Johannes Gutenberg: A Biography in Books by Eric Marshall White

 This is a book for Wikipedia editors who are accustomed to beginning discussions of their contributions with "Well, actually...."   In other words you could call it "meticulously researched" (as the Storygraph AI summary does), even though words like 'precise' and 'persnickety' were the ones that kept leaping to mind as I read.

But that's not actually a diss!  This is also a book for those who are interested in how we know what we think we know about history.  As White traces each historical reference that credits (or ignores) Gutenberg's contribution to the invention of movable type, you get a much better sense of the fragility of historical records, and of how our sense of our joint past is created both by the stories we tell one another and by the information we retain or lose as time passes. 

The book is also full of fascinating details, like the fact that Johan Fust, Gutenberg's business partner, made the then-largest order of paper in European history to print the (probably) 158 copies of what we now call the Gutenberg Bible. Or that we can tell that 6 different teams of printers working in concert produced that bible, based on differences in ink composition, paper, and the minor printing discrepancies between the various 'quires' of the books of the bible.  It was also interesting to learn that the Gutenberg bible was *not* the first widely distributed piece of printed material -- that honour probably goes to a mass of indulgences that Gutenberg printed for the church the year before (that were intended to raise money for a campaign against Muslims after an attack on Cypress). 

I found Johannes Gutenberg: A Biography in Books an interesting read, even if I personally have no particular interest in printing, medieval history, or Johannes Gutenberg per se.  Recommended for students of any of those subjects, or for those, like me, who sometimes enjoy learning random things.

Fair Play: How Sports Shape the Gender Debates by Katie Barnes

I'll start by saying that I think a more accurate subtitle for this book would be something like "A discussion of the gender controversy in sports in the United States, and how it has been weaponized by the Trumpian Right Wing" 

That makes the book a bit of a puzzling read for me because:

• I am not an American
• I am not a sports person

But given how the very existence of trans people (particularly trans children) has become a key way for current "conservative" parties to generate outrage, I thought this book could be a timely and perhaps informative read.

My thoughts? 

First of all, Katie Barnes is an excellent journalist.  They have been covering trans folks in American sport since 2016 (the book was published in 2023), and bring their in-depth knowledge, personal experiences, and full professionalism to the discussion. This feels particularly impressive given that Barnes was a child athlete and is trans themselves. No matter how understandable it might have been for Barnes to write either a rant or a polemic, they have not done so.  Instead Fair Play is a thoughtful and well-informed book that benefits from Barnes' empathy, insight, and deep knowledge of the subject matter.  Throughout they go beyond the obvious to tell the human stories of people like Lia Thomas or Mack Beggs (who are more often treated as talking points than people), while also diving into what we know about the science of gender-based athletic difference, the history of post Title IX American women's sport, and the known history of trans/intersex people's involvement. 

In other words, Barnes did an excellent job with Fair Play.  

Does that mean that I think everyone should read this book? The answer for me would have to be, yes but. And the reasons for that but really boil down to the fact that fundamentally, this is a sports book and an American book:

• Example #1:   Barnes expresses as a supposed truism that "Sports are important; all kids should be able to play them".  This sounds admirable, but I don't believe sports as a whole actually believes that in any real way.  For example, when some of the trans/gender-non-conforming athletes interviewed for this book speak about how they felt isolated or excluded within their sports, my gut reaction was "I'm so sorry you experienced that, but that's sports and sports people for you. That's exactly what they're like." 

In other words,  I find it sad but unsurprising that gender-non-conforming kids have the same experience within sports that I did as an unathletic nerdy child. 

• Example #2:  The book is full of "inside baseball" details about American sport. The most literal example comes when Barnes describes the experiences of a kid who started their sports career playing girls softball before transitioning. I have sympathy for the difficulties that kid faced, but:

•  the idea that softball is gendered as a female is weird (which Barnes acknowledges. Unlike in Canada or Australia, in the US softball is purely a women's sport.)  
•  the idea that softball and baseball are somehow completely different sports is hilarious to me. (I played league softball as a kid.  IIRC, the differences are underhanded pitching in softball vs. overhand pitching in baseball, a different ball, and a few minor rule differences around strikes and outs. In other words, softball and baseball are essentially the same sport! We aren't comparing rugby and rhythmic gymnastics here.) 

In other words, as with many books, its specificity is both its weakness and its strength. Which is to say, once again, that fundamentally Fair Play is both an American book and a sports book.  

My last observation is that I found the discussion in Chapter 8: The Breakup in Women's Sport heart-breaking.  This is where Barnes covers the attempt of a group of 'old school feminist sports advocates' and a group of 'new school LGBTQIA+ activists' [my words, fwiw] to come up with a common position and an agreed-upon set of policies around trans inclusion in women's sport. 

They failed. 

The resulting fracture was seized upon and weaponized by those who wanted nothing more than to stoke hatred and division (ie/ Trumpian politicians). You could say that we are seeing the repercussions of that failure everywhere today (including in the despicable laws recently enacted by the Alberta government).

What happened?  

A reductionist view is that one side favoured "fairness" while the other favoured "inclusion". But in some ways the division reminds me of a division that I've seen in the world of computer programming.  

To be a good UI designer (and to make a truly awesome user interface), your designs must make the tasks that most people do most of the time easy and intuitive. Sure, there are less-common tasks, and there are people who need to do unusual things. But if your user interface focuses on that 20%? Disaster. Most people will dislike your software, avoid using it, use it incorrectly, or even hate it.

On the other hand, to be a good back-end programmer, you need to obsessively concentrate on edge conditions. If you don't account for every 'uncommon' case that could possibly happen, your code will fail -- probably spectacularly and at the worst possible time.  In other words, to make a system work you need to spend 80% of your time concentrating on the 20% of edge conditions that could make everything fall apart. 

 In the world of computer programming, the best software comes from teams with both sets of skills, of course, where each kind of expert can focus on their area of expertise. Then the team can work together to build something great.  

But outside of the technical sphere? Well, even within it we live in a world with UIs built by back-end specialists, and back-ends that fail because they don't account for easily predictable situations. And outside? I wonder what kind of software we'd have if every bug was treated as a deliberate provocation and if stoking outrage was a goal written into the product specs?

Overall, Fair Play is an interesting and often thought-provoking read. 

Trees against the wind: The birth of prairie shelterbelts by William R. Schroeder

 When you drive across the Canadian prairies, you'll soon notice that most farmyards are surrounded by trees. This isn't an accident. For 111 years, the Canadian government operated a prairie agroforestry program to support homesteading, control erosion, and enhance agricultural production. Over its lifetime  the Prairie Shelterbelt Program (its final name) gave away 175 million trees, free of charge, to Canadian farmers in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. It changed the face of the prairies.

Growing up in Saskatchewan, I was familiar with shelterbelts. Some farms, particularly in the south of the province, had fields bordered by long hedgerows.  Almost every farm had a rectangular box of trees surrounding its farmhouse, barns, and equipment sheds.  I never questioned this: it's just how farms were. 

Trees Against the Wind explains.  The Indian Head Forestry Nursery Station (and later the Saskatoon Forestry Farm) were founded by Norman Ross, who oversaw a research program that identified the best trees for planting on the prairies and established the horticultural techniques needed to successfully grow them. Ross also created a nursery program that grew millions of trees annually, devised shipping techniques for seedlings that ensured the trees reached farmers alive (even in the days when they were transported by train and horse cart), and created an outreach/extension program to mentor farmers in tree husbandry so that most shelterbelt trees survived and thrived. He also publicized and promoted the tree planting program and cultivated the political support that saved it from budget cuts more than once. He also also never hired anyone with a non-British background to a responsible position on his team, and was known for being a bit of a martinet -- and didn't earn enough money to send his only son to University.

Other things I learnt by reading this book:

• Carragana hedges are ubiquitous in the oldest parts of Saskatoon, so I've always known about carragana. As it turns out,  carragana shrubs are originally from Siberia, and were the single hardiest tree produced by the shelterbelt program. During the severe drought of the Great Depression, the program focused on growing and distributing carragana because it was the plant most likely to survive.
• The Forestry Farm Park in Saskatoon -- d'uh!-- was originally a secondary tree plantation that was founded to expand production for the shelterbelt program. It operated as a tree farm until 1966, when operations ceased and it was transferred to the City of Saskatoon.  The main park area you visit today was conceived as a 'demonstration project' to show farmers what they could achieve by planting on their farms.
• The shelterbelt program originally focused on foresting farmyards.  Most of the prairies (especially the southern prairies) were flat and featureless.  By creating a treed farmyard, famers could not only shelter their homes from the ceaseless winds, they could capture snow over the winter, and create a tiny oasis where they could grow food plants (fruit trees and vegetables) that would otherwise not survive.  In the early years of the program, homesteads with farmyard shelterbelts were much more likely to remain occupied, because they made the farm much more hospitable for farm families.
• The husbandry techniques identified by the program meant that most trees could survive without watering, even in their early stages.  The techniques included soil preparation, the depth of planting, tree spacing, the mix of species used, and frequent weeding/inter-row cultivation during the seedlings' first three years.

