A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders: Surprising Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps

A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders: Suprising Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps [1] by Jonn Elledge covered some of the world’s border-freak zones, as well as the boring straight lines such as those that separate Canada from the US and the Australian states from each other. The book was divided into three parts, Histories, Legacies and finally Externalities. I learned about what could very well be the first political border in history, that between Upper and Lower Egypt, and their eventual unification. Elledge also covered the Great Wall of China, the borders of Great Britain, the Mason-Dixon Line, the American invasion of Mexico, Schleswig-Holstein, how Britain and France carved up the Middle East, Ulster, the partition of India and the Iron Curtain and the division of Berlin. Those were only about half of the topics covered in the Histories section. I was always glued to the pages as Elledge managed to turn what I might have anticipated as a dry five or six pages into a stimulating read.

Unfortunately there weren’t as many maps as I would have hoped there’d be, a revelation I knew in advance because the beginning of the book had a list of the maps, which totalled only 23, so only half of the chapters had cartographic accompaniment, and even then, the maps were quite small. I used Google Maps to learn more about the places that provided no maps, as well as to see more detail in the places that did have them. As per usual with books on maps, I took plenty of notes to do more research later. Elledge made repeated reference to The Atlas of Unusual Borders, which I also read yet didn’t find very informative. That atlas though did live up to its name and supplied the required maps.

Exploration of empire and colonialism led to the “discoveries” of new places and the carving up of the land amidst the people who already lived there. I liked how Elledge phrased the process from the British point of view:

“The words of British prime minister Lord Salisbury–which, in best British tradition, manage to be amusingly ironic about the terrible thing while also making clear he had no intention of stopping it–sum up the results best: ‘We have been engaged in drawing lines upon maps where no white man’s feet have ever trod; we have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were.'”

The second section in the book, Legacies, is devoted to freakish border zones, enclaves and explanations behind some areas which, on the surface, might seem to have pretty boring borders. The most interesting chapters in this section were on Kaliningrad, Bir Tawil, the Korean DMZ, Baarle-Nassau/Baarle-Hertog, the Canada-US border, Italian and German exclaves within Switzerland, European micronations, Washington, DC, Australia’s states and “Some Accidental Invasions” (which more often than not seem to involve Switzerland marching into Liechtenstein).

The final section was on Externalities, which was devoted to such topics as the history of the Prime Meridian, time zones, the International Date Line, maritime boundaries, landlocked countries, Antarctica and, most interesting, boundaries in the air. Within that chapter I hoped Elledge would write about the rare vertical frontier created by the Stahnsdorfer bridge in Steinstücken, but instead he wrote about international flight paths.

Elledge included numerous footnotes, almost all of which were comic asides and, after reading only a few of them, became annoyingly self-referential. I know that this book was not an academic read but I don’t think Elledge wanted his audience, including captive readers such as myself who love reading about borders, to roll their eyes at yet another annoying footnote.

I enjoyed the final section on further reading, where Elledge went chapter by chapter, revealing the sources he used. I took plenty of notes about future books to look at and read.

[1] The full title page (which is the source that counts when citing a book’s title, not the front cover) commits the embarrassing error by misspelling Surprising as Suprising.

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Don’t Be Canada: How One Country Did Everything Wrong All At Once

I came across Don’t Be Canada: How One Country Did Everything Wrong All At Once by Tristin Hopper from a popular on-line reading list. When I saw the book I was surprised that it was only 97 pages long, supplemented by 29 pages of endnotes. I had no idea who the author was, but I falsely presumed that he must be an American. I was wrong: Tristin Hopper is a Canadian who writes for the National Post.

Hopper covers eight topics such as euthanasia, the legal distribution of drugs to addicts, gender identity, bail and prison sentencing. As a conservative old-school gay I can side with Hopper on most of his points. The author is not a fan of Justin Trudeau and the Liberals. While I myself am (or was), I was often exasperated by what cause Trudeau was going to apologize for next. I was surprised Hopper never mentioned feeling the same way about the steady flow of Trudeau tears. The Liberal policies regarding gender, bail, prison sentencing and health care are major targets of Hopper’s for what Canada is allegedly doing wrong.

