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.

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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.

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Lace Up: A History of Skates in Canada

Lace Up: A History of Skates in Canada by Jean-Marie Leduc with Sean Graham and Julie Léger was an informative look back at the evolution of skates and the sports that use them. Leduc, the owner of 350 pairs of skates, ironically cannot skate himself:

“I have always loved to watch skating. Because I have problems with my feet, though, I have never been able to skate. I passed along the one pair of skates I had to my cousin because I could not use them.”

Over the years he has acquired a collection that includes pairs from three thousand years ago made from whale bones and buffalo ribs, as well as more contemporary styles and those who were owned by such skaters as Olympic gold medalist Gaétan Boucher. I wonder how he obtained the final pair that is depicted in his book, a pair of blades from the nineteenth century imprinted with “Marsden Brothers Skate Manufacturers. By Special appointment to Her Majesty & The Royal Family, Sheffield.”

Leduc revealed how slight improvements in skate design helped hockey players, speed skaters and figure skaters perform better. Whether it was by making the skates lighter to wear, curving the blade ever so slightly, or filling in the gap between the blade and sole to prevent pucks from flying through, skate manufacturers were constantly trying to improve their product. I never would have thought that skate anatomy could be so interesting.

Sometimes innovations in skate manufacturing ended up as failed experiments. Punching holes into the blades to reduce their weight never caught on and the idea to split the blade into two, in effect giving each skate two blades with four edges, did not produce the results the manufacturers wanted.

Leduc provides good advice to people who want to learn to skate:

“I have always maintained that if you want to learn how to skate, pick up a pair of long blades, even if they are the sort you have to strap onto your boots. They are so much easier to begin on than short blades. Falling down on long blades is not easy to do–not only are they longer but they have a smaller rocker, which makes balance much easier to maintain. On hockey or figure skates, you can fall to the side or forward or backward. On long skates, you can only fall to the side. And if you start with long blades, moving to short blades is easy.”

Lace Up is filled with photos of old skates, famous skates, paintings and drawings depicting skaters as well as photos of skating paraphernalia such as sharpening machines and advertisements. 

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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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