The Sentimentalists

Most people can’t go home because of the gulf that exists between their childhood memories and reality. Many residents of Eastern Ontario can’t go home because it lies under the St. Lawrence Seaway.

War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing.
                    --Bruce Springsteen

In the wake of WW# 1&2 many children met their fathers for the first time at age 5: a man nervous, short-tempered, and irresolute: who had trouble getting or keeping a permanent job or completing anything he ever started.

The story ranges over the state of Maine, Upstate New York, and the Thousand Islands area of Ontario. Also Alberta, British Columbia and Fargo, North Dakota. The story ranges far and wide in between and eventually to Vietnam.

To quote Henry’s wife: “The war can’t explain you forever, you know. I think you should be gone by the time we get home.”

I had read nearly a quarter of the book before I realized the narrator was a woman, not a man.

Eventually in a book about Vets we end up in Vietnam as the point of view changes. This by way of allowing at least one Vet to talk about his War Experience. And this being Vietnam marijuana is involved. And as with most soldiers there were incidents a soldier would rather forget that continue to haunt him but about which he is reluctant to talk. Finally a man referred to as father turns out to be Napoleon Haskell.

Kikwaakew

Natives in Canada have a disproportionate amount of war service veterans among their numbers. This story picks up the life of a WW#1 amputee we first met in Three Day Road two decades later as he works his trap line and even manages snow shoes with a prosthetic limb. The title would seem to be the Cree word for wolverine. In a few short pages Joseph Boyden hits upon many of the issues facing aboriginal peoples in Canada. The dwindling resources that once supported a traditional lifestyle, inadequate health care, and the depredations of well-meaning priests in the lives of his people.

Labor Day

This is the short book upon which the thoroughly panned movie is based. There are three essential characters. A reclusive divorced young mother Adele, her teenage son Henry on the cusp of pubescence, and an escaped convict Frank they bring home for the weekend. Narrated by the boy, whatever little action there may be is constantly interrupted by his stream of consciousness ramblings. Justice is what can be proven in a court of law, no one ever claimed it was fair or just. If you’ve read The Bridges of Madison County you know how a few days a pair spend together can be life-changing. This is another such story, it takes a long time getting there but this one has a happy ending.

The Homecoming by Carsten Stroud

Carsten Stroud is a discovery for which I can thank a Toronto Star review when his first book came out. A Canadian by birth he was a law enforcement officer before writing became his full time profession. His first book, as I recall was Lizardskin. He continues to write police procedurals and his style has only improved with time. Highly recommended and highly readable. Not a genre I regularly frequent but I'll read anything that's well done.

His choice of place names and surnames: Niceville and Crossfire? This book has a dark tinge of the occult, paranormal about it. Old resident evil haunts hair-raising corners of the tale. There is demon possession. Like a lot of modern prose this book is wordy, filled with descriptions and atmospherics that do nothing to move the story along. The storyline is riddled with plots and cross-plots that make hefty demands of the reader challenging one to remember where it all began.

Further research shows that this is book 2 of a trilogy set in Niceville. The actual crime at the base of this tale was described in detail no doubt and committed in book 1. As I complete this volume I’m about to discover how much resolution is given is book 2 or if the reader is forced to buy book 3 to get the answers. Methinks a taut editing could have put the whole in one volume.

The Loop

There is no question but that the return of its top predator has been beneficial to America's Western Wildlands. No disputing the fact that local ranchers who extirpated wolves in the first place oppose their return. And since wolves can range for hundreds of miles local is a big territory and wolves are no respecter of park boundaries. They don't read maps and the ranchers whose stock they predate probably aren't excited about National Parks in the first place considering them a sop to useless city slickers seeking a bucolic vacation spot. To locals on both sides of the American border parks are lands where they can't hunt, trees are wasted for their scenic potential, mining and oil exploration are banned, and the tourists clutter their roads and local watering holes.

Its mythology makes of the wolf the stuff of nightmares. The fact that science has recorded no record of a healthy wolf attacking a human in no way diminishes the fear and loathing this animal invokes. The wildlife branch tasked with running interference for this ferocious predator have a thankless job seeking protection for a creature that is all too often its own worst enemy. That the animal is only doing what comes naturally doesn't wash well with local ranchers and their minders can't tell their charges to stay within park boundaries. Deer and moose on the contrary seem to know exactly where to go to remain safe during hunting season.

This book is the story of one such wolf/rancher encounter. It serves to make the controversy personal. That the writer lives in London probably doesn't make him sympathetic to real life ranchers. This is the second writer I've read this year who refers to a pickup truck as a car, that's like calling a fighter jet a passenger plane.

The novel begins by documenting the wolf attack and then backtracks to introduce the various players. The author has a tendency to get sidetracked spending chapters at a time in detailed the introduction of new characters before finally clarifying what they have to do with the plot.

The Loop can variously be interpreted as meaning an animal's territory, the circle of life in which the death of one creature sustains the life of another, or a cruel device designed for killing multiple wolves.

In the end it boils down to a balance between wolves doing what wolves will do and ranchers invading wolf habitat. Settlers killed off the wolves so they could run herds of cattle in their former territory. When government policy and environmental sense decreed the wolves should return to their former ranges it put them in conflict with ranchers. In a nation that exterminated and attempted to extirpate 100,000,000 indigenous peoples so they could settle the US the lives of a few hundred wild predators don't amount to much. Could we somehow make them sexy like the bald eagle?

Let us not forget that a bounty on Indian scalps matched that on wolves or that the buffalo were systematically slaughtered so that they couldn't support the Indians. Who of a certain age hasn't sheltered in a sled under a buffalo robe or kept warm in a wolf skin jacket?

The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley

In movie terms this is a high concept novel. Andrew is dead or everything in his world has died but death, a female, stalks the floors of a Roanoke Hospital somehow missing the lad. He skulks the floors sleeping in an unfinished wing, works in the cafeteria, visits patients in the pediatrics wing, shops in the gift shop, and haunts the ER where his love-ones died. The five stages of the title are those identified as the dying process in Kubler-Ross's On Death and Dying: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.

Andrew is gay. He may have been driving when the collision that killed his sister and parents occurred. He frequents critical care units where patients die. He encounters other gays on staff and fellow patients. In particular Rusty who has been the victim of systemic bullying. Andrew or Ben has graduated high school and worked as a volunteer fireman/paramedic. The story is about how he resolves his issues and in particular how running from them rather then confronting them fails to help.

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

A book that should be required reading by all Federal and State Representatives and Senators and taught in all schools. It is to Aboriginal Affairs what Howard Zinn's similarly titled book is to working class Americans. Written using documents readily available it documents the Doctrine of Discovery which was seen as justifying the seizure of lands in the Americas by European colonial powers. It turns America's sacred mission to fulfill its manifest destiny of occupying the continent from Sea to Sea on its head. America was founded and expanded using a policy of extermination and assimilation of the resident aboriginal population that mirrors the Israelite's occupation of Palestine.

This is not easy reading. It sees the patriotic myths that underlie American jingoism as a cult of genocide and theft. Histories are typically written by the victors, this one was written on behalf of the victims.