Shadows of the Republic: The Rebirth of Fascism in America and How to Defeat it for Good

Shadows of the Republic: The Rebirth of Fascism in America and How to Defeat it for Good by Omer Aziz is a review of recent American history which led to the state the country is in now. The current administration did not occur in a vacuum and Aziz went back in time to show how the 45th and then the 47th president could have come to power. Aziz maintained throughout the book that fascism in the United States is not a new phenomenon and existed for decades through various movements, yet was always simmering under the surface.

In order to understand how fascism could resurface in the United States, the author reviewed fascism in Europe, with a focus on Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany and how each man came to power. Aziz made this history accessible and the events of one hundred years ago seemed as fresh as the current state of affairs south of the border. Thus the connections between what is happening in Washington and what occurred in Italy and Germany are too close for comfort. He states it succinctly from as soon as page 2:

“In America, collective amnesia precedes collective hallucinations, and now this country lives through an authoritarian nightmare that violates the Constitution, upends centuries of norms, and controls a massive surveillance state that knows everything about us.”

Aziz was not blind to fascism on our own shores, and also looked at fascist, white supremacist and Nazi movements that existed in the US not only over a century ago, but those that lurk among us today. He looked at the origins of fascism and its connection to paganism, a link that I had discovered during my university days studying German history and culture. Fascism lays blame at any number of scapegoats, and can develop as a response to a bad economy, or feelings of disenfranchisement by others such as immigrants, or as a reaction to what we now call a woke agenda. The author looked at propaganda and how it was developed to blanket the masses with fascist ideology.

The latter part of the subtitle, How to Defeat it for Good refers to a 25-point Antifascist Playbook that Aziz lays out in the final chapter. One can actively counter fascism and undemocratic action by following the steps he outlines. A selection from this playbook includes having the courage to speak up; resist passivity; champion the free discussion of ideas; know your history; prosecute extremist organizations; work across the aisle to get big things done; and teach kids kindness.

The author often repeated dates and timelines, reminding his readers when Hitler came to power (in 1933) and that it was eleven years prior to Mussolini (in 1922). Aziz provided 22 pages of endnotes which I referred to after finishing each chapter, versus flipping to after each exponential encounter. Most of my notes were to references I later researched from the endnotes.

Shadows of the Republic is an accessible and intelligent read, bringing the past to life with stories that seem as if they could have actually happened yesterday versus a century ago. History does seem to be repeating itself and Aziz has given us the means to take action and stop it.

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The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World

The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World by Jonathan Freedland is the story of Rudolf Vrba, who along with Alfréd Wetzler, managed to do the unbelievable by escaping from Auschwitz in April 1944.

Freedland starting by writing about the anti-Semitism in Slovakia and the deportation of Jews to places that they believed were resettlement camps. Vrba, seventeen at the time and living under his birth name of Walter Rosenberg, knew that there was a more sinister plan behind the idea of resettling his country’s fellow Jews and devised a plan to flee to England. He was apprehended and then deported to the Majdanek death camp, then after two weeks was moved to Auschwitz.

Vrba was a fit young man and survived the flick-of-a-finger assessment that saw three-quarters of new arrivals sent immediately to the gas chambers. He described the horrors of the camp and his time there, barely surviving on the limited food while being forced to work in the gravel pits. For lack of a better word, Vrba was “promoted” to a position that was easier on the body and worked sorting the suitcases and possessions of the newest arrivals. He used his access to the money and valuables he found to curry favour with the guards. They turned a blind eye while Vrba secretly scoped out the place, all the while planning a way to escape.

The author portrayed Vrba as a master of memory, being able to recall the layout of Auschwitz and every fence and guard post. With his life at stake and no paper or pencil to draw a map, he had to rely on his memory in order to save his life. He memorized the guards’ schedules and knew when and how often they would be in certain areas. Any escape attempt had to be a successful one, for failure meant instant death.

Without the means to record facts and figures, Vrba, because he worked on the ramps which saw the arrivals of trains to Auschwitz, committed to memory the number of cars and people who disembarked. He could tell their country of origin. He could also distinguish from all the identification numbers, seen on tattoos, when they arrived.

Freedland wrote a suspenseful account of Vrba and Wetzler’s escape and their three days of hiding before they could make their breakthrough. While on the run they had to watch every step, as they were now wanted men who put anyone at risk if they tried to seek help. Fortunately some sympathetic people opened their homes and gave them food.

