alfabet / alphabet: a memoir of a first language

alfabet / alphabet: a memoir of a first language by Sadiqa de Meijer was the perfect book to start–and finish–while taking the train from Glasgow to London and then flying back home. This pocketbook of 147 pages chronicled, in 26 essays, the author’s reminiscences and experiences as a child and new immigrant to Canada from the Netherlands. The single-word titles of each chapter began with a different letter of the alphabet and were convenient translations of Dutch and English words which also began with the same letter. Examples are kennis / knowledge and liefde / love. For the record, the sticky letters Q and X were for quarantaine / quarantine and xenofobie / xenophobia. I did find the overall connection to some chapter words to be a bit of a stretch.

I could feel the sudden shock and sadness de Meijer experienced when she first arrived in Canada as a young girl. Her group of friends was suddenly gone, and her beloved environment where she could ride her bike across bridges to explore canals was now transformed into a suburban Scarborough landscape where it was too far and dangerous to ride anywhere.

de Meijer revealed that as a native speaker of Dutch, there were feelings and deep emotions so rooted in her upbringing that she could never translate them into English. Thus Dutch is her innate “feeling” language. Yet as a writer now based in Canada, she admits that “I’m doing what millions of others also have to do: making a life in the other tongue, writing and speaking as if to strike new sparks between English and myself.”

The memoir is poetical, which explains why I needed to cross Great Britain, and then the Atlantic, in order to finish it. de Meijer has been a lover of poetry from a young age and she filled the book with her favourite Dutch poems and provided literal calqued translations for some and attempted to find other translators’ efforts to show the diversity in the art of poetry translation. I was thus immediately reminded of Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language. Whenever I encounter poetry the genre demands multiple rereads, so I always spent extra time going over each poem and mapping the calqued Dutch and English words, or looking at the ways each poet decided to translate certain lines.

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Silly Isles

Silly Isles by Eric Campbell covered the author’s visits to sixteen islands or archipelagos. Campbell visited some islands that I dream of going to (the Kurils, Spitsbergen, Greenland and the Falklands), some I have already been to (the Faroes and Iceland) and others that I may have no current interest in seeing, yet made fascinating reading nevertheless (the Spratlys, Zanzibar, Timor-Leste, King George Island in Antarctica and the Republic of China which occupies the island of Taiwan).

The first chapter was to a place I knew well, the Faroe Islands. Campbell was in the islands during grind, the pilot whale hunt, and relayed the importance of this hunt to the islanders. He did not pussyfoot around the opinions of the Faroese towards international whaling commissions or those who are ignorant of Faroese culture.

The most interesting chapter was about the Spratly Islands, a disputed archipelago in the South China Sea which is claimed in part by four countries (the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Vietnam) or in its entirety by one (the mainland part of the Republic of China). I was genuinely surprised to find a chapter on this island group, and that Campbell managed to go there. He sailed to the Spratlys aboard a Filipino supply ship en route to replenish the rusting BRP Sierra Madre, which was deliberately run aground off a reef in order to support the Philippines’ territorial claims to its part of the archipelago. The Sierra Madre has been rusting and falling apart ever since, while keeping a small crew of the Filipino navy aboard its dilapidated hull. Campbell’s ship had to dodge patrols by the Chinese Coast Guard in order to approach it.

Campbell visited Greenland, and reported that its citizens didn’t consider global warming to be a disadvantage to their lifestyle. The melting ice gave them more arable land to engage in agriculture yet I wonder if he was telling the whole story. Wouldn’t the melting of the glaciers and shrinkage of the ice cap have a deleterious effect on hunting, animal habitat and migration? For a population dependent on the ice for its very survival, I’d be worried that a significant melt would do more harm than any increase in arable land could offer. I had to shake my head at one passage, when the author wondered why he couldn’t drive between Greenlandic communities. The island’s agricultural consultant told him:

“All the settlements are like small islands. Even though they’re connected by land there are no roads between them.”

What I found so puzzling was that Campbell discovered this on his fourth day in Greenland. Wouldn’t you notice an absence of roads or road signs by then? And no one told him upon his arrival that the only way to visit other communities was by boat or plane? I did like his observance of the Greenlandic language:

“He began an animated conversation with the Inuit captain in Greenlandic, a language that sounded to me like they were swallowing marbles.”

