1 comments about Jimmy Simpson, Legend of the Rockies.

1. This was a throroughly enjoyable read.

   It was an entertaining and descriptive history of my newly adopted home. The author describes in vivid detail what the area was like 100 years ago and one doesn't need look too hard to find the footprints left by Jimmy Simpson and his friends.

   A good read that has inspired me to read more of the original frontiersmen, the area and those who documented it (eg. artist Carl Rungius).

3 comments about Perfection of the Morning: A Woman's Awaking in Nature.

1. Some books are good because they tell a good story; some are good because they are funny; some present new and intriguing ideas; some are simply well written. Sharon Butala's Perfection of the Morning is good because it is uncompromisingly honest, and that alone gives it tremendous impact. She writes about her transformation from an urban, academic feminist when she marries a rancher, moves to rural Saskatchewan, and finds herself living among rural women in the midst of nature. It would have been easy for her to have either romanticized the rural life, or to have poked fun at the men and women in whose world she had come to live. She writes about what can best be described as spiritual experiences in nature, and she could have exaggerated them and couched them in "feminist" or "New Age" terms. Instead, she writes about her perceptions and reactions simply and clearly, without fanfare.
   
   She writes of her life on a ranch in the middle of virgin prairie grassland, her frustrations and her achievements, and her insights into her relations with her new neighbors, both human and non-human, domesticated and wild, animate and inanimate. The book is wonderful because she is careful to be truthful and clear about the changes she went through, not glossing over either her difficulties or her breakthroughs of understanding. She describes the lives of rural people who spend most of their time out of doors, and in particular, the lives of ranchers who spend many hours of every day in all kinds of weather with their animals on the prairie. She talks about how living in the midst of nature affects the way people think and feel, their awareness of the world around them and their relation to it. The book describes cultural differences which are so profound that it is difficult to explain them to those of us who have grown up in suburban and urban environments. And yet she succeeds in this gem of a book to make us crave the opportunity to experience the awareness she describes. It is a pity that so few of us will be able to do so.



2. The author claims that having left behind her urban comforts to live in rural Saskatchewan eventually put her closely in touch with nature. Unfortunately, I was deeply disappointed with her version of 'in touch with nature'. I expected to read the words of someone who respects animals and wilderness. Instead I read about her views on mice as pests, how she and her husband made their living fattening cows before the slaughter, and her twisted comments about hunters having a greater capacity for pain and suffering than the animals they cruelly kill. Exploiting animals has clearly become an inherent part of her livelihood on the farm. She thinks nothing of attending rodeos where animals are wantonly abused, and she has no trouble inflicting pain on cows through branding without anesthetics. She describes environmentalists as mostly "urban" people who are only capable of fighting the corporate world and governments by attempting to put Nature in their own terms. (Huh?) She fails to realize that if us crazy "urban" environmentalist all moved out into the wilderness, there would be no wilderness left! (I for one am proud to live in the city, leaving wild areas free for the animals to roam.) The author also totally fails to acknowledge that an animal-based diet (which she and her husband directly rely on for their livelihood) is behind much of the mass-destruction of wilderness observed in the last century. I suppose I wouldn't have been so shocked reading this book had it not been advertised as "an apprenticeship in nature". I'd sooner see it called "a treatise in exploiting nature".



3. Sharon Butala has written a deeply personal book with universal application. She tells of her journey from a fulfilling but hectic urban life to one of isolation and introspection. She joins her new husband on a cattle ranch in southwest Saskatchewan and leaves behind her university teaching, her graduate studies, her support network of feminist friends, and her teenaged son. In her long, lonely hours of interaction with "Nature," she encounters the mysteries and messages of the natural world and experiences the gradual healing of her own wounds. As I read Butala's book I found myself stopping to write about my own pains, my own healing, and my own mysterious encounters with Nature. It was a journey we took together, and I am stronger for the experience.

4 comments about Neil Young: Reflections in Broken Glass.