The tone is often whiny, and the brevity–in spite of the voluminous endnotes–makes the book come across as one big bitchfest. I agree with Hopper on the sad state of Canadian health care where long waits may lead to patient deaths, but his take on euthanasia is tabloid-level ludicrous, where doctors are left shrugging to their patients who, when faced with the wait of over a year for a vital operation, are offered the choice to do themselves in instead.

Gender identity is covered in the chapters entitled The Transing Canada Highway and A Whiff of the Orwellian. Hopper covers the foolishness of supplying women’s sanitary products in men’s washrooms and the non-binary and transgender hysteria affecting workplaces and schools. Trans activists Jessica Yaniv and Kayla Lemieux are profiled, two femmes fatales whose multiple court cases tested the legal system, often with nuisance cases. Hopper portrayed Lemieux as more of a legal monkey wrench while Yaniv was painted as a simpering nutcase who is never happy being out of the public eye, always demanding Insta-attention for her legal battles.

Hopper supplied two apt quotes in the book’s conclusion. They reflect what happened to our country when we decided to let criminals get instant bail, or when we decided to give drug addicts free fentanyl. Euthanasia as a health option? Putting biological males in women’s prisons? Hopper says we’re going to Hell:

“If I can sum up over what went wrong with Canada over the past decade or so, it’s that the country decided to run absolutely everything on the honour system and didn’t have the imagination to consider why this would be a bad idea.”

and:

“There were vanishingly few safeguards in place, and many Canadians lacked the imagination to conceive that their system was capable of such dysfunction. A national faith that ‘this can’t be happening in Canada’ ended up yielding a whole bunch of ghastly scenarios that were only happening in Canada.”

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The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary

The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary by Sarah Ogilvie was a pleasant read about some of the three thousand people who volunteered their time and effort to help create the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Fifteen years ago I read another book about the making of the OED, The Professor and the Madman, yet that book only profiled two people: one of the dictionary’s editors, James Murray, and a prolific contributor of words to the dictionary, Dr. William Minor. In Ogilvie’s book, she wrote about over two dozen classes of people, sorted according to letter of the alphabet. Thus the book starts A for Archaeologist and is about Margaret Murray. Chapters can get gruesome, such as C for Cannibal and M for Murderers (where most of the information on Dr. Minor is contained) but the lighter side of dictionary making is also covered in chapters such as D for Dictionary Word Nerds and H for Hopeless Contributors. Ogilvie even has a chapter Q for Queers. I am thankful she used that term instead of the ridiculous initial overload beginning with any permutation of LGBTQ+.

In the middle of the nineteenth century an international callout was made for people to read books, journals and newspapers and submit individual words with citations for possible inclusion into the new dictionary. This grand crowdsourcing effort didn’t seek only participation from academics but all kinds of people without prejudice:

“The response was massive. In order to cope with the volume of post arriving in Oxford, the Royal Mail installed a red pillar box outside Dr Murray’s house at 78 Banbury Road to receive post (it is still there today).”

A quick check at Google Maps does indeed show that pillar box outside the editor’s former home, which at the time the Google photo was taken, shows that the house needs a bit of work, such as a fresh coat of paint on the garage, weed removal from the driveway and a hedge trim.

Ogilvie gave credit where it was due, and did her research to find out more about these word nerds. She took pride in profiling some heretofore unknown women contributors. In the middle of the nineteenth century in England, women were kept out of academia. They could not ascend the ladder of the intelligentsia if universities would not even admit them. The author raised a good point: all people who were shut out of universities for whatever reason could be made to feel worthy and part of an elite circle of academics by contributing to the dictionary. No one on the editorial board had to know if you were a dropout, a junkie or a resident in a lunatic asylum (as those institutions were called then). Many were autodidacts and polyglots. Some were hoarders and obsessives. As long as you submitted entries according to the specified format, you were a welcome (but often unthanked) part of the wide dictionary team. That said, the chapter H for Hopeless Contributors was a riot to read, as Murray recorded the negligible input from some people and their deliquency returning (or sometimes not returning at all) prescribed books for reading assignments.