After the escape Vrba and Wetzler set out to tell the world about the horrors of Auschwitz. In a series of independent interviews they laid the foundation for the Vrba-Wetzler Report. Vrba was understandably manic in his urgency to get this information out in order to stop the deportations. He could not comprehend why world governments did not immediately come to the aid of Hungarian Jewry, who were being sent to Auschwitz at that time. Freedland wrote about the state of the war at that particular moment, and how much the American and British governments knew about the genocide, yet Vrba grew increasingly frustrated that no one was heeding his report’s call for help. I can imagine Vrba, knowing that he possessed the knowledge to possibly save countless thousands, running around in circles pulling his hair out, desperate for someone to do something. That is not an inaccurate description of him, for Freedland does paint a picture of a man lashing out over apparent international inaction. Vrba and Wetzler’s efforts were not in vain, for in July of 1944 two hundred thousand Jews from Budapest were saved when the Hungarian government ordered the deportations to stop.

Vrba did not live a happy life after the war. Post-traumatic stress ruined his marriage to his childhood sweetheart, and the author had a strained relationship with his two daughters, the older of whom committed suicide. He spent the rest of his life regretting that more Jews couldn’t be saved. He wasn’t satisfied that his work had saved two hundred thousand; he wanted no more Jews to die once his report was released. He had the statistics committed to memory and knew how many would perish as each new train pulled in to Auschwitz. To delay a day meant the loss of thousands, and he probably felt responsible for not being powerful or influential enough with governments to stop it.

Freedland wrote what might have blown up into a career-ending piece on how the Jewish community shunned Vrba. He wrote about the unthinkable, that Jews themselves didn’t appreciate Vrba because his media appearances were so unflattering. Every interview or TV appearance was filled with accusations against others, blaming them for inaction or complicity. What was worse, Vrba exposed Jews as well as Hungarian Jewish Councils whom he believed were collaborators with Nazi Germany, as the possible reasons that his report was not acted upon. Vrba lived as a pariah among Holocaust survivors:

“Rudolf Vrba refused to conform to what the world expects of a Holocaust survivor.
…
“Rudi knew that he was refusing to fit what he called ‘the survivor clichés manufactured for the taste of a certain type of public’: he would offer no uplifting aphorisms, reassuring his audience that, ultimately, human beings were good. He was unforgiving and he was angry. The result was to make Rudolf Vrba, for the best part of three decades, a peripheral figure even in the small world of Holocaust remembrance in Vancouver.”

The last word in the quotation above indicates that Vrba eventually moved to Canada and settled in Vancouver, and died there in 2006.

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Life on Svalbard: Finding Home on a Remote Island Near the North Pole

 

Life on Svalbard: Finding Home on a Remote Island Near the North Pole by Cecilia Blomdahl was a stunning collection of photos and stories about the author’s life in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago high above the Arctic Circle. Within its 258 pages Blomdahl tracks the sun through the calendar and orders her chapters accordingly. We start off with Polar Night, then move on to Pastel Winter, then Sunny Winter, then we have the midnight sun during Polar Day, and then the return of the setting sun ends the book with Golden Autumn. Whole text does not fill the pages with the exception of reproductions of Blomdahl’s diary entries. For the most part, the photos take precedence and the text is relegated to half a page. The pages were very thick and I always had to ensure I was not turning more than one page at a time. I was glad that the book was printed on matte paper as glossy pages would catch the glare of the light. I need to have a light shining down on each page as I read and would have had to constantly move the rather large book around to take in the beauty of the photos while avoiding the lamp’s glare.

Blomdahl’s photos of the glaciers and of her walks within them left me in awe. Sometimes openings in the ice enabled a person to walk underneath the enormous hulky cover to see what it looked like from the inside of a glacier. It looked organic, like exploring the body during an operation, yet not in red fleshy tones. While living on Svalbard she had numerous stories to tell of hearing mysterious rumbling sounds, and realized that it was caused by the thundering glaciers, sometimes heard when two were pushing against one another. Imagine the sounds of glaciers as they were moving across the North American continent millennia ago. I wonder how loud they would be as they advanced and retreated. While sitting across from the Nansen Glacier, Blomdahl wrote:

“There was a stillness that spread out across the bay, interrupted only by the eerie creaks and cracks of the thousand-year-old glacier ice. It stands as one of nature’s most breathtaking landscapes.”

