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magazine / oct12
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October 2012 issue |
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BOOK REVIEWS
The Eastenders
MEMOIR
A Geography of Blood
Unearthing Memory from a
Prairie Landscape
By Candace Savage
Greystone Books
224 pp.,
$26.95
hardcover
Eastend is a dusty little village
tucked into the Frenchman
River valley in the southwestern
corner of Saskatchewan. On the
horizon to the west lie the Cypress Hills, a
cool, forested refuge from the Plains that
for millennia were favoured camping and
hunting grounds for the Blackfoot,
Assiniboine, Cree and Sioux. Candace
Savage is not the first writer to extract a
non-fiction book from the story of tiny
Eastend (population: 527), but A
Geography of Blood is more sympathetic in
tone and more ambitious in scope than
Wolf Willow, the much-celebrated 1962
classic work by American novelist and natural
history writer Wallace Stegner, in
which he recounts a vivid slice of
Eastend’s frontier history.
Savage’s book also excavates the past
much more thoroughly. The author of
some two dozen non-fiction books, she is
one of Canada’s most accomplished natural
history writers. What she uncovers
in Eastend ranges from 75 million years
of dinosaur life to 9,000 years of First
Nations occupancy, the story of the
Sioux in flight from the U.S. Cavalry,
the arrival of the North West Mounted
Police, Prime Minister John A.
Macdonald’s brutal duplicity and the
vibrancy and diversity of the plant and
animal life in and around the village that
has become her second home.
Like many writers before her, it was
Stegner’s memory that first brought
Savage to Eastend. The village’s Arts
Council maintains Stegner’s family home
as a retreat for writers. During her stay at
the house, Savage became enchanted with
the landscape and the quiet charms
of village life. She eventually bought a
small house down the street that became
the base for her many explorations.
(Disclosure: Candace and I met at a writer’s conference 15 years ago and
became friends, and she once lent me her
house in Eastend for a vacation.)
Up the hill from her bungalow is the
village’s marquee attraction: a modern
museum that holds the fossilized remains
of one of the most complete
Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons yet discovered.
It was excavated from a nearby coulee that
paleontologists call the “Supermarket of
the Dinosaurs.” What Savage learned
from her visits and subsequent interviews
with museum staff is that fossils found in
the area tell an almost unbroken story of
“75 million years of vertebrate history.”
From the age of the dinosaurs to their
extinction 65 million years ago and the
emergence of new life forms, fossils found
around Eastend range from dinosaurs to
the rhinos, camels, tiny bears and myriad
other mammalian species that emerged in
their wake.
The landscape around Eastend also
bears the faintest traces of the earliest
human occupancy. Stone circles reveal
ancient tipi sites. And in a meadow in the
Cypress Hills, Savage encountered archaeologists
who have uncovered a campsite
used continuously by aboriginal hunters
for more than 9,000 years. Near the bottom
of a seven-metre-deep pit, which the
archaeologists scraped out layer by layer,
they discovered a bone needle, “as white
as ivory and as delicate as a stem of grass,”
that someone lost 8,000 years ago. Nearly
one million artifacts were recovered during
the dig. What they tell us is that hundreds
of generations of First Nations families
camped and hunted buffalo here until the
great beasts vanished from the Plains.
The disappearance of the buffalo and
the settling of the West engendered the
bloodshed that ensued between the Sioux
and the U.S. Cavalry and between whisky
traders and the Blackfoot and Assiniboine.
Mounted police may have brought law
and order to the area, but they didn’t
deliver anything resembling justice to the
First Nations, who discovered that land
they had occupied since the end of the last
ice age had suddenly become the property
of a distant government.
Savage’s retelling of this tragic era of
Canadian history is heartfelt and thoughtprovoking.
