Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love by Dani Shapiro

Fifty-four years old, happily married, a teenage son, a successful career--what might it take to create an existential crisis?

For Dani Shapiro, it was finding out that her beloved but deceased father, the parent to whom she'd felt closest, was not her biological father. She was conceived by artificial insemination in a laboratory in Philadelphia after her parents had struggled for years to have a child. A donor's sperm was mixed with her father's, as was the accepted "treatment" at the time. The result was that the donor was her actual father.

She becomes consumed with trying to find out if her parents knew that the "treatment" had given her a different father. Did they lie to her? By this time, both her parents had died. She could remember fragments of conversations with them about her different physical features, about the circumstances of her birth, but they had never hinted in any way that she was not her father's daughter. She questions her father's relatives and his friends to try to learn the truth but they really cannot help her.

But they do. Her family friends and relatives are supportive and loving, and they reiterate the nobility of her father. They do tell her all she needs to know.

Or do they? What does she really want?

For all her researching tenacity, there are huge questions that she avoids, perhaps because she has no personal interest in the answers. We find out nothing about her mother's lineage or extended family, which is apparently still Shapiro's own. That being said, we never learn if Shapiro even attempted to confirm the DNA findings with her mother's living relatives.

Why did she not try different DNA tests? Why is she only interested in her paternal line?

This is a well-written memoir, honest and revealing, but it leaves the reader with much to consider. Being a memoirist, that can be a good thing for Dani Shapiro.

This book is part of the Mississauga Library System's 2020 Raves and Faves collection.
 

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Mudlark: In Search of London's Past Along the River Thames By Lara Maiklem

Have you ever gone looking for things on a beach? You, like me, probably found shells and sand dollars, smooth pebbles, or perhaps some sea glass. Did you ever find a doubloon, a piece of Roman roofing tile or a human tooth? No? Mudlark: In Search of London's Past Along the River Thames by Lara Maiklem puts us both to shame, then.

A "mudlark", as a derogatory term for a rubbish picker who combs the shores of tidal rivers like the Thames in England, is an old occupation.  Mudlarks these days in London must be registered and are expected to notify authorities if they find objects of historical importance or human remains.  Lara Maiklem tells her tales of mudlarking (now it's a verb) all along the tidal Thames, as far west as Teddington, or the Tidal Head, all the way east to the Estuary near the coast where the river meets the North Sea.

There is always much to discover, since the tides are constantly revealing--and burying--the history in the River. Maiklem is interested mostly in human history, and there are thousands of years of it along this stretch. You never know what will be uncovered at the next low tide. The mud hides World War I medals beside wherry tokens from Shakespeare's time, along with a button from a naval uniform from the Napoleonic Wars.  There's no stratification showing the layers of years; it's all revealed in a jumble as the tides decide, much of it crushed, twisted, rusted.

It's a bumpy ride, following Maiklem. She is very knowledgeable and is a good guide, but only up to a point. She is cagey about the "best spots" while talking about royal residences and bits of Roman evidence, as if she doesn't quite want us in her confidence. She wanders geographically as well as historically, in her own life and in London's timeline, which is a challenge for a Canadian not fully versed in British landscapes as well as a reader trying to find context. Like the objects she finds, it can be hard to comprehend how all this fits together.

Maiklem is a poetic writer and she fills her days with the imagined lives of those who lost this belt buckle, that shawl pin, that leather shoe, but tunes out her workplace, her relationships, and her young family. Her life seems as chaotic as her house filled with river bits and bobs that tell only tiny stories but not her own.

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North Korea Journal

I took an exceptional interest in North Korea Journal, Michael Palin's personal travelogue of his thirteen-day trip in April and May 2018. As I have been to the DPRK myself, I am always interested in reading others' travel diaries. I certainly did my research in advance of my nineteen-day trip in 2011, when I read as many travel blogs as I could find. 

I used the same travel company as Palin (Koryo Tours) and recognized the personnel in the photos. North Korea Journal was fortunately packed with bright colour photos on almost every one of its 170 pages. I took three days to savour this book--when it could easily be read in one--because I pored over all the photos, reliving my own time there. When I was in the DPRK, I knew well enough from all that I had read that it was important to obey the rules. Once you established that you could be trusted by the guides who accompany you throughout the entire trip, you may be allowed more freedoms. That certainly happened to me during my trip. I was a model tourist who even impressed some professors with my knowledge of the works of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung. However, since Palin travelled with a camera crew, I sense that he was more restricted than me or my own travel group. 

Tourists do not go to the DPRK without knowing what they're getting into. There are metres of red tape to be cut and tunnels of hoops to jump through before you're allowed into the country. That said, I found that Palin broke protocol by asking the Koreans questions that no respectful visitor would have. He broached topics--such as the fallibility of all leaders--which no Korean could ever answer, and put them in awkward positions of needing to save face. I suppose the journalist in him obligated some sort of gentle consciousness raising but not with a camera crew, notepad out and other colleagues and officials milling around. I have the feeling that some of the restrictions imposed on his team, including the trip to Mt. Paektu, may not have been cancelled "because of the weather" but rather for overstepping his limited boundaries. 

Palin had a sense that he was being played. So did I (and often). An educated traveller to the DPRK knows this, or should be prepared for it. I was able to opt out of one specific event when I was over there because I couldn't stomach the phoniness. My approach ensured everyone saved face, and thus I was enabled--having by then earned the privilege of being a trusted traveller--to spend some time on my own among Pyongyang park visitors. Palin wrote at the end of his journal:

"So why should I feel something's missing? I think it's because I sense that, for all the access we've had here, for all the increasingly warm relations between us and our minders, they've been playing a game with us. We have been indulged, but never fully informed. We have been allowed more sustained access to this cagey country than most broadcasters, but I still feel that we have been subtly manipulated for some greater end."  

In spite of Palin's background, this was not a funny book (for which I am thankful, because I can imagine how such an approach could backfire) yet there was one part at the beginning of the book that had me in stitches. He was looking for a place to sit at the Beijing railway station just prior to leaving for the DPRK. With no place to be found, he and his team had to settle for the massage chairs, that you pay to use:

"Cautiously, I pay my twenty minutes' worth and sit back. It's a weird sensation. Everyone tries to look as if they're simply relaxing, whereas in fact they know and I know that it's like being strapped to a sackful of live badgers."

I noticed one error at the very end, not by Palin but by Neil Ferguson, the director of Palin's travel series. Ferguson wrote that KITC stood for the Korea International Tourism Company, when in fact the abbreviation stands for the Korea International Travel Company. 

Palin ended the book with the same wondrous admission that I had--and that I told everyone, to mouths agape--when I came back from my trip:

"As Pyongyang recedes into the distance, we turn and exchange smiles. Of relief, but also of regret. One thing we all agreed on at our farewell meal last night is that none of us would mind coming back."

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