The Dionnes

I started reading The Dionnes by Ellie Tesher while in the Cape Town departure lounge waiting for my flight to Johannesburg. Since I did nothing but read this book while flying back to Toronto, I almost finished it on board. I have always been attracted to the Dionnes' story yet this is only the first book I have ever read about them. When I read a book I start from the front cover, and I mean it. I am interested in the bibliographic and publishing data and I like to see how the book is catalogued. The first page of cataloguing information credits one of the cover photos to Peter Powell of the Toronto Star. Yet on the first page of the Acknowledgements it says:

"I thank Peter Power of the Star for the powerful photo that helped connect me to the surviving Dionne quintuplets and their story, and that so appropriately graces the book's cover."

So I rolled my eyes at the shoddy editing job even before I got to the official page one. Tesher herself works for the Toronto Star so I wonder how that mistake could have been made.

The Dionnes' story is nothing less than tragic. The quintuplets were removed from their northern Ontario household shortly after their birth and under the pretext of maintaining their fragile health they were isolated from their parents. What may have been a noble yet necessary precaution to protect five premature infants turned into a circuslike freakshow where five toddlers were exhibited at scheduled times in a grotesque human theme park known as Quintland. The girls never knew their own parents or their siblings, and by the time they were reunited as a family the estrangement had already set in. The girls were regarded as pariahs in their own family and Tesher reports that to this day their many siblings shut them out of their lives.

At the time The Dionnes was published in 2000, three of the quintuplets were still living (Annette, Cécile and Yvonne; Yvonne died in 2001) and Tesher was given rare access to them for this biography. The Dionnes usually shun the media but needed Tesher's help as they sought publicity in their threatened lawsuit against the Ontario government for pilfering their trust fund. Tesher exposed how the girls' fund was emptied as it paid for the means of their own blatant exploitation, for it was the quintuplets' own money that funded Quintland, not the government's, even though the government was raking in millions of tourist dollars in the years immediately following the Depression:

"The commercialization had turned the sisters into a flourishing industry instead of five members of a family. And it was all made possible by the unique legal structure the provincial government had set up to exploit the situation."

Legislation was rushed through parliament to give the government some veil of legitimacy behind its money-making exploitation of the Dionnes. The doctor who assisted in their birth, Dr. Alan R. Dafoe, was portrayed as a self-obsessed egotist with a God complex, who wrested the sisters from their parents and put them under his care in a facility specially built for them named not after the Dionnes but after himself: the Dafoe Hospital and Nursery:

"What was really wrong in all of this was the official stamp of approval given to Dafoe's belief that he had more rights as regarded the five girls than did their real father and mother."

Numerous medical and psychological tests were conducted on the Dionnes and it was also their own trust fund money that funded these dubious tests, as well as paid for the doctors and nurses:

"A 1937 scientific paper that [Dr. William E.] Blatz and his associates coauthored in Collected Studies on the Dionne Quintuplets for the University of Toronto openly enthuses that 'for the first time in history five children are growing up in a restricted social atmosphere of multiple contemporary siblings.' In its conclusions, the paper also points out fairly proudly that 'for the past two years they have been on display almost daily.'

"Although Blatz is still revered by some as the father of child psychology in Canada, none of the tests he administered was necessary for the healthy development of the five little girls. The children received no counselling or treatment with regard to their unusual upbringing, or as a result of his findings."

and:

"If anything further was needed to confirm the sisters' feelings that they were part of a sideshow, it was the fact that they were treated as laboratory specimens by scientists, with the government's blessing."

I did not like Tesher's overwrought maudlin tales of woe as she reported how Annette, Cécile and Yvonne were stricken with health problems and couldn't work any longer, or couldn't work at all in the first place. The sisters are portrayed as pathetic figures without any sense of inner strength to triumph over past tragedies. Ironically, it was hard to have any sympathy for these sisters since Tesher made them out as cowardly weaklings afraid to set foot outside their own front door. In spite of this portrayal, by the end of the book they found the resolve to make the Ontario government right its past wrongs against them by awarding them $4 million in compensation. Without a lawsuit, and only through the negotiations between the sisters with their lawyers and the government, they found the strength and confidence to turn down smaller offers, some of them as high as seven figures, until they reached a figure they felt they deserved. The sisters can stand tall knowing that they will live the rest of their lives proudly vindicated, and not as victims of the exploitative Ontario government.

