Tag Archives: review of the written word

Book reveals incredible truth on Canada in Afghanistan

The Dogs are Eating Them Now

By Graeme Smith

Alfred A. Knopf Canada

298 pages, $32

Reviewed by Katrin Horowitz

“The cycle of outrage and convenient forgetting seems likely to continue,” Graeme Smith writes in this extraordinary book about Canada’s war in Afghanistan.  The quotation comes from his chapter on the detainee crisis.  Unfortunately it applies all too aptly to the war as a whole, although now that our troops are home, “convenient forgetting” is more dominant.

Since 2005, Smith has spent much of his life in Afghanistan, far more time than any single Canadian soldier of any rank, which is why this account of what went wrong and why it went wrong is so compelling.  He arrived as a 26-year old Globe and Mail war correspondent:  “…an excited kid, recording what felt in some ways like a climactic battle between the forces of barbarism and civilization.”  Unlike our soldiers, he stayed long enough to see the big picture and to understand how that picture deteriorated over the years, despite occasional local successes.

One example: NATO funds the building of paved roads to improve transportation and strengthen civil society. The local insurgents demand protection money from the contractors (as much as $50,000 U.S. per kilometre) to allow construction to proceed. A success – the road is built and traffic moves swiftly.  Then various government and/or insurgent groups put up roadblocks to collect kickbacks or to steal goods. Success is redefined so that getting through with not too many delays and not too many payments is good. Meanwhile, the drug dealers use the nicely paved road to speed opium to Pakistan or Iran. And the insurgents buy more weapons, and the war worsens.

Another: A schoolteacher who knew Afghan President Hamid Karzai as a child tells Smith about his old friend’s government. “It’s corrupt . . . morally and economically,” he says.

By the end of the book, after seeing all the surges that only made things more dangerous, after cutting through the complexities and disinformation around the detainee-torture crisis, after itemizing the cascading corruption of government theft and bribes and collusion with the Taliban, after watching the Americans and other NATO forces work at cross purposes, after conducting the first-ever survey of insurgent fighters and discovering that the Taliban were more interested in closing cinemas than global jihad, after being targeted by a drug lord for his revelations of government collusion in the drug trade, and after seeing too many small, heartbreaking catastrophes where a farmer loses his livelihood to the war on drugs or loses his family to friendly fire or loses his freedom because he was in the wrong place, after all this, as the Canadian presence comes to an end, Smith sums up the West’s collective failure as, quite simply, “our inability to understand the needs and desires of the local people.” It was always all about us.

Graeme Smith is still in Afghanistan, now as an analyst with the International Crisis Group. We can only hope that he will continue to report on events there with the same unblinkered honesty that is evident throughout The Dogs are Eating Them Now. Lest we forget.

Katrin Horowitz is the author of The Best Soldier’s Wife, a novel about Canada’s war in Afghanistan from the perspective of a military wife.

Vagabond’s candour makes memoir worthwhile

Wanderlust: A Love Affair with Five Continents

By Elisabeth Eaves

Seal Press

304 pages, $17.50

Reviewed by Isabela Vera

Elisabeth Eaves first began her love affair with travel as a college freshman, spending the summer in Spain as an au-pair with a penchant for Pepe, the suave bartender down the road. Now a middle-aged freelance writer living in New York City, she returns through her travel memoir to reflect upon a decade and a half spent pursuing pleasure in places that the meeker among us may only dream of. Wanderlust: A Love Affair with Five Continents untethers Eaves from the grey, drizzly backdrop of her “disappointingly unexotic” university life in early-90s Seattle, pushing her through roles ranging from an exchange student in Cairo, a backpacker in Australasia, a hiker in Papau New Guinea, and a Master’s student in New York.

