No comments about Jacques Cartier: Navigating the St. Lawrence River (Library of Explorers and Exploration).

1 comments about The Right Place at the Right Time.

1. "The Right Place At The Right Time" is an excellent professional memoir that has the merit of being both entertaining and informative. From his early days of working as a sub-editor for the Reuters international news service in London, to the pioneering way he later helped to break the mold of network television's pack journalism, Robert MacNeil tells wonderful stories from one of the most interesting periods of the 20th century.

   MacNeil was there when the Belgian Congo was granted its independence and--like many developing African nations unprepared for the end of colonial rule--fell into tribal feuds and warfare. He reported from the front lines of the Cold War in Berlin as the Wall was being built, and was in Cuba during the missile crisis. He was there at the assassination of President Kennedy and (in all probability) even met Lee Harvey Oswald just minutes after the shooting. MacNeil covered the 1964 presidential campaigns of Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson, fought the Nixon Administration to prevent the federal government from interfering with freedom of the press on public television, and ultimately gave up a comfortable job with the BBC to launch what would later become the "MacNeil/Lehrer Report."

   During the most turbulent years of the 1960s, it is clear that MacNeil was haunted by the escalating body count of the Vietnam War, and his disillusion with the conflict in Southeast Asia runs throughout this book like a subtext that puts many of the breaking news events into a sort of special perspective. For a man who has interviewed everyone from Charlie Chaplin to the Ayatollah Khomeini (before the fundamentalist revolution in Iran), it is remarkable how his focus keeps returning to the Vietnam War and what it did to America at home and overseas.

   Accordingly, "The Right Place At The Right Time" is full of colorful, often funny, sometimes heartbreaking, stories about the people touched by events beyond their control. MacNeil has a keen eye for how the broadcasting business can illuminate or distort the facts of a particular case, and he goes to considerable effort not to let his work slip into the cliche of stale formula punditry. For the most part, he succeeds. His criticism of modern television news as being obsessed with style over substance is especially devastating. He demonstrates a respect for the intelligence of his viewers that seems rare among the media today.

   If MacNeil's book has a fault, it is that the author never ventures into the realm of a true autobiography. The man himself is something of a cipher. While it is admirable that he has not indulged in the type of confessional, introspective New Journalism that is so fashionable and trendy among writers now, MacNeil is so reserved about protecting his privacy that he says more about one of his old grade-school teachers than he does about his family. Even Walter Cronkite's recent autobiography told the reader more about his wife and children than MacNeil does at any point in this account. After a while, it tends to deprive him of a human dimension. You learn something of his political leanings (liberal), for example, but he never includes more than a passing reference to any part of his domestic life, and that makes him come across as rather bloodless and remote.

   Nevertheless, that small quibble aside, "The Right Place At The Right Time" is one of those few books that really does have something important to say, and does so with grace and wit to spare. The short chapters fly by quickly. And when you reach the end, you may even realize that MacNeil has not only provided food for thought, but also left you looking at the broadcasting industry in ways that you haven't before.

1 comments about The Cabin: A Search for Personal Sanctuary.

1. I was really excited when The Cabin showed up in my mailbox and started reading it right away. The next few weeks (yes, weeks) of getting through the book became a mission. In general, the story is good with satisfying stories set in the Temagami wilderness area of Ontario, the passion (almost freakish obsession) of a canoeist, and a little coming-of-age story of the author and primary character. But, key geographic locations within the stories become muddied with inexact detail or a lack of explanation. Unless you are personally very familiar with the territory, you become lost quickly. The author spends an inordinate amount of time discussing these locations, rivers, portages, and you find yourself referring to a basic map that has little detail included on the back cover. And it's curious how the author uses an absolute thesaurus full of adjectives and adverbs throughout the book. Keep a dictionary handy while reading this, you'll need it. This particular aspect of the book bothered me most as the spectrum of linguistics the author uses hardly complement the back-to-nature, simplistic and uncomplicated world of the Temagami wilderness. Instead of impressing the reader with his arsenal of unique words (which is what is seems the author is trying to do), it serves as a distracting paradox to the simplicity of the story and really reduces the enjoyment and of the read.

No comments about Harry Johnson: A Life in Economics (Historical Perspectives on Modern Economics).

2 comments about Frontenac: The Courtier Governor.

1. Frontenac: The Courtier Governor is the absorbing and deftly researched biography of Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac (1622-1698), who was appointed governor general of New France in 1672. Though Louis de Buade was popularly credited with making a daunting and ruthless impression on the Iroquois, defying the military power of colonial Britain, and promoting the imperial expansion of France, his biographer W. J. Eccles (Professor of History, University of Toronto) deftly dissects these myths and steadfastly delves into a more sordid picture of the true Frontenac: a man out of his time who strived to hold on to power and status through corruption, favors at court, and the illicit drive for commerce in the West. A closely researched reexamination and interpretation of primary sources, Frontenac is seminal contribution to a colonial era portrait, and a welcome addition to Canadian and North American history and biography collections.