Her story weaves descriptions
and quotes from historical documents into
a narrative threaded with the stories of
First Nations residents who live on reserves
near Eastend. Their voices bring the book
into the present. Fluidly written and conversational,
A Geography of Blood artfully
unearths Eastend’s astonishingly complex
natural and cultural history. If the village’s
Arts Council ever harboured any doubts
about the value of hosting writers in
Stegner’s old house, Savage’s book should
comfortably bury those anxieties.
— Rick Boychuk
Big lake stories
NATURE/ADVENTURE
The Greatest Lake
Stories from Lake Superior’s North
Shore
By Conor Mihell
Dundurn
224 pp.,
$24.99
softcover
With a circumference of
nearly 4,400 kilometres,
Lake Superior has no
shortage of shoreline. And, as Conor
Mihell’s book The Greatest Lake shows,
it has no shortage of stories either.
Mihell, a sea kayak tour guide and environmental/
adventure journalist who
lives in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., takes
readers on a trip along the Canadian
side of the world’s largest freshwater
lake (by surface area; Russia’s Lake
Baikal is the largest by volume).
Through 16 separate stories, he paints
a distinctly Canadian picture of Lake
Superior’s north shore, telling tales of
the land and the people who inhabit it.
The subject matter of the stories is
diverse. One chapter tells the tale of an
eccentric and isolated woman living
alone in a lighthouse; in another, we
meet a group of skiers taking shelter
in an abandoned backwoods cabin
rumoured to have been built by a
Vietnam War draft dodger; others focus
on conservation, digging into the consequences
of mining projects in Northern
Ontario and investigating the impact of
hydroelectric dams on the area’s rivers.
The author sews these stories together like a patchwork quilt, creating a broad
and colourful mosaic.
At times, the book blurs the line
between an engaging look at a land less
travelled and a set of stories that might
appeal only to a niche audience of outdoor
enthusiasts. The chapter about telemark
skiing may not interest people who are not
into snow sports, for instance, and the
book’s focus on sea kayaking and canoeing
may alienate landlubbers. Ultimately,
though, it’s open-air adventure that ties
everything together. Whether by himself,
with his close friends or with greenhorn
tourists, Mihell paddles between tales of
natural beauty and human interest, and his
experience as both a guide and a journalist
make The Greatest Lake a compelling tour
of a fascinating and beautiful place.
— Jesse Tahirali
Northern hero
HISTORY
The Last Viking
The Life of Roald Amundsen
By Stephen R. Bown
Douglas & McIntyre
370 pp.,
$32.95
hardcover
When Norway gained its independence
from Sweden in
1905, Roald Amundsen was
oblivious. He was immersed in Inuit culture
in the Canadian Arctic, learning how
to survive in harsh conditions while leading
history’s first successful expedition
through the Northwest Passage. It was
only when Amundsen completed his journey
the following year that he discovered
he had become one of the nascent country’s
first national heroes and an international
celebrity — and that heroes and
celebrities rarely have the privilege of
exploring for the sake of exploration.
In The Last Viking, award-winning
historical non-fiction author Stephen R.
Bown (Merchant Kings: When Companies
Ruled the World, 1600-1900 and
Madness, Betrayal and the Lash: The Epic
Voyage of Captain George Vancouver)
peels away much of the romantic varnish
from the legend of Amundsen, most
commonly known as the man who beat
British explorer Robert Falcon Scott to
the South Pole. Although Bown is
clearly an Amundsen admirer, he reflects
on the explorer’s achievements in a measured
voice bolstered by meticulous
reviews of contemporary press coverage.
Bown’s book reveals another side of
exploration, countering Amundsen’s
own expedition journals and autobiography,
which were written in the explorer’s self-deprecating, lighthearted
and understated style, to expose the trials
of a man burdened for almost his entire life
by crippling financial debts and the constant
struggle to align his principles with
the necessary evils of his career. Although
he was a natural expedition leader — principled,
unyielding and always the first
among equals — Amundsen was no businessman.