1. I just don't get what some of these complaints are about this book. Yeah it's short but how I understand it is it was meant to be short - an introduction to Neil Young. And that was exactly what I was looking for. I've only just started getting into the man (yeah, I know!) and I didn't want to plough through 600 pages, but this really gave me a lot of insights into his character and his life and made me want to read further. Now I'm going to buy Jimmy macDonoughs book. But if you want something to the point and well written I would recommend this



2. After reading this biography, I've no more insight than I would from reading cd liners. Very little insight into the characters in his life; nothing more than say CS&N's large egos. No interviews from on the scene characters, old band mates for ex. This book does not do justice to its subject.



3. I was very excited to get started on this book but about 15 pages into it, it states that Neil was at Woodstock and mentions CSN as "sidekicks". It was very wrong. I was truly dissapointed.



4. I'll lay my cards on the table, I am what is commonly called a Neil Young obsessive so I wouldve been driven to buy the book whatever it was like. So no surprise I have a library full of, how shall I put this politely, mouse food. When I bought Sylvie Simmons' book on Neil Young I was a bit disappointed on first viewing to see that it wasn't very long - I've always loved her writing in MOJO magazine, especially of course when she's written about Neil Young, so I would have loved something the length of the Jimmy McDounough book (which I also bought). But do you know what? She packed more information and real insight into that short space than McDounough did into his huge tome (and actually I liked that too). So I'd say to any Neil Young fan, check Miss Simmons' book out, you won't be disappointed

1 comments about Kootenai Brown: Canada's Unknown Frontiersman.

1. It is written to much like a chronicle rather than a novel. It gives a little different outlook to the American and Canadian West in the mid 1800's. The story also shows Canadians that it's West was not "won" without some violence.....It may spark a little more interest in the Canadian West as soon as we take off our "rose coloured" glasses and look for a little more of the truth.

4 comments about What the Stones Remember: A Life Rediscovered.

1. DEPRESSING BUT HOPEFUL BOOK ABOUT RECOVERY FROM DRUG AND ALCOLHOL ADDICTION AND RETURN TO NORMAL, SOBER LIFE.



2. As a 60 year old male recovering from my own life of addiction, I was somewhat resentful when I first read the reviews for this wonderful book -"how dare someone write my life's story!" was my first thought. Having read the book, however, I am glad that Patrick Lane took the time to write such a moving and poignant story. His skills as a poet echo throughout every chapter of the book. The peace he finds in his garden stands in total contrast to the chaos he put himself through for forty five years. As a member of a 12 Step fellowship who followed almost the exact same path (minus the gardening skills), I have told all the other men in my program that this book will help them find a piece of themselves - and ultimately peace for themselves. Lane's book will be a cornerstone for the foundation I am building in my own recovery.



3. This memoir by one of Canada's best-known poets follows Patrick Lane's first year of recovery from a lifetime of alcoholism, a recovery that unfolds almost entirely in his Vancouver Island garden. The narrative weaves between his present-tense garden and the struggle and brutality that was Lane's past. His poetic voice permeates his storytelling, compelling us to see how the honesty and enchantment of the natural world can save us from our nightmares, our addictions, our terrible losses - if only we will let it.
   
   Originally published a year and a half ago in Canada as There Is a Season: A Memoir in a Garden, the book won the 2005 BC Award for Canadian nonfiction. It is not at all disingenuous for Lane to re-release his memoir under a new title - What the Stones Remember - as there really are two stories folded into the one book. This new title summons the story of Lane's turbulent past as a wayward child, an absentee father, a fledgling poet, a failed husband, a triumphant writer, and ultimately a recovering addict. We follow him deep into his personal history and come to understand, along with him, that it is a miracle he is still alive. This story is rich with personal intrigue, gossip, sentimentality and curiosity. I think it's rare that we look even into our own lives so intimately.
   
