Bryson uncovers a world of wonders inside the home

At Home, by Bill Bryson

Published by Anchor Canada, a division of Random House Canada Limited, 2010

Bill Bryson is an author of immense curiosity, a characteristic that serves him well as a non-fiction writer who tackles diverse topics that include travelogues (In A Sunburned Country), outdoor adventures (A Walk In The Woods) and science exploration (A Short History of Nearly Everything).

In At Home, Bryson focuses that curiosity on the house that he and his wife occupy, a former church of England rectory in Norfolk, England. As Bryson points out in his introduction, "Houses are amazingly complex repositories...whatever happens in the world - whatever is discovered or created or bitterly fought over - eventually ends up, in one way or another, in your house."

In this exhaustively-researched book, Bryson takes readers on a sweeping and amusing tour through his house, devoting entire chapters to the history of the bedroom, the bathroom, the study, the nursery, and so on. His exacting eye for detail and talent for summarizing trends, ideas and events makes At Home a thoroughly entertaining read.

In the chapter on Gardening, for instance, Bryson describes how the pleasant pastime we know today as planting geraniums and pruning roses can be traced back to the mid-nineteenth century. In 1841, a book entitled Practical Instructions in Gardening For Ladies was published, which encouraged "women of elevated class to get their hands dirty and even to take on a faint glow of perspiration."

Bryson writes:

"The value of Gardening for Ladies wasn't what it contained so much as what it represented: permission to go outside and do something. It came at exactly the right moment to catch the nation's fancy. In 1841, middle-class women everywhere were bored out of their skulls by the rigidities of life and grateful for any suggestion of diversion."

Many times I found myself awed by the obscure people of history who played pivotal roles in the advancement of western thought and civilization, such as the American educator, George Bissell who, in 1853, discovered by accident that oil could serve as an illuminant - a discovery that precipitated the rise of the oil industry; an illiterate weaver in England named James Hargreaves who invented the spinning jenny in 1764; and Reverend Edmund Cartwright, who (after a chance conversation) designed the power loom in 1785, a discovery that contributed to the start of the Industrial Revolution and impacted Britain's financial fortunes for decades.  

At Home is as much as history lesson as it is a meticulous exploration of ideas, customs, superstitions and bric-à-brac that might be found inside anybody's home. Whether it's tracing the history of bizarre fashions (male wigs) or food trends (salt and pepper) through the centuries, Bryson's takes an otherwise mundane subject and makes it relevant and endlessly fascinating.

For Bryson fans, At Home is everything you've come to expect from this talented author, a far-ranging curiosity, a passion for exploring the randomness and quirkiness of life, and an informal writing style that blends charm, empathy and humour. At the end of the day, this is a book I'm more than happy to recommend.

Chris Hadfield's memoir recounts a proud Canadian's journey to the stars

An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth, by Chris Hadfield

Published By Random House Canada, 2013

Chris Hadfield's long journey into space began on a warm July evening in 1969. That's when he (along with millions of others) watched the first Apollo moon landing on TV, which inspired his lifelong dream of becoming an astronaut. At first, Hadfield didn't know what route to take because there were no Canadian astronauts or space programs in existence. Without a game plan, Hadfield decided to train, study and work to prepare himself anyway, for the possibility of one day being chosen as an astronaut.

Hadfield realized that to become an astronaut it would require relentless training and conditioning, mental preparation and nerves of steel. He applied himself to that task with unstoppable zeal and he rarely ever faltered. In his informative memoir, An Astronaut's Guide To Life On Earth, he takes readers on an intimate journey inside the fighter jets, the command centres and the space stations with an almost childlike glee, but his enthusiasms are tempered by a sense of realism about the stark realities and potential dangers of the job. In one harrowing incident, Hadfield describes how he experienced partial blindness during a spacewalk to install the Canadarm2. His ability to cope with that frightening  - and fortunately short-lived - visual impairment is a lesson in rational thinking and grace under pressure.