All too often, and much to the contributors’ disappointment, Murray never credited them for their work. It was a rare mention of thanks in an introduction that anyone could hope for. People were rarely paid yet some of the obsessives contributed tens of thousands of word submissions, and a handful even over one hundred thousand.

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mortal monarchs

mortal monarchs [1] by Suzie Edge tracked the deaths of the past millennium of monarchs who ruled over the British isles. In addition to all of the kings and queens, some others, like the six wives of Henry VIII, were also covered. Chapters were short, with the final page on Elizabeth II being only page 312. The front cover illustration certainly made the subject matter intriguing, as beheadings were not uncommon in the first six centuries of the last millennium for doing away with inconvenient royals. The very first years of royal deaths, though, were more likely as a result of dysentery or battle injury. Thus the same reasons for death, over and over, made the beginning of the book a dull read. With already short chapters telling much the same story, I grew bored, until the monarchs started demanding their rivals or wives have their heads chopped off.

Edge is a doctor who spent part of each chapter analyzing the physiological processes that each royal body underwent at the point of death. So for deaths caused by dysentery, she wrote about a lot of diarrhea. From heart attacks to just plain old age, all were analyzed from the medical point of view. I have a weak stomach for blood and gore and at times I found her descriptions of royal decapitations to be so off-putting I didn’t want to turn the page. Court documents recorded the circumstances of these ordered decapitations, and how successful each blow of the axe was each time the blade struck skin. The author did have a sense of humour, thankfully, and injected amusing asides when writing about kingly autopsies or queenly rivalries that could have come straight out of a soap opera.

During the nineteenth century there was a trend to open the coffins of kings and queens and poke around inside. Edge reported on the states of decay and adipocere for each monarch. Sometimes the contents of these coffins were pilfered for souvenirs and icons.

modern monarchs was a short read told in a pop historical narrative by a doctor who only changed tone when writing about disease and death. In these postmortems Edge opted for a more academic tone. I found that the pace slowed down whenever she used lengthy medical terminology. Scientific terms were always in italics, which are difficult to read in a cursive font.

[1] Of course there’s a footnote. The title is entirely in lowercase on the formal title page and is in lowercase on the header of each page thereafter. The subtitle is not included on the formal title page.

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Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global

 

I heard about Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global by Laura Spinney after listening to a radio interview with the author. Spinney captivated my attention throughout the entire broadcast as she mapped the spread of our common Proto-Indo-European ancestor throughout Eurasia. Scientific advancements such as DNA analysis have enabled linguists to discern with more accuracy the migration patterns of various tribes, and established more precise times when peoples moved about. Thus the timeline of Indo-European evolution can be set in stone in some regards, where we know with certainty which migrations and thus which languages must have entered a certain area first. Archeological discoveries also aid in the ordering of these events. These details were the foundation for the subtitle of this book.

Language nerd that I am, yet I found it hard to get into this book at first. The enthusiasm I felt after listening to Spinney’s radio interview did not translate to my experience with the printed page. While I do read theses and academic texts on language–knowing full well what I’m getting myself into–Proto was not, as I was led to believe, an “accessible” introduction into the greatest-grandparent of our common language families. It was a slow read, which for me meant six days to cover its 325 pages. I am glad Spinney did not write a language history full of exclamation points and pop culture references, yet from the interview and praise on the back cover I expected this to be an easier read, since one of the critics stated that it was “lightly written”. What made it less accessible was its scientific structures, which entailed long sentences that always required me, ever the perspicacious reader, to stop reading once I finally encountered the final period, gather together all the clauses and endnote addenda from each sentence, then piece them together to read through them again in an unbroken free flow of text. That’s just the way I read; I do not stumble through a sentence where I treat each break independently, whether it’s a dependent clause or a footnote interruption. Each interruption is dealt with then the entire sentence is reread as it should be, in one continuous string of information. For those readers who are expecting a “lightly written” history of our language’s common ancestor, they will be disappointed. Proto is closer to an academic read than a transcript of Spinney’s radio interview.