   The second story is the simple unfolding of the seasons in his suburban garden, and it mirrors Lane's journey of recovery and self-redemption. His garden is his sanctuary and the midwife of his rebirth as a sane and sober person. He delves into the ecology of his garden with the same studied depth as he digs through his personal history. The carefully documented hours of observation are underscored by a book knowledge of plant and animal classification, behaviour and habitat.
   
   This being said, Lane is first and foremost a poet, and his garden ramblings are never dry or dense. How can they be when he periodically unearths old vodka bottles in the woodpile or under a bush? Or when he stops to watch a hermit thrush dance and mourn beside its dead mate? Or sees his mother, long decades dead, kneeling in the corner under the plum tree?
   
   What the Stones Remember contains equal parts beauty and horror. Patrick Lane describes a past that many people would be inclined to leave buried in the furrows of time. But in bringing forth the dead, the wounded, the lost, this poet carves a path of healing and new life.



4. I can't believe I'm the first reviewer to take a stab at WHAT THE STONES REMEMBER, A LIFE REDISCOVERED. Everyone I know is reading this book! It's especially good for people who are just undergoing recovery, those who will recognize and nod with wonder at the pain Lane describes at just waking up and experiencing the little things, the color of your bedroom walls, the feel of the cotton pillowcase under your cheek, as if for the first time, without the sheltering batting of cocaine or alcohol. He thinks of the American poet Weldon Kees who, fueled by despair and drink jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge in the early 1950s, and of Kees' famous zen riddle, "Whatever it is that a wound remembers/ After the healing ends."
   
   Lane finds the courage to remember the years before he fell into heavy drinking, and what a dreary lot of memories he dredges up! Okay, there were some happy moments too--a sensuous description of lovemaking at age 16 with the girl who would become his first wife--but mostly he grew up in Canada, a misbegotten part of the world with more casual brutality, sexual violence, and abuse against childred than you will find in Ghana or Sierra Leone. For pocket money he sold himself to pedophiles, for a quarter here or a dollar there, allowing them to buy him forbidden ice cream sundaes in depressing town dessert joints. At another time he watches from between parked cars as three white men brutally rape and torture a native Indian woman. For Lane, youth is an unusual place, marked by the absence of his dad during World War II and by the remarkably hard-earned wisdom of a lovely mother, with a caustic wit which, who knows, might have contributed to Lane's own dexterity with words.
   
   I don't like his poetry very much, and it's a shame that he feels he has to quote from it in this book, but as a memoirist he really shines. After getting out of the treatment clinic, he goes to work on his garden, like Candide, but even there memories of different things that happened to him sometimes leap up and assault his senses so that he'd do anything to have just one drink! And sometimes he finds bottles of vodka hidden around the house, and garden too. Malcolm Lowry probably said just as well and earlier to boot everything that Patrick Lane has to say about the sadnesses of Western Canada, the glittering allure of drink, and the repentance of women's arms, but Lowry (author of UNDER THE VOLCANO and one of Lane's literary heroes) has been gone a longtime, the victim of his own alcoholism, and Lane lives on, triumphantly speaking of a new marriage to another of Canada's notable literary figures, a woman who he calls "Lorna" here. Maybe her real name is Lorna too, but in any case you get the idea he's trying to protect the innocent and to lacerate only himself and his people.
   
   I predict a long future for this book if only more people knew about it besides people in recovery.

No comments about The Hanging of Angelique: Canada, Slavery and the Burning of Montreal.

No comments about Walter Gordon and the Rise of Canadian Nationalism.

3 comments about Henry Hudson: Dreams and Obsession: The Tragic Legacy of the New World's Least Understood Explorer.

1. This is a marvelous book about one of the least-known of the great explorers.
   
   As Corey Sandler says, very little is known about Henry Hudson except for the period included within the five years of his four voyages. And much of what is on the record is based on the testimony of the mutineers who were out to save their own necks.
   
   Instead, what the author has done is write a fascinating biography of the PLACES Hudson explored: Svalbard near the north pole, Novaya Zemlya above Russia, the Hudson River, and northern Canada including Hudson Strait, Hudson Bay, and James Bay.
   
