Review by Anne McDougall of “Come, thou Tortoise” by Jessica Grant

Dave — Thu, 06 May 2010 13:53:00 +0000

This is a quirky, whimsical story of a motherless girl, determined to find love in her precarious life. With a lot of courage - and some very funny antics along the way - she succeeds.

The tortoise of the title is her friend at one end of the continent, Portland, Oregon, and a mouse called Wedge at her home at the other end, St. John’s, Newfoundland. She talks to them when neither her Dad, whom she adores, or her uncle Thoby, are available. With no mother, sisters or brothers to trip her up, the protagonist, Audrey Flowers (often called Oddly), is original and abrupt in her talking and dealings. But her search for affection never deserts her and she batters her way through to a fairly convincing sense of home.

Of the author, critics write, “her work twinkles with wordplay”. Jessica Grant lives in St. John’s and you get a vivid feeling of the closeness of that city to the U.K. with many plane trips back and forth in this book. She is a most original writer and has won prizes for her stories, in particular “Making Light of Tragedy.”
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Matt and the Wonder of Wishes, by Bobby Hawley, Saturday May 8, 1 to 3pm

Dave — Sun, 02 May 2010 02:32:02 +0000

From a review on True North Perspectives;

“… Matt and the Wonder of Wishes by Nepean, Ontario author Bobby Hawley.

In this masterfully written book, Queen Zephania is the ruler of the fairy realm and can be found in the forest glade not far from a magnificent landscape of flowers. Should you become one of the chosen, you might even be given a wish. The fairies were attracted to this location by the display of colors and the heavenly scents coming from a beautiful garden right at the forest’s edge.

One night just before dusk a young lad by the name of Matthew spotted a box moving toward the forest glade, and on the side of the box was written an invitation to a wish. He followed the box and there he glimpsed the magical kingdom.

He felt sure he was one of the chosen, so the next day he returned with his young friends Jake, Katie, Danielle, Ana and Max. The Queen granted a wish to each child so that the special dream held in their hearts could be fulfilled.

Bobby Hawley is a retired teacher who loves working with children. She has published two children’s books on bullying since retiring and has frequented many schools, doing readings and discussing the importance of empathy. She has written and published a book of illustrated children’s poems as well as a couple of chapbooks.”

An evening with Frank Koller, author of “Spark”, Thursday May 6 from 6 to 8pm

Dave — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 15:37:32 +0000

Frank Koller will be at Books on Beechwood, on Thursday the 6th of May from 6 to 8pm, reading from, discussing, and signing copies of his book “Spark: How Old-Fashioned Values Drive a Twenty-First Century Corporation! SPARK is a fascinating glimpse into how capitalism can, and should, work in North America - to protect people as well as profits.

Long time CBC economics reporter and foreign correspondent, Koller tells the story of how one unusual and profitable Fortune 1000 multinational company challenges the conventional wisdom shaping modern management’s view of the workplace by refusing to lay off its workers in tough times.

Norman A. Berg, Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School says in his review:
“Frank Koller has done a remarkable job of presenting both an economic and a moral argument for the value to society of the unusual policies followed with great success by Lincoln Electric for over a hundred years. The book is excellent in both the historical overview and the numerous interviews with current and past employees. There is much that modern management can learn about the benefits to employees, customers, shareholders, and communities by examining the role of the ‘old fashioned’ culture of Lincoln Electric.”

Michael Enright, The Sunday Edition
“A fascinating story.”

Harvard Business Review
“A fascinating depiction of a rare human resource practice in a company with a long and hearty track record—food for thought for the rest of us.”

“Tea Time for the Traditionally Built” by Alexander McCall Smith

Dave — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 19:33:14 +0000

This is a Vintage Canada edition of the Alexander McCall Smith book which came out last year.

It is as delightful and easy to read as all his books, perhaps particularly those from the The No.l Ladies’ Detective Agency series. Precious Ramotse is the lady detective involved. This time she has her hands full with professional as well as personal problems. Her beloved tiny white van has broken down; her assistant has run into jealousy probems with her fiance; finally, the local football club has run into an unexpected losing streak, and the owner thinks one or more of the players is throwing the game.

The problems themselves are not really what hold our interest. It is the gently hilarious way McCall Smith handles them. He brings to life a gentle African town - so different from the deadly headlines we read every day from that continent. He once lived in Africa, although for the past decades has been attached to the University of Edinburgh from where he writes equally enchanting books about that city.

Read this one. “Wit worthy of Jane Austen”, says the Daily Mail, (London).

Review by Anne McDougall

“Brooklyn” by Colm Toibin

Dave — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 19:32:39 +0000

This is really the story of immigration - 50 years ago - from Ireland to the United States. It is interesting to us today as we watch immigration to our country changing from European to non-European, as the whole world ’s population shifts.

Eilis Lacey couldn’t find a job in her small southern Ireland town in the unsettled days after World War ll. When a priest in New York, who knows her family in Ireland, offers her a job in Brooklyn, she accepts it. It means leaving a close-knit family, a charismatic sister she dotes on and a widowed mother. After intense loneliness in her new boarding-house in Brooklyn, she eventually finds her feet, is liked at work, as well as the local dances. Somewhat to her surprise romance enters the picture, and she is wondering what to do, when her sister “back home”, suddenly dies, and she has to make the trip to Ireland.