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

Be My Guest

I picked up Be My Guest by Conrad Hilton when I stayed at the Milwaukee Hilton several years ago. Guests of Hilton hotels in addition to finding the standard free soap and shampoo also receive a complimentary copy of Hilton's memoir, originally written in 1957. I started reading Be My Guest while aboard S. A. Agulhas II en route from Cape Town, South Africa to Tristan da Cunha. I finished the book on board and while I wanted to leave it in the ship's library when I had finished it, the lack of Internet on board, both on my way to Tristan as well as coming back, precluded me from posting this review from the ship. Thus I have waited until my return to Cape Town to post this.

Be My Guest was an engaging story that I enjoyed reading each night. It was a can't-put-down book, wherein Hilton documented his family story, often with humorous anecdotes, from the courtship of his parents and his boyhood growing up in New Mexico to his founding of one of the greatest hotel chains worldwide.

Each of Hilton's parents instilled in him a guiding principle that he has followed all of his life. From his mother, Mary Laufersweiler Hilton, he learned the power of prayer and from his father Gus he learned the value of work. In addition to these principles Hilton added his own: that one must never be afraid to dream. And to dream big . And big is exactly how Conrad Hilton dreamt.

Hilton got his first taste of the hotel industry when a currency panic in October 1907 left his father nearly broke. His family soon realized that they had been literally sitting on a moneymaker:

"We had the biggest, ramblingest adobe house in New Mexico directly facing a railroad station on a main line. And we had my mother's cooking. This added up to only one thing--a Hilton Hotel."

Be My Guest had plenty of humorous moments and I can imagine Hilton himself laughing out loud as he recalled some moments from his childhood. I'll bet he had a good time writing (or dictating) his story. Having such a devoutly Catholic mother kept a young Connie always on his toes:

"Almost as much as going to church or playing hooky, I liked going down the road to talk with Charles Hislie, the carpenter, or Carl Jenks, the village blacksmith and dentist. Mr. Jenks shoed horses or pulled teeth, whichever service was required at the moment. My brother Carl, after an extraction, claimed that he used the same instruments for both operations, but I have no first-hand knowledge of that.
"As I seldom had a toothache I loved to hang around Mr. Jenks' emporium and smell the pungent hot smell and listen to the hammer ringing on the anvil. I also liked to hear Mr. Jenks cuss. He was very talented in that direction and to this day I believe he had as extensive a vocabulary as any man I ever met.
"This hero worship was rudely interrupted when an unsuitable word escaped my lips at dinner table. Mother was shocked. Gus paused in carving the roast only long enough to glare at me and say, 'You stay away from the smithy.' From that time I did, except on dental business when I was accompanied by my lady mother."

Mrs. Hilton also features in an amusing story after her son had made his fortune in the hotel business. She could not accustom herself to having others do for her what she had proudly always done herself:

"My mother, I might add, never did modernize her views on tipping. When she lived for some years at the El Paso Hilton, this was a source of some amusement and much conniving on the part of her children. I, myself, would take her twenty or thirty quarters with specific instructions that she was to give one or two to any bellboy, any waiter, anyone, indeed, who gave her special service, depending on the extra amount of trouble it gave him.

"'I'll try, Connie,' she'd say.
"And I would find out from my sister Helen that, as soon as my back was turned, she'd trot down to the cashier and have the quarters converted into dimes, with which she reluctantly rewarded any service she absolutely could not do herself. Ten cents remained all her life the most she could bring herself to tip."

Be My Guest traces Hilton's shift from buying banks to buying hotels. At first he took over older hotels and transformed them according to his vision. The Hilton empire of new hotels was not his immediate intention. Only after his frustration in having to renovate yet another older building did he consider starting to build his next hotel from the ground up.

It was however not a new hotel but the palatial Queen of all hotels, the Waldorf Astoria, that was his prime target for many years. Its prestige as the height of luxurious hotel accommodation and reputation for unparallelled service made it the diamond in the eye of the Big Apple. He dreamt of owning it one day, and this big dream of his would one day become true. Hilton wrote of his many offers and counteroffers, and offered his insights into the skills of negotiation and the honour in keeping your word with a handshake.

The Waldorf Astoria may be the Queen of his "dowager" hotels, yet he still had to revitalize it to meet Hilton standards. However even when confronted with a rather unfortunate reality of hotel ownership, Hilton can still elicit a smile:

"A wire from Carl at the Waldorf pinpointed this vague feeling. 'Fellow in 202 bumped himself off last night. After looking at his room I don't blame him. We have got to fix up those rooms.'
"I somehow doubted that the décor in 202 had driven the poor fellow to suicide. Unfortunately tired people, discouraged people have sought the impersonal solitude of a hotel for their unhappy business since time immemorial."