   He uses the logs and journals of Hudson and some of his crew to put things in context, and then tells us the stories of some of the most amazing places on the planet.
   
   This is a most unusual book, a great read. And it delivers exactly what it promises: "The Tragic Legacy of the New World's Least Understood Explorer." Every page brought a new perspective on history for me. I highly recommend this book.



2. If you're considering buying this book you should know what you're in for. If you're expecting a biography of Henry Hudson you'll be disappointed. There is very little on Hudson in this book. What you get is a high-level overview of what Hudson is thought to have done and a whole lot of ramble on Corey Sandler's experiences visiting the places Hudson visited.
   
   There's not a whole lot that's known about Hudson. What there is comes from a few brief surviving documents. You get the text from those documents word-for-word with little if any interpretation from the author. That's the real disappointment of this book. If I wanted to read the text of the original documents I'd look them up myself online. What I wanted was expert interpretation and the telling of the story that these documents seem to describe.
   
   Sandler writes from Nantucket, an island he shares with the great historian Nathaniel Philbrick. But where Philbrick excels at taking scant information and turning it into a fascinating story, Sandler dumps the source information on the page and then rambles on about his own experiences in visiting the same places 400 years later. Unfortunately, it's just not very interesting. Thought you'd learn about Hudson's trip up the river that bears his name? You're going to get a little of that and then a whole lot of information on General Electric, PCBs, the environmental movement, and Pete Seeger.
   
   An earlier reviewer characterized this book as being 1/3 history. I'd put it more at 1/10th. By the end of the book you'll know little about Hudson, but all about Sandler's political views, summer camp experiences, family, feelings, travel preferences, and a whole lot of other personal detail. If that's what you're looking to read about, you'll love it. But if you read the title and thought you were instead going to read a biography of Henry Hudson, you'll be disappointed.



3. I am going to give this 5 stars. I'll list why in a second just let me tell you a few of my issues. First Sandler doesn't seem to interview that many people concerning the Clearwater Sloop, the Hudson River Keeper or the many, many other environmental organizations dedicated to keep the Hudson clean. He also brushes over the Storm King case. Sandler does not mention the Indian Point nuclear power plant.
   
   Ok now that's out of the way let me explain a bit why this book is excellent.
   
   First of all its one-third history, one-third travelogue and one-third PSA for keeping all the places Henry Hudson visited clean. The history part is fairly typical in that we don't know much about Hudson; he may have been a bad captain nothing that new or exciting. But overall it's still interesting and a good introduction for those unfamiliar with Hudson.
   
   Then comes the travelogue sections. These are really interesting mostly because of all the unique people the author met on his travels. In reading the book the former director of Clearwater, Andy Mele, comes off as a pretty genuine guy. He's not a crazy tree hugging hippe but just a regular guy that wants to do some good. Most of the environmentalist people come off this way. Some people may not like this but honestly try spending a night near the Hudson...smell that? Yeah, that's the river. I did enjoy Sandle's search for Hudson's monuments and as he mentions in the introduction the most obvious ones are the Hudson River and New York City.
   
   The best parts are the sections that are basically the PSAs about environmentalism. There are numerous digs at GE for dumping PCBs and our society in general. Having lived for four years about 100 yards from the Hudson I must say it's easily one of the greatest sights in the world. But its also one of the biggest dumps too. I think it's terrible that the river is so polluted that you can't go for a swim or eat a fish from there. I had a picnic with my girlfriend one day in Hyde Park right on the river and it was pretty easy to spot all the trash washed up on the shore. Ok enough gushing as Sandler does a much better job explaining this then I do.
   
   In conclusion just read the book. It's excellent.

5 comments about Ambushed: A War Reporter's Life on the Line.

