February 2007 Bibliographies

“Dem’s Fightin’ Birds”
Larry Frolick
pp. 17-20

Guyana’s exotic bird population is a cause for both celebration and concern. The government of Guyana cheerily promotes birds, from the red-eyed Hoatzin to the mohawk-sporting Guianan Cock-of-the-Rock, as a major tourist attraction. Birds of Guyana, by Balram Singh and Robert Fernandes (Oxford: Macmillan, 2004), is a fine print introduction to Guyana’s wide variety of winged species.

Unfortunately, many of these beautiful birds, including seed-finches, are part of an illegal trade network. Traffic, a wildlife trade-monitoring network, has published the authoritative work on the subject: Perceptions, Conservation and Management of Wild Birds in Trade (Cambridge: Traffic, 1992). There’s a chapter on Guyana, and other primary bird-exporting countries—Argentina, Indonesia, and Senegal—are also discussed individually.

Activist sites addressing the illegal bird trade are easy to find. Many of them refer to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), an international agreement adopted in 1973, currently with 169 signatories, which aims to ensure that international trade of wild animals and plants does not threaten their survival.


“Against the Grain”
Megan Williams
pp. 20-21

If Megan Williams’ field note made your mouth water, head to ochef.com for links to some fabulous couscous recipes. While “Warm-Weather Couscous,” with its combination of summer vegetables, may not be quite right for February in Canada, you could always use it to justify your winter vacation!

Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food (New York: Free Press, 2002), by Felipe Fernández-Armesto, charts the changing role of food in shaping societies. As Fernández-Armesto explains, globalization (partly responsible for phenomena like couscous festivals in Italy) is only the latest of many revolutions that have altered our relationship to food. This is a lucid and enthusiastic text, with enough wit and insight to carry readers through its almost three hundred pages.

Should your curiosity be more specific to Italy, Anna Del Conte’s The Concise Gastronomy of Italy (New York: Pavilion, 2004) combines recipes and cooking tips with cultural history in a colorful package full of photos, diagrams, and maps. Del Conte goes well beyond spaghetti and pizza, introducing readers to the great variety and subtlety of real Italian cooking.


“Arctic Cabaret”
Margo Pfeiff
pp. 21-22

John Bennett and Susan Rowley’s Uqalurait: An Oral History of Nunavut (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004) uses quotes from hundreds of Inuit elders to paint a picture of Inuit culture and history before extensive contact with southerners.

There are plenty of books written about life in the extreme environment of the arctic, but one of the best is probably Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (New York: Vintage Books, 2001). The book, which won a National Book Award in 1986, was based on fifteen trips to the north over a five-year period.

For more on international cab culture, check out Jim Jarmusch’s 1991 film, Night on Earth. As the title suggests, the film takes place on a single night, sketching the relationships between cabbies and their charges on the streets of Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki. Iqaluit, sadly, is not included.


“Gertrude Stein’s Radical Grammar”
Kay Armatage
pp. 26-28

For a gossipy, firsthand account of Stein’s exploits in Paris with Picasso, Hemingway, and company, read The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). The 1933 book, which is neither an autobiography nor by Alice B. Toklas, was written by Stein and tells the story of her life in Paris from the imagined point of view of Toklas, her lifelong partner.

While barreling through France in their Model T, giving lifts to soldiers during World War I, Stein and Toklas befriended a young American infantryman called William Rogers. Years later, Rogers published his account of their thirty year friendship in When This You See Remember Me: Gertrude Stein in Person (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1971, c1948).

For a more academic look at Stein’s writing, try the recent Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises: 1923-1934, by Ulla E. Dydo and William Rice (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2003). The book provides close readings of Stein’s work from “An Elucidation” in 1923 to “Lectures in America” in 1934.

