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Canwest News Service
FOR THE BIOGRAPHY BUFF
After the Falls
By Catherine Gildiner
(Knopf; 344 pp.; $32.95)
Gildiner's memoir about growing up in the '60s is often laugh-out-loud funny. It picks up where Too Close to the Falls, published a decade ago, left off, telling the story of the family's move to a tract house in suburban Buffalo when the author was 12. The young woman we meet is sassy and cocksure, but also smart and brave. Susan Schwartz, The Gazette
Chaplin: The Tramp's Odyssey
By Simon Louvish
(Faber; 320 pp.; $39)
Louvish makes a good case for a fresh look at "the mask behind the man," which is to say the only role that Chaplin really played on screen: the Tramp. From his arrival in the U.S. in 1910, Chaplin tried to suppress his background, crafting a false persona calculated to appeal to an American audience: an Oliver Twist with a dead mother, who was born in a hotel and whose first stage role was in Rags to Riches — none of which was true. Nicholas Shakespeare, The Daily Telegraph
Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing
By Michael Slater
(Yale University Press; 720 pp.; $38.50)
Slater's Dickens is a far more sober and sensible figure — the writer as businessman and philanthropist rather than the imaginative oddball: the Dickens who was central to his age, rather than the one who kept himself at a wary angle to it. One of the finest qualities of this biography is his skill at showing how closely involved Dickens's fiction was with the world in which he moved. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Daily Telegraph
The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt
By T.J. Stiles
(Knopf; 736 pp.; $45)
Winner of the 2009 U.S. National Book Award for non-fiction, this is a mighty — and mighty confident — work, one that moves with force and conviction and imperious wit through Vanderbilt's noisy life and times. It is full of sharp, unexpected turns. Among the biggest: Stiles has delivered a revisionist history of American capitalism's original sinner, the man who inspired the term "robber baron." He has real sympathy for the old devil. Dwight Garner, The New York Times
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life
By Gerald Martin
(Penguin; 668 pp.; $38)
This portrait of a 20th-century legend was sanctioned by the author (though Martin's phrase is "officially tolerated"). Making his way through the fog of speculation and myth-making that surrounds the Colombian writer is no easy task, but this trenchant piece of work is filled with excellent stories. Hilary Spurling, The Daily Telegraph
I Am My Father's Son
By Dan Hill
(HarperCollins; 320 pp.; $29.95)
In this heartfelt memoir, singer-songwriter Dan Hill traces his growth as a musician and man through his fraught relationship with his father, Dan Hill Sr., the Canadian civil-rights activist and first director of Ontario's Human Rights Commission. The book charts a spectacular clash of wills: the son's determined pursuit of a music career vs. the father's equally vigorous effort to stop it. Donna Nurse, Ottawa Citizen
King Hussein of Jordan: A Political Life
By Nigel Ashton
(Yale University Press; 431 pp.; $35)
He fought wars and pretended to fight them; he shifted alliances, survived numerous assassination attempts, outlasted his opponents and befriended former enemies. This new biography by Ashton, a senior lecturer at the London School of Economics and Political Science, provides insight not only into the king, but into the conflicts that changed the face of the Middle East and continue to bedevil the region. Levon Sevunts, The Gazette
Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling
By Charles Allen
(Little Brown; 448 pp.; illustrated; $20)
An engaging account of Kipling's life in India as a child and journalist, leading up to the publication of Kim in 1900-1901. He lived until 1936, but after Kim, suggests Allen, his "extraordinary powers of imagination were already on the wane," and "the seams he had mined so thoroughly for the best of his writing were all but exhausted." Michael Kenney, The Boston Globe
Lester B. Pearson
By Andrew Cohen
(Penguin; 207 pp.; $26)
Cohen argues that Pearson was a "transformative" Canadian prime minister who turned the country away from its British past and tried to create a new Canadian nationalism, "symbolic" rather than economic. He introduced radical initiatives such as medicare, official bilingualism and the Canada Pension Plan and greatly increased the powers of the provinces, largely to meet the demands of Quebec. An excellent short biography, well-researched and a pleasure to read. Neil Cameron, The Gazette
Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir
By Christopher Buckley
(McClelland & Stewart; 264 pp.; $29.99)
The younger Buckley lost both parents in the space of a year and lived to reel off bon mots about it. To some extent, this book about the senior Buckleys is an act of expiation, the apologia of a son who sometimes found himself "tempted to pack them off to earlier graves." Read it and chortle. Read it and weep. Janet Maslin, The New York Times
Open: An Autobiography
By Andre Agassi
(Knopf Doubleday 400 pp.; $35)