Who should read this book?  Anyone who wonders why the Canadian prairies look like they do today, or who is interested in the history of horticulture and forestry in this part of the world. 

The Emotional Brain: Lost and found in the science of emotion by Dean Burnett

I wouldn't rate this one more than 3 stars out of 5, if this were Goodreads or Storygraph, mostly because I didn't find it a super-engaging read.  This is ironic because the author structures the entire book around his personal story of trying to understand his own emotions after the death of his father during COVID -- and one of his conclusions is that humans are wired to be more engaged by personal and emotional stories than by 'pure facts'.

I do have a few take-aways though:

• There is no 'scientific' definition of what an emotion is. Emotions are complicated.
• Many brain structures are involved in the creation of emotions, and emotions influence most brain functions
• Cognition (rational thought) is dependent on emotion: how else are we to identify what is important to focus on (of the literally overwhelming number and variety of things we can sense, remember, or identify)?  Without emotion, on what basis would we make decisions? (after all, what is a 'good' or 'bad' outcome without emotion? what would those words even mean?)
• Emotions evolved from our most primitive evaluative functions, deep in our evolutionary past. How do we know?  Emotions are fundamentally linked to our sense of smell i.e./ the part of our brain that evaluates chemical inputs. (The author imagines a single-celled organism in the primordial ooze being attracted to or repelled by chemicals that are useful or dangerous.)
• Sharing emotions, understanding others' emotions, being influenced by others' emotions....these are the basis of human cooperation, human survival, and ultimately, human evolutionary success. 
• Which is why we are more likely to believe information conveyed by someone we have an emotional connection with....and that's why anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists. climate deniers....

So, informative and worth reading, even if I found a few of his conclusions trite (no, I don't think we are attracted to rational thought because we find it emotionally satisfying. I think we are attracted to rationality because it works.)

 

The York Factory Express: Fort Vancouver to Hudson Bay, 1826-1849 by Nancy Marguerite Anderson

You aren't as tough as a voyageur.  No, not even if you run marathons.  Not even if you run ultramarathons.

The York Factory Express is a non-fiction book based on the journals kept by Hudson's Bay Company 'gentleman' (company administrators). It documents their annual trip from the HBC post at modern-day Vancouver, Washington to the main HBC depot at York Factory Manitoba on the shores of Hudson Bay.  Remarkably, they made this 2,700 mile (4300 km) trip by paddle, sail, horseback, snowshoes, and foot without benefit of railroads, roads, or engines of any kind.  The main motive power was the voyageurs who paddled and rowed the boats upstream, except when the current was so strong that they needed to 'line' the boats through rapids with ropes or carry them across portages. To cross the Rockies they left the boats behind and snowshoed up and across Athabasca Pass (https://www.alltrails.com/trail/canada/alberta/athabasca-pass-from-jasper claims total elevation gain of 2500m), carrying packs of up to 70 pounds.  Days were long too: the journals document daily start times ranging from 2:30am to 4:30am, with days ending at 8 or 9pm -- except when they travelled all night to find better conditions for snowshoeing of course.

The trip typically took 3.5 months each way.  

Why?  Well, I also don't want to hear anyone complain about their work meetings again.  Sure, maybe that meeting could have been an email, but at least you didn't have to travel across the continent to attend.  It took sailing ships from England two years to reach Fort Vancouver. By travelling overland to to the annual HBC administrator meeting at Norway House (or the Red River colony), central administrators could get an annual accounting of the activities of Western fur traders, and the Western fur traders could make more timely requests for the right amounts and varieties of trade goods (which were  delivered by those annual ships from England).

The York Factory Express tells a remarkable story.

How about the book itself? The author quotes extensively from fur trade journals, and the book has a number of helpful maps to illustrate the path taken by the Express. However, I have to sympathize slightly with the reviewer on Goodreads who says "Like the voyageurs, my main feeling on finishing was relief that the journey was finally over."  The book would have been much improved if the author had added more analysis and context.  I found myself turning to the internet repeatedly to understand where locations mentioned in the book are in terms of modern landmarks, a task made more difficult by the fact that most of the rivers the Express travelled have since been extensively altered by Hydro developments.  I also struggled sometimes with fur trade terminology and history -- when there are explanations, they often appear well after the terms, events, or people in question are first mentioned.  

Who should read this book?  Anyone interested in the history of the land we all now share, or who wants to understand why Cumberland House (1774) is the earliest European settlement in the province of Saskatchewan.  But it would help if you already knew something about the history of Western Canada and the role of the Hudson's Bay Company in that history, as the author assumes a lot of knowledge on the part of her readers.

Doppelganger by Naomi Klein

Klein was inspired to write this book by the unnerving experience of being repeatedly confused with Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth.  Both women are authors of a certain age who have written "thinky" books, both women are Jewish, both are named Naomi. 

Klein, of course, is best known for her books No Logo and Shock Doctrine. She is also Canadian leftist 'royalty', being the daughter of feminist icon filmmaker Bonnie Sherr Klein, sister of author and former think-tank director Seth Klein, and wife of progressive NDP activist Avi Lewis (who is himself the grandson of former NDP leader David Lewis and son of NDP icon Stephen Lewis). 

Naomi Wolf, on the other hand, has taken a turn since her feminist days.  As a popular meme goes "If your Naomi be Klein, you're doing just fine.  If your Naomi be Wolf... oh buddy. Oof."  Wolf has gone full conspiracy-theorist anti-vax MAGA.

Klein is at no risk of following in Wolf's footsteps, which is one reason why she became somewhat obsessed with the path taken by her shadow-self, her doppelganger.  How had this once feminist become a regular on Steve Bannon's radio program? What prompted Wolf to start ranting about 'freedom' when faced with vaccine requirements?  Why had Wolf transformed from an advisor to the Clinton administration to a MAGA hanger-on? 

I think that Doppelganger is strongest when it addresses this specific issue.  Why did Wolf and a whole swath of others move towards health conspiracy theories?  Q-Anon?  MAGA politics?  

Two factors in particular struck me.  

The first is that at the core of most of these conspiratorial beliefs is a fear rooted in reality.  For example, during the pandemic one of the anti-vax talking points was that the vaccines were a tool of Big Pharma, being rolled out to maximize profits.  Leaving aside their "arguments" about the vaccine's dangers, Big Pharma is in fact fucked.  We need look no further than the contemptible Martin Shkrelli (2015's most punchable man), who raised the price of a critical antiparasitic drug from $13.50 to $750.00 a pill.  And during the pandemic, as Klein points out, we could have cancelled patents on the COVID-19 vaccines and rolled out a global low cost vaccination program to protect lives around the world while simultaneously reducing the virus' ability to mutate. Instead we protected corporate profits. 

Anti-vax anger at Big Pharma is not wrong.  

Similarly,  Wolf amongst others railed against vaccine passport apps as being an intolerably oppressive Big Brother tracking tool designed to first track everyone and then imprison them.  The riposte of the sane was something like "Just wait until they find out about cell phones."  Klein's response: "They know about cell phones."  In other words, smirk all you like but we all carry an unparalleled surveillance device in our pockets.  We're just mostly being surveilled by unchecked corporations who can and do do anything they like with our data.  (The "mostly" is because of course we've all decided to politely ignore Edward Snowden's revelations about the reality of unrestricted government data capture.)

Anti-vax anger at surveillance is not wrong either.

In both of these cases (and in so many more), the problem is not that conspiracy theorists are afraid and angry at things that are happening in society.  The problem is that they direct their fear and anger towards invented targets, twisted mirrors of the real causes, because their invented targets are easier to understand, easy to demonize, and are less threatening to oppose than the real forces that are causing danger or real harm. 

The second point that really struck me about Klein's description of the attraction of the shadow world is that the shadow world of conspiracies is very welcoming.  When Naomi Wolf first wanted to say something on Bannon's program, she was eagerly accepted into the fold.  "Look, this  feminist and former Democrat wants to talk to us about <insert mild conspiracy theory here>."   Wolf was listened to instead of challenged and received lots of validation (and new social media followers), and step by step she went deeper and deeper into MAGA world.  Similarly, Klein notes that callers to Bannon's phone-ins are treated gently, encouraged and supported in whatever they choose to talk about, and generally welcomed with open arms.