One of the pleasures of reading Be My Guest were its stories away from the wheeling and dealing and cornerstone laying. I was absorbed not only in the stories of Hilton's boyhood but also in the tales about his wives and children. Hilton's second marriage was to Zsa Zsa Gabor which in retrospect he could see "was doomed before it started". He recounted with heaving exasperation the countless times he tried to curb her spending habits:

"Glamour, I found, is expensive, and Zsa Zsa was glamour raised to the last degree. She also knew more days on which gifts could be given than appear on any holiday calendar. And then, of course, you could always give gifts because it was no special day at all and thereby transform it."

and:

"I have tried to instill sound business principles into my beautiful Circe, but I might as well have practiced on a statue in the park."

Be My Guest , being that it was published in 1957 at the end of the communist red scare of McCarthyism, ends its final chapters with Hilton vowing to fight communism. The anti-communist tone seems like a time warp of a read for today's reader, yet at the time the red menace was seen as a legitimate threat and proud Americans showed their patriotism by publicly fighting against it. To Hilton, his hotels bridged cultures by bringing the peoples of the world together as a united front against communism.

Hilton ends his book by listing his ten ingredients for successful living. His words of wisdom may help others realize their dreams. Herewith are the Hilton top ten:

Find your own particular talent.
Be big.
Be honest.
Live with enthusiasm.
Don't let your possessions possess you.
Don't worry about your problems.
Don't cling to the past.
Look up to people when you can--down to no one.
Assume your full share of responsibility for the world in which you live.
Play consistently and confidently. 

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

Never Say Never: Finding a Life that Fits

I fell in love with Ricki Lake when I first saw her in the John Waters production of "Hairspray" in 1988. I saw that film over and over in Toronto's second-run cinemas and even bought the all-too-brief soundtrack. What endeared me more than her performance was the way she seemed in real life when she appeared on talk shows, especially her initial appearances on "Late Night with David Letterman". I loved how real she was, totally unaffected by fame, and she was in awe of Letterman as of the adoring attention she received from the audience. Close to a quarter century after the original "Hairspray" I still do not believe there is a phony bone in her body. What you see is what you get with Ricki Lake, and her memoir Never Say Never: Finding a Life that Fits (written with Rebecca DiLiberto) is an extension of herself:

"I can't help but be honest all the time, wearing my heart on my sleeve. Even though I've been on this earth for forty-three years, I'm so naive that every time someone I get close to turns out to be two-faced, I'm shocked. Please do not think I'm trying to take any moral high ground here--I wish I were capable of being sneakier, of concealing my motives--but I'm incapable of acting like a convincing phony, and it never ceases to amaze me when people I think I know well turn out to be acting their way through real life.

"I hate the idea of living in a world where everything I say and do is calculated rather than natural. Performing your way through life is exhausting and no fun at all."

Lake shares her life story yet keeps the pre-"Hairspray" tale brief. The book's focus before she was cast as the first Tracy Turnblad was her childhood ordeal of sexual abuse at the hands of a family handyman. Lake believes, as do most psychologists, that overweight girls who were sexually molested learned to view food as protection, as a way of making them deliberately overweight in order to seem unattractive to future abusers. The molester was never caught and Lake's own parents did nothing to comfort her when the truth came out. Her parents hoped everything would go away, yet Lake remains crushed in that she was never given any support from her mother and father.

After enrolling in two performing arts schools, Lake gets her big break when she responds to an audition for a happy fat girl who can dance. She gives credit where credit is due, calling John Waters her "fairy godmother" and saying that she "wouldn't even have a career if it weren't for John". Lake spends several chapters talking about the filming of "Hairspray" and of her loving but unfortunately brief friendship with her on-screen mother, portrayed by Divine. Divine died just days after the movie's premiere.

Lake's next big project was the TV movie "Babycakes". I remember when this movie was being filmed because it was shot in Toronto and the media were all over Lake. I had even hoped to run into her downtown since I was attending the University of Toronto at the time. Lake however errs in the photo captions (if in fact she wrote her own captions) for although she does tell the story about shooting the movie in Toronto, the caption in the photos section reads "With Craig Sheffer, my love interest in Babycakes, on a New York City subway platform."