An uncommonly well-written sports memoir that's an unusual addition to the shelves of jock autobiography, partly because of Agassi's collaborator, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former newspaperman, partly because it's unusually honest in a way that jock memoirs rarely are. Charles Mc-Grath, The New York Times
A Place Within: Rediscovering India
By M.G. Vassanji
(Doubleday; 464 pp.; $21)
Vassanji's travel memoir documents his search for a connection with the country his forebears left in the 19th century for East Africa–only to realize the past remains out of reach and the sense of homelessness undiminished. There are serious concerns addressed in the book, chiefly the ever-present threat of communal violence in India and the underlying hardening of religious attitudes. A Place Within recently won the 2009 Governor General's Literary Award for non-fiction. Philip Marchand, Weekend Post
Robert Altman: The Oral Biography
By Mitchell Zuckoff
(Knopf Doubleday; illustrated; 576 pp.; $42)
Before his death in 2006, the irascible yet cannily reputation-burnishing Altman began co-operating on this biography. Zuckoff continued after Altman's death and wound up interviewing 200 Altman collaborators, as well as exhuming the voices of journalistic critics and camp followers. He has spun all this material into a big, comprehensive, flesh-and-blood account of Altman's persona and exploits. Janet Maslin, The New York Times
Small Beneath the Sky
By Lorna Crozier
(Greystone Books; 197 pp.; $28.95)
The Governor General's Award-winning poet's vivid narrative about her upbringing in Swift Current, Sask. Her father, Emerson, was an alcoholic, and we come to know the shame she experienced living with poverty and addiction. Her mother, Peggy, was a tough proud woman who never wasted a potato and who loved her daughter fiercely, if quietly. This is a fast read, due in great part to Crozier's superb ability to tell a story simply and from the gut. Elizabeth Withey, Edmonton Journal
True Compass
By Edward M. Kennedy
(Grand Central; 532 pp.; $43)
In this engaging memoir, Kennedy devotes anywhere from a few paragraphs to a half-dozen pages to each of his major misdeeds — with less space accruing to minor offences. But more interesting is the insight the senator allows into the pathology of a family whose pathology has been explored many times, but never at this close range. Many details of this life will be mesmerizing to anyone with more than a remote interest in 20th-century history. Debbie Waldman,
Canwest News Service
FOR THE BIG THINKER
Canada in Sudan: War Without Borders
By Peter Pigott
(Dundurn Press; 272 pp.; $35)
This book details Canada's military intervention in Sudan, beginning in 1984. Without knowing that story, and the history that follows it, it's impossible to understand the context within which the Canadian Forces are working in Sudan today, and the context within which Canadian aid workers are being kidnapped. This is a book full of the kind of history they don't teach in schools. Kate Heartfield, Ottawa Citizen
Carbon Shift: How the Twin Crises of Oil Depletion and Climate Change Will Define the Future
Edited by Thomas Homer-Dixon
(Random House; 240 pp.; $34.95)
Essays by six people from different backgrounds: two oil experts, two economists and two from newspapers. It's refreshing to see someone making an attempt to bring this variety to this complicated issue. Thomas Homer-Dixon is a professor at the University of Waterloo's Centre for the Environment and Business. Tom Spears, Ottawa Citizen
Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army
By Christie Blatchford
(Anchor Canada; 389 pp.; $22)
In her weeks embedded with Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan, Blatchford, who won the 2008 Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction for this book, learned about the fear the troops live with, their tenderness for one another and their grief when a fellow soldier dies. She does a magnificent job. Barbara Black, The Gazette
The Good Soldiers
By David Finkel
(Douglas & McIntyre; 272 pp.; $29.95)
Finkel, a Pulitzer Prizewinning reporter at The Washington Post, describes the war on the ground, day by day, for members of an Army battalion sent to Baghdad during the surge in 2007. With a novelistic sense of narrative and character, Finkel shows the fallout that the decision to invade Iraq and the war's "ruinous beginnings" would have on a group of individual soldiers (average age 19), who by various twists of fate, found themselves stationed in a hot spot on the edge of Baghdad. Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Murder Without Borders: Dying For The Story In The World's Most Dangerous Places
By Terry Gould
(Random House; 400 pp.; $34.95)
The Vancouver writer has done an enormous service to journalists everywhere with this macabre collection of murders most foul, for it is intentional homicide, not war, that is the leading cause of death among those who cover the news. Gould travelled over a three-year period to Colombia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Russia and Iraq to interview their friends and surviving families. Ian Mulgrew, Vancouver Sun
Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century