“I had woken up at the age of thirty-four to realize that I wanted to go home, only to discover that I had no idea where that was,” writes Eaves in her opening prologue.   It is our first hint that Wanderlust may not be your run-of-the-mill tale of self-discovery. Eaves’s memoir is darker and more thought-provoking than its cheesy tropical cover suggests. Although this final revelation looms over readers from the start, we initially indulge in 20-year-old Eaves’ adventurous spirit. Her opportunities seem endless, and we barely bat an eyelid when, after a failed attempt at diplomacy in Karachi, she writes that “the ebbing of this professional direction didn’t yet worry me much . . . what I most wanted was to travel more, without an end date or obligation in sight. I wanted to wander and feel free.”  The memoir moves constantly between different men and countries as her wanderlust intensifies. Each new part of the world is revealed through a lens of love, separation, and sex.

Her journey has a theme: “travel equals longing equals love.”  For Eaves, the conventional aspects of  travel–the food, the culture shock, the self-discovery–have always been entangled with desire. If we can first accept the memoir’s romantic focus, than we can appreciate her personal revelations. Wanderlust flirts with the men and the places, but at its core lies Eaves and her inability to stay with them. “I know that I’m the problem,” she writes. “I’m perverse . . . Nothing with me can last.”

This problem makes Eaves a frustrating protagonist. We begin to mistrust her judgement by the book’s second section, when she tells us that “the jungle, with its never-wavering pattern of life and death . . . was a rational place compared to my own heart.”  In moments of emotional climax, her attention to other characters is minimal, and we feel that she cares little about them. It is the frank exposure of both her strength and her vulnerability that keeps us with her. “Even if I don’t love the reality . . . want to have the enviable life, just because it’s enviable,” she admits. The prose is simple, humourless, even narcissistic. The honesty is refreshing and forces us to admit that we, too, were once seduced by her limitlessness.

At first, each new sexual and geographical conquest is exciting to us. By the memoir’s last section, it all feels repetitive. Eaves does a clever job of closing down the opportunities we once saw as never-ending, making us want to scream “enough!” and book our own return flight home. She drags us through the claustrophobia to reward us by picking up the pieces, acknowledging “when traveling stops changing you, it’s time to go home.”

Wanderlust is not so much a bubbly beach read but a companion for a long, winding journey, preferably with a lot of time to spend staring out the window of a train. The author’s candour ultimately makes the entire tumultuous ride worthwhile.

Isabela Vera is a tea-loving world traveller and a UVic student.

 

 

Technology helps us manage ourselves

The Virtual Self: How Our Digital Lives Are Altering The World Around Us

McClelland and Stewart

$19.95, 229 pages

Reviewed by Jenny Aitken

Nora Young is a well-known Canadian broadcaster and writer who lives in Toronto and hosts CBC Radio One’s Spark, a program that focuses on how technology affects the world around us. In 2012, she released the book The Virtual Self: How our Digital Lives Are Altering The World Around Us, which has since gone on to become a national bestseller. She also visited the University of Victoria recently to discuss the implications of technology with students.

In The Virtual Self, Young explores the concept of self-tracking and how technology is changing the way people manage and register information. Using examples that range from Benjamin Franklin’s journal entries to the social media posts that helped pinpoint the location of a pipe-bomb in 2010, Young identifies different methods of self-tracking that increase self-awareness and make people more accountable for the way they spend their time.

One thread of this self-tracking relates to weight management. As Young explains, the web is rich with services to help people lose weight and stay fit through recording diet and exercises. In the book, Young identifies several technologies that are helping people shed pounds, such as FitBit, a small wrist monitor that tracks calories, exercise and even sleep by using 3-D motion sensors. There are also countless websites, such as FitDay.com, dedicated to giving specific information about the nutritional information for different foods in order to make it easier to keep tabs on how many calories users consume in a day.

Although Young discusses the benefits of these technologies, she acknowledges the concern that if people are too vigilant about their tracking, the danger is that “sources of bodily delight and physical expressiveness, such as running or eating a meal, are reduced to stats driven, objectified activities.” By demonstrating the positives as well as the negatives of these budding technologies, the reader is given a comprehensive look at the technological tools available today.

I appreciated that Young not only describes these technologies, but also tries them herself, creating authenticity and character in a research-driven book.