“First on the Hill”
John Fry
pp. 29-31

Ahhh, skiing. It’s not like it used to be, is it? The atmosphere just isn’t the same. The next time you’re wrapped in Gore-Tex under the bubble cap of a high-speed quad chairlift, why not make an effort to evoke the good old days by leading your friends in a round of “She’ll Be Skiing Down the Mountain When She Skis” and other classic songs from David Wyckoff Kemp’s The Skiers’ Song Book (Palo Alto, CA: Pacific Books, 1950)?

You can brush up even more on the history of skiing in Quebec with W. L. Ball’s I Skied the Thirties (Ottawa: Deneau, 1981). Ball provides a first-hand account of the sport’s nascence in the Laurentians plus stories about “Jackrabbit” Johannsen, the Red Birds Ski Club, and thirty pages of plates.

Finally, Corey Ford’s amusing story, “Loads of Fun on Snow and Ski,” was published in the February 16th, 1929 issue of the New Yorker (pp. 20-22). It recounts a trip by Ford and a friend to the Laurentian Lodge in Quebec and offers a colourful take on the early skiing scene—despite Ford and his companion’s never making it onto the hill.

“Once Upon a Country”
Don Gillmor
pp. 32-45

“Beating Mr. Harper,” Gillmor quotes Michael Ignatieff as saying, “means defeating his narrative.” Fair enough. To defeat his narrative, the Liberals will have to understand it; to understand his narrative, it might help to understand its author. After Harper was elected prime minister, William Johnson revised his book, Stephen Harper and the Future of Canada (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2006), for its paperback edition. It is recommended reading for anybody with an interest in Harperology, though the reader shouldn’t expect a red-blooded account of Stephen Harper the man. Instead, Johnson offers a political biography of the twenty-second PM, tracing the evolution of Harper’s thinking through the last twenty years of Canadian politics.

Recent plot twists in the Conservative narrative are traced in Hugh Segal’s The Long Road Back: The Conservative Journey, 1993-2006 (Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 2006). Segal questions whether we, as Canadians, are still committed to the Liberals as a “default position” and examines the path of Canada’s right during their time in the post-Mulroney wilderness. His observations of both sides of the spectrum are astute and informed and provide valuable insight into Canada’s principal conservative actors of the last decade and a half.

As for the Liberals, their efforts to define a narrative are most recently recounted in University of Toronto political scientist Stephen Clarkson’s The Big Red Machine: How the Liberal Party Dominates Canadian Politics (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006). Clarkson is a long-time observer of the Grits, and here he examines their performance in the last nine elections and questions the party’s prospects now that their brand has been tarnished in Quebec.

“Good to Go”
Semi Chellas
pp. 46-52

Compare Chellas’s report on the military’s Journalist Familiarization Course with that of Shannon Wilmot. Her article, “Canadian Forces 101,” was published in the online edition of the Ryerson Review of Journalism in November 2006 and includes several photographs.

Not surprisingly, most analyses of embedding are American. James J. Kim and Christopher Paul provide a reliable survey of the practice in Reporters on the Battlefield: The Embedded Press System in Historical Context (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2004). Embedding in its most recent and publicized form is also covered in Bring ‘Em On: Media and Politics in the Iraq War, edited by Lee Artz and Yahya R. Kamalipour (Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005).

With internet access and some free time, every soldier can be an embedded journalist. Milblogging.com has links to a variety of military blogs, both American and Canadian, domestic and overseas. American journalist Bill Roggio, who served in the US Army and New Jersey National Guard before turning to the pen, writes a blog called The Fourth Rail.


“Separate and Unequal”
Larry Krotz
pp. 54-65

J. R. Miller’s Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996) is the first comprehensive history of Canada’s residential school system. The book stretches from seventeenth-century New France, where the foundations of the modern system were laid, to the 1960s, when the gradual dismantling of the system began. Miller’s history is based on personal interviews and archival research, with a particular emphasis on accounts by residential school survivors.

