It’s not very often I learn something worth shouting about on every page of a non-fiction book, but it sure felt like that when I was reading this one. I didn’t want it to end. I was planning on starting it again as soon as I finished, just to let it all get fixed permanently in my brain.

If you’d like to read a book that pulls no punches when it comes to knocking out popular diet myths, you must immediately hie yourself to the closest bookstore and nab yourself a copy of this book.

I was a vegetarian for 12 years and I can’t say the diet did me any favors. It was during my teens and early twenties when, as a growing boy, I could have really used a decent diet. And I suffered. Boy, did I suffer.

Aside from the intro and outro, the book has three main sections, Moral Vegetarians, Political Vegetarians and Nutritional Vegetarians. In each she decimates the often preposterous and sometimes seemingly sensible ideas people have for not eating meat.

I’m not going to say much more about it. The book is preaching to the converted as few vegetarians – and even fewer vegans – will ever read it simply because of the title. I know it’s partly a record of the author’s personal journey and yes, dispelling myth is a central part of the book. I just happen to feel that the information in it is too valuable not to know – for everyone, especially vegetarians. So I’m kind of saddened that the title will put them off.

Seriously, ignore the title and buy this book, no matter who you are or what you eat. You’ll thank me – and especially Lierre Keith – later.

These days, it’s often thought the opposite of cynicism is naivete, the sort of innocence that can easily be poked fun at. If you aren’t snidely self-aware you’re labelled a rube who isn’t in on the game. The truth is, cynicism is the mask that our idiot youth culture puts on to seem grown-up. There are fully-fleshed worlds of story and song out there that can make a grown man cry without a single note of snark. And thankfully, Howard Pyle has drawn us a world like that, where the sheer joy and innocence of it can prompt those happy tears.

Seriously, only Dylan Thomas and Richard Llewellyn have painted bittersweet worlds as rich as this. This is literature’s Eden.

Forget every other Robin Hood book and movie. This is the real deal. And Pyle, as one of the greatest illustrators in the past 500 years, has given us not just words, but pictures as well, and the best that have ever been drawn of the subject. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read this book. I bought it nearly forty years ago (in a beautiful library binding) and keep picking it up, savoring it, not wanting it to end.

Tired of modern “media” trying to shock you with its cold edginess? These Merry Adventures will show you how the simplest story can get right into your bones and warm you through and through.

This is really not my sort of book – a Marxist, feminist analysis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism – but my wife was so full of praise for it, I couldn’t wait to read it. And it did not disappoint.

First off, the book is written, probably as a thesis, for those who are familiar with the terms of Marxist views of history. Since she’s writing for that in-group, the Preface and the Introduction are almost unreadable for the layman.

The rest of the book though, is a revelation. (Well, except for the rare occasions when she decides to cover the mic and talk directly to the Marxists in the front row to make sure the in-group is still listening.) When my wife was reading it, and exclaiming over certain passages, I thought, okay, I hope I like it as much as she does. And well… I did.

It’s the story of the heretics, the loss of communal land and the witch hunts in Europe as well as North America. These were absolutely eye-popping to read about. (If I wasn’t a feminist before this, I sure am now.) But what really blew me away was the history of manners, of corralling our sexuality and superstitions, funnelling them into the capitalist straitjacket so that the common man’s thoughts and actions could be predictable. Because, hey, not showing up to work because the moon was in a certain phase was not good for profits.

All these years I had thought it was Victorian tastes that had killed Dionysus in our culture. Now I find out that it was capitalists – the church, the state, the wealthy – that basically stomped on women, on reproductive rights and on the average person’s ability to feed themselves without depending on those who could make money from our hunger.

Now I know why my wife is so sensitive to the modern inequalities of women. This crap was deliberately engineered over five hundred years ago. I tell you, after getting a taste of the historical facts, I would pay a lot of money for a book that told this same story from pre-history, from the dawn of cities and agriculture. ‘Cause wow, the stuff I don’t know is still legion.