By George Friedman
(Doubleday, 272 pp.; $30)
The author is head of Stratfor, an intelligence agency based in Austin, Tex. Among his forecasts: That America will continue to be the strongest nation on the planet for the next 100 years; the U.S.-Islamist war is nearly over because al-Qaeda is effectively broken; a new cold war with Russia will occur in the 2020s; also in the '20s, China will fragment as the interior provinces get poorer and the coastal provinces get richer. Considering how right Friedman has been over the years, he's worth listening to. Harry Thomas, San Antonio Express-News
The Peep Diaries: How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors
By Hal Niedzviecki
(City Lights; 256 pp.; $18.95)
The Toronto-based social commentator presents a compelling case that more and more of us want to know everything we can about everyone else and want everyone else to know almost everything about us. This is Peep culture, and Niedzviecki declares that it represents the most fundamental transformation of Western society since the Industrial Revolution. Don Butler, Canwest News Service
Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis
By Alanna Mitchell
(McClelland & Stewart; 240 pp.; $32.99)
To explore what's going on in the oceans, Mitchell snorkelled along the Great Barrier Reef, hiked through the Pyrenees in Spain and watched corals reproduce off the coast of Panama. After reading the book, you'll understand why Mitchell found herself preparing for a trip to the ocean's floor utterly depressed. But she realized that choosing hope will be the only way to turn the ocean around. Monique Beaudin, The Gazette
Seeds of Terror: How Heroin is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda
By Gretchen Peters
(St. Martin's Press/H. B. Fenn, 300 pp.; $32.95)
The former ABC News reporter draws on decades of field experience, numerous interviews and secret documents to demonstrate that opium — not religious or political ideology — poses the greatest challenge to the U.S. and NATO in Afghanistan. She advocates air strikes against heroin labs and drug-smuggling convoys and the targeted killing of upper-and mid-level traffickers. Michael Byers,
Vancouver Sun
Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America
By John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev
(Yale University Press; 704 pp.; $42)
This important new book based on archival material shows the huge extent of Soviet espionage activity in the United States after the Second World War. The book is based on controlled Russian intelligence documents, access to which was negotiated during a moment of glasnost. Andrew Lownie, The Daily Telegraph
Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent
By Andrew Nikiforuk
(Greystone Books; 208 pp.; $20)
The Calgary author contends that Canada is starting to resemble the petro-states of South America and the Middle East — rich in oil but short on democracy and freedom of speech–and that Alberta's tar-sands development is mismanaged, environmentally toxic, bad for Canada's autonomy and short on long-term benefits for Albertans. Nikiforuk has a point, and he has guts. He also explains the tar sands in a straightforward way, something government and industry have been slow to do, apparently with reason. Jon Midgley, Edmonton Journal
Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization
By Jeff Rubin
(Random House; 286 pp.; $29.95)
Rubin's aggressive prediction is that oil will break $200 in the next economic cycle. He believes the price of energy is the single most important factor in maintaining both globalization and our high-consumption lifestyle. Take away cheap oil and the world gets a whole lot smaller. And Rubin makes a convincing case that prices are bound to rise. Peter Hadekel, The Gazette
Unembedded: Two Decades of Maverick War Reporting
By Scott Taylor
(Douglas & McIntyre, 400 pp; 34.95)
Scott Taylor has been an artist, musician, soldier and, since 1988, editor and publisher of the Ottawa-based military magazine Esprit de Corps. He's been pilloried as an amateur glory seeker and worse, but a 20-year record shows an often brave, principled man. He's been in and out of Iraq and Afghanistan dozens of times, both pre-and postwar, and has in recent times travelled in Afghanistan. Chris Cobb, Ottawa Citizen
Zeitoun
By Dave Eggers
(McSweeney's; 349 pp.; $24)
Abdulrahman Zeitoun was living a version of the American dream. A long-time merchant seaman, the Syrian-American Muslim had settled in New Orleans, married Kathy, had three kids, lived in a Victorian home in a fashionable neighbourhood and built a house-painting business. Then came Hurricane Katrina. Kathy fled with the children. Zeitoun stayed put, and soon the dream turned into a nightmare. From its clear-eyed account of how a good man was done outrageously wrong to its guardedly hopeful coda, this book is an American epic that brings the complexity and ennobling dimensions of the best fiction to real-life. Ian McGillis, Canwest News Service
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I adored Buckley`s “Losing Mum and Pup”. I laughed and cried
and was entertained by this generous writer.
Please continue discussion on the forum: link