He found lecture tours more trying
than the expeditions he led and it took
him years to master the art of dealing with
the media. Yet he understood that for his
career to survive, he would have to either
work with the government or entertain the
general public. Amundsen, who always
tried to disassociate his expeditions from
political agendas, chose entertainment,
seeking elements of drama and spectacle
to garnish each of his expeditions.
But even stripped of this aura,
Amundsen’s story remains remarkable.
As one of the first people to fly above
the North Pole, Amundsen was decades
ahead of his time. Despite technological
leaps, few today have accomplished what
Amundsen did in 1926, when air travel
was in its infancy.
In chronicling Amundsen’s career,
Bown shows that it is ultimately an explorer’s
vision, not his or her business acumen
or public relations skills, that makes
incredible feats possible. For the armchair
explorers among his readers, Bown offers
a second, more poignant layer of insight
into how the modern age has shaped our
attitudes toward the unknown.
— Samia Madwar
BRIEFLY NOTED
Walls
Travels Along the Barricades
By Marcello Di Cintio
Goose Lane
280 pp.,
$29.95
hardcover
“Mr. Gorbachev,” Ronald Reagan
famously said at the
Brandenburg Gate in 1987, “tear down
this wall.” Reagan was imploring the
Soviet leader to do away with the Berlin
Wall, which had been dividing East and
West Germany since 1961. But the
U.S. President wasn’t speaking about
the physical barrier; the wall stood as a
symbol of the Communist East’s separation
from the democratic West, and
Reagan was seizing the momentum to
help end that era.
In Walls: Travels Along the Barricades,
award-winning Calgary-based non-fiction
author Marcello Di Cintio (Poets &
Pahlevans: A Journey into the Heart of Iran
and Harmattan: Wind Across West Africa)
explores some of the walls that continue to
divide cultures around the world. From
Palestine to India-Bangladesh to the U.S.-
Mexico border, he discovers that while
people often find ways to get through (or
over) the actual fence — to tend fields
they’ve been cut off from, for instance, or
to seek opportunity in a new land —
there’s an undeniable emotional impact
from living in the shadow of a long line of
concrete and barbed wire. “The Wall does
not defend,” writes Di Cintio, “it defines.”
In Montréal, the sole Canadian stop
in this tour of barricades, a rusty old
chain-link fence separates the affluent
Town of Mount Royal from the lowincome
Parc-Extension neighbourhood.
Most people, on both sides, now ignore
the fence. But not Di Cintio. And
that’s his strength as a writer: he
observes and reports tirelessly, then
makes powerful and poetic connections
between all that he has seen and heard.
Walls is a moving and extremely engaging
book, a reminder of “the constant
thrum of hope” amid so many manmade
obstacles.
— Dan Rubinstein
Sharks
By Michael Bright
Firefly Books
128 pp.,
$19.95
softcover
Few people feel indifferent toward
sharks. Haters point to the 1975
movie Jaws for justification, while lovers
celebrate the Discovery Channel’s Shark
Week, which is packed with info on
everything from a shark’s sense of smell
to the horrors of shark finning. Humans
have a long-standing fascination with
these fish, and it’s easy to see why: ranging
from the metre-long cookiecutter
shark (named for the way it munches
perfect circles out of the flesh of large sea
creatures) to the ancestral megalodon
(the length and weight of a school bus),
sharks are captivating. Lightning, bees
and snakes kill more people every year
than sharks do, but none have the notoriety
of these finned fish.
Michael Bright, the recently retired
executive producer of the BBC Natural
History unit and author of more than
90 books, plunges into sharks’ life
cycles and biology, explaining different
species’ fin-biting mating rituals and
debunking myths about feeding frenzies.
Readers might cringe when learning
about an arm regurgitated by a
shark in an Australian aquarium, but
Bright does a commendable job of making
sharks lovable as he describes their
ability to learn and the threats to their
conservation. With more than 100
stunning images, Bright’s book is an
easy yet informative read.
— Kenza Moller
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