The Diet Myth by Tim Spector

I bought this book after seeing the author interviewed on David Suzuki’s The Nature of Things, (which Canadians can watch online). Though I knew a little about gut bacteria and the role it plays in our general health, our immune systems and the effect it has on our diet decision-making, the TV program consolidated a lot of my ideas and the book drilled the truths home.

Though the book wasn’t quite as good as I thought it would be, its central idea is so important, I would go so far as to say that no human should have to go about life ignorant of it. It should be taught in schools from an early age, promoted in government nutritional guidelines and play a part in every person’s food choices.

If you are on a diet of any kind, if you are having any sort of intestinal troubles, if you have trouble sleeping, crapping, staying awake, buy this book. I kind of wish the author had taken on the mantle of guru and made some explicit recommendations at the end of the book. But the gist is this:

1. There is good fat and bad fat. The good is very good, the bad is deadly.

2. Lack of fibre is perhaps worse for us than all the sugar and refined carbs we’re packing away.

3. What you eat creates it’s own feedback loop, making you want to eat more of it.

4. The health of your gut bacteria is the foundation upon which your immune system works.

5. Foods that digest quickly (sugars, highly-refined grain products) can kill your gut bacteria.

6. If the best your doctor can do is recommend dieting and exercise, he has not been reading the latest research.

I will be looking for more books on this subject. Acting on its lessons has completely changed how we eat in our house.

Gestalt Therapy by Perls, Hefferline and Goodman

I first read Gestalt Therapy in the early ‘80s and it made a permanent impression on me and set me on a course that changed my life forever. As such, it’s a difficult book for me to talk about, so I’ll keep it short and try not to go rambling off into Lala Land about it’s implications. The book and it’s ideas date from the great postwar surge in the cognitive and behavioral sciences, the 1950s. This is the decade when some of the greatest minds in 20th Century psychology published their seminal works: Erik Erikson, Rollo May, Alfred Kinsey, Carl Rogers, B.F. Skinner, Harry Stack Sullivan, Abraham Maslow, Viktor Frankl.

The book is written as both a treatise and manual, offering both explanation and exercises in gestalt therapy. In a nutshell, the therapy seeks to help everyone, not just those suffering from mental maladies, by a systematic process of increasing awareness. That may seem like quite a lame goal, but if you think about it, a heightened awareness could easily be the reason some people seem to be smarter or more creative than others. For that matter, it could be the reason some people are more compassionate, better listeners, better friends or lovers.

When I started reading it, I did not realise the book contained a ton of simple practical exercises. I’m not big on that kind of book, so I resisted at first. Then I thought, what the hell, let’s give it a go. The benefits were immediate and wonderful, so I continued. By the end of the book, I can honestly say I was transformed, kitted out with a remarkable toolkit that would help me every day of my life thereafter.

I was watching a video the other day (Judson Brewer’s “A Simple Way to Break a Bad Habit”) and was reminded that raising awareness is not just some dumb subjective wank. It had real objectively verifiable benefits.

Let me say though, try and avoid the book “Gestalt Therapy Verbatim” by Frederick Perls. I bought it, mistaking the title for my old fav and regretted it. Though Perls is one of the originators of Gestalt Therapy, he often comes off as a bit of a stoner flake. Thankfully, he is only a coauthor of Gestalt Therapy, so his ‘unique style’, to put it kindly, is confined to a brief author’s note at the beginning of the book.

Buy it, do it. You’ll thank me later.

Life in a Medieval Castle by Joseph Gies and Frances Gies

Though the book’s been around since the ‘70s, I found it in a spanky new edition. Being a writer of traditional fairy tales, I guess you could say it was a professional read. Maybe I’ve read too much on the subject since it came out, for I’m sure it was a ground-breaking work 40 years ago, but I have to admit I didn’t learn a ton of new stuff from it. The historical bits (this king this, and this king that) bored me to tears and after a couple chapters of it I feared the whole book was going to be like that. Thankfully, the detail about medieval daily life I was seeking kicked in and I was amused for the rest of the book. If you know nothing about the subject, it’s a good place to start.