Contrast this experience to Wolf being publicly humiliated by an interviewer who discovered errors in her 2019 book Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalisation of Love.  (The errors were profound and real: Klein points out that Wolf has never been a meticulous researcher, but I think her publisher also has a lot to answer for.)  Contrast also the stereotypical world of the left, where the People's Front of Judea will fight to the death the heresies of the Judean People's Front (in preference to effectively opposing the Romans of course).  Or to to take a personal example, look at Doppelganger itself, which has an entire chapter pointing out that Hitler's Germany and its final solution was simply a darker doppleganger of Western societies and their "Indian Reservations" and  their Boer War concentration camps, and their anti-Semitic laws.  (My emotional reaction: in this broken and nasty world we live in, isn't there anything we can celebrate? Not even defeating the actual Nazis?)  Or another personal example:  a statement on the Wild Bird Trust website about the harm done by white environmentalists by creating a bird sanctuary at Maplewood Flats without the knowledge or consent of the Tsleil-Waututh people -- in a world in which it feels miraculous that Maplewood Flats exists as a natural area at all. (It's a near-impossibility to preserve any natural area seen as having "economic value".)

The 'left' is not a welcoming world.  Maybe because reality isn't.  Maybe because we really do share a very dark history, and there is much pain for which real amends have never been made (and probably never can be truly made).  Maybe because we are collectively too often genuinely powerless, and it is the only the battles against the Judean People's Front that seem winnable.

Klein, like any good activist, ends her book with a call to action.  She asks us to work together with real people in the real world, where we can see and feel their totality, and can perhaps learn to work with people we don't 100% agree with.  

But as I finished the book all I could think was how much easier it is to shitpost than it is to understand or act.  And that every one of us is vulnerable to the temptation to seek simple answers to complex problems.  

Story Genius: how to use brain science to go beyond outlining and write a riveting novel by Lisa Cron

Why do folks who write "how to" books insist that they have "the one true way" and feel compelled to dismiss every other technique?  Do they really think this makes what they have to say more convincing? And are there folks for whom this kind of dismissal makes an argument more compelling?

Also, why do "plotters" hate "pantsers" so much?  

For those of you who know something about the writing world, the oversimplified generalization about writers is that they come in two varieties.  "Plotters" plan out an entire story scene by scene before they start writing.  "Pantsers" fly by the seat of their pants: that is, they start writing and see where the story takes them.  

Which technique is better?  Well, plotters tend to view 'pansters' as time-wasters, but Stephen King, Margaret Atwood, and Diana Galbadon (author of the Outlander series) have written and sold an awful lot of books.  To be fair, plotters J.K. Rowling and John Grisham have too, so I personally think that the only fair conclusion to draw is that whichever technique works for you works for you.  (To those in the know, me saying 'what works for you works for you' outs me as a pantser, because no plotter seems capable of admitting that pantsing is a valid way of writing.)

All of this is prelude to saying that Story Genius is a book about how to write a novel, and there are things about it that really really annoy me.

But I'm here to write a book review, so I'll leave behind my irritation. What does Story Genius have to say?  Unlike most books about planning a novel that talk about the three act story structure for plot, Story Genius puts character, character arc, and story theme at the heart of writing.  

How does that work?  Basically Cron argues that it is far more effective to begin planning a novel by asking 'what is my novel going to be about?' rather than 'what's going to happen?'  In other words, no matter what genre of novel you write, your book will fundamentally illustrate some universal theme like 'you can't have love without pain' or 'kindness matters most' or 'failure is the best teacher'.  So you should start planning your novel by deciding what you want to say about life.  Of course, novels are about people, so the next step after that is to decide who your protagonist will be.  How will their life will illustrate your theme through their story arc?  (Perhaps your protagonist will be someone who is a jerk to everyone because it means that they get what they want?). Once you have those two elements in place, your job as a writer is to think of a backstory for the character that makes their current attitude make sense and be relatable (for example, as a child they were crushed for being too nice).  Finally you need to imagine a sequence of emotional events that will force them to confront their misbelief about the world (only jerks get ahead) and change.  Only after all of that character work is done do you start to think about the specific events (the plot) that will force your protaganist through this emotional arc.  

Why does Lisa Cron suggest this approach to novel development?  This is where the 'brain science' part comes in.  Recent fMRI studies of the brain show that when we experience fiction, our brain waves mirror those that the protagonist of a story would be going through. In other words, in some sense we experience what a protagonist is experiencing.  Why is this important?  Cron quotes Keith Oatley, a cognitive psychologist and author "Fiction is a simulation that runs on the software of our minds. And it is a particularly useful simulation because navigating the social world effectively is extremely tricky."

Story is how humans make sense of the world, especially the social world, where story can educate us about how to act and react to situations we have not yet encountered.

That means story is important.  What humans relate to in story is humans.  Therefore, all types of novel need to centre character and character arc.  The most effective way to do that is to plan your entire novel around  character arc.

What do I think of the thesis? Well, I'm only half-way through, but I see a lot of value here.  It reinforces my growing understanding that my writing needs more interiority -- that is, I need to share more about how my characters experience the events that happen. What do they think and feel?  Interiority makes characters real to readers, and helps readers engage with your story and your writing. There are a lot of other gems thrown in here and there too.  For example, at the heart of your story, your character must face a situation where they they face great personal loss if they choose not to act.  In other words, there should be compelling reasons for your characters actions, and your readers need to feel those reasons. 

But overall? Well, as you might guess, I reject the overall thesis that there is only one 'correct' way to write a novel, let alone plan a novel.  Her book also has a couple of big flaws.  The first is that the example novel that she plans step-by-step as she explains her technique is as dull as ditchwater.  The second is that she keeps claiming that her technique is valid for all types of fiction, but she doesn't include concrete examples of how a character focus for planning would work for plot-driven fiction like mysteries, thrillers, SF, fantasy, or horror (or for more abstract and intellectual genres like literary fiction). 

So, is this a useful 'craft' book for writers?  Well, I suppose I should have waited to finish reading it before writing this review.  I'm only halfway through.  :-)  But yes, I think it is.  I'm never going to create a scene-by-scene breakdown of my entire novel before I start writing, and it makes my heart shrivel when Cron brightly directs me to keep myself in check as I write to keep myself from deviating from that plan.  But character truly is at the heart of story -- just as plot is essential to many types of fiction.  So I can learn from a craft book that focuses on character even if I'm probably not going to finish reading it.  

One book leads to another: Half-Breed, The One and a Half Men, The Northwest is Our Mother

The Northwest is Our Mother by Jean Teillet: an activist political and social history of the Metis people

The One and a Half Men by Murray Dobbin: an extensively researched political biography of two Metis activists active from the 1930s through the 1960s

Half-Breed by Maria Campbell: a personal memoir showing the impact of Metis social and political history through the story of one Metis woman

OR, in reverse order....zooming out from the story of a few decades of a single life (Campbell), to one thread through political and social life of the Metis people over the course of two men's entire lives (Norris and Brady), to the story of a people (Teillet).

One book leads to another: Half Breed by Maria Campbell leads to The One and a Half Men by Murray Dobbin leads to The Northwest is our Mother by Jean Teillet

First I re-read Half Breed.

I read Maria Campbell's book many years ago, when I lived in Saskatoon.  Even then, before she was perhaps technically an elder, she was an honoured elder Metis, a noted indigenous activist, and a legend.  Our circles didn't touch, but that was because I was an unremarkable white juvenile activist who wouldn't have rated an introduction even if we had happened to be in the same place at the same time.  Maria was a celebrity, someone who people would name-drop if she'd been at their baby shower or potluck, or especially if they'd rated an invitation to her place at Gabriel's crossing at Batoche.

What did I think of Half Breed on re-reading it more than a half-century after publication?  First, how the book still resonates in so many ways.  The vividness of Campbell's stories leap from the page, especially as she tells the stories of her childhood living as one of the 'road allowance people' in North-Central Saskatchewan in the 1940s and 50s.  Those are stories of poverty and struggle, discrimination and official abuse -- but also of happiness and family and connection, at least until her mother dies and her father falls apart, leaving her and her younger siblings to struggle and ultimately be separated for many many years.  Broken families are nothing new for indigenous peoples in Canada.  Neither are the tough choices and unhappy circumstances that lead to sex work, addiction and often despair, as they did for Campbell in the 1960s.

Campbell overcame.  She reclaimed her life and her heritage, became politically active, and wrote the story of her life in the early 1970s.  In the process, she became one of the first indigenous voices to be published in Canada, and the fore-mother of a new literature.

