I've officially declared "time out" on TIME OUT guides!
On the back cover blurb, New York Times declared, "These books are the most hip and culturally I've officially declared "time out" on TIME OUT guides!
On the back cover blurb, New York Times declared, "These books are the most hip and culturally savvy I've used".
The Observer gushed, "Liberally peppered with all the quirky extras for which TIME OUT is well known".
Until I purchased this copy, I would have happily agreed and, indeed, that's the reason I purchased this one as a supplement to the EYEWITNESS SEVILLE & ANDALUSIA which I already owned.
My expectation was that TIME OUT would be just a little more hip, a little more under the radar, a little less touristy and a little more in the know locally, a little more off the beaten path, a little more focused on entertainment and arts and culture, and a good deal less focused on the typical text heavy list of top tourist sites and places to stay.
This little dud was most assuredly none of that and, even as a normal travel guide, fell well short of the standards established by the likes of EYEWITNESS or LONELY PLANET. I wouldn't categorically state that I'll never buy another TIME OUT guide, but it certainly won't be sight unseen by mail order.
“A newly discovered Vermeer – it would rock the art world.”
Indeed it would.
GIRL IN HYACINTH BLUE is the poignant and compelling tale of the prove“A newly discovered Vermeer – it would rock the art world.”
Indeed it would.
GIRL IN HYACINTH BLUE is the poignant and compelling tale of the provenance of a fictional undiscovered Vermeer that the current owner, for reasons of his own, is unwilling to disclose to the art world or present to experts for validation. Eight short stories, linked to one another through the painting, trace its life backwards in time from the present owner, through Holland under Nazi occupation in World War II all the way back to the 17th century when a financially challenged Vermeer sought to put brush and his own ground colours to canvas in the creation of a painting of … well, you’re just going to have to read the stories for yourself!
GIRL IN HYACINTH BLUE is entertaining, informative and as easy to read and comfortably sink yourself into as looking at your favourite Vermeer painting and allowing his trademark treatment of light streaming through the ever present upper left window to wash over you. Full disclosure … Vermeer is definitely my favourite classical artist so I’ll admit that made the novel even more enjoyable. What a wonderful treat the art world might have if a new Vermeer were discovered.
In late 1929, “ … the Depression began on that manic morning of October 29, to be known forever as Black Tuesday, …”
“… when the easy, buoyant era of In late 1929, “ … the Depression began on that manic morning of October 29, to be known forever as Black Tuesday, …”
“… when the easy, buoyant era of the twenties – the roaring, turbulent, high-flying twenties – came to a dead stop. Yet those fevered October days were more than symptoms of a deeper malady, undiagnosed and untreated.”
And I had absolutely NO idea of the magnitude and depth of those issues – hard-core right wing fascism that threatened to blossom into actual support of Hitler’s Nazism; a paranoid fear of socialism or public programs which knee-jerk reactionaries labeled as Communism; xenophobia and anti-immigrant racism; the enormity of the already well-developed divide between what Hugh MacLennan would characterize as THE TWO SOLITUDES, Quebec, French Canada and the Roman Catholic Church versus English Canada and all comers; the nasty, near criminal nature of Old Boy politics at municipal, provincial, and federal levels; the decade long (and more) domination of federal politics by RB Bennett and Mackenzie King; illegal right-wing police tactics from both municipal forces and the RCMP; work farms for unemployed men more properly described as prisons and military concentration camps; hunger marches, soup kitchens, protests and riots quelled with police batons and truncheons, endemic unemployment, grasshoppers, dust bowls and multi-year crop failures; … I repeat, I had NO idea!
And, suddenly, on September 8, 1939, “ … Parliament declared that a state of war existed between Canada and Nazi Germany. On that day, the Great Depression can be said to have ended. For war, which would bring mutilation and death, would also bring jobs … Suddenly a country that had been unable to provide work for a fifth of its people found work for all. The chronicle of the Great Depression is a catalogue of ironies, but that is the bitterest irony of all.”
The greatest irony of all is that Canada’s conversion to a left-leaning country with universal government paid health care, unemployment insurance, social welfare programs of all stripes, Old Age Security, Family Allowance, minimum wage laws, accident and sickness insurance, amended income tax laws to correct serious inequalities in wealth distribution, laws limiting hours of work, and a host of other ideas which in the twenties and during the Depression would have been reviled as much dreaded Communism is attributable to Canada’s decision to participate in World War II, to combat the Nazism which so many in Canada at the time seemed to genuinely support and believe in. The bullet that we dodged in our development of the policies of that new nation was not a mere infantryman’s bullet fired from the trenches. It was a full-fledged bomb that any tank in the coming war would have been happy to launch at a Canadian population well on its way to right-wing hatred and governmental autocracy.