I spent two days with this beautiful book, which I wouldn’t mind having on my own bookshelves. I know I could have finished it in a single sitting but with such gorgeous photos of the Svalbard landscape, the northern lights, glaciers and her dog Grim, I took my time with it. In spite of my praise I did notice a couple errors. For one, the map Blomdahl provides at the beginning of the book shows the Arctic Circle passing through Iceland and Southampton Island. It does not pass through either island, and is located to the north of each. She also misspelled Philippines as Phillipines. As a reader with a degree of low vision I could not read the text when it was white on yellow, yellow on white, or white on light blue without a viewing aid.

Blomdahl is an avid adventurer and a skilled photographer whose respect for nature will ensure that the Svalbard environment remains pristine. As she explored the archipelago she stressed the need to leave things as they were and to pick up after oneself.

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The Bullet: Stories from the Newfoundland Railway

The Bullet: Stories from the Newfoundland Railway by Robert Hunt was a collection of homey personal reminiscences of the author’s time as a teen working the summers on the Newfoundland Railway in the 1960’s. Hunt came from a family where the men were long-time employees of the railway, which crossed Newfoundland from St. John’s to Port aux Basques. Hunt’s father, brother and uncle all worked various jobs on the rails. Hunt shared not only his own but also his late father’s stories on the railroad.

The title of the book is the nickname used for the train. It was used ironically, as throughout the book Hunt related how slowly the train travelled. It used a narrow gauge which meant that not only was its speed compromised, but that it faced delays when receiving cargo from mainland trains, as the latter could not ride on the island’s tracks and the cargo had to be off- then onloaded. I had to laugh at Hunt’s remark:

“The train was called ‘the Bullet’ or ‘the Caribou’ by all who worked there and by many of the Newfoundlanders who travelled on them. People said that it was named the Bullet by the Americans because it was the slowest train they had ever ridden.”

Prior to every one of Hunt’s shifts he would visit the pharmacy across the street from the train station and pick up some snacks. He befriended the pharmacist who was none other than genuine World War One hero Sgt. Tommy Ricketts. Hunt shared his conversations with Ricketts. He always treated him with respect, calling him Mr. Ricketts and never Tommy, as his father forbade him to. Even as an adult recalling these stories from over a half century ago, Hunt maintains the utmost respect for this war hero, a Victoria Cross recipient.

Hunt wrote about railway history on the island, from the creation of the Reid and Newfoundland Railways to the amalgamation into the Canadian National Railway after Confederation. In addition to his personal stories about washing dishes all day, serving customers and exploring areas he shouldn’t, Hunt wrote chapters on the exemplary service the CNR provided and the kind men he worked with. He also wrote a chapter on the train tragedies of Newfoundland where trains derailed or sometimes collided. Thus in one chapter at least, the railway stories were not always feel-good.

When the Trans-Canada Highway officially opened in 1966 it signalled the imminent end to passenger rail service. Although 1966 was also a Come Home Year, where expat Newfoundlanders were encouraged to come back home to visit, the increase in rail passengers did not help the industry and passenger service ceased in 1969.

Hunt supplemented the book with many personal photos of his own family, plus archive shots of the former railway, its staff and railroad paraphernalia.

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The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore

 

How could I resist the subject matter in The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore by Evan Friss? Bookstores are my favourite places to shop, although I am drawn to secondhand and antiquarian shops over retail outlets. Friss covered both, as well as bookshops on wheels, sidewalk stalls and the mass murderer of all kinds of bricks-and-mortar stores: Amazon. After 312 pages of text, Friss supplied an incredible 67 pages of endnotes. Almost all of these notes provided bibliographic references only and could be ignored. Therefore the heft of the book is thinner than what appears between the covers.

We read about the first American bookstores, and those that were pioneers in their fields (though not necessarily the first) such as stores dealing exclusively with queer content, or black-focussed or feminist bookstores. Friss profiled some of the most beloved and famous bookstore owners, not all (but must) of them a bit quirky, and how each one seemed to live and breathe a life of all things books.

Bookstores have managed to survive amidst changing technologies, and I don’t believe the paper medium for reading is doomed:

“Nineteenth-century booksellers worried that public libraries would destroy them. In the twentieth century, the bogeyman was the radio, then the movies, then TV, then mass-market paperbacks, and then the superstores. In the twenty-first century, ebooks and Amazon have been the existential threats. The fear that the book business is imperiled–near death, even–has always been an industry staple.”

Yet the number of my favourite bookstores continues to shrink. On my latest visit to Helsinki, I wrote about the disappearance of one (Antikvariaatti Korkeavuori) and the downsizing of another (Akateeminen Kirjakauppa). Everything boils down to the bottom line, and as one New York vendor explained:

“Booksellers needed profits, of course, but they didn’t need much profit to keep the doors open. ‘If I wanted to make money, I’d sell herring,’ one Fourth Avenue seller claimed. It was a business and a passion.”