Gulp by Mary Roach

If you like non-fiction and have never read Mary Roach, run, don’t walk to the nearest bookstore and buy yourself an armload. Glancing through it a few weeks after finishing Gulp, I found myself immediately drawn back into her brilliantly lucid style and tongue-in-cheek humour. Seriously, if she chose to write about poop or corpses or vomit (which she does, a lot), I would still own every book and read them with relish (not that kind of relish).

Gulp is definitely one of her best. It is subtitled, Adventures on the Alimentary Canal. It takes us on a journey through the science of smelling and tasting all the way down to pooping and well, not pooping. The chapter on how Elvis lived and died is by itself worth the price of admission. (Just let me say, that poor friggin guy.)

I will always read Mary Roach’s books. And without question, I will reread them.

I found this a thoroughly unsatisfying book. Somewhere during the first third I started calling him Thoma Spiketty because there did not appear to be any meat or sauce, just endless strands of dry, barely-digested facts. His reason for writing the book was to enlighten the world with hard-won data where there was once a lack of it. Fair enough, but data does not equal meaning and he barely delves into the whys and wherefores with anything resembling insight.

For example, he does not address the source of everyone’s wealth, which is weird because without wealth there would be no book. It’s as if a thirty thousand foot mountain of cash suddenly appeared out of nowhere and all he can talk about is the division of its shares. Sure, that could be interesting. But it’s like an endless bass solo when the rest of the more musically interesting band is standing around waiting to play.

Yeah, yeah, it’s a very particular book for a very particular audience. But tracing the lines of a graph with words in place of a pencil is descriptive, not explanatory. I left thinking, wow, I can read my own damn chart, buddy. I don’t need a hundred pages of you jogging on a treadmill to tell me what I already know from a walk in the woods. When inquiring minds want to know why part of the data is low, telling us it’s because the previous section was higher not only doesn’t help, it’s fucking annoying.

Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, by Alexandra Fuller

Of course, I reached for this because of the cover. Who wouldn’t? That is image is just cuteness overload. And the book is at least as good as the cover. The setting is a million miles from my tame North American world. But I was carried along by the author’s wicked sense of humor and unflinching candidness. Buy it, you’ll love it.

A Book of Giant Stories, compiled by Kathleen Adams and Frances Elizabeth Atchinson (1926)

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve read this book. It isn’t the greatest collection of giant stories in the world, but I own it, so it keeps getting picked up and read. There are a handful of gems in the book and a few duds. But I’m sure when I’m 80 I’ll still be reading it, as, since my edition is from 1954, I am crazed about the smell of the pages.

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, by Elizabeth Kolbert

If you’re thinking, from the title of this book, that it is exclusively a history of the sixth extinction – which lil old planet earth is now experiencing – you would be wrong. It is that in small part. But the bulk of the book is actually the history of the concept of extinction, how we discovered there have been extinction events in the past. It’s a good and enlightening read, just the wrong title.

The Coral Island, by R. M. Ballantyne

I love stories from this era, when the world was not yet fully explored or populated. This example has become a classic for the simple reason that it spends over half the book luxuriating in the idyllic life of our three ship-wrecked heroes – before any bad stuff happens to them. It ain’t Lord of the Flies. It’s much more a naive adventure story along the lines of Treasure Island, but far more tame even though cannibals figure prominently in the tale.

It’s tough to sit back and admire the works of others without doing anything yourself. But once you get far enough into the development of your own works, you begin to have a far better appreciation of what went into their acts of creation. Every day, I post something of others’ that I admire. But it’s rare I get to do the big Ta-Daaa! myself. But today, some of my own work is being released. It’s a collection of seven original fairy tales, all quite traditional, with castles and queens and even a giant or two. It has taken over twenty years to bring this project to fruition and I’m darn proud of it. If you’re the sort of person who likes a good yarn or a heart-warming bedtime story that is at once simple, complex and talks down to no one, this book is for you.