It was after shooting "Babycakes" that roles for loveable fat girls dried up. Lake could no longer find work in a leading role. Throughout her life Lake battled her weight and when there was no longer good work she decided to reinvent herself in an attempt to remain in show business. She writes:

"My need for personal reinvention had never been this intense. This time, it wasn't about being healthier, or happier, or finding some other sane, emotionally sound reason to lose weight. It was about taking care of myself financially. I knew I needed to get a job, and soon."

I remember seeing Lake's first appearance on "Letterman" after she lost well over half her body weight. When asked what motivated her, Lake replied that she at first lost all the weight to try to attract a guy, but then confided that she really did it because she got so sick and tired of having to rest in order to catch her breath after climbing a flight of stairs. She had thus lost the weight for herself, not for another person. In Never Say Never, Lake tells the background of the guy part of the story:

"It's a teensy bit disingenuous for me to claim that 100 percent of my motivation in finally losing weight was financial. I also did it to get this guy to like me."

The guy though was not interested in Lake because he was gay and in the closet. Lake did not need to diet in order to please a man, and she learned to appreciate her body for herself. When she learned the right motivation to embark upon a drastic weight-loss program, she writes:

"Truth be told, I should really be grateful that Aidan was gay. It was because he wasn't sexually attracted to me that I finally decided to lose weight."

Lake looks at her life's disappointments as learning points and no matter how tragic the circumstances, she finds the lemonade within. Even her third-place finish in "Dancing with the Stars" was a triumph. She looks at herself now, and imagines her former fat self squeezing into some of those dresses and being lifted aloft by another man on the dance floor. That show gave her a confidence boost like no other. With an attitude like this, none of Lake's brain space is used to hold on to negativity or grudges:

"How could I so easily forgive someone so inconsiderate? When I think about what my ex-husband Rob and I had to go through with our divorce--how hard it was--I just think life is too short to hold on to negative feelings."

This is one reason why I love Ricki Lake. We both do not hold grudges. I am all too willing to give people second chances, and to forgive those who have wronged me. Why pollute my mind with negative feelings, and allow poisonous thoughts to live rent-free in my mind? Go Ricki!

In Never Say Never Lake seems to discuss her milestones as a series of rebirths: her new self as a movie star; as a wife; and as a mother and filmmaker. The latter two could be considered one and the same, for Lake used the occasion of the birth of her second son as the starting point behind a campaign for the rights of all women to choose the method of birth best suited for themselves. Instead of looking at pregnant woman as patients and at the birthing process as a clinical procedure, Lake regards childbirth as natural, primal and earthly, an event that should be made with educated choices versus being made to feel like a pawn in the medical establishment, going through the motions at the convenience of doctors and pharmacists. Lake used the birth of her second child in her film "The Business of Being Born", a documentary which analyzes all birth options and supports the right of a woman to have the education to choose the best birth option for her.

Ricki Lake has triumphed in Hollywood, in the dog-eat-dog world of daytime talk shows, and in her battle with remaining thin and being healthy. Ricki has the loves of her life in the form of her two sons, Milo and Owen, and at the time of writing she had just become engaged. (Ricki has since remarried.) Ricki's smile, her giggles and her honesty are traits that made me love her for over twenty years, and I am thankful that she opened up her life with no holds barred to her fans in Never Say Never. She would never consider herself as a role model, but she is, for she is living proof that you can realize your dreams. 

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

Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire

I fancy myself as another Simon Winchester. For not only does he have a passionate interest in dictionaries, as seen in his remarkable story The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, but Winchester is also a geography nut who likes to travel the world to the most unlikely tourist destinations. Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire is Winchester's travel diary written over the three years he spent travelling the world, in his attempt to visit the remaining bits and pieces of the British Empire.

By 1985, though, when  Winchester wrote Outposts, the empire had shrunk to only a handful of inhabited islands plus Hong Kong and Gibraltar. Not counting all the empire's rocks, skerries, uninhabited islands, Pitcairn Island and British Antarctic Territory, Winchester visited all the remaining relics of Her Majesty's empire. He started off with British Indian Ocean Territory, which happens to be the most tragic of all empire stories. The entire population of two thousand was forcibly evacuated from all the BIOT islands in order to convert the territory into a high-security air and naval base. Over five years and often without any advance notice, the citizens were uprooted and resettled, many to Mauritius. I had read about the forced depopulation of BIOT before, and Winchester has written the most personal account from the perspective of a tourist.