Campbell held no punches, often calling out countries for their incompetence or naiveté:

“I was planning a shoot in Ecuador and needed a second story to make it cost-effective, so naturally I started researching the Galápagos Islands, which are administered by Ecuador even though they’re 1000 kilometres from South America. I knew about the amazing flora and fauna, but until I looked closer I had no idea of the other feature that made the archipelago unique–the most diverse ecosystem in the world had the most dysfunctional conservation agency on the planet.”

and:

“Fast forward a decade and everything had changed. Iceland had not only come to see itself as a major world player, it had even kick-started the catastrophe known as the GFC, the global financial crisis. Under Davið Oddsson, first as prime minister and then as head of the Central Bank, this remote volcanic island community had embarked on perhaps the dumbest campaign in the history of Stupid. It had decided to become the new Wall Street.”

Campbell did not include a visit to the Scilly Isles in this book, however he did refer to the archipelago a number of times. The book came without a table of contents, which I would have appreciated as well as headers on each page to inform me which chapter I was on. It wasn’t easy to locate passages I had already read, or to find chapters while composing this review.

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The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice, and Courage

The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice, and Courage by Philippe Sands is a legal account of the forced eviction of the citizens of Diego Garcia and the surrounding Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean in 1973. Sands is a lawyer specializing in international law and took an active role in representing the Chagossians’ fight to return home. The subject matter was of great interest to me, and when this book come across the returns desk I knew exactly what the title and subtitle referred to, without having gained any specificity by the postage stamp reproduced on the cover. Although this book was heavy on legal talk and was overrun with names of lawyers and their various related cases, surprisingly for me I did not find it a yawner, and raced through it.

Sands is sympathetic to the plight of the Chagossians and the right of the Mauritian government to reclaim the Chagos archipelago. What a difference in perspective, as when I read African Islands and Enclaves, the author made it sound as if the Mauritian government was complicit in severing these islands from its territory and ceding them back to the UK.

The author covered the international court cases and UN resolutions pertaining to Chagos. We learned about individual judges and their biases. In 2019 the International Court of Justice ruled that Chagos was part of Mauritius, and that the UK must end its occupation, which it found to be illegal. In 2022 Chagossians were finally allowed to visit their islands without a British escort.

So far the US airbase is still located on Diego Garcia, and I don’t ever see the Americans abandoning it. However in late 2022 the British government announced that it would enter into negotiations with Mauritius over the sovereignty of Chagos. Five decades after the illegal expulsion of the Chagossians I hope that those who wish will be allowed finally to return home.

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All the Leaves are Brown: How the Mamas & the Papas Came Together and Broke Apart

 

All the Leaves are Brown: How the Mamas & the Papas Came Together and Broke Apart by Scott G. Shea was a substantial and weighty biography of 373 pages. It was published last year and as a fan of the group I looked forward to reading it. I wrote numerous notes to check YouTube for television appearances by pre-Mamas & the Papas incarnations and to check Discogs for their earliest recordings. Shea established in detail the convoluted paths that led to the formation of the group, starting with a biography of its founder, John Phillips. From the start, John was portrayed as an oversexed drug addict who never cared for his first wife and their two children. He remained a junkie philanderer his entire life. Shea profiled Michelle Phillips next, who by the way is the only member of the Mamas & the Papas whom I have met in person. She steered clear of becoming a drug addict but was always unfaithful, professing her love it seemed to all the men who came into her life, including fellow Papa Denny, former Byrd Gene Clark, their producer Lou Adler, Roman Polanski and other musicians. And all of this under husband John’s nose. She was the muse who provided John with so much of his writing material:

“What he did know was that his world was falling apart before him and he couldn’t do more than sit home and pine away for his wayward bride through songwriting.”

Shea then gave biographies of Denny Doherty and Cass Elliot, the latter of whom was the last to join the group and the one who made them famous.

