Quick hits: Four books worth a look
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published
Last updated
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The Best Things in Life
By Thomas Hurka, Oxford University Press, 200 pages, $19.95
Self-help books make the road to the good life seem easy and direct. Thomas Hurka is a University of Toronto philosopher who knows that it’s not so simple: The best things in life have to be about more than making money fast, shedding unwanted pounds or snagging the corner office. His short and thoughtful guide to the fundamental questions of existence neatly blends the everyday with the eternal. In his world, the Montreal Canadiens are as much a part of the human conversation as Aristotle; hitting a nice golf shot as essential to happiness as anything Kant could have conceived of. While his reasoning is necessarily abstract at times, Hurka’s intellectual position is refreshingly populist: Far from being trivial, our daily preoccupations about personal achievement, love life, family and even hockey can illuminate the perennial problems of moral philosophy.
Read John Allemang’s interview with Thomas Hurka in Focus.
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Seeing Reds: The Red Scare of 1918-1919, Canada’s First War on Terror
By Daniel Francis, Arsenal Pulp, 280 pages, $27.95
The Winnipeg General Strike took place more than 90 years ago, but it resonates still – as in historian Daniel Francis’s new book. Following the Russian Revolution, North American governments became alarmed by the prospect of something similar here. In 1918-1919, the government of prime minister Robert Borden began to spot communism everywhere, denouncing labour leaders as Bolsheviks. The media dutifully followed suit. The hysteria issued in the Winnipeg Strike, a legitimate dispute over working conditions that led to violence and arrests, and to the government sending in the RCMP to put down the dispute. A well-told tale, even if one is not convinced by Francis’s efforts to create a contemporary parallel in the “war on terror.”
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The Memory of Love
By Aminatta Forna, Atlantic Monthly, 445 pages, $28.95
Among the most powerful of new voices from Africa, Aminatta Forma quickly established a reputation with her first novel, Ancestor Stones, and with The Devil That Danced on the Water, a memoir of her activist father. The Memory of Love follows the linked fortunes of several people and two generations in a country – Forma’s native Sierra Leone – devastated by civil war. Kai is a haunted young surgeon; Elias is a man who experienced the country’s first, turbulent postcolonial years. They, in turn, are linked to a well-meaning British psychiatrist, Adrian, and one women who is at the centre of all. A novel about the persistence of hope and the redemptive power of love in people as crippled by the past as is their society.
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Is Eating People Wrong? Great Legal Cases and How They Shaped the World
By Allan C. Hutchinson, Cambridge University Press, 247 pages. $28.95
In 1959, Malcolm Bradbury wrote Eating People is Wrong. But Bradbury was a novelist, and Allan Hutchinson is a law professor (Osgoode Hall), so it seems natural that he’d make the statement interrogative. In this fascinating, learned and anecdotally rich study, he chooses eight exemplary cases to show how the common law (one of our great cultural inheritances) develops in its own haphazard, dynamic and often unsatisfactory way. The title case, from 1884, involves the law of the sea and whether people set adrift after a shipwreck may eat some of their number in order to survive. And Hutchinson offers a lucid reading of the classic case, Donoghue v. Stevenson, in which a snail was found in bottle of ginger beer, and Britain’s law lords established far-reaching rulings governing negligence.