I took the greatest interest in the chapter on Tristan da Cunha. His experience there with a local family seemed pleasant, yet after he left the island and wrote about his experiences in the 1985 edition of Outposts, he discovered that there were repercussions. Winchester wrote in the introduction to the 2003 edition (which is the edition I read):

"For what I wrote in this book about the island of Tristan da Cunha I have been banned, and have never landed there since. I have been to the colony's territorial waters a number of times, but the local police have kept me away--the islanders still vexed that I had written about the war-time romance of one of their number, now an elderly (and contentedly married) lady. Whenever I have since visited I have had to content myself with lying offshore in a boat, gazing at the black rocks and the potato fields I liked so well, from a floating vantage point half a mile away." 

His journey to Tristan is unfortunately typical of many travellers: they get so close to the island, but the ocean is so rough that they cannot land. Thank goodness my trip there this autumn is aboard a vessel that has a helicopter on board, ensuring the passengers a landing. Winchester details the ordeal his ship, the St Helena, endured in its attempt to land at Tristan:

"Bows down and shoulders hunched, St Helena rammed her way around the island, which was illuminated by sudden shafts of sunlight, instant rainbows, and over which streamed veils of cloud. We reached the southern edge--a cape where the three-masted barque Italia had been wrecked in 1892, bringing the surnames of Repetto and Lavarello to the island, where they still survive--but the wind refused to calm. In fact, as we pummelled our way further and further around, it became clear that this, unique among all islands I have known, is a place without a lee--there is nowhere to shelter. The gales either blow around the island in some devilish spiral, or else pour as a katabatic torrent up and over the mountain, striking anything below, no matter at what quarter of the compass."

I have long been fascinated by Gibraltar's smallness, where close to thirty thousand people are crammed into less than seven square kilometres. A good portion of this land area is dominated by an uninhabitable rock (uninhabitable for humans, not for Barbary apes). Winchester got the feeling from many that he spoke to that life on the rocky peninsula was claustrophobic, and that living there was like being in a muggy prison. He explained the history of Gibraltar and Great Britain's ongoing dispute with Spain over the territory, and I appreciated his extensive histories in each chapter behind how these areas became colonies, such as the colony-no-longer, Hong Kong.

Upon arriving via a heart-in-throat landing at Hong Kong's Kai Tak Airport, Winchester noted:

"It is a mesmeric, intoxicating sight, a view to make one gasp. A hundred years ago there was almost nothing: just a thin line of warehouses, a few church towers, the mansions of the taipans up on the slopes, and Government House on Upper Albert Road with the Union flag waving lazily in the steamy air. Today a vast white winding cloth of concrete, steel and glass has been bolted on to the hillsides, obscuring the contours, turning a world once dominated by the horizontal and the gentle diagonal into a pageant of the vertical."

Winchester was in the south Atlantic in early 1982 just prior to the Falklands War. He flew to the Falklands when Argentina, at first, occupied the island of South Georgia, but was never on the Falklands themselves when war eventually broke out there. Winchester and I certainly share a love of islands; after he first set foot on East Falkland he wrote:

"Everything, so far as I was concerned, was exactly right. It was a place of islands, and I loved islands. It was cold, and I loved cold places."

His time in the Falklands capital, Stanley, was a tense experience owing to the invasion of South Georgia to the southeast, but one without any sense of impending danger. He writes that no one was aware of the Argentine invasion, and if the stationed military did have any advance warning of it, they were keeping it top secret.

Winchester's observations were often occasions I would want to reread. His descriptions of scenery captured a snapshot that seemed high-resolution and always panoramic:

"There may be no native trees on the Falklands, but the twentieth century's sterling efforts to allow the colonists to talk to the outside world has left many rusting iron masts and rotting hawsers that, from a distance and in a mist, look much the same."

Winchester ends his book as he begins, with a stinging belt to the behind to the empire for its devastating forced eviction of the citizens of British Indian Ocean Territory:

"And we deal--or rather we dealt--with horrifying callousness with the people of the Indian Ocean, when we evicted them from their homes, transported them to a foreign country against their will, and lied and evaded our responsibilities for years before a writer discovered the scandal, and told it to the world. Of all the events of post-Imperial British history, those of the late 1960s that occurred in the archipelago we customarily call Diego Garcia remain the most shabby and the most mean. No excuses can be made, by politicians of any persuasion: Diego Garcia is a monstrous blot on British honour, and shames us all, for ever."