So, how did this book lead me to One and a Half Men?  When Campbell talks about the forces that destroyed her father's life, she talks about his deep disappointment with the failure of political organizing by the Metis people in Saskatchewan in the 1940s, and his disappointment with the noted Metis organizers Jim Brady and Malcolm Norris.  She also talks of the many betrayals of the Metis by the CCF government (who are otherwise heroes of mine).  It made me curious.  I googled Brady and Norris, and discovered One and a Half Men, a political biography written by someone I had actually known in my long-ago Saskatoon days -- Murray Dobbin.

Murray wasn't someone I knew well -- he was of the notable political generation just ahead of mine.  But the combination of a book by someone I knew and a history I did not made finding and reading this book irresistible.

One and a Half Men by Murray Dobbin

My initial reaction:  Wow.  What an amazing book.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not saying that everyone should drop everything right now to read One and a Half Men.  It's an extensively researched and competently written political biography, but it's probably not a book that will change how you see the world.  It isn't written with ground-breaking literary quality. It isn't the self-expression of an oppressed people and it doesn't tell a universal story of interest to people everywhere in the world.

But writing One and a Half Men was an extraordinary act of respect and service to the Indigenous communities of Saskatchewan and Alberta.   Murray Dobbin spent years diving into archives and interviewing friends, families, and political allies and foes of the legendary Metis political organizers and activists Malcolm Norris and James Brady.  Because he did so, a detailed record exists of their decades-long political struggle from the 1920s and 1930s in Alberta (where they were responsible for the grudging creation of the Metis Settlements by the Alberta government) through the late 40s, 50s, and 60s in Saskatchewan where they nurtured the spark of Metis Nationalism through dark times while mentoring and inspiring future generations of Metis activists and leaders.

This book is an important historical record of one part of the long struggle of Indigenous peoples against colonial settler society.  You can read it to learn more about the racism, neglect, hostility, and extraordinary vindictiveness* of mid-20th century government officials towards Metis and Indigenous peoples, particularly those who dared to advocate for themselves.  More importantly, it allows people today to see and honour the strength and dedication of two extraordinary men who spent their lives in service to their people.

Metis people would undoubtedly themselves tell this story differently -- and next I should seek out The Northwest is our Mother by Jean Teillet to see how.  But because Dobbin did the research, asked the hard questions, and donated his records to the Saskatchewan archives, researchers have much more detailed source information than they otherwise would.  

 * The supremely competent but politically outspoken Norris was fired from his Saskatchewan government job mere months before he qualified for a pension by the Liberal Ross Thatcher government -- who then went on to make sure that he was fired from his replacement job at the Prince Albert Friendship Centre.  Norris died of a stroke soon afterwards.

The Northwest is Our Mother by Jean Teillet

In her introduction to One and a Half Men Maria Campbell explains that her immediate and visceral reaction to the book was that she did not want Murray Dobbin to write about her heroes -- even though Murray was a friend and the book was excellent. She did not want a white historian to tell Brady and Norris's story.  

After reading Jean Teillet's history of the Metis People, I completely understand Campbell's reaction.  

Teillet's book is the story of the Metis people, told from the perspective of the Metis people.  

What does this mean?

The Northwest is our Mother is comprehensive and extensively researched, and tells the stories that are important to the Metis.  One example:  the book includes a few pages explaining the brief visit of a white grifter to the Forks in the early 19th century.  Why?  This is not a particularly notable event!  But there is a traditional Metis song mocking this man and his pretensions, so of course it is of interest to the Metis to understand the song's origins.  Another example:  Teillet describes in detail the Metis perspective on what she calls "the Northwest Resistance" -- when the Metis' heart-breakingly reasonable requests of the Canadian government were met by Gatling guns at Batoche.  She doesn't describe events during the Resistance that involved only First Nations peoples, even though those are important to understanding the overall arc of events. Teillet is telling the story of the Metis, not an objective history of Western Canada.  A final example:  Teillet focuses on a single decade of Malcolm Norris and Jim Brady's lives, the decade of activism and struggle that led to the creation of the Metis Settlements in Alberta.  In doing so she gives a much better perspective on the importance of those settlements -- because despite the profound disappointment Norris and Brady felt at their limited land and their limited autonomy, the settlements remain to this day the Metis' only secured land base and so remain profoundly important to the Metis people.

But it's not only the content of Teillet's book that is striking.  She speaks in a Metis voice. Her language is sometimes non-academic. She focuses on the perspective and experiences of the Metis in all situations.  She includes stories about how these historical events impacted members of her family, and how those events are remembered today. In telling the story of the Metis she not only explains the origins and history of her people, she tells us what the Metis remember, what they valued and who they are. 

Dobbin is alway sympathetic to his subjects, but he writes about Metis lives, Metis politics, and Metis history.  He is always at at least one remove, the objective observer.   Not to mention that the very title of his book is offensive: it is based on a historical story that positions the Metis people as 'other' and not entirely human: 

"...in the early 1850s...he asked a Catholic priest about a nearby group of boisterous men. They were dark skinned but obviously not Indians. 'They are the one-and-a-half men,' the priest replied, 'half Indian, half white and half devil.'"

And while Dobbin researched and wrote within 10 years of Norris and Brady's deaths, and so had access to people who knew them and remembered events described in his book-- reading Teillet's book reminds me that the stories important to the Metis would not have been lost.  Those men's families, their compatriots, their communities: they remember.  They told and continue to tell their own stories, both as inheritors of the oral culture of their indigenous ancestors and as descendants of highly educated and literate French Canadians and Hudson's Bay traders.

The Metis did not need Murray Dobbin to tell Malcolm Norris and Jim Brady's story, any more than the Woman's Movement of the 1970s needed Murray to create a 'Men's Auxilliary' and hold bakesales to raise money for them (which he apparently did in his youth).

So, in the end, the most amazing and impressive of the three books is undoubtedly Teillet's.  Not only does she tell the Metis stories about themselves that they need to know and remember,  her book clearly explains to white Canadians just who the Metis are.  Which makes it clear just how insulting it is when pretendians with some tiny random fraction of indigenous ancestry call themselves Metis.  

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow

I expected to love this book.  I expected to want to write about it in some detail.  I began enthusiastically,  underlining passages and taking notes as I read.

Spoiler alert:  I did not love this book. It took me a long time to finish, and my notes have been sitting unread for weeks.  I also feel very unmotivated to revisit them and to write this review.

But waste not, want not.  Given that I went to the effort, I might as well share a few thoughts.

To start with, don't get me wrong.  The Dawn of Everything is eye-opening!  It may well change the way you understand human prehistory.  You will certainly learn a lot, even if you already have some interest in prehistory and/or have visited some of the archeological sites referenced in the text.  Not to mention that the authors are frequently amusing.  Graeber and Wengrow bring a sly sense of humour to what is literally 'ancient history'.

My fundamental problem is that the book failed to answer the question it set for itself -- not the question that they began their journey with ("what are the roots of inequality in today's societies?") -- but the question they circle through all 500+ pages of their text "are the kinds of deeply unequal societies we live in today inevitable?"

To be fair, it's a lot to expect an answer to that question and I probably shouldn't have expected one, despite the frequent promises in the text itself.  I might have been overall more satisfied with my reading if I had expected exactly what this book delivers: a re-examination of the evidence we have about human societies throughout history and prehistory, and a thorough debunking of the mythology of "human progress" that we are all familiar with. You know the one: "Humans started as hunter-gatherers, living in an idyllic state of nature in small groups.  Then we invented agriculture and settled down, developing task specialization, cities, and kings and armies along the way."  Or possibly the more Hobbesian view (shared by Stephen Pinker) -- "We developed civilization to protect ourselves from the unending 'war of all against all'".  

As it turns out, neither perspective offers much value as a description of human prehistory. 

As Graeber and Wengrow point out, it's easy to forget that human prehistory is very very very long.  Biologically modern humans have existed for somewhere north of 150,000 years, while our oldest written records date back only about 5000 years.  That means that there is time enough for human prehistory to be far stranger, more complex, and more various than we generally imagine.

For example, the more we learn, the more we discover that prehistory abounds with examples of settled groups of hunter-gatherers (Haida, people of Çatalhöyük),  peoples who adopted agriculture and then abandoned it (notably, the builders of Stonehenge), and even non-hierarchical cities (Teotihuacan does not contain the kinds of images of warrior-kings found in other MesoAmerican ruins, instead featuring vast complexes of apartment buildings that housed peoples of all social classes.  There are ancient large circular settlements in Eastern Europe that seem to be designed that way on the 'Arthur's round table' principle -- in other words, they seem deliberately designed to prevent any subgroup from claiming undue significance or prestige due to their location within the larger group.)