1. Stewart does give a number of experiences in shocking & vivid detail, but I was hoping for more time spent on the experiences of the people in Africa, opposed to HIS experience of Africa and five entire chapters on his own experience of being shot.
   The horrible experiences of the people he sees deserve much more attention than a decadent (an example on page 159) Western reporter who meets an unfortunate experience. On top of this he brings slanted and self-admitted ignorant views on Africa ("The more I discovered, the more I grew angry and disgusted at Africa's recent colonial experience, but I still knew little about African history" page 35).
   Stewart makes a few blanket accusations against the West for all that is wrong in Africa ("Europe demonstrated to Africa that self-serving greed outweighed all else" page 129) with no mention to the equally ruthless Arab slave traders who oppressed Africa before the white man. The book makes Stewart seem more self centered than compassionate. His criticism of the west is best re-directed to his own book: "the West's luxury and comfort comes before the human rights of African citizens" page 130.



2. Ian Stewart's "Ambushed" is a commendable book worthy of use as a introduction to life behind the lines, however it falls short of the actual horrors of war. Stewart's writing is linear, easy to read, and palatable for most readers and the stories he has to tell are courageous. However I am a bit reticent to give his book four or five stars because he, albeit probably unintentionally, doesnt portray the soul-crushing horrors of war as they really are. Having worked and witnessed the atrocities in Sierra Leone, the DRC, and Cambodia myself I sympathize with Ian but I can assure you his book is a trip to Disneyland compared to the actualities of the situation in these war torn countries. I'm glad that his book brings light to the Sierra Leone situation (which fortunatly is being extinguished) to the public. If one wants a more to real life of todays modern and barbaric wars I suggest reading Jon Steele's "War Junkie". This horribly named book was written by an ITN news photographer but he should have been a journalist. Jon has covered twice as many wars as Ian(not that this is a comparision) however no book has ever given me nightmares or brought more emotion to what really happens behind the lines as his book has. Read it with caution, I can still smell the stench of Rwanda's murdered...



3. In this book you get the information you will not see on any TV station. You recieve first hand the experience of a war reporter. The author is very good about telling you the situation before he travels to his destination. He doesn't hold anything back. He makes the story come alive with his descriptions.
   My favorite part of the book was his recovery period. He had to work so hard to find out who he truly was and what he had to overcome was amazing. It opened my eyes to the dangers that reporters face to bring us the news.



4. I read Freetown Ambush published by Penguin Canada. If this is the American version of the same book, I highly recommend it.
   Stewart's description of Ivory Coast and the disintegration of a society is compelling and the descriptions of the inside workings of the AP is very interesting. The touching story of his recovery is short and sweet. His writing style keeps moving and he explains the confusing situation in West Africa very well.



5. When I first picked up Ian Stewart's "Ambushed: A War Reporter's Life on the Line" I had some trepidation. I worried I would finish it with the same feeling I had when I read "All the President's Men." I enjoyed that book, but I had a feeling it was only really compelling to people interested in history, politics or journalism. Not that those topics are boring - they just don't always have much heart or soul.
   With Stewart's book, I was pleasantly suprised. Although a good portion of the book focuses on the political climates he faced as a war correspondent, it also gets to the heart of how war affected people in the places he covered. With relative grace, Stewart manages to balance the bare-bones reality of war with the personal struggles he had covering it as the Associated Press' West Africa bureau chief. He brings real emotion to the book by describing both fighting in the streets and the reactions of children who see it every day.
   But the real heart of the story is apparent in the final third of the book, after Stewart has been shot in the head by rebels in Sierra Leone. As he describes the rehabilitation process following his injury it becomes more and more evident what war reporters really face. It's really compelling to analyze, along with Stewart, why those journalists do what they do and whether it is worth the sacrifice.
   In the simplest terms, the book is interesting because it tells one person's story in a way that most people, not just journalists or history and politics buffs, can relate to. By showing how Stewart covered war and how he dealt with it personally, "Ambushed" opens a window into war that most of us will never get to experience first-hand.

No comments about As Many Liars: The Story Of The 1995 Manitoba Vote-Splitting Scandal.