Actor William B. Davis, the notorious chain-smoking villain on The X-Files
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Mini-reviews
Four new books worth a look
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published
Last updated
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Where There’s Smoke …
Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man, by William B. Davis, ECW, $22.95
William B. Davis, the Canadian actor who played the “Smoking Man” bad guy (also called “Cancerman”) on The X-Files, has appeared in many other films and television shows, including Stargate SG-1, Smallville and Human Target. In this warm and entertaining memoir, he discusses his life and career, including anecdotes, recollections and gossip from time on-stage and before the cameras with such stars as Brian Dennehy, Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, Martin Sheen and Donald Sutherland. Born in Toronto in 1938, he attended the University of Toronto and theatre school in Britain, and went on to a career in theatre, television and films, both Canadian and Hollywood. He most recently directed a production of Noel Coward’s Hay Fever at the Jericho Arts Centre in Vancouver.
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The Submission
By Amy Waldman, HarperCollins, 299 pages, $29.99
The central character of Amy Waldman’s novel is Claire Harwell, whose husband died in the destruction of the World Trade Centre towers, leaving her with two children to raise on her own. She becomes a spokeswoman for the other grieving 9/11 widows, and finds herself sitting on a jury to select a plan to memorialize the attack’s victims. Of the thousands on plans submitted, she is most moved by one that calls for a garden and a wall containing the names of the dead. But when the winning plan is announced, it turns out to have been submitted by a Muslim American named Mohammad Khan, moreover a Muslim American who doesn’t feel the need to represent anyone but himself, and a media firestorm breaks out. Claire finds herself trying to balance principles against emotions, and to deal with the outrage of the U.S. public.
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The Journey Prize
The Best of Canada’s New Writers, selected by Alexander Macleod, Alison Pick and Sarah Selecky, Emblem, 155 pages, $17.99
Canada is a culture of short stories, rightly celebrated in this anthology (and accompanying prize), now in its 23rd year, and which launched some of CanLit’s finest careers: M.G. Vassanji, André Alexis, Yann Martel, Caroline Adderson, Madeleine Thien, Timothy Taylor. The 10 writers in this’ year’s anthologies will be obscure to most Canadians, but perhaps not for long. Michael Christie, whose story The Extra leads off the collection, was this week short-listed for the Rogers Writers’ Trust fiction prize for The Beggar’s Garden (also long-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize), and Jessica Westhead made a splash with her second book, And Also Sharks. Finalists this year are Hamilton’s Miranda Hill (Petitions to Saint Chronic), British Colombian Ross Klatte (First-Calf Heifer) and Toronto’s Seyward Goodhand (The Fur Trader’s Daughter).
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Soccer Men
Profiles of the Rogues, Geniuses, and Neurotics Who Dominate the World's Most Popular Sport, by Simon Kuper, Nation Books, 336 pages, $19.99
Simon Kuper, co-writer of the bestselling Soccernomics (with Stefan Szymanski) has a healthy skepticism about soccer players and team managers. They are fascinating as practitioners, but not really as men, he finds. Thus, many of the “profiles” in this eccentric but vastly enjoyable collection of journalism pieces are not based on interviews with those men. Instead, Kuper observes, analyzes, takes notes at a press conference, reads the player’s autobiography and writes deftly incisive portraits. It’s a wise approach; most pro sports players have little to say and it’s the doing that makes them interesting, not their explanation of it. One of the longest pieces here, a sweeping analysis of soccer autobiographies, those ghost-written for five of the England’s top players – Ashley Cole, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, Wayne Rooney and Jamie Carragher – provides Kuper with excellent fodder for nailing all of the clichés and stereotypes that both players and their fans adore. It’s deeply revealing, as are the shorter observations on legendary players of the past. Kuper is skeptical about individuals but still loves soccer, and it shows.