Spinney divided the book into eight chapters where the first two dealt with the origin of Proto-Indo-European and the remaining six with specific Indo-European language branches. I enjoyed the chapter on Tocharian, the easternmost branch of the family, the most. The final chapter dealt with Albanian, which linguists believe must be the last member of a specific branch whose siblings and cousins have all died out.

The author provided maps that showed migrations and the languages each tribe brought and left behind. She hardly touched on non-Indo-European languages, naturally, but did devote a few pages to the Uralic family, which includes Finnish and Hungarian. Modern research now shows that the tribes that eventually settled in Hungary then moved on to Finland originated closer to Siberia than in central Asia as was previously thought.

I was surprised by the end of my read that I barely wrote down any notes to inspire my own further research. The reason could be that Spinney’s research was so thorough that she dealt with any anticipated supplementary questions and explanations in the form of 21 pages of endnotes as well as footnotes. Surely one ought to pick one form of notation over the other, and not use both.

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Bad Gays: A Homosexual History

 

Bad Gays: A Homosexual History by Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller was a brutal read, covering thirteen gay men and one lesbian who either led unexemplary lives, or, as was most often the case, committed some “dastardly deeds” which were swept under the rug of pink history. The authors state:

“Bad Gays is a book about such characters, a book about the gay people in history who do not flatter us, and whom we cannot make into heroes: the liars, the powerful, the criminal, and the successful.”

I found the title to be misleading. I was expecting the book to be full of chapters dedicated to people the likes of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, but he wasn’t mentioned in the book, even in passing. The authors did cover J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn, the only two people I knew before I picked up this book who were both “dastardly” and queer. The others, ranging from Hadrian, Frederick the Great, Lawrence of Arabia, Margaret Mead, Yukio Mishima, Philip Johnson, Ronnie Kray and Pim Fortuyn (whom I had just read about in Why the Dutch Are Different) were names I was already familiar with. I didn’t know, though, that some of them were queer (like Kray and Johnson) and I certainly didn’t know that the latter was an American Nazi, fascist and racist.

Lemmey and Miller however could not capture my interest, even in reporting about the notorious sexual Black Diaries of Roger Casement. Their biographies were bogged down with too much unnecessary detail which I felt only served to pad the pages. I started this book with a feeling that I would like it, as the introduction certainly captured my interest, but I was immediately overcome by a sense of dread once I started the first chapter on Hadrian. As I read each chapter, I hoped that I would see the end each time I turned the page. The authors were occasionally catty and dropped enough F-bombs to keep the work from being a genuine academic read. However it was page after page of minutiae which did not enhance my perception of the subjects as being bad gays. I just wanted to end the book and shove it across the table.

The conclusion contains this paragraph:

“The history of homosexuality is a long history of failure–failure to understand ourselves, failure to understand how we relate to society, and the failures of racism and exclusion. It is also a history of dead ends; of movements like the Uranians or the masculinists, trying to find new ways to express same-sex desire. It is not just an issue of shifting language, from ‘sodomite’ to ‘urning’, from ‘invert’ to ‘queer’: the changing words emerge out of a recognition that what it means to be gay has shifted, and new words are needed to understand it.”

Thankfully Lemmey and Miller did not include the alphabetical mouthful, the password that never ends, the one that usually starts with LGBTQ+. Perhaps they didn’t include it because it isn’t a word. The authors ended their evolution of shifting language with the preferred queer. I am sure that the tongue-tripping initialism will fall out of favour within a decade, as I cannot imagine LGBTTIQQ2SA+ ever catching on. How can it? It is a ridiculous term that fails in its attempt to be all-inclusive.