Some early reviews:
The Fairy Tale Site
Spinning Straw Into Gold
Breezes from Wonderland
I Heart Edmonton

Link to the Print edition on Amazon
Link to the eBook edition on Amazon

Hearing about a book on humans, dogs and Neanderthals immediately had my attention. And a subtitle that suggested humans and their dogs pushed Neanderthals into extinction made me doubly interested. But did the author deliver on the promise of her premise? Yes and no.

The first three quarters of the book is about humans invading the lands occupied by the last Neanderthals around 40,000 years ago and how the coincident date of the latter’s demise may be significant. Did we kill them off? Maybe, probably, likely, we don’t know for sure. Ugh, I remember thinking, scientists are so annoying. But what about the dogs?

She doesn’t even mention the word dog until three quarters of the way through the book. That’s sort of like introducing the hero of our story during the climax of the tale. And the rest wasn’t even leading up to it!

Finally, I thought, we get to hear about the human/dog team effort that led to killing of the last Neanderthal. But no. We’re right back to the presentation of evidence for and against and great big bunch of maybes, probablies and likelies. And the things I thought she was going to talk about were left out entirely.

Here are a few missed opportunities:

1. If you’re going to talk about human invasions, and in fact, put the word invasion in your title, you better talk about history and not just archaeology. She went on at length about modern humans leaving Africa and spreading out over a world already inhabited by other early humans and wondered and guessed and hesitantly speculated what it might have been like. But she wasn’t going to talk about Europeans colonialism or their outright invasion of the Americas? Heh?

2. Every day one of my friends on Facebook posts a video of some kind of interspecies play. A kitten playing with a duckling. A gorilla with a cat. A dog with a duck. A goose feeding fish. Humans with dogs? Please, this is no big mystery. We like pets. Critters like pets and critters like playing. And don’t get me started on the ubiquity of symbiosis. But any mention of any of this in the book? Nada.

3. Lastly, this book is strictly archaeology and anthropology. You won’t hear a peep about what humans probably thought of Neanderthals or vice versa. But if you gave a psychologist or a sociologist five seconds to provide likely precedent they’d instantly be talking territoriality, sense of ownership and racism. Let me say, we have a pretty good idea what it was like. The author even goes so far as to say that we don’t know if Neanderthals had whites in their eyes. They could have been dark all the way across. Really? Can you imagine the stories told around the campfire of the monsters in the woods? Trust me, we know what it was like when modern humans met Neanderthals. But you won’t find any of this in the book.

In the end, I was happy to hear about the latest archaeological research on the world of humans 40,000 years ago. It was too bad the author didn’t have a better editor, for she repeats herself and page after page feels like a summary of what we’ve already read twice. Ultimately, I was disappointed in the book as it failed to deliver on the promise of its cover.

Though I finished this book over a month ago, the savage imagery is still with me, clear as day. Going into it, I knew that facing its subject matter head on was going to be life-changing. I had two big questions at the outset: Were these Nazi doctors just normal people who got sucked into Hitler’s gruesome agenda or were they chosen to work in the death camps because of they were known to be morally twisted? And, were the experiments these doctors did on death camp inmates as horrible as I imagined?

Well, I got my answers. To the first question, it was gratifying to discover the author shared my curiosity. And of course, that made sense. We all want to know if those doctors were aberrations, in which case we, the average joes of the world are safe, or whether they started out as normal people like us and circumstances changed them, which would mean, we are all walking time bombs. My second question about just how grim their experiments were, took over two-thirds the book to answer, as if the author were priming us for the severity of the truth. I admit that was necessary, but it sure wasn’t pleasant. It’s a big book and the writer likes his long compound sentences. So the worry I had at the beginning about the true horrors was made far worse, thinking, those experiments must be a thousand times darker than I imagined for him to prime us this much.

In the end, I was surprised by the truth. Hey, I’d spend a lot of years speculating, and for the truth to be outside all of my myriad scenarios came as a shock. The truth was that the doctors were so varied in their behaviours and choices, the only theme running through their experience is the background of death camp horror.