Throughout his career, Hadfield earned high praise for the many roles that he performed with distinction, including as a test pilot in the U.S Air Force, involvement in the Canadian Space Agency, Chief of Robotics at the Johnson Space Centre, Director of NASA operations in Russia, and Commander of the International Space Station. This memoir recounts these and other career highlights with humility, frankness, and humour.

As informative as this book is, however, it's not a How To Succeed in Life book, nor does it pretend to be. But astute readers will glean the acquired wisdom and life lessons that Hadfield learned along the way. One of the clear messages for me was his willingness to prepare and practice - continuously - without prompting or complaint. Being prepared for any potential problems and outcomes was the price Hadfield paid for membership into that elite club of astronauts.

In An Astronaut's Guide To Life On Earth, Hadfield punctuates his narrative with personal anecdotes about the people closest to him - family members, relatives, friends and colleagues. He talks openly about the challenges that he faced working for the various space agencies, and his strategies for overcoming them. It's hard not to be impressed with the life lessons and sage advice that he offers up, such as this:

"Anticipating problems and figuring out how to solve them is actually the opposite of worrying; it's productive. Likewise, coming up with a plan of action isn't a waste of time if it gives you peace of mind. While it's true that you may wind up being ready for something that never happens, if the stakes are at all high, it's worth it."

As Hadfield's memoir clearly reminds us, mastering any pursuit requires fierce dedication and discipline, intense focus, constant learning, a supportive network of friends and family, and there are no shortcuts. Here's hoping that Hadfield's professional accomplishments on earth and in space - not to mention his desire to serve as ambassador for space exploration - will inspire a new generation of Canadians to reach for the stars.

Book argues that online technologies are an enabling force for good

Smarter Than You Think, How Technology Is Changing Our Minds For the Better, by Clive Thompson

Published in Canada by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group USA (2013)

(Disclosure: I'm a big Clive Thompson fan. His monthly column in Wired magazine is a must-read, as are his articles in Fast Company and the New York Times Magazine.)

The emergence of the Internet has given rise to a claque of naysayers who believe that digital technologies (especially social media) are making us dumber and less human. Fortunately, Clive Thompson is not among them. When it comes to digital technologies, he is an optimist at heart, and that optimism is amply borne out in his first book, Smarter Than You Think.

In this carefully researched work of non-fiction, Thompson explores many facets of the online technologies and their impact on our lives, from education, gaming and politics to collaboration, memory and literacy. He delves into these topics with an unflagging appetite for discovery and he arrives at some surprising conclusions.

Rather than making us dumber and less human, Thompson believes the Internet is actually improving our lives in remarkable ways. He points to examples like Wikipedia (the collaborative encyclopedia), online gaming (collective thinking) and educational resources (Khan Academy) to show how easy access to information has become an enabling, not a disabling, force in the world. He shows numerous examples of how educators, scientists, businesses, governments and activists are using the Internet to build communities and affect positive change.

Smarter Than You Think is broken into nine chapters, each of which delves into an aspect of online computing and its broader impact. In the chapter entitled Public Thinking, Thompson tells of a Kenyan-born law student living in the U.S. who decides to start a blog about the corruption taking place in her native Kenya. Without any training as a journalist, the woman's writing soon attracts a worldwide following of loyal readers.

Stories like this are commonplace and illustrate how easy it is for anyone with an Internet connection to communicate messages to (and share information with) a potentially unlimited audience. Thompson believes that blogs, comment threats, discussion boards, text messages and tweets have contributed to a new kind of literacy over the past two decades. As Thompson observes: 

"Before the Internet came along, most people rarely wrote anything at all for pleasure or intellectual satisfaction after graduating from high school or college. This is something that's particularly hard to grasp for professionals whose jobs require incessant writing, like academics, journalists, lawyers, or marketers...personal expression outside the workplace - in the curious genres and epic volume we now see routinely online - was exceedingly rare. For the average person, there were few vehicles for publication."