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Joy Ride: A Bike Odyssey from Alaska to Argentina

 

Joy Ride: A Bike Odyssey from Alaska to Argentina by Kristen Jokinen documented the author and her husband Ville’s two-year bike trek across the Americas from north to south. This was the third cycling memoir that I have read, following Through Siberia by Accident: A Small Slice of Autobiography by Dervla Murphy and Cycling Across the South Atlantic: An Oceanic Odyssey with a Bicycle by Simon Levell. Jokinen kept her book rather short; I raced through its 266 pages and could easily have enjoyed a book twice the length. One reason I found her book such a can’t-put-down read was that the author was so open about her experiences. The reader might find life on the road exposed to the elements to be predictable and boring if all she did was roll her eyes about the rain or the muddy mountain roads she had to climb. What made her memoir different from the others is that Jokinen told everything exactly how it was, holding nothing back, especially when it came to intimate matters. Living next to nature for two years can do this to you. Jokinen told it all: responding to the call of nature when there are no toilet facilities; always feeling horny for her husband (Kristen and Ville must have a wonderful sex life); and dealing with a bladder infection while riding and what that entails with a woman’s anatomy. Jokinen made the bike odyssey more relatable by inserting such intimacies. While most of us will never embark on such a long trek as theirs, the Jokinens still experienced the same pleasures and challenges as those who may have never even ridden a bicycle. Their odyssey could be enjoyed by everyone, not just cycling enthusiasts.

Jokinen also kept my attention by describing the people she met. Throughout the journey, Kristen and Ville met the most generous people, especially in Mexico and Peru. Random encounters on the roadside often led to invitations to dinner and offers to camp on their hosts’ property. People were happy to share what little they had and never accepted anything in return. Jokinen inserted a dig at Trump’s anti-Mexico rhetoric, since she was cycling through the country during the first Trump presidency. She only had the most gracious things to say about Mexico and its people. Many times during their trip through Central America, the Jokinens disguised their nationalities as Canadians or Finns in fear of what an American identity might provoke.

Jokinen recorded several observations and experiences that I found priceless, and I wanted to record them in their entirety instead of summarizing them with a few words. Here are my favourites, told in chronological order.

Heading south of Prince George, British Columbia:

“Since there were multiple, large, lumber mills along this stretch of highway, most of the passing traffic were giant log-loaded semis. If you have been in a car when one of these passed, loaded as high as a two-story building, you know that the vortex nearly blows you off the road. Imagine what it would feel like to be on an itty-bitty bicycle when one of these monsters thundered past about a foot from your body at sixty miles per hour.”

Near Nanaimo, BC:

“We tried to find a place to camp near Nanaimo not realizing until we arrived that it was a sprawling city. We took a few wrong turns off the freeway, down what we assumed were country roads, arriving in thick brush with an abnormal amount of paper and plastic bags and such flittering about. We pitched the tent, cooked some spaghetti, ate, played a mean game of rummy, and went to sleep. In the morning, we discovered the sign we had missed on the way in: Nanaimo Garbage & Recycling. We camped in a real-life garbage dump. Maybe in my next life I will be born a princess who sleeps in castles and rides in chariots, but until then I am a vagabond who lives in a tent, rides a bicycle, and sleeps in garbage dumps.”

Approaching Vancouver, Jokinen had this revelation:

“At the start of the ride, a day in the seat felt like an eternity. I don’t remember the moment I stopped counting the miles, but I know I noticed them less. My internal voice had been silenced. I was able to still my mind. Thoughts would come and go as I passed through ever-changing landscapes. I felt more peaceful, quiet, and calm. The chaos that had existed in my life before the ride felt far away.”

Cycling through Los Angeles:

“Passing through small towns on bicycles had been challenging. When it was sprawling cities, it became a larger brain drain that weighed on our nerves, but when it was a monolithic metropolis, the size of Los Angeles, it was pure hell. After Malibu, according to Google Maps, we would be riding our bikes through the greater Los Angeles area for just under one hundred miles. We needed to endure one hundred miles of continuous urbanization, solid houses, businesses, highways, freeways, pedestrians, drivers, traffic, and chaos before we’d escape at the other end and arrive at Camp Pendleton. My stomach hurt just thinking about it. Navigating through Los Angeles would be a complete nightmare in a car, but on a bicycle it was a death wish.”