John may have been the main songwriter and arranger responsible for creating the harmonies that define the Mamas & Papas sound, yet he was jealous and cruel to Cass. I was impressed by the way Shea presented Cass, whose personality and drive for stardom was stronger than John’s taunts to belittle her. Cass had star power and was a natural on television, often serving as the group’s spokesperson in interviews. She was the only one who had a successful solo career after the group’s breakup, which was cut short by her untimely death.

The Mamas & the Papas lived the rock and roll lifestyle, indulging in sex, drugs and alcohol which accelerated their demise. Their record company always seemed to be chasing after them for new material. John was instrumental in organizing the Monterey International Pop Festival in June 1967 and the Mamas & the Papas as main headliners closed the three-day event. However since they were so disorganized with Denny being AWOL and having had no rehearsal time, their closing set was a disappointment. In comparison to the acts who immediately preceded them like the Who, Grateful Dead and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, the Mamas & the Papas seemed on the way out.

Insider revelations are prevalent throughout this work and it was obvious to me that Shea wouldn’t have learned any of them from the people he interviewed. Three of the Mamas and Papas are deceased, and he did not acknowledge Michelle as a source. I concluded fairly early on that, the Mamas and Papas fan that I am, he must have gotten his dirt from other sources, such as the autobiography by John and memoir by Michelle, which both came out in 1986. I could pick out passages that I recalled from Michelle’s California Dreamin’: The True Story of the Mamas and the Papas. To be fair he did cite each of these books in his bibliography.

Unfortunately the text was sullied by sentences with duplicate verbs and run-ons, and some sentences didn’t even make sense. I had to pause and reread sentences to figure out what was going on. Shea could have caught his errors with a simple proofread, as I am sure he meant to write when instead of was as the word before Cass, below:

“The circumstances were incredibly unbelievable, and spirits got even higher was Cass presented them with a vial filled with liquid Sandoz LSD.”

However, to place incredibly next to unbelievable is redundant and elicited an eyeroll. That is just bad writing.

The following sentence was the worst example of the unedited text yet I didn’t bother to record any more in my notes. I still don’t understand what Shea meant:

“After recognizing all the havoc she’d helped sow by looking around and seeing everybody except she and Scott had left the hotel, she groveled her way back into John’s good graces and traveled with him, Peter Pilafian, Abe Somer, Ann Marshall, Scott, and his girlfriend to Paris and on to Belgium.”

Denny’s second wife was named Jeanette yet Shea spelt it Jeannette on page 362 and on the very next line right underneath it, spelt it Jeanette. You can’t not notice this, and it’s sloppy. Just as bad is his misspelling of Denny’s daughter’s name Emberly. Her name does not have an E between the L and Y.

I appreciated the references Shea made to Billboard magazine and I pored over historical issues on-line to find the group’s first trade ads and chart appearances. For example, before “California Dreamin'” hit the Hot 100, it bubbled under for two weeks at #116 (on December 25, 1965) and rose to #103 (on January 1, 1966) before it entered the chart at #99 on January 8. It vaulted to #74 on January 15 and the hitmaking parade began.

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The Volunteers: How Halifax Women Won The Second World War

The Volunteers: How Halifax Women Won The Second World War by Lezlie Lowe told the stories of the countless women who came to the aid of the city and in turn their entire country during WWII. Through Lowe’s extensive research she was able to rescue these stories and give credit to many of these heroic women by naming them and giving them their deserved place in history. She pored over archived photos and local newspapers and proudly put names to those who helped make coffee and hundreds of sandwiches, knitted socks, gave inspirational talks to returning injured soldiers, organized charitable events, or otherwise gave their time to keep the war machine running. Since gender roles were so rigid in the 1940’s these volunteers had to do all of their wartime work in addition to their household and parenting duties. I don’t know how they found the time to do it all.

Thankfully Lowe was able to interview some of these women, who were by the time of publication in their late nineties or even centenarians. I am sure she thanked them and told them of the valuable role they played in their own fight for our freedom, yet when these women were acknowledged for their contributions, Lowe was often met with self-effacement. This book was published in 2022, 77 years after the end of WWII, and our Haligonian heroines were happy to tell the author that they were only trying to do their part and didn’t expect anything from it. It may have been nearly eight decades since the end of the war but their work was not forgotten and Lowe has ensured their names are part of the historical record.