John Milloy’s A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System—1879 to 1986 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999) covers much of the same terrain as Miller’s book, with a focus on the role of the Department of Indian Affairs. In the course of doing research for the 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, Milloy was given access to government documents that had previously been kept secret, and this research found its way into his condemnation of the residential school system.


“Ringo’s Drum Roll”
David Gilmour
pp. 67-69

David Gilmour’s five novels belie his claim to mediocrity. In A Perfect Night to Go to China (Toronto: Thomas Allen Publishers, 2005), Gilmour tells the story of a father coming to terms with the disappearance of his son. The book won the 2005 Governor General’s Award. Gilmour’s recently reissued first novel, Back on Tuesday (Toronto: McArthur & Co, 2006), is about a failing, miserable writer who kidnaps his daughter and heads to Jamaica for a weekend of binge drinking.

In an interview with Paula E. Kirman, Gilmour touches on much of the same subject matter he writes about in his Walrus memoir: the difficulty of writing with a modest talent, the need to work hard, and what to do when you read the galleys of your latest book and think “Oh, I am screwed, I am really screwed.”


“The Other Side of Darkness”
John Bentley Mays
pp. 70-75

The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001 unleashed a wave of passionate enthusiasm for the form and future of the skyscraper, to which several books bear potent witness.

New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger’s very readable Up From Zero: Politics, Architecture, and the Rebuilding of New York (New York: Random House, 2005) is the definitive account of the political and artistic controversies that swirled over the World Trade Center site after 9/11. Mark Kingwell’s Nearest Thing to Heaven: The Empire State Building and American Dreams (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006) is a spirited, thoughtful portrait of the world’s most famous skyscraper, and a handsome introduction to the philosophical issues raised by building tall.

Terrence Riley and Guy Nordenson’s Tall Buildings (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2003) and the accompanying website are richly illustrated documents of an outstanding exhibition at the Modern that surveyed twenty-five recent tall-building projects and proposals. Architect Eric Höweler’s Skyscraper: Vertical Now (New York: Universe, 2003) covers much the same ground as Tall Buildings, though Höweler has shaped his material into a handy field guide to the various types of contemporary skyscraper designs.

No serious fan of the tall building should be without Johann Eisele and Ellen Kloft’s High-Rise Manual: Typology and Design, Construction, and Technology (Basel and Boston: Birkhäuser, 2003). In clear essays targeting non-specialists, this book lays out the hard, fascinating facts of skyscraper design from geotechnics and structural dynamics to the effects of wind.


“Europe’s Original Sin”
Randy Boyagoda
pp. 76-79

Notable among recent entries in the field of postwar European history is Krushchev’s Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006). Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali have taken advantage of new access to documents from the Politburo and from Soviet intelligence services to paint the most comprehensive portrait yet of the Soviet leadership—of Krushchev and the inner circle of Soviet government and of the way the state functioned in the late ’50s and early ’60s.

New Yorker editor David Remnick served as Moscow correspondent for the Washington Post between 1988 and 1991. His Pulitzer Prize-winning Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (New York: Vintage Books, 1994) is also notable, an exercise in portraiture more than in history. Remnick was stationed in the Soviet capital as the totalitarian state was seized in its death throes, and he interviewed and observed most of the pivotal players in the transformation of the USSR. Remnick’s account of the effects of glasnost and perestroika policies, and the actors who realized them, is remarkable.

Europe Central is just one of many remarkable works by William T. Vollmann. Like Joyce Carol Oates or Robert Pollard, he is so prolific an artist that it’s hard to know where in his catalogue to begin. Expelled From Eden: A William T. Vollmann Reader (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004) excerpts his novels, his journalism, his poetry, and his correspondence to offer a sketch of one of America’s most formidable contemporary authors.

Finally, as Randy Boyagoda points out, Tony Judt and John Lewis Gaddis take different approaches in their assessments of the Cold War. Judt took exception to Gaddis’ work in “A Story Still to be Told,” a lengthy essay published by the New York Review of Books in March 2006. Handbags at twenty paces, gentlemen?