THE GREAT DEPRESSION should be considered as mandatory reading in any Canadian history course. It’s not light reading and it’s not a short, easy read by any stretch but it’s informative, it’s compelling, it’s gripping, and it’s genuinely eye-opening. Thank you, Pierre Berton.
Paul Weiss
An interesting personal observation:
One of the developments of that decade was the formation of the CCF, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation – the precursor of today’s NDP - a left-leaning political party whose objective was to formulate and effect change through parliament in the manner of Britain’s still youthful Labour Party. With a rather rueful shake of my head, I can recall ever so clearly my deceased father’s (he was born in 1930) pejorative scornful reference to that party “CCFers? Common Cow F—kers!” I guess that will tell you clearly enough what he thought of any new-fangled socialist ideas at the time!...more
The shocking criminal history of American capitalist greed and the sub-prime mortgage crisis that rocked the world's markets!
Make no mistake. THE BIG The shocking criminal history of American capitalist greed and the sub-prime mortgage crisis that rocked the world's markets!
Make no mistake. THE BIG SHORT is a non-fiction piece of American history, it’s a story of American culture, it’s a complex reality tale of the structure of the US economy and its financial markets, it’s a shocking revelation of the negligence of US regulatory agencies and their lack of oversight of the markets for which they were responsible, but, more than anything else, THE BIG SHORT should be characterized as a true-crime dramatization of what was arguably the grandest of grand thefts in the history of the world!
The self-entitled attitudes of the moneyed class in the riotous aftermath of the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage derivative market was simply appalling:
“The ability of Wall street traders to see themselves in their success and their management in their failure would later be echoed, when their firms, which disdained the need for government regulation in good times, insisted on being rescued by government in bad times. Success was individual achievement; failure was a social problem.”
The powers that be could have stepped “in at any time to prevent individual American subprime mortgage borrowers from failing. The powers that be never did that, of course. Instead they stepped in to prevent the failure of the big Wall Street firms that had contrived to bankrupt themselves by making a lot of dumb bets on subprime borrowers.”
“The Wall Street firm became a black box. The shareholders who financed the risk taking had no real understand of what the risk takers were doing, and, as the risk taking grew ever more complex, their understanding diminished.”
But as to laying of criminal charges and the prosecution of traders and corporations and their boards of directors?? Don’t be ridiculous. It didn’t happen then and, to this day, if hard right-wing Republican politicians continue to have their way in government thanks to millions of starry-eyed, gullible, misinformed voters who imagine themselves as the next possible billionaire on the block, it never will happen. Strict regulation of financial markets remains a pipe dream!
“… the unwillingness of the US government to allow the bankers to fail was less a solution than a symptom of a still deeply dysfunctional financial system.”
My mind is still reeling as I try to absorb the reality of a US political, legislative, judicial and regulatory system that betrayed its citizenry by the refusal to recognize the criminality behind the virtually complete collapse of markets in 2008 and the necessity for steps to ensure it doesn't happen again!
“The storm had undergone an intensification [now known] as explosive deepening, but the Weather Bureau of Isaac’s time had no idea such a dramatic cha“The storm had undergone an intensification [now known] as explosive deepening, but the Weather Bureau of Isaac’s time had no idea such a dramatic change could occur.”
ISAAC’S STORM’s sub-title, A MAN, A TIME, AND THE DEADLIEST HURRICANE IN HISTORY provides an excellent overview summary of the three part aim of Erik Larson’s story of the death and destruction that passed through Galveston, Texas, in the second week of September in 1900. Larson has done an excellent job of telling the biographical story of a single man, Isaac Cline, dedicated to the early, undeveloped science of meteorology and its use in forecasting that had to be considered as, at best, rather hit-and-miss; the story of the development of the science itself in the context of a typical hubristic US mindset and the growth of the US port city of Galveston, Texas, in competition with its neighbour, Houston; and, finally, the catastrophic specific details of the hurricane itself and its horrific aftermath … in effect, the “story of what can happen when human arrogance meets the uncontrollable force of nature.”