Which brings us to one of the other main points that Graeber and Wengrow are at pains to make: we have no reason to believe that ancient peoples were any less clever than we are, or any less deliberate in making choices about how, where, and with whom they lived.  Just because a people did not have a written language (or a written language that we still have evidence of or that we can still read), does not mean that those people somehow lived 'in a state of nature' dictated by their predetermined stage of 'cultural evolution'.   

So read this book if you're interested in learning more about recent discoveries about human prehistory, and if you're interested in a contrarian view about what those discoveries show and mean.  Also read this book for the many interesting perspectives and asides that the authors provide about human culture and cultural influences.  

One example: Wengrow and Graeber  examine the possibility that North American First Nation's way of life influenced and inspired the European Enlightenment.

After all,  how was it that European thinkers like Rousseau developed their ideas around liberty, equality, individualism, toleration, and rationality in the first place? There was literally no precedent for these ideas in the religiously rigid, hierarchical societies of late medieval Europe.  Could the rise of these ideas have anything to do with the contemporaneous contact that French society had with egalitarian North American cultures like that of the Wendat (Huron) people?  

The Wendat viewed with something between horror and disdain the idea that anyone had the right to compel obedience from another. Instead they chose to govern themselves via councils that featured endless articulate and philosphic debate.   

Sounds like a stretch to think that the Wendat helped to inspire the Enlightenment?  One of the most popular books in early 18th century Europe was a book written by a French priest (Lahontan) who had recently returned from what is now modern Canada.  The book is a scathing critique of French society written in the form of a dialog between Kandiaronk (a notable Wendat) and the priest.  

The book has traditionally been interpreted as being a liberal critique of French society that simply uses a mythical Wendat as an interlocutor.  Perhaps -- but Kandiaronk was a real person.  His existence is documented in First Nation's oral history, and in multiple contemporary European historical accounts.   Moreover, these historical accounts (letters, journals, church reports) are uniformly admiring of Kandiaronk's intellect -- one Jesuit calls him 'surely the most intelligent man who ever lived'.  And remember, Jesuits were the intellectuals of the Catholic Church. 

So why shouldn't we believe that the critiques of European society attributed to Kandiaronk were his own?   Particularly given that Lahontan knew Kandiaronk, and there is a plausible argument to be made that Kandiaronk himself actually visited France as part of an Indigenous delegation that visited the French court in 1691.  So why shouldn't we believe that a book that was widely read and widely translated affected the intellectual climate of its time? 

That argument gives you a taste for the kind of information and analysis that Graeber and Wengrow provide throughout the thoroughly entertaining (and well-referenced) pages of The Dawn of Everything.  Just don't expect their discussions to come to the conclusions that they claim to be pursuing.

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

It's absurd to write a critical review of a book that has endured for more than 1500 years.  It's even more absurd to do so without finishing that book, especially given how short it is (163 small pages in the edition I picked up from my closest little free library).

But I just can't.

Meditations is a foundational work of Stoicism, written by the Roman Emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius in the second century AD.  The very fact that this text still exists after all this time is a testament to the wisdom that generations of readers have found in its words. 

But when Aurelius writes of accepting whatever life gives you with a quiet mind because it is what Nature has allotted to you, I can't help reflecting how much easier it would have been to do so as the adopted son of an emperor, and then emperor yourself than it would have been to do so as one of his own slaves. When Aurelius rates the "womanish" sins of desire (sins that are pleasurable) as worse than the (more manly) sins of passion (involuntary loss of control), I reflect first on the misogyny of calling such sins feminine, and then on how sins of desire primarily hurt the sinner while sins of passion like 'striking out in anger' hurt others.   And then there's the irony of the passages that speak of the futility of seeking lasting fame.  :-)  

This isn't a book that speaks to me, even if I could learn from the Meditations on procrastination, keeping an even keel, and the other lessons that I haven't yet read (and probably never will).

From Left to Right: Saskatchewan's Political and Economic Transformation by Dale Eisler

What happened to Saskatchewan?  I grew up in a province that was home to the NDP, the cooperative movement, the Wheat Pool, and Medicare. Last year my sister said to me, off-handedly, "Saskatchewan is a right wing province".  It startled me, but she's right: the NDP has lost every federal seat that they once held, and the right-wing Saskatchewan Party has a stranglehold on provincial power.  Voters don't care about serious financial and political scandals (Global Transportation Hub), or huge financial deficits (Grant Devine conservatives, current Saskatchewan Party), as long as the perpetrators are self-proclaimed conservatives. In 2021 pandemic policy became "Whatever Jason Kenney says".  The resulting wave of deaths and the near-collapse of the province's health care system reduced the current premier's popularity, but hasn't brought any real political consequences.

What the f* Saskatchewan?

When I saw this book I grabbed it, hoping for answers.  

Sigh. 

I didn't want the answer to be "It's because people are stupid and easily led."

To be clear, that's my conclusion, not Eisler's.  Eisler blames the NDP itself, after outlining political events in Saskatchewan in some detail from the 1970s through the 2000s.  But while the NDP certainly had "fails" (that coalition with the Liberals in 1999 certainly looks daft for both the Liberals and NDP in retrospect), nothing the NDP did or didn't do explains a few mysteries.  

Why don't the Saskatchewan people care if conservative governments run deficits?  In the 1980s, Grant Devine took Saskatchewan from a surplus to the largest per-capita deficit in the country. Today's Saskatchewan Party has won 4 majority governments in a row while consistently running deficits -- mostly during an era of high commodity prices that should have made running surpluses a piece of cake.

Why don't the Saskatchewan people value competent government?  The Romanow government of the 1990s made some hard choices to eliminate the Conservative deficit. But apparently those choices completely destroyed the credibility of the NDP in rural Saskatchewan, despite farmers' supposedly hard-headed pro-business perspective on economic issues, and despite the depopulation of rural communities which made those policies rational. Why didn't the Calvert government of the 2000s get credit for the economic growth that they created?  Why does the credit instead go to Brad Wall, who simply continued or doubled-down on NDP economic policies?

Eisler's answer would be that politics in Saskatchewan is essentially populist.  Saskatchewanians feel like outsiders in the Canadian federation. They feel that their political and economic interests are subsumed to those of Ontario and Quebec, which gives them a sense of grievance that is core to Saskatchewan identity.  Tommy Douglas was successful because of his charisma, and because he understood that sense of grievance and offered a collectivist solution: in Saskatchewan we work together to build a better life in spite of indifferent Easterners and rapacious capitalists. Grant Devine was successful and defeated the fiscally competent Blakeney government (that was focused on the fate of rural communities, no less) because he spoke to people's immediate concerns about affordability (concerns derived from factors that were entirely outside the control of the provincial government).  Brad Wall defeated the competent, growth-focused Calvert government because he was charismatic and projected a vision that Saskatchewan could be "more".

In other words, people vote based on emotion, not based on facts.  Or, as I prefer to put it, people are stupid and easily led.  

Yes, I understand that phrasing the issue in this way means that I don't have a future in politics.  But I want politics to be about issues.  I want the art of politics to be about figuring out how to implement rational, intelligent policies in a competent way, and political difference to be about differences of opinion about priorities and the relative importance of certain shared values.  

Apparently that makes me either an alien or naive. 

Eisler certainly belongs to the camp that sees gaining political power as the sole point of politics, and  policy simply as a tool to keep that power.  I mean, he's not alone: the entire existence of the Liberal Party of Canada is based on those principles, and no political party is without adherents to that philosophy (looking at you Bill Tieleman).  But because Eisler doesn't doesn't see politics as being fundamentally about values, he doesn't really address the question of values in his book.  And I think that's a real gap.   

So I still don't know WTF happened to the province of my birth. Other than to believe that Saskatchewanians are stupid and easily led -- which, given that 40% of them don't believe that climate change is real, might actually be the answer. <tears>

21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act by Robert P. C. Joseph

I wasn't sure I needed to read this book. While I'm not a student of Canadian history, I was pretty sure that I was already familiar with at least some of the most egregious parts of the Indian Act: things like residential schools, the pass system that confined Indigenous peoples to reservations unless they had written permission to leave, legal provisions that stripped "Indian" status from women who married non-Indigenous men, suppression of vital cultural practices like the Potlatch and the Sun Dance, and the paternalistic administration of reservation lands. In short, maybe "I knew this stuff" and there might be better books for me to read about the experiences of First Nations peoples in Canada?

But you don't know what you don't know. I decided to read it anyway.  