Heading towards Puebla, Mexico:

“It had taken over a year, but I had found peace in the quiet places. Being an extrovert who thrived on friends, gatherings, and noise, I was surprised to find that I had grown to crave the quiet. I had traded listening to friends’ stories and opinions for my own thoughts. It felt as if it were the first time I was listening to myself and who I was.
“I realized I was not really listening before, only thinking about what I wanted to say. But with only Ville on the road, I found myself listening to the world opening, living, breathing, growing, and dying around me. I watched time pass with every pedal stroke and inhalation, looking only as far ahead as I could see and rarely looking behind me. Memories flashed into my mind. Before this adventure, I was so busy I didn’t have the opportunity to dive deep. Now, on long stretches of highway, my mind wandered into depths I had not known existed.”

In the Ecuadorian Andes:

“We had lived in a tent, four bags, a bicycle, and $800 a month. We were the epitome of inefficiency at home and yet efficient here in the developing world. That was why the response we received about our adventure varied greatly from people in the U.S. who couldn’t understand how or why someone would choose to do what we were doing to people south of the Mexican border who told us how fortunate we were to experience so much beauty on such a journey.”

Near the end of their journey at the southern end of the Argentine and Chilean mainland:

“But I had never loved anything more than living in a tent and riding on Blue Bullet with Ville. I could do this forever. I wanted to do this forever. I’d never been happier watching the world slowly glide by, my body in a constant state of sweating, climbing, always and forever climbing. I’d grown to love feasting on oatmeal, peeing on the ground, sleeping on an air mattress, washing my clothes in a sink, always having dirt under my fingernails, sleeping in sex motels, and talking with strangers.
“I never wanted to go back to my life before this.”

When they reached the southern end of their journey they were both laughing and crying at the same time. I was so attached to the couple that I too started to tear up. It was a shame Jokinen included no photos as I would have loved to see when they achieved some of their milestones en route, most significantly their arrival at Ushuaia, Argentina, at the end of their odyssey.

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The Last Castle: The Epic Story of Love, Loss, and American Royalty in the Nation’s Largest Home

 

The Last Castle: The Epic Story of Love, Loss, and American Royalty in the Nation’s Largest Home by Denise Kiernan told the fascinating story about Biltmore House, the 175000 ft2 mega-mansion in Asheville, North Carolina. I have long been fascinated by this place, ever since I saw it in a 1970’s edition of the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s largest house. Biltmore was the brainchild of George Washington Vanderbilt. Construction commenced in 1889 and opened (but was not completed) six years later. Some rooms in the mansion, such as the music room, were never completed even decades after.

Kiernan captivated me from page one. Can she ever tell a story! Fifty-five pages of notes and sources documented the author’s drive for meticulous detail. She managed to piece all of these factual tidbits together to tell an engrossing tale of architecture, landscaping and forest management. I never would have thought that a book about the construction of a mansion could be so interesting. Although only 307 pages long with dense solid blocks of text and minimal paragraphs, it took me nine days to get through this, yet I couldn’t put it down. I was often reading it late into the night.

Although some newspaper writers of the time may have thumbed their noses at the audacity of such a private construction, the Vanderbilts were beloved by many for their charitable work and for the gratitude they showed their employees. The infrastructure to create Biltmore House and its surrounding estate had to be developed before a foundation could even be laid, thus the nearby town of Asheville boomed as workers moved in. A spur of the local railway even had to be built to transport all the building materials to Biltmore.