2. This is THE book on the fur trade, Canadian colonial government,
   the Iroquois Wars, and Frontenac himself. It is not a biography of Frontenac, but an engaging history of French Canada. Highly recommended to me by an expert on the subject.

2 comments about Days and Nights in Calcutta (A Ruminator Find).

1. In the first half of this documentary of a family's trip to India, Blaise paints an anti-feminist and harsh perpective of his wife's Indian heritage. At first compassionate, Blaise soon loses his readers with his inattention to plot and chronology. His story jumps from his time with his family in Bombay to Calcutta and the present with almost no transitioning explanation while his use of Indian words unknown to his reader are not clarified.

   If Mukherjee had written this book entirely, readers' interest may not have wandered as far. Bharati's interpretation of their journey is nostalgic and whimsical at the same time, telling of her return to India after a fourteen-year absence. She often visites the idea of what if; for example, what if she'd stayed behind in India and married an Indian? What if she'd led the traditional Indian life?
   I feel a bit sorry for her story being the secondary plot in this otherwise difficult book.




2. This is one of the most unique travel books I've ever read. The first 165 pages are written by Canadian novelist & short story writer Clark Blaise and are followed by a 115 page section by his wife, Bharati Mukherjee, also a novelist & short story writer & Berkeley professor. The book originally appeared in 1975 and documents in two distinct voices a year spent in the company of Mukherjee's family in India, first in Bombay then in Calcutta.
   Blaise and Mukherjee met at a writers workshop in Iowa, married, and lived in Canada with their two children until their house burned down which left them homeless and prompted their journey east. Mukherjee spent her formative years in Calcutta and is returning to a largely familiar world but to Blaise everything is new. The first sixty pages of his narrative take place in Bombay and Blaise is never altogether at home there as they are staying with Mukherjees parents and her father is the uncontested head of the household. Blaise's trips into the city are flights from the congestion of stifling family life, his insights into the nature of Indian family life are in equal parts humorous and informative(the family does not even know the first name of a servant who has lived with them for years, nor do they show any interest in knowing). This view of India from an outsider given an insiders access is just one of many aspects of this book that distinguishes it from mere travel narrative. His initiation into the rituals and customs and (to him)peculiarites of Indian family life make for great reading. But the best section is the sustained amazement and energy of the 10-15 page description of Calcutta(where they have chosen to spend the better part of the year in a mission which caters to scholars) as he rides a rickshaw through its cluttered streets. Over the course of the year Blaise will meet many of Calcutta's elite including its most famous(to the west anyway)citizen, the film maker Satyajit Ray. Calcutta is the major city of Bengal, the eastern most province of India, filled with a proud and cultured people, and Blaise spends many fascinating pages analyzing both its culture and polotics:
   The Bengali has lived with the English longer than any Indian, and he has absorbed him,while keeping his own soul, with astounding ease. -p.122
   Blaise begins with illusions about India but over the course of his year in Calcutta he learns about its culture and people and the contact with this world different in every imaginable way from his own has a profound impact on him, the way he views the west, and the way he views his marriage.
   In counterpoint to Blaise's description of the year is Mukherjee's. She is a westernised Indian who has married outside,and according to her father beneath,her caste and in caste conscious India that is often an unforgivable offense. The Mukherjee girls(Bharati and her sisters)are brilliant and Bharati is beautiful and her novel, The Tigers Daughter, just published to rave reviews, has made her famous in her home country. Her year is marked by equally profound realizations which include increased self awareness of her own very personal way of blending if not bridging the two very distinct cultures of which she is a part:
   My aesthetic, then, must accomadate a decidedly Hindu imagination with an Americanized sense of the craft of fiction. To admit to possessing a Hindu imagination is to admit that my concepts of what constitutes a "story" and of narrative structure are noncausal, non-Western.-p.298
   But perhaps the most fascinating part of her section is her portrait of her former classmates who have stayed in India and married and now make up the elite. These highly educated women are nonetheless stranded in their homes and live cloistered social lives atop an India which has grown restless and intolerant of the wide divisions that separate the rich from the poor. Riots and robbery are always imminent realities. The women Mukherjee observes clothed in silk saris and gold bracelets and diamond earings in their gated community of mansions in the worlds poorest city seem trapped in a world that they know cannot last. They go on as if immune(or wishing to be) from all the realites around them, a social elite with money to burn but drained of contact and significance to the greater India outside their own very high walls.
   
   Rare book by two excellent writers & one that has not gone through too many reprintings so get a copy while you can. I especially like the sturdy(always good for a travel book) '95 Hungry Mind paperback edition with excellent cover art as well as updated prologues and epilogues by the authors.

3 comments about True North.