I did learn some important things. For example, context. In the 18th Century and before, "Canadian" governments saw First Nations....as Nations.  For all their inadequacies, treaties were genuinely viewed as treaties in the same sense as international treaties are today.  The Indian Act crystallized a changed understanding.  In the eyes of the Canadian government,"Indians" became wards of the state, dependents, problems to be managed, and peoples to be assimilated.  

More context: despite the fact that Act-imposed "Band Councils" are democratically elected,  their powers are limited in scope, prescribed by the federal government, and emasculated by having extremely short terms of office -- one or two years -- limiting Councils' ability to plan and act.  

And yet more bitter history:  forced "enfranchisement" stripped "Indian" status from any First Nations person who had the temerity to pursue a legal career or become a clergyman....in other words, the Indian Act declared that anyone who attempted to gain a position of power or respect within white society ceased to be an Indian. 

Yeah.  Sit with that for a minute before moving on.

There is a lot more to digest, of course, in the pages of this book. But overall, 21 Things is a "beginner book" on Canadian - First Nations history, and it only offers a brief introduction to the issues it discusses. For example, Harold Johnson's book has a different understanding of the history of prohibition of alcohol on reserves, and a different perspective on alcohol and its place in White and First Nations communities.   21 Things will not inform you about these differences, or offer insights into the complexities of this or any other issue.  That's not what this book has set out to do.  

Instead, the goal of 21 Things is to open eyes, raise issues, and challenge assumptions by giving an overview of the impact of the Indian Act on First Nations, Metis, and Inuit communities who live within the borders of what is now Canada. Most of us settlers will learn something by reading it.  Most of us should probably go on to learn more after we do.

Capital and Ideology by Thomas Piketty

 Pages: 1041  (including inline footnotes, excluding index)

Piketty became an international intellectual super-star back in 2014 after releasing Capital in the 21st Century.  Capital and Ideology (published in English in February 2020) is his followup book, intended to answer the question "What now? Can we do something about wealth inequality?"

I can summarize Piketty's answer fairly briefly.

There is nothing natural or inevitable about the level of income or wealth inequality that currently exists.  In fact, inequality was much lower across a broad range of societies in the period 1950-1980 AND economic growth was higher.  

There are proven policies that we could use to radically reduce inequality like steeply progressive income taxes, inheritance taxes, and wealth taxes. Coupled with transnational treaties and transnational governance designed to eliminate tax competition between nations, we could radically and quickly reduce inequality. It is desirable that we do so for reasons of innate economic justice, to build funding and support for critical initiatives like combatting climate change, and because extreme inequality is fostering zenophobia and division.

But Piketty is not brief.  In fact, Capital and Ideology is 1041 pages long. What's worse is that you could get the gist of his argument if you read the 47 pages of the introduction and the 75 pages of Chapter 17: Elements of a participatory socialism for the 21st Century.  

So why is Capital and Ideology so long?  

• Piketty (or his translator) is wordy: several times I found myself taking a pencil and editing an entire long paragraph down to a sentence. 
• The book is repetitious.  Given how long it is, the repetition can be helpful.  On the other hand, if the book were shorter it might not be as necessary.
• Piketty took both the praise and the critiques of Capital in the 21st Century a bit too seriously: 
• The quotations from Austen and Balzac in that book really enlivened his descriptions of the economies of 19th Century Britain and France. His attempts to find relevant literature to quote when describing the economies of every nation and every time period included in this book just seems laboured. 
• Piketty was obviously critiqued for focusing too much on Western economies in Capital in the 21st Century, and he makes a real effort to discuss a wider range of nations in Capital and Ideology. Unfortunately, data for many of these countries is not as complete, which makes his efforts to be more inclusive sometime feel more like a 'tickbox' exercise than a true broadening of the discussion.

More importantly, obviously Piketty backs up each point that he makes with copious data and examples, and all of that takes words (and pages).

Should you read this book? Well, Piketty has much more to say my summary does, and some of his stories are fascinating: did you realize that the 19th Century Sweden was the most highly unequal country in Europe? Or that the ruinous and unsustainable level of reparations imposed on Germany after WWI amounted to approximately the same percentage of national income as the debt imposed on Haiti after their 18th Century slave revolt? (Haiti's debt was intended to reimburse slave owners for their losses. Haiti repaid that debt in full over the following 125 years.  Sickening, no?)  Or that France made an attempt to create a transnational governing body for it and its colonies as they gained  independence? (The attempt failed because France refused to share real power.) Or that the American Civil War cost about 1/3 of what it would have cost to compensate slave owners for the economic "loss" of freeing their enslaved workers? (and that no one seriously considered compensating the freed workers for the loss of the value of their years of labour, let alone the trauma of their enslavement?)

These stories are interesting, and sometimes enlightening.  Not to mention that none of what I've said so far even mentions Piketty's analysis of changes in voting patterns since the 1960s (Chapters 14-16) and the rise of 'nativism' in many countries (think Le Pen, Orban, Trump....).  These chapters are thought-provoking and could warrant an entire post of their own.

But sometimes a book makes an impact because it appears at just the right time to illuminate the world around it, and sometimes a book fails to make an impact because its timing is 100% wrong. 

I suspect that Capital and Ideology falls into this latter category.

Reading this book in 2022 reminded me how different the world feels today than it did in 2019, post-pandemic, post-Floyd George, post-Ukraine invasion, and as the climate crisis accelerates.  

If you want to learn more about Capital and Ideology, you can check out some of the professional reviews of the book, like this one from The Guardian.  You can also check out some of the notes I made after finishing it.

Firewater: How alcohol is killing my people (and yours) by Harold R. Johnson

This book was not written for me or for any kiciwamanawak (white settler).  Harold R. Johnson is a member of the Montreal Lake Cree Nation who is a senior crown prosecutor in Treaty 6 territory (south-central Saskatchewan).  Johnson wrote this book for niwahkomakanak (his relatives): the Woodland Cree and any other First Nation that struggles with alcohol.

Personally and professionally, Johnson has seen the impact of alcohol abuse first hand.  He has stood by the graveside of friends, relatives, and community members who have died by accident, overdose, or alcohol-induced illness. He has defended or prosecuted countless individuals who "are nice guys when they aren't drinking", often the same people over and over again.  He has seen families destroyed, he has seen people try to stop drinking and fail (or sometimes succeed).  He has been a hard drinker himself and he has been sober.  

He estimates that alcohol causes the deaths of half of his people.

Harold Johnson has no use for alcohol.  He doesn't understand the stories that kiciwamanawak tell themselves about alcohol and and he doesn't understand why we give it such a central place in our society. He wants niwahkomakanak to start telling themselves different stories.  He wants his people to embrace sobriety.

This book is a polemic by an elder who has seen too much. His focus is squarely on the members of his own community, and his stories use the traditions, language, and perspectives of that community to propose a path forward. 

Should you read it?  Perhaps, if you are niwahkomakanak.  If you are, like me, kiciwamanawak, this book was not written for you.  I'd say read it only if you are willing to listen respectfully to someone else's conversation.

White Fragility by Robin Diangelo

 2020 was the year of the Black Lives Matter movement.  But I was inspired to read this book by a personal experience.  Some time ago....2018? I had a conversation with a friend about sexism and racism.  During this conversation I told him a story about myself, a story about a time when I had acted in a racist way.  

He refused to accept that my actions had been racist.  "That's not helpful" he finally said the third or fourth time that I challenged his resistance.  His refusal puzzled me. When I learnt about the concept of white fragility, I wondered if it could provide some insight.

White Fragility was written by a white American woman who does diversity and anti-bias training.  Fundamentally it's about how anti-Black racism manifests even amongst 'liberal' whites in the United States, and how those liberal whites resist awareness of their own racism. But while elements of her discussion are specific to the American context, the basic discussion of white racism and white defensiveness about our behaviour are more broadly applicable.  

Here are some quotes, and what they taught me.

"...we have been taught that racists are mean people who intentionally dislike others because of their race; racists are immoral. Therefore, if I am saying that my readers are racist...I  am saying something deeply offensive; I am questioning my reader's very moral character."

"The simplistic idea that racism is limited to the individual intentional acts committed by unkind people is at the root of virtually all white defensiveness on this topic. "

Okay, that is a light bulb moment:  that's why my friend couldn't accept that I had acted in a racist way.  When I said that I had been racist, I was acknowledging that in the situation that I described, my discomfort had led me to take actions that had a negative impact on a group of people of colour.  In doing so, I had made a mistake that I was embarrassed about, and that needed to be corrected.  My actions had a racist impact.  To my friend, me saying that I had acted in a racist way was factually incorrect -- I had not intentionally acted in an unkind way -- and so I was unjustifiably identifying myself as an immoral person.