As much as Thompson stresses the personal and societal benefits of online technologies, he also recognizes that overdosing on the Internet isn't a good thing either. In the chapter called The Art of Finding, he spoke with memory experts to find out what affect digital tools are having on our memory and cognitive skills. Experts are divided. There seems no clear evidence as to what impact mobile phones, social networking and digital tools are having on long- and short-term memory. Still, Thompson concludes that distraction ("pellets of novelty" as he calls them) can be an impediment to learning. He writes:

"If you want to internalize a piece of knowledge, you've got to linger over it. You can't flit back and forth; you have to focus for a reasonable amount of time, with mental peace. But today's digital environment rarely leaves you any such peace." 

Smarter Than You Think is enlightening book that will evoke thought and discussion about where all this connectivity is taking us. Thompson doesn't profess to know all the answers, but his reasoned arguments and thorough research provides a richer understanding of the technologies that are impacting and shaping our lives.

My Top 25 Books Of All Time

The end of each calendar year always brings with it a number of "best of" lists that are published and circulated in the media and on the Internet. From "top news stories" and "most famous celebrities" to "top travel destinations" and "healthiest foods," there is no end to the desire to categorize all of the important social, political, cultural and scientific and sporting events from the past year.

Best Of lists are not without merit: they can serve as welcome brain candy, a respite from the pressures of the daily grind. While perusing several Best Of lists over the holidays, I got to thinking about creating a list of my own: my favourite books of all time. As a lifelong reader, how hard could it be to come up with at least 10 from nearly half a century of reading?

It was more difficult than I imagined. At first, I had planned to confine the list to 10, but selecting so few out of a backlog of hundreds seemed like an impossible task. So, I bumped the list to 25, although it could have been twice that number. The selection process itself was a sweetly nostalgic exercise that often recalled where, when and how I encountered a specific book. In preparing and parsing my list, I was reminded of a quote by the British author, Graham Greene: "The influence of early books is profound. So much of the future lies on the shelves: early reading has more influence on conduct than any religious teaching." (A Sort of Life, 1971).

Some of the books were chosen because they offered fictional worlds and characters that elicited a particularly strong emotion; some for the authors' skill and mastery with language; and a few were chosen for the incredible story or message that they contained, which resonated with me for long afterward.

I'm certain that some of these books might not qualify on professional critics' lists of best books ever written, but for me, each managed to say something meaningful at a time when I was ready to hear those messages, and so they got included.

So here they are, in no particular order.

 1.     War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy

 2.     The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, by Tom Wolfe

 3.     A Room of One's Own, by Virginia Woolf

 4.     The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger

 5.     A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole

 6.     The Outsiders, by S.E. Hinton

 7.     Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo

 8.     A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess

 9.     Invitation To A Beheading, by Vladimir Nabokov

 10.  The Trial, by Franz Kafka

 11.  Night, Elie Wiesel 

 12.  An Answer from Limbo, by Brian Moore

 13.  Zen and Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig

 14.  Ladder of Years, Anne Tyler

 15.  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, By Mark Twain

 16.  The Old Curiosity Shop, by Charles Dickens

 17.  The Second World War, by Winston S. Churchill

 18.  The Naked and the Dead, by Normal Mailer

 19.  Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier

 20.  The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, by Ernest Hemingway

 21.  In A Sunburned Country, by Bill Bryson

 22.  Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

 23.  Of Human Bondage, by Somerset Maugham

 24.  The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand

 25.  Into Thin Air, by John Krakauer

***

The HeLa story: a dazzling journey of scientific enquiry and discovery

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

By Rebecca Skloot, published by Broadway Books, A Division of Random House, Inc. (2010)

Normally, I avoid reading reviews about books I'm about to read. With the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, it was impossible not to be aware of the outpouring of positive press and accolades that this book has received since it was published in 2010. Critics have hailed it as a literary tour de force, both for its storytelling brilliance and its investigative research. Many publications, including Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly and the Globe and Mail, named it Best Book of the Year.