1. I read some of the previous reviews before getting this and some were positive and some negative...I have to say I was very much pleased with the book, excellent story and tale with local dialogue to add an element of adventure and flair. I just really enjoyed the story and to see the hardships people faced...



2. This book will transcend you to a time and place that makes you feel at peace with nature. Merrick's writing is like poetry in motion. You will wish you could have been there to experience the times when he is at one with the universe. The people and places he is writing about no longer exist, which is the greatest pity of all.



3. A fascinating book! A well written account by a man who traveled extensively in the Canadian North in the 1930s, just as the traditional remoteness that had characterized that world was ending with the introduction of planes and other technologies. Merrick was a keen and sympathetic friend of the North, its history and its Native peoples.

3 comments about Beloved Island: Franklin and Eleanor and the Legacy of Campobello.

1. This is a well-researched and well-written glimpse of one of the most famous and influential couples of the 20th Century. It reads extremely well while casting new light on two already-much studied lives but from an entirely new perspective. Jonas Klein proposes that FDR and Eleanor were in some measure defined by the Campobello experience and makes a credible case for it.

   Before picking up Beloved Island I had just finished reading one more of Stephen AmbroseÕ books on World War II and, quite frankly, had tired a little of the rhythm and predictability in his technique of stringing together many individual Òoral historiesÓ to create a coherent whole. He does it very well, of course, but Jonas Klein does it better. Working mostly from snapshot detail in correspondence, I presume, Klein succeeds in portraying the larger portraits of personality, emotion, relationships, and other intangibles that make figures from history what they really are.

   Though not quite a Òone sittingÓ experience, this little book leads us gently to further thought and deeper understanding about Franklin and Eleanor. ItÕs a good book.




2. Beloved Island: Franklin & Eleanor And The Legacy Of Campobello examines how the Roosevelt summer home on New Brunswick's Campobello Island (a remote Canadian location) had a significant physical and emotional influence on their lives and the events of their day. While acknowledging the Roosevelt's' traditions and background, Jonas Klein presents a fresh perspective on their public trials and triumphs as well as their personal frustrations and private disappointments as showcased by their Campobello residency. It was at Campobello that Franklin was stricken with polio, that Eleanor found peace and refuge from a demanding and unsympathetic world, and that their personal and political relationship as formed in a manner that would serve them both to the end of their lives. Exceptionally well researched, well-written, insightful, informative, and totally engaging biography.



3. I was excited when I first saw this book advertised. Anyone who has studied the Roosevelts knows the fundamental emotional foundation this island provided the family. However, when I began to read the book, I quickly became disgruntled. There was little to no new information, insight or perspective offered. The author seems to mainly cover the same formulaic roads covered before-- early marriage, polio, governor, president, & Eleanor on her own. The only difference was this books focuses on those same paths through the lens of Campobello. The problem, besides offering little new, is this lens is restrictive, rather than encompassing. If you're looking for an introduction to the Roosevelts, this may be a good selection. However, if you have studied this couple with any kind of attention, nothing profound or enlightning is likely to be found here.

No comments about Eldest Son.

5 comments about A Thousand Shall Fall: The True Story of a Canadian Bomber Pilot in World War Two.

1. I was given this book to read from a friend that purchased it in Canada prior to a flight to England. He said I should read it for a selection to our airport book club. I picked it up and lost many nights sleep over this fine book. It is capitavating. Difficult to put it down from page one. This is one read that is worth every penny spent to purchase it. Get to know the group of brave young men that gave their all to defend the freedom that we now enjoy. For the goodness of your sole, get this book and hold the actions of these brave airmen close to your heart. excelant reading.A book you will remember for years. Leo Doiron Airport Manager Flabob Airport, Riverside Ca.



2. Quite simple the best book I have ever read on any subject. Reccomended to all!



3. Quite simply, the finest book I have read covering WW2. Plenty of laughter, plenty of tears, and the burning desire to vividly relive the drama of those days, (and I'm relatively young). Anyone who lived through it will find old memories rekindled by the score



4. Ranks with Miles Tripp's "The Eighth Passenger" as one of the 2 best Bomber Command reminiscences I have read. Perhaps that is due to Peden, like Tripp, becoming a laywer after the war. Peden's sense of humour, honesty, and writing skill combine to make it a winner. Perhaps the humour is the best part, but it is also heart-wrenching and thriling. An absolute winner.



5. A one-of-a-kind story of a Canadian Pilot in Bomber Command in WW2. Peden takes us through his early enlistment process, the trying time of duty in the BCATP, operational training and finally, mission by mission, through his entire tour as a pilot in first, Stirlings, and later, B-17s. His tale is honest and frank, sharing the fears, triumphs and tragedies of his time with that turbulent and costly service. He documents with chilling clarity the loss of each of his friends throughout the war. Murray Peden has written an evocative personal history of this oft-ignored war, one which should rightly stand as a definitive text on this subject for generations to come.