Which brings us to: 

"emphasizing intentions over impact...privileges the intentions of the aggressor over the impact of their behaviour on the target. In doing so, the aggressor's intentions become the most important issue.....minimizing the impact of racism on people of color."

Yes, I had not acted intentionally to disadvantage those students because of their race.  Nevertheless, my actions had done so. My actions were racist. I didn't have the words to explain this to my friend, who resisted the idea that the impact of my actions was more relevant than my intentions.  He resisted centring the perspective of the students of colour.

"Racial bias is largely unconscious, and herein lies the deepest challenge -- the defensiveness that ensues upon any suggestion of racial bias. This defensiveness is classic white fragility...."

Ah, another light bulb moment. My friend was getting defensive (on my behalf, no less), because he does not recognize that racial bias can be unconscious. 

And then one more quote, from Diangelo's sarcastic rules for giving feedback about racism to white people without triggering white fragility:

"1. Do not give me feedback on my racism under any circumstances.  

"If you insist on breaking the cardinal rule, then you must follow these other rules:

"2. Proper tone is crucial -- feedback must be given calmly.  If any emotion is displayed, the feedback is invalid and can be dismissed."

I feel that second point (of 11 in total).  I was having this conversation about sexism and racism in the first place because I had called out this friend's sexism.  He asked to meet to discuss my comments. The end result:  I left the meeting in tears, feeling at fault, having apologized....because I had gotten angry.  The conversation became about my anger, and not about his sexism. 

I don't know what it's like to be Black, or Indigenous, or to have any of the multitude of other identities of colour. But I know how that one feels.  I understand white male defensiveness, white male fragility.

So, reading White Fragility helped me understand a situation I've mulled over many times since I experienced it several years ago.  Maybe this understanding will help me deal better with similar situations in the future, by preparing me for defensiveness and by giving me words to help discuss it.

But reading White Fragility with this incident in mind was also a hindrance. The parts of the book that resonated most with me were the parts that illuminated this experience, an experience where I "come off better" than my friend.  Alas, despite my recognizing and addressing my racism in this one specific case, I can't claim to be without racism, and I can't claim to be without defensiveness about it.  I would probably have been better served had I paid better attention to other parts of the book. 

For example, why am I so uncomfortable talking about myself or my friends as being white?  I've actually lowered my voice when saying the word 'white'.  Why?  Because in white society it is polite to pretend to be colour-blind?

"A white participant said....'I don't see race: I don't see you as Black'. My co-trainer's response: 'Then how will you see racism?'.....If she were ever going to understand or challenge racism, she would need to acknowledge this difference. Pretending that she did not notice he was black was not helpful to him in any way...."

Or is it because as a white person, we believe that we are all individuals, and not members of a class? 

"Whiteness rests on a foundational premise: the definition of whites as the norm or standard for human, and people of color as a deviation from that norm......White people find it very difficult to think about whiteness as a specific state of being that could have an impact on one's life and perceptions."

"...a significant aspect of white identity is to see oneself as an individual, outside or innocent of race -- 'just human'. .... To say that whiteness includes a set of cultural practices that are not recognized by white people is to understand racism as a network of norms and actions that consistently create advantage for whites and disadvantage for people of color.  These norms and actions include basic rights and benefits of the doubt, purportedly granted to all but which are actually only consistently afforded to white people."

Is White Fragility the definitive book on racism? No, of course not, particularly not for white Canadians. The book is American in important ways. Is it a useful book for white Canadians to read even so?  Yes, I think it is. Diangelo speaks directly to white attitudes about racism and to white defensiveness about racism. In doing so, she helps make them more visible, and therefore more addressable.

A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor

 My last entry was about time travel novels.  This book IS time travel.

In 1933, an 18 year-old Patrick Leigh Fermor walked from the Netherlands to Constantinople, beginning his journey by more-or-less following the Danube River across central Europe.  More than 40 years later, in 1977, he began publishing an account of this journey. A time of gifts is the first volume, telling the story of his journey as far as the border of Hungary.

Although the book was actually written in the 1970s, it takes you immediately back to 1933: the 1933 of inherited privilege, the weight of English and European history, actual Nazis, lost marshes full of birds and frogs, and lost villages surrounded by Romas and occupied by studious Jews, friendly peasants, and faded but welcoming aristocrats.

Fermor was the son of a senior official in the Indian colonial government, expelled from a succession British Public Schools before spending a long year of intensive private tutoring meant to prepare him for entry to Sandhurst (and thus a career in the military).  A time of gifts reflects this privileged background: Latin and French phrases are not translated -- everyone reads Latin and French, surely? -- obscure bits of British history are taken as given (everyone knows the romantic story of Elizabeth Stuart, the Winter Queen, no?), and it is only natural that one should be taken up by the smart young set in Vienna, or that the British consul in Munich would spot you 5 pounds when a misfortune deprives you of all of your funds -- your father is Someone after all, and one one does what one can.

In other words, A time of gifts captures in words a world that has vanished, in the style of the era that it describes.  It's a well-loved book that's considered a classic of travel literature, or at least, it's a classic young man's adventure story.

It's not a book that I loved.  In the words of a couple of GoodReads reviews "It’s windy, self-satisfied, lifeless, and dry" or "It was meandering and musing and fascinated, all without actually being interesting". Not for me: witnessed by the fact that I began this review 7 months ago, and then completely forgot to finish.

Grocery Story by Jon Steinman

The full title of this book is Grocery Story: the promise of food co-ops in the age of grocery giants.

I bought this book in my local food coop.  The author was there with a table one Saturday, flogging copies to shoppers.

The author is very dedicated to food:  local food, empowering farmers, empowering eaters, growing diversity in the food economy. He spent a decade creating a weekly podcast on food issues, helped organize a collective that put grain grown by local farmers directly in the hands of eaters, and served on the board of the Kootenay food Co-op in Nelson BC for a few years.

He wrote the book as an expose of the state of food economy and the enormous power yielded by food retailers on consumers and on the entire supply chain.  Farmers and food manufacturers can be bankrupted by the fickleness of huge monopolistic chains who contract for a supplier's entire production, and then renege on their obligations, leaving farmers with huge quantities of unsellable food.  Manufacturers are universally forced to pay retailers tens of thousands of dollars in "shelving fees" in order to get their products stocked....only to have those same retailers copy their products by issuing cheaper "own brand" versions, undercutting their business. Whole Foods required a small-scale chocolate manufacturer of the author's acquaintance to provide days of volunteer labour annually to take her turn managing the entire chocolate section of every BC store: removing all products, cleaning shelves, and restocking in exchange for the privilege of selling what she produces the rest of the year. 

The solution?  Well, Steinman points out that until well past mid-century, anti-monopoly laws controlled the concentration of ownership of grocery stores.  But the days of government acting in the interest of communities or of consumers is well past.  Today Steinman advocates food coops as a way for consumers to take direct power over what they eat, and as a way to create the food economy that they want to participate in.

Steinman means the book to be inspiring:  he even ends with a call to action, telling readers that they can found their own coops, join existing coops, and participate in a food revolution.

But the stories he tells about coops .... are mixed.  He discusses the history of food coops, mostly in North America, focusing on the wave of natural food food coops founded in the 1970s. He talks about the history of his own Kooteny coop, including the story of the recent-to-eater grain collective sponsored by that organization.  And he talks about a new wave of food coops founded post 2008. 

The two "modern" coops whose stories he tells in some detail, both founded in "food deserts" in American low income communities....failed, no more than 3 years after they opened, despite the huge amount of fund-raising and organizing that went into their creation.  After a roaring start, the Kootenay grain coop shrank....Steinman seems forcedly patient at the lack of commitment of members who found that they couldn't manage to mill all their own flour and then use it to make all of their own pasta and bread.   He doesn't talk about how many of those 70s era coops are still thriving, and why...I know that some are barely hanging in there, and many have closed.

Overall, the book has many ideas for improving coops, best practices from active coops, and a whole lot of passion for the ecological, economic, and practical benefits of local control of food. It just isn't inspiring in the way that the author intended. 

SPQR by Mary Beard

SPQR is a brief modern history of Rome from its earliest beginnings to the end of its prime years of empire.  Beard has a full and distinguished career as a classicist behind her, and in SPQR she writes fluently and insightfully not only about what we know about ancient Rome, but also about what the Romans thought they knew about Roman history, what most of us think we know about Roman history, and what we actually don't know and can't now ever know.