On the one hand, you had doctors who bluntly told the Nazis they would not work in Auschwitz, they would not select people for the gas chamber, they would not do experiments on inmates, and they were strongly opposed to the idea that any doctor should do that work. You would think these defiant physicians would have been sent to the gas chamber themselves, or at the very least punished by their psycho overlords. But no. The Nazis said, no problem, we understand. And that was that.

On the other hand, there were those who not only quickly adapted to life in Auschwitz, they led the charge in dragging the place down to a lower circle of hell. They set the precedent of standing on the platform for the arriving trains and being the ones who ‘selected’ who would be killed and who would go to work in the camp. They were the ones who volunteered to do research to improve the efficiency of the killing apparatus. They were the ones who recruited younger colleagues, who defined their own extreme experiments on inmates and went farther into the dark side than any ordinary Nazi ever would have. Yeah, doctors. Not poor victims, but leaders.

As for the experiments themselves, well, I imagined a great deal of gratuitous violence. Yes, there was that, but it was always associated with ‘selections’ on the platform or treatment of patients before or after the experiments. Things like beatings and neglect, not outlandish experiments per se. That’s not to say that the experiments themselves weren’t bizarre and inhuman. But they were all ostensibly to further the doctor’s own research in the service of the fatherland’s racial purity agenda.

There were many tidbits of historical information that really set me back in my chair. The fact that it was Americans who were the biggest proponents of population control, though it was the Germans who carried out the Americans’ ideas. The fact that the Nazis kept the death camps secret from their own people. The fact that Jewish doctors worked side-by-side with the Nazi doctors in the death camps.

It was a harrowing read, just as I expected. But it was completely worth it. The rigour and breadth of the author’s research is inspiring. Though it was published in the 80s, it still stands as a landmark work, for the author was able to interview many eye-witnesses, both doctors and inmates, who are now dead. Read it and weep for us as a species.

I’ve been rediscovering some of the treasures in my personal library lately. The works of Saki is one of them. I just finished re-reading Saki after a thirty-six year holiday from his nimble-minded wit. In the intervening years I did dabble a bit here and there, reading a story or two to remind myself that the world is bigger than work, babies and mortgages. But now that I have the leisure of setting my own hours, Saki was at the top of my list for re-reading. Actually, that’s not true. Proust was at the top of the list. But he got bumped into the rhubarb for a second time, a hundred pages into Swann’s Way. I have leisure now, not immortality.

Saki, for me, belongs to that world of charming British snoot – full of bon mots, six mile sentences and pre-World War optimism – that was a sort of literary apex from which we’ve been descending for the past hundred years. I didn’t want to finish the book. It ends with a biographical sketch by his sister, and of course counts his death in the trenches of WWI. He and Proust had a lot in common, aunt-wise. And I always want to picture him, a kid of ten, way too smart and mischievous for his own good, having to put up with his grandmother and two squabbling maiden aunts while his father worked overseas.

His stories are like endless appetizers that are so good, you never notice that dinner never arrived. Most are just a couple of pages, easily read just before bed or over breakfast. Many of my favorites are mere conversation pieces where the maiden aunt does the setups and the dandyish nephew the zingers. Some are, plot-wise, works of utter perfection. Every word performing a job of both advancing story and painting scenery, with a satisfying, unexpected twist at the end. Very few in the collection are mediocrities, but there are a handful, forgivable by the better ones.

I love me a good turn of phrase. Shaw, Wilde, Chesterton all those over-read writers who could run rings around most of the rest of us, well, Saki is their court jester, the impish brother who always had a prank, a song or a game to liven things up. I’m sure he did all the pip-pip upper-class British nostril wagging that Monty Python skewered so well. But at heart, he was a great writer, a great humorist and one of the biggest hearted human beings that ever lived. Maybe I’ll read him again before I kick the bucket. I may not be immortal, but some books need no readings, others need three.