Toibin gets astonishingly close to his characters and is justly called “one of the most accomplished writers writing in English today”. This book is charming and we get very close to its unpretentious group of characters. We are even challenged on our ideas of switching loyalties.

Toibin lives in Dublin and has won awards for five major novels, including “The Blackwater Lightship” and”The Master”.

Review by Anne McDougall

“The Disappeared” by Kim Echlin

Dave — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 19:32:02 +0000

It is surely a brave book that would set a love story near the killing fields of Pol Pot.

Canadian author Kim Echlin does this in her most recent book “The Disappeared” - even though the love story does start in Montreal and gives a haunting picture of the apartments, and bars and downtown dives of the east end of that city.

Echlin had travelled in Cambodia with a medical research team doing inoculations for children. She saw the memorials to those lost under the Khmer Rouge, 30 years earlier when 2 million died, many buried in the Killing Fields of Pol Pot.

Her book is an intense contrast between deep love, and hatred. A Montreal girl meets a Cambodian musician, sent to Canada by his family to escape the slaughter in Cambodia. She lives with him and falls deeply and forever in love. Her life is shattered when he disappears, back to Cambodia, where he was drawn to look up his own family. Ten years go by, without word, and she sets off to find him. The story is convincing - but harrowing. She learns the language and does find her lover. There are touching and terrifying descriptions of life in Cambodia where her true love cannot really tell her what he is doing. She follows him to his death and the book shares her feelings after that, when she returns to Montreal.

Echlin writes in a spare prose and the book has been called a battle cry and a piercing lament for truth, for love. She lives in Toronto, and has written four other books including: “Elizabeth Smart: A Fugue Essay on Women and Creativity”.

Review by Anne McDougall

“Three Cups of Tea” by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

Dave — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 19:08:07 +0000

This is the book you need beside you when you put down the daily newspaper with the continuing bad news out of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

It is the almost unbelievable story of an American who set out “to promote peace one school at a time” — and succeeded. Peace is not something we have been encouraged to pursue for some time. Greg Mortenson, through an extraordinary set of circumstances, found himself in a position to do just that.

In l993 he set off from his home in California to climb the world’s second-highest mountain,K2, in Pakistan’s rugged Karakoram mountains. He failed and was rescued and cared for by the inhabitants of a poor village up in the hills. Struck by their poverty, he promised them, and himself, to return and build them a school.

Back in America he helped found the Central Asia Institute and then set off himself to fulfill his promise. Mortenson had grown up in Tanzania, where his parents were missionaries. He learned the language of the Pakistan people. Through dangerous adventures he was kidnapped, held by warlords, shot at by opium smugglers. He became known as “Dr. Greg” and his training as an emergency nurse did indeed help him. By 2009 , 8l schools had been put up, mostly in Pakistan but a few over the Afghan borders. Children, especially girls, who had been sitting on the ground reading their lessons, now had a place to study.

Needless to say this has had a huge effect on this area. Military commanders in the U.S. have put the book on their reading list. It has been published in 3l countries. Mortenson now has a second book published: “Stones into Schools”. He is indeed an amazing man - living proof of what can be accomplished when we talk to “the other side”, instead of shooting them.

Review by Anne McDougall

“Noah’s Compass” by Anne Tyler

Dave — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 19:06:16 +0000

Anne Tyler writes about “ordinary people” in such a way that we can all relate to them. Or perhaps noone really feels ordinary, and neither do they.

“Noah’s Compass” is the story of a school teacher, Liam Pennywell, who had to retire early when his fifth grade class merged out of existence. At 6l, he pretends to be glad of his freedom. In actual fact he hits a nasty break-in in his new apartment. This in turn starts him on a life he didn’t expect.

Tyler is skilful and convincing in introducing the children from his two marriages, as well as his second (divorced) wife, sister and aged parents. Far from being left alone to read his beloved philosophy (the course he had wanted to teach) he is besieged with live-in family members, requests for drives, baby-sitting, etc.

The book uncovers stifled affection and old loyalties. As the blurb says, there may be a little of Liam in each of us. He is certainly a recognizable and likeable character.

This is Anne Tyler’s eighteenth novel. She won the Pulitzer Prize in l988. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Review by Anne McDougall

Books On Beechwood (Ottawa, Canada)

Review by Anne McDougall of “Come, thou Tortoise” by Jessica Grant

Book launch of Ray Tremblay’s “Riding the Tides of Life”, May 15, 11am to 1pm

Matt and the Wonder of Wishes, by Bobby Hawley, Saturday May 8, 1 to 3pm

An evening with Frank Koller, author of “Spark”, Thursday May 6 from 6 to 8pm

“Citizens of London” by Lynne Olson

“Tea Time for the Traditionally Built” by Alexander McCall Smith

“Brooklyn” by Colm Toibin

“The Disappeared” by Kim Echlin

“Three Cups of Tea” by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

“Noah’s Compass” by Anne Tyler