For example, did Livia really poison Augustus by painting the figs on a tree with poison to clear the way for her son Tiberius to become emperor?  Was Claudius really so in love with gambling that he outfitted his carriage such that he could continue to dice even as he travelled from place to place?  Did Nero use a self-sinking boat in an attempt to assassinate Agrippina, and was her maid murdered in her stead when the maid falsely claimed that she was her mistress assuming that the guards would rescue rather than kill her? 

These are the kind of stories that make Roman history the stuff of melodramatic television series almost 2000 years after the fact, and these are the kinds of stories that we love to read about Rome.  However, Beard points out that in most cases, we do not have contemporary accounts of these events. Roman historians like Suetonius or Tacticus wrote 50 or 100 years afterwards.  Just how could some of the stories they tell have escaped the palace walls in the first place?  How accurate were those stories 2 or 3 or more generations down the road? Especially when contemporary politics made it convenient to play up the debauchery of a Nero, or the competence of a Hadrian? It seems likely that substantial parts of the stories about Rome that we love to read might just be pure invention. 

Beard brings this kind of questioning perspective to the full sweep of Roman history, from the competing mythologies of Romulus and Remus and the founding of Rome by Aeneas to the economic and political reasons behind the fall of the Roman Republic.  She asks questions about what we think we know, and reminds us how much of our knowledge is based on a somewhat random collection of surviving stones and inscriptions, and a very incomplete collection of stories, letters, and histories. 

SPQR is an interesting read. 

But as I was reading, I wondered why. Knowing more about Roman history, or even knowing more about historiography, doesn't really serve any long term interests of mine. And SPQR, while well-written and erudite, isn't one of those amazing books that turns your understanding of some part of the world upside down. 

Fundamentally, these days I feel that I no longer have an infinite number of books in my future.  I've recently given myself permission to put down novels part way through if they aren't really working for me.  Maybe it's time to be a bit more selective about what which of my random curiosities I choose to pursue by reading nonfiction?

Unfortunately, saying that out loud makes me feel rather old. 

On not finishing books ... or why I am going to abandon my bookclub

If I start a book, I usually finish it.  But over the last year or so I haven't been finishing much non-fiction: particularly not complex, long, and intellectually challenging non-fiction.  I'm looking at you, Adults in the Room by Yanis Varoufakis and The Righteous Mind by Jonathon Haidt!

Okay, both of those books are really popular non-fiction, but each of them has complexities.

In the first, Varoufakis explains the history and economics of the credit crises of 2008, the underlying causes of the ongoing collapse of the Greek economy, and the various proposals that the Northern European economic superpowers had for "fixing" the problem, along with his own analysis and counter-proposals to lift his home country from the mess.  It's actually a fascinating read, even before you dive into the personalities, politics, and maneuverings of the brief era when he was the Greek finance minister.

I didn't finish it.

I rarely read -- have never read? -- a book like this in isolation.  As the title of this blog implies, I'm usually reading more than one book in parallel, often one "serious" book and one simple consumable book at the same time.  But that's not really the problem here.  Over the past year or so I've just had other things that I've needed to do that have limited the time and attention that I have to spend on a book like this.

That's what happened with Adults in the Room. I'd read 50 pages, 25, a hundred, then go on with the other things in my life that were a more immediate priority.  I'd come back to the book several days later, and read 5 pages more.  Somehow a week and a half would elapse, and suddenly, I couldn't keep the thread anymore.  What was that economic argument again?  Who was that person? What does that acronym mean?  When is it, in the life of the book?

Something similar happened with The Righteous Mind.  It's a book about moral psychology.  How do humans make moral judgements? What current research is there on how and why we do this? What are the impacts of our moral psychologies on our politics, our society, on our everyday human interactions?  What does all of this say about (mostly) the current US political scene, and what are the practical implications for politics and society?

In the case of the Righteous Mind, it wasn't so much the difficulty of following and remembering the arguments and terminology of an unfamiliar field that gave me grief.  The difficulty of the book came in following, remembering, and accepting controversial research and ideas.  Don't get me wrong.  I'm willing to learn, and to be challenged. But 95+% of anything I've ever read that has resembled sociobiology has been a smug, self-serving, "just so" story composed to justify the author's reactionary ideas about why people and society HAVE TO be exactly as they are. "Women have evolved to be loving baby-carers while men are intrepid hunters, because I made up a story about hominids based on stereotypes.  So shut up and get back into the kitchen, you sweet little no-nothing.  It's SCIENCE."

Ahem.

To be fair, very little of Haidt's book is based on sociobiology. (That's just my allergy talking.) The book is overall pretty interesting and I felt that I was learning some important things even as I was mentally arguing with the author.

I didn't finish it.

I'd been following Haidt out onto a limb, step by step.  He had evidence, he explained limitations, he was travelling in an interesting direction that seemed worth exploring. I followed him, with reservations, preparing to leap with him into the next tree to see where we might end up. But.... my breaks in reading his book became longer than the intervals of reading, and at some point ...my foot slipped, I missed the branch, and I plummeted out of the tree.

In other words, Haidt's arguments felt and looked like garbage again.

It had just been too long for me to remember how we'd gotten to the spot we were at, and it would take too long for me to retrace my steps.

Before I'd begun them, I'd been really interested in reading both Adults in the Room and The Righteous Mind.  As I read them, I learnt something, and the reading was a pleasure, not a chore. But...instead of finishing these books, I just have the regret of not finishing.

Which is why I'm finally quitting my bookclub.  My book club books have become one of the things that keep me from reading the books I really want to.

In the end, I'd far rather have read Adults in the Room or The Righteous Mind than The Parcel, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, At Home, or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And while I enjoyed Less, The Sympathizer, and A Gentleman in Moscow, would my life have been less rich or interesting if I hadn't read them?  Maybe, a little.  But of those three, only The Sympathizer really gave me any insights I wouldn't have otherwise had.

So, even though The Origin of Waves is beautifully written, I'm going to gracefully detach myself from the group by expressing my appreciation for being included and by talking about how my other priorities don't allow me to continue.  Maybe in August, seeing as I won't be around for July's book anyway.

I'll miss the social aspect, but there are so many other books I'd rather read than the ones that this bookgroup is interested in.  There might even be other books that I'd much rather write.

At Home: A short history of private life by Bill Bryson

Over its 19 chapters At Home  explores every aspect of private life in Western societies.  It ranges widely in time and space, outlining what we know about the evolution of domestic life from the Neolithic onward.  Along the way it discusses everything from the origins of agriculture to the historical composition of paints to the vagaries of personal hygiene through the ages.

Each chapter uses a room in Bryson's English home as a jumping off point.  Some rooms provide obvious subjects.  "Kitchen" and "Dining Room" deal mostly with food and drink, nutrition, and social habits around consuming food.  Other chapters have a more tenuous connection with their titular room.  "Cellar" mostly deals with building materials, such as concrete, wood, and brick, while "The Passage" is mostly about the telephone, although it begins with a long introduction about the construction of the Eiffel Tower and the excesses of the Gilded Age. 

These kinds of digressions are highly typical, and key to the book's charm.  As At Home progresses you feel that you are being led a wandering path across the landscape of knowledge by a genial guide.  One paragraph leads to another and before you know it, you are learning about the 18th Century Kit Kat Club when you thought you were  here to discuss the concept of comfort, the idea of crop rotation,  the workforce of the Industrial Revolution, or English Country Houses, all of which are discussed in the first 4 pages of "The Drawing Room".

Given the book's scope, you are likely to encounter familiar faces (such as Thomas Edison) and familiar ideas (the discovery of the critical role of Vitamin C in preventing scurvy) as well as much less familiar ones (the idea that Edison's genius largely consisted in his mastery of systems, necessary to roll out electric lighting on a large scale, or the revelation that it was decades after John Snow demonstrated that cholera was spread by bad water before public health officials accepted that 'bad air' was not to blame).

But fundamentally, this is a comfortable book.  You will learn many new things, and unfamiliar perspectives on familiar things.  But you are unlikely to be faced with uncomfortable facts or to be really challenged.  Bryson spends 4 pages discussing tea, but no time at all informing you of the fundamental role of slavery in the transatlantic sugar trade.  He characterizes death duties as 'punishment' of large aristocratic landowners, without discussing the implacable economic and social forces that led to that taxation, and the unprecedentedly egalitarian and democratic society that this dilution of wealth fostered in the 20th Century.

Bryson is writing popular nonfiction for the reading class, which in his implicit understanding is at least upper-middle-class.

This is a warm, idiosyncratic, eclectic, and rambling view of British and American society.  Be prepared to google for pictures of the many grand buildings he mentions, and for more background on some of the many surprising facts he mentions in passing.  But don't expect analysis, and don't expect to be challenged.  At Home is a warm bath, not a cold shower.