The praise is well earned. This is a powerful work of non-fiction that tells the story of a poor African American woman named Henrietta Lacks, who died of cancer in Baltimore in 1951. She was 31. Before Henrietta died, a doctor removed two tissue samples from her cervix without her (or her family's) knowledge. Such a procedure wasn't uncommon during that era; the idea of informed consent didn't become a legal issue in the U.S. until 1957.

Miraculously, Henrietta's cells (which became known as HeLa cells) began to grow and multiply at an extraordinary rate. Scientists had tried in vain to grow cells like this for years. The fast-growing HeLa cells soon caught the attention of doctors and scientists, who wanted to use them to further their research into infectious diseases and for other medical studies. Suddenly, a mini industry in HeLa cells was born. According to Skloot,

"The Timing was perfect. In the early fifties, scientists were just beginning to understand viruses, so as Henrietta's cells arrived in labs around the country, researchers began exposing them to viruses of all kinds - herpes, measles, mumps, fowl pox, equine encephalitis - to study how each one entered cells, reproduced, and spread."

Henrietta's cells would eventually play a vital role in developing a cure for polio, cloning and gene mapping. While the cells paved the way for medical breakthroughs, saved countless lives and enriched many companies, Henrietta's family received no financial gain or compensation and remained poor. Sadly, the family only discovered the truth about Henrietta's cells years later.

To uncover the truth about the HeLa cell line, Skloot spent years researching the subject and ingratiating herself into Henrietta's family. At first, the family was suspicious of Skloot, whom they viewed as just another outsider looking to profit from Henrietta's story. Gradually, she earned the trust of Henrietta's daughter, Deborah, who serves as a gatekeeper to the family history and a liaison with her family.

In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Skloot demonstrates a remarkable talent for narrative pacing and scientific explication. She takes readers on a journey of scientific enquiry and discovery that touches on issues of race, ethics, religion, politics and medicine, a journey that swings effortlessly between the past and the present. Along the way, she introduces us to the main players in this decades-old medical drama, including doctors, researchers, scientists, journalists, hospital officials and members of Henrietta's family. Skloot presents information in a factual, non-biased fashion and recreates conversations between the central figures, so that readers can decide for themselves who the real winners and losers were in the HeLa saga.

It's almost unimaginable that a story of this magnitude hadn't been told before the publication of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (there have been occasional magazine and newspaper stories about HeLa, but no single work told the complete story). Readers can be grateful that Skloot had the patience, perseverance and skill to do justice to a story that needed to be told, and to present it in such a compelling manner.

BuzzFeed bans negative book reviews

Tom Wolfe (The Right Stuff, The Bonfire of the Vanities) once wrote that the best way to raise one's reputation is to tear down someone else's. I thought about Wolfe's remark the other day when I read that BuzzFeed has changed its policy on book reviews. Seems the popular social sharing site will no longer publish negative book reviews, a decision that has generated controversy, including an op-ed piece in the New York Times.

Is there a place for negative books reviews? Should books and authors be publicly reviled because a reviewer doesn't feel a work is up to scratch? Those are loaded questions. If a book contains a litany of factual errors, or if the writing is egregiously bad, then a reviewer has a duty in telling it like it is. Criticism - good or bad - doesn't need to be sugar coated, but it also shouldn't contain malicious personal attacks.

On Inferior Planet, I purposely avoid writing negative reviews. To indulge in such an exercise is petty, juvenile and unfair. If there are aspects of a book that are irritating or deserving of valid criticism, I'll say so. If I can't find finish a book or can't find enough qualities to justify a fair review, then I won't review it. Period.

A case in point: There is a best-selling author whom I'd never read before and whose novels are universally praised. His work has been translated into dozens of languages and adapted for the movies. This author is frequently interviewed on radio: he is smart, eloquent, thoughtful and engaging. The longer I avoided reading him, the more of a literary ignoramus I felt.