Although this was a story that needed to be told, Lowe sullied the presentation of her research by using a teenage vernacular which, as an oral discourse, did not transfer to the printed page. I understand that she was trying to emphasize certain points by inserting interjectional phrasing to state the eyeroll-obvious, but there is no place in formal literature for passages such as these:

“Nova Scotia’s distaste for those who are not from here–‘come-from-away’ is the common quasi-pejorative–is difficult to explain to, um, those who aren’t from here.”

“Though a little late to the, um, party, in September 1942, Auxiliary Services Director E. A. Deacon requested that one small concert party be organized in each Canadian military district to supply outposts.”

“She had a habit of paying for things herself, and of calling in financial favours from central Canadians. She knew how to get shit done.”

“How many hours a week did I volunteer? No. Sweet. Clue.”

These are but a sample of teenage oral discourse which belittled the achievements of her heroines. Instead of focussing the reader’s attention on the volunteers, I could only shake my head and wonder what got into the mind of Lowe to write like that. Not to mention her numerous pregnant “Uh, yeah.” asides. Please, edit these lexicalizations out completely on the next printing. You can convey the same meaning and tone by using a more formal language that suits the text.

Lowe acknowledges the men and women who fought and gave their lives on the battlefield. Of course, one cannot write a book about the sacrifices volunteer Haligonian women made during the war without paying tribute to those who died for the cause. Those who paid the ultimate price were known to history, and documentation pays tribute to those who served. However the women who stayed at home may never have even found their names on an official volunteer roster, or if such a list existed, it has long been lost. Lowe brings up a valuable point made by Sharon MacDonald, author of Hidden Costs, Hidden Labours: Women in Nova Scotia During Two World Wars:

“So, how to count? ‘Perhaps the sheer enormity of the relief work,’ MacDonald writes, ‘can only be grasped by quantifying it and yet, endless lists of numbers of bandages and quilts and knitted socks have a difficult time competing with lists of battles and dead soldiers.'”

The Volunteers is a thank-you to the countless women who gave their time to help those in need during WWII. We can do our part by reading their stories and learning of their valuable contributions.

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Looks Can Kill: A Doctor’s Journey through Steroids, Addiction and Online Fitness Culture

Looks Can Kill: A Doctor’s Journey through Steroids, Addiction and Online Fitness Culture by Riam Shammaa with Patricia Pearson addressed the dangerous steps men and women are willing to take in order to pursue their ideal fitness goals. Whether in pursuit of a heavily muscled physique for a bodybuilding show or a sinewy and taut body for a bikini competition, men and women are taking drastic measures to achieve the perfect look.

I was glad to read what the bodybuilding and fitness literature has always denied. Shammaa, a doctor with expertise in musculoskeletal and sports medicine, calls out all the competitors who enter these physique competitions as users and abusers of appearance-enhancing drugs (AED). We are not talking merely about performance-enhancing drugs like anabolic steroids, but the entire medicine chest of substances that physique competitors ingest or inject in order to strive for their impression of the perfect look, such as insulin, diuretics, human growth hormone and estrogen blockers.

Shammaa states it plainly: there is no way that anyone can achieve these kinds of physiques naturally. End of. Physique competitors in their quest for bodily perfection must take more and more drugs to offset the deleterious side effects of whatever pills or substances they’re taking. Without medical or pharmacological degrees, physique competitors are learning about these drugs on-line via “bro science” and are dosing themselves. Since they are likely obtaining their drugs illegally, they are taking even more chances with their health regarding what they are injecting or ingesting.

As one who follows the competitive bodybuilding scene I am aware of the winners of the major shows yet I am also aware of the overwhelming number of injuries and deaths that have occurred. If any other professional athletic association recorded so many deaths among its elite competitors, not only of retired champions but also among active members, there would be a tribunal to find out why. The elephant in the room is the pharmacological playground known as appearance-enhancing drugs. Yet nothing is done about it because without the AED, every physique association would be out of business and there would be no fitness industry.

One of the book’s contributors was not afraid to state the brutal truth: the only reason elite bodybuilders and physique competitors have managed to get on stage is solely on account of not having died yet. Those who win the top titles are the luckiest ones who have cheated death (so far). Imagine if anyone had said that about players in the World Series or the Super Bowl.