My personal takeaway from ISAAC’S STORM is the rather surprised realization that the science of meteorology was much more advanced and used to a significantly greater extent than I had ever imagined in the late 19th and early 20th century. At the same time, I also finished reading with the disturbed feeling that the art of forecasting, predicated on the understanding of that science, could have been much more accurate and much more useful to the public at large if it had not been under the thumb of bureaucrats and politicians governed by the rule of CYA and the xenophobic beliefs that the USA had it all under control, knew it all, did it bigger and better, and could systematically reject any information or input from other nations and sources (particularly those, I might add, originating in nations “of colour” such as Cuba).
Neither a mere pedestrian, workmanlike, recitation of historical dates and facts nor a compelling page turner that could be read with the relentless interest of a suspense thriller, ISAAC’S STORM is a worthy addition to Larson’s body of work and maintains his position as an author able to write non-fiction in a manner that is at once informative and entertaining. (And readers should be reminded that the list of authors capable of that feat is quite short!)
“An almost endless series of depredations with human depravity at its worst.”
“The feud began in the spring of 1847 and only a few hours after James Do“An almost endless series of depredations with human depravity at its worst.”
“The feud began in the spring of 1847 and only a few hours after James Donnelly, an Irish immigrant first arrived in Lucan from his native Tipperary. It last nearly thirty-three years; was marked with murders, gang wars, highway robbery, mass arson, derailed trains, mutilations and barbarisms paralleling the Dark Ages.”
When it comes to a compelling portrayal of out-of-control, psychopathic criminality, Truman Capote’s IN COLD BLOOD or Ann Rule's THE STRANGER BESIDE ME pale and, frankly, look like Sunday outings in the park compared to Thomas P Kelley’s THE BLACK DONNELLYS. When Kelley outlines the shocking degree to which the Lucan community was held so completely in thrall that absolutely nobody had the courage to follow through with laying of criminal charges or acting in court as witnesses to the Donnelly multi-year reign of terror (even when law enforcement itself actually mustered the wherewithal to step in and attempt to assist), readers will have to pick up their jaws from the floor and shake their heads in frank disbelief.
The termination of this feud came about on February 4, 1880, when a vigilante mob (aided by more than a few glasses of Dutch courage) slaughtered the entire family in a bloody rampage which Toronto’s The Globe (the 19th century version of The Globe and Mail) characterized as “the blackest crime ever committed in the Dominion”. That’s as may be, from a strictly legal point of view, (said I with raised eyebrows as I read it) but I don’t think anyone, then or now, was shedding any tears or expressing any commiseration over the mistreatment of the Donnelly family. You'll never find a better example of the age old aphorism, "An eye for an eye".
If you’re a fan of the true crime genre and want to indulge in a shocking piece of Canadian history, then pick up this re-issue of Thomas P Kelley’s THE BLACK DONNELLYS. Definitely a page turner.
The home, museum, and library of 19th century architect, Sir John Soane
During the course of my travels, I’ve purchased a number of guides for museumsThe home, museum, and library of 19th century architect, Sir John Soane
During the course of my travels, I’ve purchased a number of guides for museums and art galleries which were intended to fill the holes in visits that were incomplete simply because complete coverage of these kinds of places in a single visit is all but impossible. They were also intended to be souvenirs and to provide me with more complete explanations and histories of some of the more interesting, controversial, or exciting exhibits that, once again, one would not obtain with a single pass tourist visit. THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART GUIDE, FRICK COLLECTION: HANDBOOK OF PAINTINGS and ROYAL OBSERVATORY GREENWICH SOUVENIR GUIDE are excellent 5-star examples of this type of tourist guide which I return to fondly from time to time to jog my memory many years after my original visit.
SIR JOHN SOANE’S MUSEUM LONDON: MUSEUM GUIDE is most assuredly NOT that kind of souvenir. In fact, it is an actual room-to-room and exhibit-to-exhibit guide which would have been extremely useful in making my visit more complete, more productive, and infinitely more informative had I known what I was holding in my hand as I strolled around Soane’s home. Buy it by all means but use it in the way it was intended because as a souvenir it has to be graded as a failure. My rating of 2-stars is on the basis of the purpose for which I bought it.
I’ll take the liberty of quoting the complete review of a reader who obviously valued it for its intended purpose:
“This well illustrated informative little pamphlet guides a visitor through the architect’s home which is stuffed full of books, paintings, sculpture, and antiquities. Illustrated with color photographs and floor plans, it also calls attention to Soane’s designing of the rooms for visual impact using natural light, mirrors and the placement of furnishings and his immense collection of arts and artifacts. While not a complete catalog of his collections, it’s an excellent little guide for visitors.”
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