About two months ago, I finally bought one of his novels and began to read it.

After 300 or so pages, I gave up. The characters were bland. There were too many random, unexplained events, and the narrative thread was weak. It was a struggle to finish each chapter. The writing was good, even brilliant in spots, but a novel needs more than good writing to sustain it over several hundred pages.

When I encounter a book that I can't appreciate, I'm not going to slam the book or the author. That's not my style. I'll find another book - there are far too many great ones deserving of my attention to worry about the books that don't measure up.

Writers spend an inordinate amount of time alone with their thoughts and ideas; the effort required to produce a work of fiction or non-fiction is intense. Such intellectual rigor deserves a steady and unbiased eye, and reviewers have an obligation to weigh the good with the bad.

Plus, I believe that a fate worse than being trashed is to be ignored, especially in this digital and mobile age when relevancy and attention are the new currency.

I applaud BuzzFeed's decision to ban negative book reviews. I believe that reviewers can provide honest criticism without resorting to personal attacks and trying to destroy a writer's reputation. Besides, trash talk often speaks more to the attacker than it does about the intended victim, and readers are far better served without it.

McEwan captures the abundant joy, beauty and drama of a single day

Saturday, a novel by Ian McEwan

Published in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada (2005)

Saturday tells the story of a day in the life of Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon who lives and works in London, England. In the opening scene, Henry is standing at his bedroom window at night when he observes an airliner off in the distance, apparently on fire as it flashes across the sky and disappears from view.

The dramatic action in the skies above London foreshadows the drama about to unfold in Henry's life. On this particular Saturday, Henry is looking forward to a day off work: playing squash, shopping for seafood, and a planned family reunion. But an uncharacteristic lapse in judgement while driving his Mercedes-Benz will have unsettling consequences for Henry and his family; and suddenly a carefully calibrated life is tipped off balance.

Henry - a happily married father of two grown children - is a man who is normally in control. Up to this point in his life, there has been a clean, orderliness to his existence. He has been a master of his own fate (in his career and his personal life) through dedication, perseverance, hard work and luck. As McEwan explains, Henry is "too experienced to be touched by the varieties of distress he encounters - his obligation is to be useful."

In McEwan's hands, the plot progresses quick enough to keep readers engaged, but it almost pales in comparison to the surgical precision of his prose. McEwan packs an extraordinary range of detail into his scenes and takes readers on an extensive journey inside the mind and world of Henry Perowne over a 24-hour period, describing his thoughts, fears, biases, aspirations and beliefs. Indeed, McEwan dissects Henry's waking moments as would a surgeon operating on a patient, with unflappable confidence, dexterity and skill.

McEwan suggests that the true miracle of life resides in brief snippets of everyday experience, not in grand events or political movements (the backdrop of Saturday is the lead up to Britain's involvement in the invasion of Iraq). The moments that define us are brief, accidental and fleeting - and suffused with beauty and meaning.

The pacing of Saturday is slow and deliberate; with each new plot development, McEwan steps back and dissects various undercurrents of thought and actions before proceeding to the next turn of events. For me, that's what makes McEwan's writing so brilliant and memorable: this ability to stop the action in mid-stream and examine its parts from different vantage points using language that sings and alights on the page, without losing the narrative thread. At one point, McEwan spends several pages describing a game of squash between Henry and his colleague, and by the end of it, the reader is caught up in the competitive drama between the two men and Henry's fierce desire to win.

In another scene,  Henry is listening to his son performing at a music rehearsal, and recognizing how music has the capacity to touch the soul: 

"There are rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they've ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything you have to others, but lose nothing of yourself."

It is these kinds of meticulous descriptions that characterize McEwan's writing. He creates a vivid fictional world that is realistic on the outside and fantastically complex on the inside. Saturday is a novel that exemplifies why Ian McEwan is considered one of the finest - if not the finest - living novelist working in the English language. 

For those you have never read a McEwan novel, Saturday is a perfect place to jump in.