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

North Korea: Beyond Charismatic Politics

I have read many books about the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, those that were printed in the west from both anti-DPRK authors and as well as DPRK sympathizers, by authors who don't resort to anti-DPRK sensationalism, and books which I had purchased in the DPRK itself. A book about the DPRK is almost always an entertaining read, even if I had to give the book a failing review. North Korea: Beyond Charismatic Politics by Heonik Kwon and Byung-Ho Chung failed to make a "friend of North Korea" such as myself the least bit interested in the country. I have never read a book about the DPRK that was as boring as this one. At 219 pages it was however a lot longer than it might at first seem. The library received it in July of last year yet I put off reading it for months because the typeface was so small. Pages of solid bricks of text in tiny print without a paragraph in sight didn't make the book look appealing, although some of the chapter headings certainly did ("The Great National Bereavement, 1994", about the mass wailing that overtook the nation after the sudden death of Great Leader Kim Il Sung, "The Graves of Revolutionary Martyrs", "Gifts to the Leader").

Kwon and Chung analyze the politics behind the Kim dynasty since the creation of the DPRK. They talk about the power of the Kims' charisma, and how national propaganda has had to reinvent itself in order to keep the charismatic element relevant. This was of particularly grave concern to the regime at the time of the famine that devastated the entire country in the mid-nineties:

"The centralization of power, because of its primary reliance on political cultural means and the mobilization of the population to this activity, came with an increasing negligence and ineptitude on the part of the state in the sphere of economic sustenance and growth. The cumulative effects of this failure in all spheres of state life other than the sphere of cultural production were made brutally clear by the tragic crisis of the mid-1990s, which devastated the single most important foundation of any modern state: the economic and moral integrity of its civil society."

Beyond Charismatic Politics was belaboured with repetitious phrases embedded in lugubriously long sentences. I have to confess that I loathed reading this book where I couldn't wait to finish it. Sentences quoted above and below, wherein the authors discuss the political expedience of rewriting history, were typical:

"The succession from Kim Il Sung to Kim Jong Il was 'the communist world's first hereditary transfer of power' and began as early as the start of the 1970s. Contemporary North Korean accounts extend the origin of this process further to the outset of the 1960s and even as far back as the time of the Korean War (1950-1953). These claims represent the powerful efforts in North Korea, as in other socialist polities, to appropriate and rewrite history in the service of a specific political goal. These historical revisions are intended not merely to bring greater honor and dignity to the country's iconic leader but also to appropriate the authority and majesty of the leader's persona to facilitate a desired future--particularly, the continuity of the political order free from the risk of a rupture in the political life of the charismatic authority. In this respect, the evolution of North Korea's statehood has been an epic struggle against the impermanent nature of charismatic authority and against the mortality of this authority, to which all other charismatic personas of the twentieth century eventually succumbed."

I acknowledge that Beyond Charismatic Politics was an academic read more for a student of political situations and conditions, versus for a student of Korean history, which might explain why I was so turned off by all the politicobabble. Even so, I have read many such books about North Korea before which never made me feel like throwing it at the wall. Any book about North Korea is of course going to be full of political theory and analysis of the Kim regime. I would like to read a thoughtful review from a scholar of political science who favoured the book so I might appreciate if from a different perspective.

The chapter entitled "Gifts to the Leader" discusses the diplomatic act of presenting gifts to the Great Leader and Eternal President Kim Il Sung and the Dear Leader Comrade General Kim Jong Il. Leaders and diplomats from around the world, as well as delegations from international socialist institutions, and even private citizens the whole world over have presented the Kims with elaborate gifts. There must be a place to store them all, and the International Friendship Exhibition Hall was built to display thousands of these items in a dazzling and luxurious representation of international esteem for the Kim administration. I visited this exhibition hall and walked down its kilometre-long corridors as my tour group saw room after room after room of often garish and ostentatious examples of folk art. No wonder the Kims didn't want to put such kitsch in their own homes. There is one such piece that has acquired mythical status among North Korea watchers. I had heard about it before I left for my trip yet had never seen a picture of it. My roommate during the trip warned our group about what we were going to see in the exhibition hall, this one kitschy item in particular, and that as hard as it might be we had to keep a straight face or run the risk of offending the authorities. One must not laugh in the International Friendship Exhibition Hall:

"The gifts to Kim Il Sung include a bulletproof automobile from Joseph Stalin; a large handicraft depicting a roaring tiger from Mao Zedong, sent in November 1953 in celebration of Kim Il Sung's victory in the Korean War (these items are 'tributes' to Kim Il Sung made by Comrades Mao and Stalin, according to the labels next to the gifts); and a gigantic porcelain vase offered in 1978 by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party specially for the opening of the Hall of Gifts. Most of the gifts are displayed according to their geographical region of origin. Gifts from Latin America include a silver machete and a machine gun from Nicaragua, decorative plates from Ecuador and a Peruvian university, an oil painting of an Andean market from Guiana, and a briefcase made of crocodile skin from Fidel Castro. A stuffed, standing crocodile holding a plate of wine glasses, a gift from the Sandinista leadership, is a favorite for many visitors to this section."

I appreciated the trip down North Korean memory lane when the authors talked about the cult of gifts in the International Friendship Exhibition Hall in this one chapter, but I cannot recommend North Korea: Beyond Charismatic Politics to anyone but post-graduate scholars of North Korean politics.

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

C'mon Papa: Dispatches from a Dad in the Dark

To commemorate Dominion Day, I am posting a review of a Canadian book.

C'mon Papa: Dispatches from a Dad in the Dark is Ryan Knighton's second memoir, written after the birth of his daughter, Tess. I posted my review of Knighton's first book, Cockeyed: a Memoir in mid-June. In his latest book, Knighton writes of his experiences as a blind father raising a daughter.

C'mon Papa is divided into three parts. The first part deals with the conception, where Knighton's wife Tracy suffers a miscarriage as a result of a molar pregnancy. Tracy goes through chemotherapy and the Knightons must wait a year before trying again to conceive. The second part is about the birth and Knighton's trials with an infant. The third part deals with blind life with a two-year-old. I did not find this story as funny as Cockeyed, although it still was a book I couldn't put down. Knighton writes of his failures at diaper-changing and baby-minding. After a heavy snowfall, Knighton loses his daughter while they are playing outside and there is a sense of panic that infects the reader until they are reunited. More tales of near-disaster, or even near-death, are included. The toughest time for Knighton is trying to care for Tess while she is a baby. It gets easier for him when she is a toddler since she, even at the age of two, can walk and see and lead her father around.

Unfortunately I missed seeing Knighton at an author appearance in Toronto while I was in Halifax. It would have been a pleasure to meet him; even more so now that I have read his latest memoir. I am hoping that he will continue to write about his experiences as a blind man and father.



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



Trailblazer: An Intimate Biography of Sarah Palin

I read Sarah Palin's memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life before I started writing book reviews for the Mississauga Library System's Nonfiction Book Club. Palin impressed me with her political history, going from city council to mayor to governor to Republican Vice-Presidential nominee. The story of her climb up the political ladder was exciting to read, and I looked forward to a different perspective in Trailblazer: An Intimate Biography of Sarah Palin by Lorenzo Benet.

Benet, an assistant editor at People magazine as well as a coauthor of a number of pop biographies, unfortunately has written a boring book that reveals absolutely nothing about Palin that the public doesn't already know. Trailblazer relies on news articles and televised media stories for its sources, and anyone who has read the newspaper or watched Palin's media appearances will find nothing new here. Benet, to his credit, did interview Palin for People, when the magazine did a story on the then governor shortly after she gave birth to her son Trig, who was born with Down Syndrome. There however mustn't have been a lot of substance to that article as he only touches on his actual meeting and interview with Palin. Benet relies on many quotes from an interview he had with one of Palin's sisters, but the calibre of quotes he culls from her are all fluff, ranging from how good she was at high school basketball to how fabulous she works at juggling her time between her work and family. He also interviews Palin's hairstylist and all that she can say is how she changed Palin's hair colour and that she and Palin love to chitchat about their kids. All the quotes he gets out of people are fluff like this, which makes a very boring read indeed.

Trailblazer, written in 2009, seems out of date already since Palin has lived a lifetime of activity in the four years since the book first came out. Most glaring are the references to the upcoming wedding between Palin's daughter Bristol and future Playgirl model Levi Johnston. Benet speculates about Palin's future and while he could not have known that she would resign as Alaska governor later on in 2009, or that she would star in her own TV show, he was prescient in thinking that she would write her autobiography. For more in-depth information about Palin's rise up the political ladder, read Going Rogue.

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