The story did not end once Biltmore was completed (or when most of it was). Kiernan wrote about George Vanderbilt and his family yet spent more time writing about his wife Edith and her extended family. George did not marry until he was 35 (reading between the lines through my pink lenses may have told me why). Edith, from a prominent family herself yet not as rich as the Vanderbilts, seemed surprisingly unimpressed with the Biltmore Estate. After their daughter Cornelia was born, the family spent more time away from Asheville and hobnobbed in New York and throughout Europe. After George died following an appendectomy, Edith took over Biltmore yet didn’t spend much time there, and oversaw its maintenance when she moved to Washington, DC when she remarried eleven years later.

Cornelia Vanderbilt lived a privileged life but did not act like a spoiled child or snooty adult. She was carefree, living a hippie life in the flapper era. Three marriages as well as various changes of name (from Cornelia to Nilcha to Mary) as well as hair colour (she favoured a pink coiffure) marked her extroverted personality for adventure and style. The revelation of her final resting place made my jaw drop: Cornelia Vanderbilt’s ashes are not interred in the Vanderbilt Family Cemetery and Mausoleum on Staten Island, but on another island…South Ronaldsay in the Orkneys! When Cornelia’s widower, William Goodsir, died in 1984, her ashes were taken to his family’s burial plot in St. Peter’s Churchyard on South Ronaldsay.

The upkeep for such an enormous estate cost a fortune, and as rich as the Vanderbilts were, they could not afford to maintain Biltmore to the same degree as they did at the beginning of the twentieth century. Economics changed and fortunes dwindled, so they had to sell off the surrounding lands. The Great Depression took a toll on everyone, the Vanderbilts included, and in order to raise funds the family opened Biltmore to paying guests in 1930. To this day the house is still privately owned and is open to visitors.

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Willie: The Game-Changing Story of the NHL’s First Black Player

Willie: The Game-Changing Story of the NHL’s First Black Player by Willie O’Ree with Michael McKinley was a rapid read that was a pleasure to sit with for hours at a time. O’Ree told his story starting with his ancestor Paris O’Ree, who escaped to Canada via the Underground Railroad in the late eighteenth century. He then devoted a paragraph to each succeeding generation until he arrived at his father. The story flowed like a long interview transcription, and whether it was O’Ree’s storytelling ability or McKinley’s skill at piecing interview bits together–likely both–Willie was a can’t-put-down read.

O’Ree loved to play hockey from a young age, and played on outdoor rinks and then in New Brunswick leagues, gradually making his way up the hockey hierarchy, eventually achieving his goal of playing in the NHL. He played for the Boston Bruins starting in 1958 and remained in the NHL until 1961.

What struck me from the start of the book was O’Ree’s sense of optimism and positivity. He acknowledges that while racist taunts from spectators stung his ears, he never let it bring him down or make him question his position in hockey. He had close bonds with his teammates, and over and over O’Ree said that once he was part of a team, race didn’t matter. They were all in the game and had to work together. His friendship with Bruins left winger Johnny Bucyk is told with such heartfelt fondness it nearly brought tears to my eyes.

O’Ree played professionally until 1979 and then embarked on a new career in security. In 1998 the NHL asked him to come aboard as part of their new diversity task force, in an attempt to broaden the appeal of hockey and make it more inclusive. His work in this field over twenty years saw O’Ree inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2018.

Willie was full of inspirational passages and quotes that I am reproducing below.

“I sometimes wonder whether my life would have been different, or somehow felt different, if I’d grown up watching [Rocket] Richard and other NHLers on television. That is, if I saw what they looked like. I never saw the red, white, and blue of the Habs sweaters, but I also never saw black and white–because it wasn’t there for me to see. All I ever imagined as a kid was the game itself. The question of color was never part of it. It’s interesting to think that the tradition of Hockey Night in Canada on the family radio, which was so much a part of Canadians’ lives back then, allowed me to imagine a version of the game that had a place for a player like me.”