In the 1940’s and 50’s I would have loved browsing amidst the booksellers along New York’s Fourth Avenue, known as Book Row. One of the stores, the Strand Bookstore, is the sole survivor today, yet now located at 828 Broadway.

I liked the profile of bibliophile Burt Britton, a bookseller at the Strand:

“He also invited herds of librarians to browse in person. When they did, he didn’t hesitate to correct their pronunciation of Nabokov’s name–or their taste. ‘It’s just as easy to read something good,’ he would say, replacing the book in their hands with another. He was grumpy and charming. When one customer asked him for a book recently published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, adding, ‘I don’t know the name of it, and it’s got a subtitle, but I don’t know that either,’ Britton let him have it: ‘Jesus Christ! … Get outta here!’ But as the customer walked away, Britton told him exactly where to find it. (FSG had published just one book with a subtitle in the previous week.)”

The Bookshop was a delight to read which I could not put down. How I wished I could travel back in time to visit some of these stores, and I often reminisced about the favourite stores of my past, sorrowfully no longer in business or transformed into establishments I no longer recognize.

Friss employed the nominal lexicalization of the virgule, i.e. slash, throughout the book. It grew annoying after the second example. These examples occurred near the end of the book, when I realized I needed a couple citations:

“Borders began in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as a small used bookshop in 1971. It had grown tremendously by the time Kmart acquired it in 1992, at which point Kmart already owned Waldenbooks, which already owned Brentano’s. Borders-slash-Waldenbooks-slash-Brentano’s-slash-Kmart was a powerhouse.” (p. 237)

and:

“And then there was author-slash-actor-slash-playwright-slash-hiphopper Lin-Manuel Miranda.” (p.298)

In a chapter on the Aryan Book Store, which operated in Los Angeles in 1933, Friss alternated between Adolph Hitler (p. 159) and Adolf (p. 170).

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Dreaming the Karoo: A people called the /Xam

 

Dreaming the Karoo: A people called the /Xam by Julia Blackburn is the author’s account of her time in the karoo region of South Africa. Blackburn conducted her research at the outbreak of the COVID pandemic and her chapters alternated between hiking through the semi-desert visiting the /Xam and their historical sites, and scrambling to find out what was happening back home with the world in a rapid state of lockdown. Ironically I found the chapters about COVID more interesting than those about her field research. Blackburn consulted the resources of linguists Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd from the 1860’s and 1870’s and reproduced Bushman artworks and their photos, and included their quotations on every page. Colonialism decimated the Bushman way of life, forcing the people off their land and their landscape was looted of its flora and fauna. One of the most moving quotations came from a Bushman called Dia!kwain:

“We shall see whether we make those people cry as we do, for they do not seem to know that we are people.”

I remember when in senior kindergarten in East York reading about the quagga. It was from an encyclopedia or large book of animals we had in our classroom. I was sad to discover that the quagga was extinct, and at the time I first read about it, the species had been extinct for only 88 years. This animal which resembled a zebra in the front and a horse in the back was often mentioned in the cited Bushman tales. At the time Bleek and Lloyd were conducting their research, there were still quagga roaming the karoo. The species was made extinct by the late nineteenth century.

What I found particularly interesting is that some of the interviews Bleek and Lloyd conducted were with Bushmen who were confined to the Breakwater prison. Some of these Bushmen, trapped in a new society that made them feel like foreigners in their own land and unable to grasp the laws suddenly imposed upon them, had a special arrangement to leave Breakwater to live with the Bleek and Lloyd team, where they could study them at length. The name of the prison sounded familiar, as I stayed there, now known as the Breakwater Lodge, in 2013 on my first visit to South Africa. My room was a converted prison cell, and perhaps I walked the same halls as ǀAǃkunta and ǁKabbo.

Blackburn fortunately had established good contacts that enabled her to get around South Africa when she was all too often confronted by yet another locked gate. The karoo of today–cordoned off by electric fences into private estates owned by white settlers–stood in sharp contrast to the karoo in the time of ǁKabbo, when he used to roam freely to hunt springbok with poison-tip quartz arrowheads.

COVID took its toll in those early months of 2020 and Blackburn wrote of the friends and colleagues she had lost during that time, which seemed to parallel the losses the Bushmen faced 150-160 years earlier. The alternation of timelines made it seem as if no one was ever safe, as a mysterious virus had the power to kill as mercilessly as the settlers who stormed through the karoo and pushed the Bushmen out.

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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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