10:45 am

Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life

by Jonathan  Sperber

I have had this book on my to-read list ever since it came out. I was not disappointed. However, it is driving me crazy that so many things I say and teach about Karl Marx and Marxism need to be amended now. For one, Marx’s radicalism needs to be very closely tied to the 1848 revolutions, something I don’t do. For another, the way I teach Marxism as a fully formed  late nineteenth century ideology is a bit premature.

Though this book is over 500 pages long, it is a perfect demonstration of historical thinking, particularly historical perspective. The entire point of the book is to interpret Marx in the light of his own times, not in the rear view mirror of twentieth century communism. Doing so really changes one’s impressions of Marxism as an ideology. Marx was not at all sure what a communist society would like, and, in fact, he didn’t even like to speculate about it.

This is yet another book in a long line I have read about characters who are not personally likeable but who are historically significant: Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, now Marx. For me, Lenin and Marx get higher marks for their personal characteristics. Marx, it turns out, was a loving husband and father, though he did father a child with the household servant. While he had many quirks and held many of the prejudices of the time, he was committed to his writing and espousal of revolutionary viewpoints. The reader feels sorry for his health problems and loss of multiple children.

The one thing that puzzled me most throughout the book was that I could never get the connection I was looking for between Marx and the proletariat. It was made utterly clear that Marx was basically a bourgeois intellectual who had little contact with real industrial workers, though his colleague, supporter and main source of funding, Engels, certainly did with his ownership of a cotton mill in Manchester.

This book makes me want to read a biography of Engels. He comes across as somewhat of a hero for his financial support of Marx.The two were very close friends. Essentially there would be no Marxism without Engels’ attempts to get the works of his friend known after his death. It turns out that I have been right all these years in insisting that my students refer to both “Marx and Engels.”

Because historical context is so crucial in Sperber’s interpretation of Marx, it needs to be said that to understand this book one needs a good grounding in European history. Marx essentially based his concept of revolutions on the French Revolutions, plural because of the fact that the moderate revolution of 1789 was of course followed by a more radical one a few years later. Readers must understand the Napoleonic Code to see its effects on the part of ‘Germany’ where Marx grew up, the Rhineland. Then there are the revolutions of 1848, the Franco-Prussian War, the Reform Act of 1867 in Britain, Italian nationalism, all events and movements that served as backdrops for Marx’s ideas.

I don’t want to sound too Eurocentric, but I’m not ready to drop a lot of the European history from my grade 12 course. Though we’re still waiting for the new curriculum to be released, I anticipate that it is moving toward world history and away from European history. I am already feeling nostalgic for “The West and the World.”

At times it was difficult to read the biography, laced as it was with Hegelian philosophy and political economy. At other times it was surprising to read about Marx, this supposed icon of communism, as the proper Victorian man.  In the end I feel more grounded in nineteenth century history. Rarely have I felt so accomplished after reading a book.