Shammaa addresses muscle dysmorphia, which refers to the distorted impression of oneself as less muscular than one actually is. He uses other street terms for this disorder, including megarexia, which I had never heard of before, yet did not include bigorexia, which is the most common term, at least in terms of Google hits. The rise of social media and photo sharing has led to the epidemic of perfect lives and perfect bodies, no doubt leading to the quest to be more muscular or leaner than others. Shammaa wrote:

“Bodybuilding and fitness competitions become a kind of breeding ground for muscle dysmorphia, because they hold you to–and indeed expect you to achieve–extremely unrealistic standards of what healthy musculature should look like.”

and:

“Instagram is a powerful platform for reinforcing shame, as are Pornhub and other visual media sites.”

I sped through this book, not only because I was interested in the subject matter but also because of the way it was written. Shammaa discussed some anatomical and metabolic processes in language that made it easy for the layperson to understand. In fact, one remark I made early in my notes is that Shammaa tended to oversimplify things. I wondered who he was writing this book for.

Eating disorder specialist psychiatrist Dr. Leora Pinhas summed it up the best:

“If our aim was health, none of us would look like that.”

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Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries

 

I read Go Ask Alice forty years ago and as a diarist myself I enjoyed peeking into the private world of another teen. My own strong sense of living clean steered me clear of drugs so the diary did not influence me as a moralistic horror story to just say no. Only after I read Alice’s diary did I start doing my own research and discovered that the entire diary was a hoax. I have been interested in the real story behind Go Ask Alice for decades, and was immediately drawn to the new library acquisition Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries by Rick Emerson.

Emerson exposed the truth behind the alleged diary’s real author and while the secret had been out for decades, his exposé revealed more about the background of Beatrice Sparks and her motivation to swindle the public. Emerson painted Sparks as a wannabe author driven to achieve the heights of fame and if she fudged the truth to get there, so what? As long as her “anonymous” works were serving their purpose of educating people about the evils of drug use or Satan worship, then her ends would justify the means:

“Sparks was a walking correction. When she talked about the dead girl, dates and details shifted, almost at random. Alice died in May, but sometimes November. Alice gave Sparks the diary, except when her parents did it. Sparks occasionally mentioned ‘interview tapes’ she’d made with Alice, but nobody ever heard them.”

The publishers, who believed the story that Go Ask Alice was based on a genuine diary Sparks had acquired through her dubious claim as a youth counsellor, thought that the book would have more of an impact if it was marketed without her name on it. Teens would be more likely to buy the book if it presented itself as a work created without the intervention of adults, whether they were editors or mail-order PhD’s (as she was). So her books were bestsellers and are still in print and for the rest of her life Sparks remained ticked off that fame eluded her and no one knew who she was.

The Satanic Panic in the title refers to the second diary Sparks acquired, from a real teen named Alden Barrett who died by suicide. In this case Sparks did borrow Barrett’s actual journal, yet created a faux diary (which was published under the name Jay’s Journal) about his obsession with satanism. Barrett was not a satanist yet Sparks linked his suicide to the occult. Jay’s Journal was a complete fabrication created as a cautionary tale to warn teens and their parents about the evil found in Ouija boards, tarot cards, black magic and so on. Sparks would later write other diaries, all supposedly based upon the youth she counselled in her nonexistent practice, to warn teens of premarital sex and pregnancy, STD’s, and running away from home, among other topics. They all shared the common thread of being diaries she obtained from her clients. That sounds too convenient to be true and critics wondered just how she was able to get her hands on yet another diary–which reads exactly the same as all the others.

Emerson did his research, interviewing members of the Barrett family and uncovering documentation to refute the existence of Alice’s diary, but he did find who could very well be the real-life inspiration for Alice.

Unmask Alice was a rapid read, not only because I was enthralled with the subject matter, but on account of its layout: short chapters and multiple sections within each chapter. Thus there was always time to read a bit extra as I am loathe to start reading a new chapter if I know I will have to stop reading within a few minutes. Emerson explained why he avoided including endnotes within the body of text yet the few that he did include I found to be trivial and in some cases snarky, two reasons which should not warrant the need for them in the first place.

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