In The Virtual Self, Young examines surprising uses of tracking technology that could greatly improve the health of users. From the asthma inhalers that have a GPS to better monitor where flare-ups occur, to Twitter feeds that pin-point and monitor the spread of infectious diseases, tracking technology offers many opportunities to advance our health.

The Virtual Self is well-written and packed with historical and contemporary examples. It opened my eyes to opportunities available to me, many readily accessible through the Internet or my iPhone. Several books already outline how technology is shaping our society, but few do it with such a fresh voice or attention to detail. Young puts it nicely, “Self-tracking is our gin. It’s an almost impulsive desire to document the actual states of being and physical presence.” If that’s the case, we can all drink up.

Jenny Aitken is about to enter the technology-rich job market after finishing her undergraduate education.

 

 

Leacock-winner’s characters warm-hearted at core

Dance, Gladys, Dance

By Cassie Stocks

NeWest Press

300 pages; $19.95

By Joy Fisher

When 27-year-old Frieda Zweig answers an ad about a beautiful old phonograph for sale, she’s hoping to meet Gladys, who’s selling the phonograph because she’s giving up dancing and needs the room for baking. Frieda, in retreat from a broken romance and determined to give up her attempts to become a visual artist, hopes Gladys can show her how to lead a “normal” life.

Instead,  answering the ad puts Frieda in touch with the paranormal .  Gladys, it turns out, is a ghost, albeit a friendly one who has Frieda’s best interests at heart. When she answers the ad, Frieda meets an elderly but lively man named Mr. Hausselman, who teaches photography at the local art centre. “Mr. H.,” as Frieda soon comes to call him, offers her a room in his house at a price she can’t turn down. Thus begins an adventure that will ultimately lead Frieda on a path of personal growth.

Gladys and Mr. H are just two of many colourful characters convincingly drawn by Cassie Stocks—an accomplishment worth celebrating in the author of a first novel — which has won the 2013 Stephen Leacock Award for humour.

There’s Norman, Frieda’s ex, a well-meaning fellow who feels duty-bound to keep his promise to his dead father to manage the family’s string of porno shops; Norman’s mother, Lady March, who fancies herself a spiritualist but isn’t afraid to bare it all for a worthy cause; Ginnie, Frieda’s art school mate, who’s determinedly climbing the corporate ladder in the commercial art world; Mr. H’s son, Whitman, a Hollywood filmmaker who buys his best screenplays from Marilyn, a brilliant druggie who lives in a Winnipeg flophouse; Mr. H’s neighbour, Miss Kesstle who crochets incessantly and, though never married, has a solid maternal instinct; and a doomed girl named Girl who is the last of Gladys’s line.

It’s a little easier to understand how this novice author managed to create such diverse characters when you read her bio. No spring chicken when this novel was finally published, Stocks is described as “a biker chick, a university student, an actress, and a rich man’s gardener.” She had also worked as a waitress, an office clerk, an aircraft cleaner, had raised chickens and had even been the “caretaker of a hydroponic pot factory.” In short, by the time she wrote this book, Stocks had already lived a long and diverse life, and she clearly poured all of her experiences into her characters.

And almost all of them, in spite of their individual differences, eventually come to have the best interests of the others at heart. The book is set in Winnipeg and is imbued with all the solidarity and fellow-feeling of the participants in the Winnipeg General Strike. These characters eventually organize a sit-in on the roof of the local art centre when the city decides to sell the building to a chain store. They succeed in saving the centre, of course, and, in the process, weave a web of support for one another that’s also revitalizing for the reader.

And what of Gladys? Well, in the end, Gladys dances one more time while Frieda cheers her on, and then she disappears for good, but not before Frieda reclaims her own identity as an artist by getting out her paints to capture the dancing image on canvas.

“I hoped you’d do it,” Gladys says to Frieda, when she sees Frieda plying her brush once again. “Mission complete.”

This is not a profound novel, but it’s a warm-hearted one. I loved hanging out with the characters in this book.

Joy Fisher graduated from UVic in 2013 with a BFA in writing.