Fifty Shades of Grey

Began reading this to see what all the fuss was about. More worrisome than the fact that someone felt compelled to write these books and that they found a publisher is the fact that there are people who who enjoy reading them and express interest in their subject matter. The writings of the Marquis de Sade have long been considered pornographic and virtually unreadable and although I resist the practice of censorship and book bannings I find little literary merit in these books. Although I may be aware that there are people who derive perverted sexual pleasure from bondage and sadomasochism I have better things to do with my time than read about them. Whether or not the object of these practices consents to domination it still smacks of assault on another fellow human and sexual abuse.

Golden Son

Max is transgendered, his body possesses both male and female genitalia. Add a rape scene in the opening chapters and this hardly seems like a young adult novel. The book is told from multiple points of view, at least the narrator's name heads each section. The language seems aimed at teenagers not adults but the philosophical and psychological discussions are very mature. Some of the philosophical discussions distract from the narrative flow but on the whole this book tackles a difficult subject with candour and empathy.

We, the Drowned

We the Drowned
by
Carsten Jensen

There's a sameness about the lives of sailors before the mast and miners below ground and whether you drown at sea when a ship goes down in a howling gail or die of starvation and foul air after a mine collapse the result is the same and men feel powerless to act in their own defence. In spite of this generations of sailors and miners ply their trade with a sense of fatalism as their fathers did before them. Alas, little seems to have changed over the centuries and despite advances in technology man is still powerless in the face of a raging sea.

The brutality of life in the mid-1800’s as described in these pages is unsettling. I'm reminded of the story of the little girl who arrives at school eager to learn who is lined up with her classmates and watches as each in turn is beaten by their new master. An entire chapter is devoted to the description of a sadistic Danish Schoolmaster who administers daily flailings with a rope. In the end the only thing his male students learn in their 6 years with him is how to take a beating. This lesson they take with them when at 12 to 14 they go to sea as cabin boys and the beatings continue.

The captain of a sailing vessel that could be at sea for years at a time had the power of life and death over his crew, to this day captains have the right to perform marriages. Given the dregs of society that were often rousted out of bars and jails to fill out a ship's complement iron discipline was probably necessary but the cruelty and hazing here described makes one wonder why anyone in their right mind would submit to such indignities.

Given the conditions in which these men live the language used is salty and the sufferings they endure are described in a frank and forthright manner. In battle men soil themselves and as cannon and musket balls fly bodies are rended and blood and guts flow. This is not a book to be read by the squeamish.

All this said the stories told here ring true and bring to life an era that is now history. Never boring they keep one turning pages to find the outcome. There is a matter-of-factness about the way these sagas are related and a fatalism about the way the hardships these men must endure are described. While their menfolk are at sea for years on end their wives back home keep the family together cooking and cleaning without an end in sight and without any certainty that their men will ever return or that word of their demise will ever reach home.

It’s one of the ironies of a sailing vessel that calm seas are not a good thing. While a ship lay becalmed in the horse lattitudes fresh water and food supplies could run out leaving a crew in dire straits. With no land in sight and a cloudless sky desperate things could happen. On the other hand storms at sea can drive a ship onto a lee shore, a reef, or a rocky shoal and when water temperatures are near freezing or the waves 100 foot high the ability to swim means little.

This book gives a unique perspective on the life of the women and children back home that would not go amiss in much of Newfoundland. Husbands and fathers went to sea for periods of up to 5 years and were not heard of until their boat came back in port. Children were born never knowing their fathers or meeting a stranger after they attained school age. Boys became midshipman at age 12 to 14, cabin boys in less exalted contexts and likely objects of sexual favours. The wives back home became defacto widows for years at a time and all too often never heard of their husbands again if their ships went down without a trace. The transition from sail to steam to diesel engines and iron ships was horrendous for many. Ship to shore radio and the internet has ushered in an entirely new communication age but sailors whether navy or merchant marine are still physically absent for extended periods of time.

Indian Horse

White society's treatment of the original aboriginal residents of North America constituted variations on two themes: assimilation or annihilation, a process that came close to succeeding. The Christian Church was more than complicit in abetting this process. In their missionary zeal Jesuits brought Christianity to the heathen and with it European disease. In their hubris missionaries failed to understand that a people's theology is tied to their culture and way of life. The dislocation that these priests began was continued by the residential schools. Traditional life was hard and children were allowed to be children and physical punishment was unknown as was mental cruelty. Children forcibly removed from their parents were forbidden their own language and religious practices. Many were physically and sexually abused. Several generations of this system produced a cohort who had lost their traditional heritage, their language, culture, and myths; drank too much; ate unhealthy diets, and suffered from alcoholism, obesity, and diabetes.
The Old Ones, elders, who still remembered the traditional values were spurned by their offspring who shamefully rejected the Old Ways. Children were torn between their grandparents values and their parent's beliefs. Should the dead for example be buried in a traditional manner or be placed in expensive coffins and exposed to the ministrations of priests whose schools exposed them to the diseases that killed them in the first place.

Wagamese makes all this plain in an engaging manner in a story that makes compelling reading. The story is filled with tragedies and heartache, this is no child's fairy tale.

Wildest Dreams

Book nine in Robyn Carr’s Thunderpoint Series. Introduces Ironman Blake Smiley. Not sure how a pro triathlete affords a million-dollar home; those endorsements and sponsorships must be lucrative. Hearing about the training, supplements, diet, and exercise schedule this lad endures makes his life sound more like a science experiment than an actual living person. Elite athletes are anything but amateurs these days.

This being a romance he has to have a love interest. Blake moves in next door to Grace and Troy. We continue to hear about most of the other residents of Thunderpoint. Somehow after 9 books the story ends rather abruptly.

A New Hope

Book 8 in the Thunderpoint Series continues the series as if this is one extended story continuing with the wedding we ended with in book seven. The focus simply shifts to another couple.

What has always made these books worth reading is the fact that the action takes place inside a community in which all the characters are given equal attention. The world they live in isn’t just background, it becomes real  in our minds.

One quibble, the dog on the cover should be a Great Dane like Ham, Sarah’s dog....

One Wish

Book 7 of Robyn Carr’s Thunderpoint series. As the book begins we meet Grace, the florist shop owner introduced to us in The Homecoming but it’s as if we are meeting an entirely new individual, or learning new aspects of her life barely hinted at in the previous book. Troy, the high school teacher with interests in skiing and river rafting, was introduced in Book 6 as well but here the focus has shifted to their relationship. The timeline continues seemlessly taking up where Book 6 left off.

Romance is not my normal genre so there are conventions here that are new to me. One of them seems to be that the happy couple go through perilous trials on the way to marital bliss but that ending always seems to be inevitable. Somehow it doesn’t seem realistic to me that every liaison have a happy ending however....

It is the character development and the sense of place that makes these novels worth the read. These people seem real to us, they are not cut out figures who end up in twisted bedsheets with clothes scattered along the way.

The Homecoming

Robyn Carr’s Series of Romance Novel’s set in Thunderpoint, Oregon near Coos Bay is a better than average set of novels or I wouldn’t be reading them. I’ve visited the area and loved it. Her characters are well developed and continue to appear in succeeding editions. In short these aren’t cut out figures used as a means of writing about bedroom gymnastics. It’s there of course but these people have lives outside the bedroom.

That being said this particular entry is totally predictable, the outcome telegraphed from the opening chapters. Boy next door is best friends with girl next door. Fails to appreciate his true feelings and hurts hers. Years later they reconcile. This isn’t a spoiler, the plot is self-evident from the beginning. What make the book worth the read is the fact that both the lovers in this tale have professional lives and family and friends who interact with them. Thunderpoint is a small town and everyone knows everybody.

To Reap and to Sow by JP Roberts

Having read Louis L'Amour and Zane Grey I've come to understand that cowboys were a randy lot. Bookbub has introduced me to Harlequin's Western Division. The present tome is the 311^th in Penguin's All-Action Western Gunsmith Series which as of 2007 had apparently sold nine million copies. The hero Clint Adams makes ample use of his modified Colt but equal use of another gun when he goes for rolls in the hay. Unlike so many movie Westerns the writer here is realistic about the accuracy of the metal weapons, plenty of lead flies to little effect. This paperback was given me by a fellow camper at an RV Park in Fort Davis, Texas. The chapters are short, the point of view constantly changing, this is a quick read. Don't expect too much.

The Bean Trees

The print in my trade paperback copy is rather tiny.

Barbara Kingsolver grabs the readers’ attention from the first page and holds it however by the half-way point I had fallen asleep reading this tome 8 times. It does pick up later on.

Modern fuel-injected vehicles cannot be started by popping the clutch in third gear while they’re being towed, pushed, or run downhill.

The bean trees of the title are Wisteria Vines. The story involves illegal aliens from Guatemala and an orphaned Cherokee child who is the victim of child abuse.

Devious

This is a better than average teen romance. Volume one of the trilogy, Dangerous, is still offered free to get one interested. The book has some grammatical errors but otherwise is well written and edited. It’s a cliché that in these stories the male is always tall, dark and handsome, hard bodied with narrow hips, wide shoulders and bulging rock-hard biceps. Wimps, it would seem never get the girls. And only a voluptuous beautiful suitor would be worthy of this hunk of manhood. This first person narrative is told alternately from the guy’s and the girl’s point of view. 

Are all high school romances as fickle, untrusting, jealous as this one. This couple run hot and cold as quickly as a Texas weather pattern. Does a girl have to “put out” to keep her guy interested? The fact that Dara’s drunk father killed Stone’s twin brother is a complicating factor in inter-family relationships.

No one will accuse this YA Novel of being great literature. The offer of book one got me interested in seeing where the author would take the storyline. I was rather disappointed when book 2 turned out to be a mushy teenaged soap opera.

Dear Life

Alice Munro’s latest collection of short Stories published just before she won the Nobel Prize. This collection is very adult in its content the situations not suitable for children though written about children caught up in very mature circumstances. The ‘you’re too young to understand’ clause applies all too often. The writer has long since lost her innocence and even in rural small towns rather tawdry goings on occur. Life is raw and given the Great Depression and the War Years that followed somewhat lacking in romance and fantasy. The writer escaped in books but the reader here is brought up short. The era was that of my own mother and Munro evokes it unerringly.

Not on Fire, but Burning

The book opens with an act of Nuclear Terrorism but continues nearly a decade later with a story of repressed memories, xenophobia, and family values. The Gulf War and Muslim extremism are bound up along with current security fears, founded or unfounded. There are extremists on both sides. The story is set in a dystopian future told in the main from the point of view of teenage boys, the narrator keeps changing and that makes following the storyline rather confusing at times. The tale follows various tracks in a what if sort of pattern taking alternative paths ending in a confusing muddle.

Everybody Sees the Ants

When Lucky Linderman decides to survey his fellow classmates on their preferred mode of committing suicide he gets some undesired attention. Being small for one’s age tends to get one unwanted attention from the class bully. Lucky doesn’t seem to be living up to his name.

Too many disengaged Fathers around whose jobs occupy all their time. I’ve met overweight slobs like Lucky’s entitled, obsessive, hypochondriac, pill-popping Aunt Jodi. If she didn’t come with the deal Lucky would move in with his mother’s brother Uncle David tomorrow. To cope Lucky has a rich fantasy life lived in his imagination, not video games.

Fifty years later I can still identify with this character. Bored by school, picked on because he isn’t athletic, small for his age, and prefers reading to being outside.

Lucky learns what every child comes to understand. That his parents aren’t perfect. That adults are just as confused and messed up as any teenager.

Medicine Walk

Richard Wagamese’ Indian Horse was a Canada Reads Contender. Until then I like most had never heard of him. This book as much as any shows him to be a very readable author and exponent of his aboriginal culture.

Franklin Starlight has been raised by his grandfather wise in the old ways. He knows how to live off the land: hunt, make camp, find food, take care of himself.

His father Eldon is a town Indian who has lived by white man’s ways, an alcoholic, who is dying of cirrhosis of the liver. Although never a presence in his son’s life they make this last journey together to fulfil a dying man’s wish for a traditional burial. His father also wishes to tell his son his life story.

Frank was raised seemingly by his maternal grandfather who worked 80 acres of farmland. No mention is made of his Mother, did she die in childbirth?

I like this story but on the face of it a boy packs his dying father into the wilderness on a horse like so much baggage and buries him there after feeding him unknown tribal medicine. This may have been what the man wanted but I shudder to think how it would look in the eyes of the law.

Redeployment

Phil Klay’s book begins with a group of soldiers returning from a seven-month deployment. Soldiers on a plane with their guns unarmed between their knees left with nothing to do with their hands when required to hand them in. They carried their guns onto the plane but their bayonets were forbidden.

Returning home after seven months to find a wife 5 months pregnant, their home empty, their wife gone, their lives on hold, lacking purpose. Their memories haunted by what they had seen, friends they had lost, things they had done.  Reaching for that gun which isn’t there. Resorting to alcohol or withdrawal in a vain attempt to cope. This writer evokes all this with a realism that makes it all too real for the reader at least in the initial chapter.

The author uses military acronyms indiscriminately without defining the terms which may lend authenticity to the story but is confusing to the uninitiated. The narrator would seem to be Sgt Ozzie Price though names are rarely used here. And so I discover that the narrator changes from chapter to chapter because this is a book of short stories not a novel. And, like so much of the best fiction written about war, written by someone who never served on the front lines. Most who did do not want to talk about it or if they do many years after the fact. Since this author didn’t serve at the front he probably tries too hard to make it real hence the acronyms among other things that make this book difficult to assimilate. For example the chapter titled OIF?

When the author drops all the jargon this isn’t a bad read. He has a feel for his topic. He has worthwhile things to say about how a Chaplain, a Catholic Priest,  handles a disillusioned  soldier; about how a vet explains his war experience to a fellow student post-war. To soldiers war has nothing to do with the political reasons for waging it; it’s about surviving and supporting the fellow soldiers in your unit whether or not you like one another. What he has to say helps makes it clearer why suicide now accounts for more casualties than combat itself.

Reversible Errors

Another legal number from Scott Turow whose Presumed Innocent became a movie. There seems to be a tradition of those in the legal profession penning novels. This outing ranges far and wide from the courtroom doing little to make those who uphold the law look upstanding. The book is riddled with the usual plot twists and side issues. Who knew lawyers and judges were such a randy lot.

Uglies

George Orwell wrote his classic dystopian novel back in 1949. Back then 1984 seemed a distant future date, it is now 31 years in the past. Writers are still inventing cautionary tales about future horrors and the present novel is one of them.

This is YA literature, dialogue driven, and easy reading. It grows on one as the story progresses proving to be above average in quality. It is also well-edited, something I’ve learned not to take for granted in E-Book Literature.

The plot includes possible betrayals, love triangles, teenage angst; typical growing pains. It also explores social pressures, conventions and mores. The pressure to conform, accept certain ways of looking at things and each other. And since the title is Uglies our sense of what is beautiful and normal. There is also enough action and adventure to create excitement and suspense.

The book also ends with major plot lines unresolved leading one to buy what must be book 2 to find out the resolution. I feel ambushed.

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.

The Awakening: The Vampire Diaries One

Have read one other book in the series. My motivation being a check to see if I feel it worthwhile to get interested in the CW TV Series based on the original books. Unfortunately it appears to be just another in the YA high school romance genre with Vampires thrown in. The similarities to Twilight are endless. It appears to be another opportunity to employ pretty boys and fawning girls to sell cosmetics ads and teenage fashions to a demographic loaded with disposable income.

The love triangle that forms the basis for this story is as old as history. A woman, who will not make up her mind as to which of two suitors she wants to favour turning brother against brother, friend against friend, even nation against nation. Helen of Troy; Lana Lang in Smallville; Tristan and Isolde; Joey Potter, Pacey and Dawson. None of these stories have happy endings. Of course when men do it we call it adultery, bigamy, or in male dominated societies allow multiple wives or harems. Where passion and jealousy are involved rational thought is abandoned.

Book two follows immediately even numbering the chapters sequentially.

The Guns at Last Light

Matters discussed here are all part of the historical record. Those who have not studied the history of WW#2 may find them spoilers. This is not the first history of WW#2 but it does have the advantage of using records recently declassified.

First comment from a Canadian, of course, is to highlight the fact that this History of WW#2 is written from an American point of view. The Yanks maintained their isolationist stance until December 7, 1941 when the Japs bombed Pearl Harbour at which point it took another two years for them to ramp up their efforts and make any significant contribution to the war effort. Therefore the Liberation Trilogy of which this is book 3 begins in 1943, four years into the war. What the rest of us were doing until that point hardly seems to matter.

Three things stand out over and over again:

Military Intelligence. Planning depends on it and the best laid plans can fall apart when the unexpected happens and in war it usually does.

Fraticide. Before GPS finding a precise location from the air, by sea, and even on land was a tenuous process. Bombs were dropped on allied positions. Airborne troops were dropped over open ocean or miles from their intended drop zones. Fire missions hit wrong targets. Troops got lost or advanced into friendly fire and were landed by boat on the wrong beachhead.

Transport. An army marches on its belly. Landing troops is one thing. Keeping them fed and in ammunition quite another; motorized equipment cannot run without fuel. Air fields and ports become critical for materiel transport. Battles were won or lost by Quartermasters. Soldiers can't fight once they run out of bullets.

Of concern to the supreme commander, Eisenhower, was the need to mollify the egos of the generals who held command of the armies of the various combatants: Britain, France, Canada, and the US. Each wanted their opportunity to win glory and felt slighted when deprived.

The author continues to give historical background to the locations where engagements occur and to introduce new personalities as they appear. Attention is paid to both the Allied forces and the German leadership.

With the liberation of Paris High Command and Logistics move there. High Command balloons to 24,000 staff. With that many they could well have transported Gerry Cans of fuel across Europe by bucket brigade. To keep equipment fueled it took 1.5 gallons of aviation fuel to fly 1 gallon of truck or tank fuel. Supplies involved 800,000 separate items ordered from half way round the world for troops ever on the move that took up to 4 months to arrive. Imagine keeping several million men fed and in toilet paper. Americans are noted for prodigal wastage, they lost their guns, their ammo, their grenade launchers at ridiculous rates. Tires were shredded on tossed ration cans. Not only did they bomb Europe, they trashed it as well.

After Monty's Market Garden design fails he continues to be an exasperating egotistical little peacock planning pushes into Germany while neglecting to clear the approaches to Atwerp. While troops are forced to stand fast for lack of supplies ships lay anchored offshore for lack of berths to unload and supplies lay waiting in America for lack of transport. Meanwhile Monty fumes that sufficient resources are not being allocated to his schemes. Attacking Germany is sexier than clearing ports so his troops can have supplies.

Given Hitler's decrees that German soil be defended to the last man to the last bullet cities such as Aachen were pulverized building by building right down to their basement foundations.

In Band of Brothers a general is quoted as saying: “Flies spread disease, keep yours closed.” Venereal Disease is one of the dirty little secrets of war. The lack of proper clothing, malnutrition, and the spread of disease among men in close quarters lacking clean water and proper sanitation created more casualties than the actual fighting. Maladies of neglect such as trench foot invalided hundreds of thousands. None of this touches the psychological affects of endless warfare.

My pacifist leanings will become apparent. When the state sanctions the killing of their own citizens they call it capital punishment. When the state sanctions the mass-murder of the citizens of another country they call it war. Whatever jingoistic terms are used to pretty it up soldiers kill other human beings. Once that taboo is broken putting limits on the means used to do it seems specious. Until the American Civil War soldiers lined up on the battlefield and shot at one another. When labelling another the enemy makes killing him legitimate how do you define atrocity? Can there be gentleman's agreements as to the limits of barbarism.

Canadian Documentary Film Makers named McKenna were vilified by Veterans for portraying the Canadian War Effort in less than glowing lights. This author describes Bomber Harris and his bombing of German Civilian Targets in similar fashion. Some people seem to get a charge out of killing their fellow creatures. Military training instills that killer instinct for the murder of their fellow human beings. What the military has yet to deal with is deprogramming for a return to civilian life. How do you turn that off?

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The decisions generals make gets their own men killed as well as the enemy. When generals make bad decisions their own men die needlessly and/or without accomplishing any useful objective. The exercise of that kind of power requires a certain amount of ego, some are better at keeping their egos in check than others.

In the end the Allies won the war because the Germans ran out of cannon fodder first. Wars are lost not won and in a war of attrition the loser is he who runs out of men and materiel first. This history makes it plain that this war was not lost because the Allies possessed such superior military skills. One of its strengths is the fact that it makes no effort to hide the blunders made by both sides.

One such blunder is known to history as the Battle of the Bulge. Allied intelligence believed that only a madman would initiate an all-out offensive in December 1944 but they discounted the fact that the orders were given by Hitler, not his generals. When their leaders make mistakes, soldiers die.

As portrayed Monty was an egomaniac who refused to follow orders and kept insisting that he be put in charge of all troops in the European Theatre. Problem being that this was Ike's job and the Generals in his fellow Allied Countries found Monty impossible to work with and assumed an either he or I stance. Once more Monty dithered and failed to act in time prevent German Troops from retreating when the “Bulge” failed them. His public statements antagonized British Allies. The writer is an American. It would be interesting to see how a British Historian would interpret the same set of facts. It is also obvious that the subject of this “History” is dead. To quote Churchill: “There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them.” Lovers quarrels are part of Love.

The final sections of this book dealing with the discovery of the Concentration Camps is not reading for the faint of heart. Reading these books will have you reaching for your dictionary more than once. New words were coined to describe this war and new meanings given to old ones. The author uses some rather arcane language at times.

Mr Midshihpman Hornblower

If you’ve seen the mini-series starring Ioan Gruffuds this is the first in the series of Hornblower books upon which it was based. In the age of wooden sailing ships and iron men the officers of ships of the line commanded sailors recruited by press gangs from local jails and bars in port. Callow 17-year-old midshipman were officers in training giving orders to men twice their age.

The setting is a British man of war at the turn of the 18th Century. To be learned was the art of commanding men, the mechanics of cannon firing, the art of navigaion, the handling of sail, and manoeuvring a ship under sail. Advancement was as much a matter of luck as it was intelligence, keeping a level head and learning quickly under pressure. Cannon balls and grape shot are no respecters of rank or privilege. The art of leading men involves keeping a level head and knowing your own limitations so that you delegate authority to those who know their business. The captain of a ship must be seen to know all in order to keep the confidence of his men.

Written at the turn of the 19th Century the author appears to know his seamanship creating a series of historical novels set at sea that follows the career of a navy brat from midshipman in this first of the series through the ranks in succeeding novels all the way to Admiral. At a time when military officers purchased their rank rather than earning it competence was not guaranteed. This young officer learned his trade working his way up through the ranks. Beginning as a navy puke who became seasick in harbour getting rowed out to his first boat he gains his sea legs and the confidence of his men.

If you enjoy adventure at sea and the thought of hanging onto ratlines a hundred feet above a heaving deck doesn’t make you turn green then you’ll enjoy this series.

Borstal Boy

So I've watched the movie multiple times. Reading the book is somewhat spoiled for me and the differences made in the adaptation are immediately apparent. The picture on the cover clearly shows that Shawn Hatosy is far better looking. Whatever ratings the movie is given the book is not G rated.

Remember the it describes prison life. The language is of the lowest form of Cockney/Irish/English dialect laced with enough profanity to make a dockyard stevedore blush. These aren't choir boys. Fully half the book deals with his stay in the English Prison System before he is ever sent to Borstal.

The reading is rather tedious being excessively wordy. Eight people tell one another good night rather than putting it as I just did. We are given the words of the author's extensive repertoire of Irish ditties in Gaelic as well as English. The movie cast obviously weren't singers.

On the other hand to say that the movie version of this book is a loose interpretation is to understate the case. Behan's book may have been partially fictionalized but the script writers altered the facts presented here so radically the author would not have recognized himself were he alive today.

Blue Lily, Lily Blue

The Raven Cycle takes fortune telling for granted. A principal character is a ghost. A group of private school boys are searching for an ancient king who lives in a magical realm situated on a line of power. If you accept these little details it's not a bad tale. It does require a fair dose of imagination and a great deal of suspension of disbelief. Oh, and we learned in book one that one of the boys will die before the year is out and Blue has been hearing as long as she can remember that if she kisses her true love he will die.

There's Richard Gansley III who lives in the converted factory he owns.

Noah Czerny, the ghost who lives in a room there.

Another Roommate, Ronan Lynch who has a younger brother Matthew and an older, Declan. Ronan has a pet Raven and in book 2 we learned he can dream things into existence—his father in fact dreamed his mother into existence.

Adam Parrish, the victim of child abuse who lives in rooms above a parsonage. A townie he lacks the other's financial resources.

“The students kept coming in. Adam kept watching. He was good at this part, the observing of others. It was himself that he couldn't seem to study or understand. How he despised them, how he wanted to be them.” (p. 63)

And Blue Sargent who lives with her Mother Maura, her Aunt and several other relatives and friends who make their living as psychics.

Book three tends to drag, it just hasn't grabbed my interest quite the same as books one and two. The private school boys have a sense of entitlement. It is taken for granted that what they want they'll get. When Gansley joins Adam before the judge the two are practically on a first name basis. The results are so foregone they aren't even mentioned.

Stuck Together

Third in a Cowboy Romance Series entitled Trouble in Texas. Set in the imaginary frontier town of Broken Wheel near Palo Duro on the Texas Panhandle in the mid-1800's. The story centres around a group of Northern Civil War Veterans whose bond was forged in the worst of circumstances in The South's most notorious prison. Luke Stone returns home in book one to find his father murdered and a stranger living on his spread. His buddies are Darius Riker the town's unofficial doctor, Jonas Cahill town preacher, and Vincent Yates town lawyer. This being a romance series in book one Luke marries a gal he rescues from a river flood. In book two Dare, the doctor marries Glynna adopting her teenage son and daughter after she takes over the town restaurant. Life is complicated when Jonas' sister arrives unannounced and as this book gets underway Vince's family arrives in town: ageing father, senile mother, illegitimate daughter—Vince's half sister and a fox hound. Vince's romance with his buddy Jonas' sister Tina is well telegraphed so that leaves Jonas to hook up with Melissa the new arrival. If this sounds like a spoiler the storyline is that obvious. Getting there the principals will lurch from disaster to disaster.

Mid-way through the book matters transpire exactly as predicted.

The Promise

I started this book which is number five in a series because of the number of plot lines left unresolved in book four. As the book begins it introduces an entirely new character and so far is silent on the subjects that interested me. As before, the population of Thunder Point keeps growing. And as it turns out the simple solutions are always the easiest.

Children graduate high school and leave home for college. In Canada it's grade 12, in America they're Seniors and go to fancy Proms and attend Fall Commencement and/or Homecoming. I graduated high school before the results of my provincially graded exams had even arrived. Deputy Yummy Pants becomes Lieutenant. Life continues and the drama of their lives lurches on from crisis to crisis.

The plot lines continue to be predictable and the characters petting, tonsil hockey, fore-play, and bedroom gymnastics remain a prominent part of the telling. There are three more E-books in the series and another in the works. Were I not reading them for free I would not have gotten past book one and as it is will not be going any further.

Go Set a Watchman

(Isaiah 21:6) For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go, set a watchman; let him declare what he seeth:

This verse quoted from the prophet Isaiah would seem to be the source of the title. Chapter 7 in the book.

The adult Jean Louise returns home from New York to the community Scout grew up in, seeing it with adult eyes. There are frequent flash backs to her childhood experiences inspired by what those eyes now see.

The traumas she experienced listening to school yard gossip and picking up miss-information she lacked a mother to correct continue to haunt her.

(1 Corinthians 13:11) When I was a child, I spake as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child: now that I am become a (wo)man, I have put away childish things.

The genie is out of the bottle but part of Scout would love to put it back.

This is a woman who smokes and defies convention by walking around in public in pants.

Those who are disturbed by this book have probably never read To Kill a Mockingbird, knowing it only from the romanticized movie version, a common error in this post-literate society.

Just a Minute More

If the vignettes in the previous two books in the series were read on air in one minute then Ms. Boulton started talking much faster as the set in this volume are at least half again as long. She still continues to make history interesting but this set of stories seems to feature events more than individuals and the people she talks about often don't live happy lives.

The Chance

Follows directly from The Hero incorporating people we've already met. Still set in Thunder Point, the community just keep growing. I've never been a fan of Romance Novels but this series just seems to keep growing on me. Book four in the series ends with many plot lines unresolved making it imperative I read Book five.

Fired Up

Follows directly from book one in the Trouble in Texas Series that began with Swept Away. Once more Cowboy Romances superior in nature to anything written by L'Amour or Zane Grey but with no pretensions of being great literature. As is written of many B-movies, okay time-wasters, or a pleasant way to curl up in an easy chair when you don't want a challenging read. This is not to say that they don't confront difficult issues.

White settlers laid claim to the Mother Earth native peoples felt no one could own and hunted the Buffalo on which they depended to near extinction. The Texas Longhorn Cattle, descendents of escaped Spanish herds developed immunity to diseases that plagued most other cattle whereas native peoples' numbers were decimated by European Diseases.

Texas at the time this story is set was a land before the law and legal statutes held sway. Hence we have a lawyer who had no degrees, a doctor who hadn't studied medicine and a restaurant owner who couldn't cook. What we do have is a confraternity of men whose attitude is us against the world.

Though I realize it may be a challenge to make day to day drudgery sound interesting this book seems to go to the other extreme of piling disaster on disaster. To put it more plainly I preferred book one in the series to this one.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Second in JK Rowling's booklets this one a text book for a course taught by Hagrid at Hogwarts owned by Harry Potter. There are 1000's of weird and wonderful critters on this earth and in its ocean depths. To look at your own skin under a microscope is a scary prospect. Legends of even more mythical creatures whose existence is in doubt persist in popular culture. Dragons and unicorns exist in song and on English Heraldry. There are also supposed sightings of sea monsters, creatures that live in deep lakes such as the Loch Ness Monster or Ogopogo, and wild men of the mountains variously called Yeti or Abominable Snowman. JK Rowling builds upon these mythical creatures and adds ones of her own.

The Hero

Book 3 of this series that numbers 9 at present begins with a minor character. What's important is the fact there may be minor characters but in Carr's world there are no unimportant ones. As new people arrive in this town of 1500 the ones we already know are not neglected; they just meet new people. This continues to be a good read with some bedroom gymnastics thrown in for those who need the titillation.

Quidditch through the Ages

Describes and gives rules of an imaginary game played with enchanted balls by players on flying broomsticks. The full list of fouls is not available to the wizarding public lest it give players ideas.

Just Another Minute

Reportage on the just finished, July 2015, Pan-American Games in Toronto aside Canadians have rarely been noted as being bullish on Canada or blowing their own horns. Marsha Boulton's three books in this series feature historical vignettes of Canadian events, accomplishments, and people who should be famous but remain unknown to most Canadians. These “Canadian Minutes” first aired on CBC Radio.

My Life with the Walter Boys

Jackie Howard, a girl who has spent most of her growing years in a private girls school loses her New York City parents and older sister in a terrible car accident and moves to live with her guardian on a horse ranch in Colorado. Her guardian has 12 sons—well one of them is her husband and there is a single tom boyish girl—Parker who gets little mention.

Living with 12 tall, blonde, blue-eyed hunks may sound romantic but the sight of dirty boxer shorts in the washroom and on the wearer first thing in the morning? For the reader the challenge is keeping track of all these people. The writer seems to see no difference between a pick-up truck and a car.

A seventeen-year-old Lothario who looks hot, knows it, and flaunts it can be tough to live with. God's gift to women can be just a touch insufferable. How do you cope with girlfriends who would just die for his attentions?

I downloaded this book out of pure curiosity. I continued reading it because it's just darn well written.

The Newcomer

A brief read of the continuing saga of Thunder Point makes it sound like a daytime soap opera but I was curious to try one more outing. The community of Thunder Point is styled as an isolated self-sufficient burg where everyone knows everyone else, people mind everyone's business but their own, but also take care of one another. Being Deputy Sheriff Roger MacCain in that context means knowing implicitly who the troublemakers are and otherwise protecting drunks from themselves and keeping partying teens safe.

Being identified as Deputy Yummy Pants hardly makes an officer the object of respect. But with all the objectification of good looking women why shouldn't female writers play tit for tat. In Big Stone Gap Adriana Trigiania refers to a handsome man as having a figure that made Levis sing. Pity that hunk was gay.

Started reading this book purely out of curiosity and was instantly hooked. If you don't mind the bedroom gymnastics these books are a good read. Covered is teenage sex, sexting, and the recently defined online practice of ghosting. Definitely written from a woman's perspective.

Isaac's Storm

Isaac's Storm because he was the meteorologist in Galveston in 1900 and storms were not named until 1953. Galveston in 1900 was built on a sand bar an average four feet above sea level, eight feet at its highest point. A one foot rise in tides covered 1000 ft of beach front. Little was understood about the formation and mechanics of hurricanes at the time. Hubris and one-up-manship completed the picture. Hurricane storm surge can exceed thirty feet. To say that residents had no clue what was about to hit them is an understatement.

The book goes back to basic principles describing Isaac Cline's training as a weatherman, Christopher Columbus' and other mariner's first encounters with cyclonic storms and even the original scientific discoveries about air—that it has weight, that moving air, wind, has force and that large storms move in circular patterns.

Back in 1900 meteorology was in its infancy and weather forecasting was an inexact science, many would say it still is. Modern technology made the collection of weather data possible but it wasn't until the advent of computers that complex modelling of weather systems became possible. Little was known about the development and behaviour of hurricanes and since they form over large bodies of water data collection was hit or miss. What was known about hurricanes was considered proprietorial information and little shared. Because hurricanes remain unpredictable and the work was a male domain until recent years hurricanes were given female names. Add professional jealousy to the mix and the fact that a dangerous, deadly hurricane was crossing Cuba was knowledge that could not be shared due to blockage of transmissions.

Whylah Falls

My reason for buying this book of poems by an Afro-Nova Scotian writer fifteen years ago is lost to me now. Probably a review I read in the Star Book Section, something the advent of a computer in my life caused me to cease reading on a regular basis.

A book of 200 pages has a 30-page introduction written by the author. Whylah Falls is a home lost in memory, a place that never existed but not unlike a home one can only return to in memory because the home remembered no longer exists in reality.

Cape Breton Highlands Nation Park: Guide

Clarence Barrett's “Companion” is one part guidebook, one part memoir of his travels in the park, and one part scientific journal. If you travel the park counter-clockwise as I did you don't get an opportunity to pick it up until after you've driven the entire highway through the park. It should be available at the Ingonish end. The book is well edited and exhaustive in its coverage of hiking trails, official and unlisted. Ideally the book should be read before one enters the park gates—there aren't any; as I peruse it becomes an exercise in armchair travel and self-education.

The practice of giving the people whose homes were expropriated to create a park first priority in job hiring ensures that park staff have a certain love-hate relationship with the place.

There is a section of colour photographs at the centre of the book on polished paper. I do with the author had opted to show half as many photos in half page blow-ups as the present collage style doesn't due justice to his photography. One or two full-page portrait oriented photos would have been nice as well.

The Wanderer

So, the preview looked good and the book was available from the library for free. The plot is rather predictable but with enough extras thrown in to keep it interesting. I've driven through and spent some time along the Oregon Coastal Towns that form the setting. Only a few editing gaffs make this a better than average e-Book. First in a series set in a small made-up community on the coast.

This author has that rare gift that cannot be bottled and sold of making the reader feel they are present hearing the surf crash, the gulls scream, and smell the salt ocean air. Her plots may be predictable but her characters come alive on the page in a way that makes them real for the reader, that puts you there on the page with them. Their lives matter and one feels compelled to read on to see whether the outcomes you expect come to pass and how the characters get themselves out of the scrapes in which they find themselves.

Yes, this is a Harlequin Romance and the characters do have rather torrid sex. I don't personally read books like this for vicarious titillation and wouldn't be reading this one if those rather detailed scenes were protracted and appeared to be the only object of the writing. The author makes the reader care for her characters and feel present in the scene with them, there are no cut-out single dimensional background figures. The book ends suddenly without any happily ever after scenarios the next book in the series picking up the story seamlessly where this one left off.

The Dream Thieves

Seemlessly takes over as volume two of the Raven Series from book one The Raven Boys and is followed by Blue Lily, Lily Blue, book three. The offer of Book one for free is a ruse to get one to buy the other two unless one can borrow them for free from an E-book Library. That crab aside as YA occult romance fiction these aren't bad stories. Well written and well edited, things I no longer take for granted where e-books are concerned.

The Birthday Letters

Ted Hughes threnody for his former wife Sylvia Plath published 35 years after her death by her own hand. A case of can't live with her, can't live without her; mental illness made life with her difficult. The poems are highly personal and often difficult of access. Bought this book when it came out in 1998 just six months before the author's death and just now reading it. Hughes was harshly judged as an unsympathetic serial lover until these poems saw the light of day.

Swept Away

Written by Mary Connealy who authored the Kincaid Brides Trilogy which I also enjoyed. Book One of Trouble in Texas is offered free once more to hook the reader on buying the other two. The author writes Cowboy Romances heavier on action-adventure than on Romance. The books are well edited and engage the reader from page one. Mind you it's a cliché that the men must be handsome, tall and strong, broad-shouldered, slim-waisted; the women diminutive and pretty. This series is set in Palo Duro on the Texas Panhandle in a time before law arrived so gun-play is an essential part of the scene. As it happens Luke Stone's sister happens to be one of the Kincaid Brides in Colorado. Cowboys ride horses and fight range wars. They also have raging hormones but their amours are handled tastefully.

The Brothers

What led a pair of brothers to bomb the Boston Marathon in 2013? The author did exhaustive on the ground research in Chechnya, Dagestan, Stalin's Gulag, and the Boston area in writing a forensic account of the family's background. The book is well edited and presented but reads like a detective's field notes giving us the facts of the case with no sense of empathy for the objects of her investigation. One senses that the many people who were interviewed must have been left with a sense of having being used.

This was a family who fled Russia because they were victimized there due to their ethnicity, religion, and culture only to arrive in America at a time when the War on Terror made all things Muslim suspect. When we grant refugees asylum they are often confronted with a language in which they cannot communicate, a bureaucracy they don't know how to navigate, customs and morays foreign to them, and a system seemingly designed to act as a barrier to their success. All too often the American Dream becomes a nightmare and children of such immigrants fail to flourish in an environment that seems fashioned to put them down and keep them there.

The story has played out in the lives of Vietnamese refugees supported with limited success by religious groups in the US and Canada. In the life of Omar Kadhr. Having extended the hand of friendship we feel betrayed. Stories such as this present the details of frustrated hopes and dreams and hint at the temptation to exact revenge and descend into lives of crime and drugs. What they fail to suggest is the motivation that led to such bad decisions or the changes that should be made to make the asylum process more humane and workable for those forced to go through it. Explaining what led to the crime in no way exonerates the perpetrators nor does it lead to solutions for preventing its recurrence.

Individual rights to freedom, security and privacy seem to be the first victims of the War on Terror. The fact that the acts of two individuals could lead to an entire city being under lock-down speaks for itself. Could it be that the reactions of security forces are far worse than those of the terrorists who provoked them. Is this akin to burning a house down because there is a mosquito inside. If you provoke your suspects into a shoot-out they spare you the bother of proving them guilty in court and the protracted appeal process that follows a capital sentence.

After reading this book the only thing I'm certain about is that bombs went off in Boston. The recipe for the creation of a pressure cooker bomb was available by direct link in a magazine posted in Wikipedia. That's hardly a spoiler. I'm not so certain as to who set them or why. I do know that police tactics and the court of public opinion probably played a big role in motivating whoever did. Executing a young man over a decade from now may create a martyr but will do nothing to make things better and may even worsen them.

Texas Jack

Like so many books I've been reading lately this one jumps around in time and place mid various generations of the same family. We see Jack as a 10-year-old, as a teenage jock, and as a parent with a son of his own. No one would accuse this of being great literature but the book is well-edited and although at times pedestrian has a certain familial appeal. It gives one an insiders view of a family's life. At times the shifting point of view leaves one wondering who's doing the narrating. The book confronts issues of alcoholism and child neglect. The book has a ready for Hollywood ending.

Saint John: Facts and Folklore

The 190-page book is a series of vignettes and brief articles often a single sentence rather than a history. Goss needs to fire his editor as the book is littered with spelling mistakes and contains boners such as the plague marking the Trafalgar Stairs and a suburb performance. The resulting gaffs have a comedic effect that may not be the intended approach. Many of the allusions are probably of more interest to native Saint Johners than to outsiders such as this reader.

An American Outlaw

Army Vets from Lafayette, Louisiana. Terlinga Texas, been there no reason to return. Alpine--jumping off point for Big Bend. Flashbacks to service in Iraq. The story told from the point of view of former soldiers on the lam after robberies and that of law enforcement tracking them. Bad grammar intentional dialect and poor editing. Despite poor choice of changes to first person the story holds the reader’s attention. Shifts from the Vets to Law enforcement and the past in Iraq can be confusing. What comes through to this reader most clearly is the futility and waste that war represents and the lasting damage it does to the individuals who wage it.

The Raven Boys

Made it fifty pages into this book before I bogged down. The writing style is reminiscent of a newspaper report and the author seems to lack any sense of tense for the verbs she uses making for reading discomfort. The subject matter is fantasy and ESP but the writing style serves to destroy the reader’s suspension of disbelief and therefore fails to draw one in .

I aver this book was severely edited and reissued since I last tried reading it.

How to describe The Raven Boys. The boys of the title attend a swank private school for boys. The book combines elements of teen romance, paranormal, murder mystery, fortunetelling, and even a ghost who seems almost live. Somehow the author pulls it all off and makes it seem plausible.

Little Brother

This review does not contain spoilers.

First off I should thank the author, Cory Doctorow for offering this book for free download. The book is meant to be disturbing. It is a cautionary tale of Security Forces run amuck. Media coverage of terrorist events have bred a sense of apprehension in the populace which is empowering repressive security agencies to infringe on individual rights and freedoms such as privacy, presumed innocence, freedom from search without just cause. The electronic devices which have come to make our lives so much more convenient also leave us vulnerable to government surveillance.

It has been known for years that checking certain books out from the library will trigger a report to the FBI or similar agencies. Police are supposed to get a court order before they wiretap your phone or obtain a phone log. However we are learning that our online activities and E-mail seem to be fair game for any domestic spy agency with a desire to track us. The transponders that allow us to cross bridges and use toll roads leave a record of our travels. Credit card records tell another tale and store loyalty cards add a wealth of information on our preferences. Electronic health and pharmacy records add more details. Transit passes reveal our every move. Red light cameras track who crosses an intersection and security cameras are everywhere--smile for the camera. Cameras in space can determine the denomination of a coin dropped on Red Square. The computer in your car can reveal the speed at which you’ve been driving and how often you’ve used your brakes in panic mode.

It is little comfort to be told that you’ve nothing to worry about if you’ve done nothing wrong. Tell that to black teens in any major American City. Bill C51 is presently before the Canadian Senate and would grant authorities sweeping powers to surveil electronic communications. Who is reading your E-mail? What happens if some functionary decides you fit a dangerous profile?

Post 911 $635,000,000,000 has been spent on security in the US. Cross any border and learn the sweeping powers of border agents. Board any plane and feel treated like a criminal. Know that most of this so-called security is mainly for show and does little to make us safer. In Canada we are still dealing with the fallout from head taxes for Chinese immigrants, WW#1&2 internment camps for Japanese and German citizens, residential schools for Native Canadians, disputes over expropriation. Do we really trust the government to protect our rights given that track record?

Reading this book is meant to leave you feeling uncomfortable and looking over your shoulder. What percentage of eligible voters exercise their franchise? Can we afford to be complacent?

I’m assuming that most of the grammatical errors were intentional to represent youth speak. I think it’s great the author acknowledges great bookstores though putting the descriptions at the head of each chapter somehow distracts from the flow of the narrative. Including Chapters/Indigo and Amazon among the independent bricks and mortar stores whose demise they are causing some may find disconcerting. Amazon has no base from which to stage a face to face book signing.  

[Spoilers Follow]

This is a book aimed at a younger audience. In explaining computer and internet technology in some detail it may leave those of us of an age scratching our heads. I’ll leave defining that age to others. The biggest surprise comes when the ending that seems inevitably foreshadowed is abandoned in favour of a typical “Hollywood” happy ending. This was the one sour note in an otherwise well constructed plot. Forgive the irony here.