Detail from the cover of The Fear Index, by Robert Harris
Quick reviews
Three new books worth a look
Staff
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published
Last updated
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ESCAPE TO CANADA
One More River To Cross
By Bryan Prince, Dundurn, 196 pages, $24.99
While Ontario historian and author Bryan Prince (I Came as a Stranger, A Shadow on the Household) was researching an ancestor named Isaac Brown, he came across references to a high-profile case from the mid-19th century, featuring an altogether different Isaac Brown, who became the subject of Prince’s most recent exploration of Canada’s black history. Brown, a slave, was accused of the attempted murder of a Maryland plantation owner, and was subjected to two brutal floggings, after which he was shipped to New Orleans. Brown managed to escape the slave pen and make his way to Philadelphia, in the free state of Pennsylvania, but he made the mistake of writing to his free wife and 11 children in Maryland to tell them where he was. The note was intercepted, leading to his arrest, and Maryland authorities attempted to extradite him back to Maryland. But once again, Brown escaped and crossed the border into Canada.
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FEAR THE COMPUTER
The Fear Index
By Robert Harris, Hutchinson, 323 pages, $22
Robert Harris has travelled deep into the past (Enigma, Pompeii, Lustrum) and into alternative universes (Fatherland) in his fiction. In his newest thriller, The Fear Index, he mines the present and the immediate future in world of high finance. The legendary physicist Max Hoffman, once part of the Large Hadron Collider team, is using a revolutionary and highly secret system of computer algorithms, wielded by an advanced artificial intelligence, to trade on the world's financial markets. Hoffman's hedge fund – built around the standard measure of market volatility, the VIX or “Fear Index” – generates astonishing returns for his investors, and leaves his rivals mystified. As the novel opens, an intruder gets past the state-of-the-art security system of Hoffman’s house beside Lake Geneva. Over the next 48 hours, as the markets head for another great crash, Hoffman's world falls apart. But who is trying to destroy him?
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YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS
Memory
Fragments of a Modern History, by Alison Winter, University of Chicago Press, 319 pages, $31.50
In a very real sense we are our memories – what we recall (or think we do), our associations, our loves and losses. Even as we trust memory, we’re not quite sure of its reliability, especially as we age and may not recall the name of the book we read last week, or, writes Alison Winter in this fascinating account of what we know – and don’t – about memory, the names and faces of those at our 12th birthday party. You can’t find that on Wikipedia. Ranging through a century of argument and evidence, through psychology, science and pop nostrums, Winter follows the search for answers to such questions as: How reliable are our memories; are forgotten details lost forever, or hidden in the brain and somehow retrievable. Looking at evidence from labs, surgeries and courtrooms, as well as technological changes from movies to digital media, Winter has produced a splendid book. One might even say a memorable book.