O’Ree has often been called the Jackie Robinson of hockey. What I didn’t know was that O’Ree was also a budding baseball player, and played during the hockey off-season. He had the opportunity to meet Robinson, and wrote of their interaction:

“After the game we gathered in the Dodgers’ dugout and met Robinson himself. He could not have been nicer, asking each of us our name and whether we liked baseball. When my turn came, I told him that I liked baseball a lot but that I liked hockey more. He looked surprised and said that hockey didn’t have any black players. I told him he was looking at one, and that he’d see me make my mark on the game the way he’d made his on baseball.”

While O’Ree was playing baseball in the American south, he experienced the worst taunts from racist ball fans and even other players. Throughout the book O’Ree looked back on his life and the discrimination he had faced, and nothing compared to the epithets thrown at him while playing ball in the southern states. His white teammates had his back when his entire team walked out when a segregated establishment refused him entry:

“The next week we played an exhibition game and I got a couple of hits, but what was new to me were the racial jeers from the white players, both in the camp and on outside teams. I let it go in one ear and out the other, but I’d never experienced anything like that from my hockey player teammates in Canada.”

This book was a cherished read for all the wisdom O’Ree imparts. I learned more about resilience, conviction and confidence from this sports hero. In the rough-and-tumble world of professional hockey, trash talking and “chirping” are part of the game–yet racist jabs aren’t. O’Ree knows the difference:

“Trash talking aims to needle an opponent by casting doubt on his strength or his intelligence or his girlfriend, but within the context of the game. Racism aims to diminish the humanity of a person, period. It’s not about a game, it’s about your life. There’s a huge difference, as anyone who’s ever been racially abused will tell you.”

As we celebrate Black History Month I recommend Willie as a must-read.

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue

 

Len & Cub: A Queer History

 

Len & Cub: A Queer History by Meredith J. Batt and Dusty Green told the story of Leonard Keith and Joseph “Cub” Coates, two New Brunswickers in a same-sex relationship who lived over a hundred years ago. Len (on the right on the book cover) and Cub lived in rural New Brunswick where life as a queer person must not have been easy. One couldn’t live as an out couple a century ago. This may explain why Len and Cub never lived together, as prying eyes in a small town might have made life uncomfortable or even unbearable. Even so, Len’s gay life was discovered and he was banished from his own town. Cub, on the other hand, escaped scrutiny and later married a woman.

I am glad the authors framed the men’s relationship in the context of their time, revealing what gay life was like over a century ago. Before the concepts of queer identity, pride, and the idea of a ranging spectrum of sexual orientations or expressions, men with same-sex desires lived in the closet, surrounded by shameful descriptors and epithets such as pervert and deviant. Even the term homosexual wouldn’t have been in widespread use back then. Gay people lived in secret. Batt and Green made sure the modern reader didn’t paint their relationship with 21st century rainbow hues. They took great care in using the appropriate language to describe the couple, and I am glad to report that the authors weren’t preachy about it, as I know queer authors tend to be when it comes to labelling and identity.

Len was an avid photographer and documented their time together, and the book was filled with photos. When you look at some of these photos, many of which were taken using an automatic timer, you can see the intimacy they shared. There are self portraits of them embracing and holding hands. Both men served in World War One and soldiers were prohibited from carrying cameras, however some pictures were included when both men were in training in Quebec before being shipped overseas.

The authors noticed that Len and Cub are each wearing rings on their left ring fingers. Len is wearing a ring on the book’s front cover, yet Cub’s left hand is covered by Len’s. Could they have formed their own personal bond with the rings? The authors didn’t elaborate how the men might have explained these rings to other people. I am sure that Batt and Green would have been as curious as I was in knowing how Len and Cub might have answered any questions about their rings.

Judging from some of the photos, however, I can’t help but think that surely Len and Cub’s family and friends knew about their relationship. The authors dealt with the possibility that the men lived an open secret which everyone tolerated, if for no other reason than Len came from a prominent family who owned multiple businesses around town. Thus if any customers raised a disapproving voice, they’d soon find themselves at a loss for service. The authors believe that a business rivalry did Len in, where a competitor outed him, the effect of which was so traumatic that he was forced to leave town–and Cub–forever.

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue