loading...
Canwest News Service
COURAGEOUS CONFRONTATION OF MURDER
Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity, by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (Publicaffairs; 672 pp.; $37.95). Goldhagen made his name with Hitler's Willing Executioners, published 14 years ago, in which he argued that ordinary Germans not only knew all about the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews but on the whole actively supported it. Now, the 50-year-old ex-Harvard academic returns to much the same theme, projected on to a far broader canvas. The first part of Worse Than War is given over to making the case that in the 20th century far more people (127 million to 175 million) have perished through mass murder than have been killed during wars (61 million). The book follows a pattern long-favoured by the author: description (what happens), explanation (why it happens), moral evaluation ( judgment on it) and prescription (what ought to be done about it). Goldhagen is a trenchant writer and it is not his way to beat about the bush. What no one can deny him is the range and depth of his knowledge or the courage involved in many of his judgments. Anthony Howard, The Daily Telegraph Buy it.
CANADA'S SHOPKEEPERS KEPT OUR HISTORY
Keepers of the Record: The History of the Hudson's Bay Company Archives, by Deidre Simmons (McGill-Queen's University Press; 368 pp.; $24.95). Anyone with a keen interest in history and the archival process will enjoy this book, but the general reader will also find the work an entertaining read and a fascinating window into one of the most extraordinary historical collections of information about Canada's past. The Hudson's Bay Co. didn't just explore and develop trade, communities and commerce, it maintained detailed records every step of the way, from counts of fur pelts delivered by aboriginal hunters to the letters and reports of governors and agents, beginning in the 1600s. Simmons, who lives in Brentwood Bay, B.C., has worked as a research and archives consultant for 25 years and knows her subject thoroughly. Dave Obee, Victoria Times Colonist Buy it.
SHE DIED YOUNG, BUT HER CELLS NEVER WILL
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot (Crown; 368 pp.; $32). A thorny and provocative book about cancer, racism, scientific ethics and crippling poverty, this story floods over you like a narrative dam break, as if someone had managed to distill the more addictive qualities of Erin Brockovich, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and The Andromeda Strain. More than 10 years in the making, it feels like the book that Skloot was born to write. Henrietta Lacks was a poor Virginia tobacco farmer, the great-great-granddaughter of slaves. Born in 1920, she died from an aggressive cervical cancer at 31, leaving behind five children. To scientists, however, Henrietta Lacks almost immediately became known simply as HeLa (pronounced hee-lah), because cells from her cervix, taken without her knowledge, were the first to grow in culture, becoming "immortal" and changing the face of modern medicine. There are, Skloot writes, "trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body." HeLa cells have been used in research that has led to the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene-mapping and in vitro fertilization, as well as to examine how nuclear bombs affect humans, and to study herpes, leukemia, Parkinson's disease and AIDS. Skloot writes with particular sensitivity and grace about the history of race and medicine in America. This book has brains, pacing, nerve and heart, and it is uncommonly endearing. Dwight Garner, The New York Times Buy it.
HOW THAT SCENE MADE US LOVE MAYHEM
The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America to Love Murder, by David Thomson (Basic; 192 pp.; $29). The film Psycho showed major studios how to make cheap exploitation pictures, and proved that violence was no hindrance to commercial success (audiences loved being terrified). Thomson's book anatomizes the film's first half in the manner of a good DVD commentary track. In the second half, he resorts to padding with a list of films influenced by Psycho. It's too bad; I would have loved to have read Thomson's deconstruction of the single worst scene in all of Hitchcock — the explanation scene at the end, in which the director stops the movie dead and has a character "explain" Norman's mother fixation. Thomson is at all times a delicious, stimulating writer, and the book is particularly interesting as he shifts between admiration for the director's technical skills and a stark dismay at Hitchcock's customary evasion of reality: "I don't think he ever believed in this idea of a character taking over another — only in the ways it could be filmed." And he questions whether Norman, as played by Anthony Perkins, would be capable of the murders, calling it the "film's inner fallacy." Scott Eyman, The Palm Beach Post Wait for the paperback
