Jupiter's Travels

By Ted Simon.

Jupiter’s Travels is one of those books that no motorcycle library should be without. Especially now that Boorman and McGregor’s epic motorcycle journeys, supposedly inspired by Ted Simon, have become so popular. In short, it’s a must-read for anyone interested in the genre.

Having said that, I must admit the anticipation far outstripped the reality of this book for me. For whatever reason I was just not able to really connect with Simon and his experiences. While he relates funny moments, moments (actually, days) of sheer terror, and everything in between, I found myself reading about them as a dispassionate observer – not really engaging beyond reading the words on the page. It’s almost as if Simon, who frequently talks about his feelings and the emotional impacts of his experiences as he journeys around the world, was afraid to really expose them to us through his writing in case they somehow lose potency for him personally.

However the reader does get a reasonable sense of what it was like in those far-off lands in the early 70’s as Simon – always exposed and vulnerable, just him and his Triumph motorcycle – makes his way around the world. He describes spectacular scenery, horrid road conditions, his relationship with his motorcycle, and the people, always the people. With few exceptions, complete strangers, initially just curious, become helpful and ultimately very friendly and supportive. (Having travelled North America by motorcycle extensively during the 1970’s, I can say his experiences in that regard were no different than those I had here in Canada and the US. Strangers would approach just to talk, offer assistance, or go totally out of their way to help. Quite a wonderful experience, and one that I have never duplicated while travelling by car.)

After nearly four years on the road and having travelled through Africa, America, Australia, India and points in between, Simon, not surprisingly, starts to lose interest in his journey. He senses the end is near and becomes consumed with his ‘homecoming’. In his rush to get back to England he finds himself “ ...moving mechanically through the landscape, undeviating, incurious...”. Interestingly, the exact phrase that I, had I his writing ability, might have used about the last 150 or so pages of this book.

So is it worth reading? Yes, if you are a fan of motorcycle road stories, and want to see what the fuss was all about. But it is certainly no page-turner.

In the Hot Zone - One Man, One Year, Twenty Wars

By Kevin Sites

I finished this book about a month ago but have put off writing a review because, quite honestly, I wasn’t too sure how to communicate my somewhat conflicted thoughts on the book.

First, let me get the basics out of the way.

Kevin Sites is an award-winning photojournalist hired by Yahoo! News as their first Internet correspondent. His job: To spend a year traveling to, and reporting from, twenty hot spots around the world. The objective was not to provide more of the same-old crisis reporting that we see every day on the television news, but rather to try to get behind the scenes and shine some light on the human side of these tragedies so that the rest of us can, perhaps, gain a little better understanding of how the people themselves survive such horrific conditions.

This he does very well. In fact he does it so well, that I found the horror and misery sometimes a bit much to take in one sitting and so had to put the book down just to get a mental break.

Whether he’s talking about how rape is used as a weapon in the Congo, or interviewing a surprisingly forgiving young Israeli woman maimed by a suicide bomber, Sites manages to treat his subjects with humanity and compassion, and tells their stories in a simple, straightforward way that I found, on occasion, disarming. He clearly feels very deeply for these people and it shows in his writing.

It is very powerful.

As a snapshot of the very real human impacts of ‘man’s inhumanity to man’, it’s one of the best books I have read in a long time. And it should be necessary reading for every student of current history or political science if for no other reason than to clearly illustrate the results of failed wars and failed foreign policies.

But here’s my problem with the book – it’s simply too intense. The stories are, each and every one, compelling, but the fact that he has but a few pages to allocate to each means that he was unable to give us much more than the broadest brush of their experience, focussed, naturally enough, on the worst that mankind inflicts on others of different races/tribes/religions. Long before I was ready, Sites had already started reporting from yet another war zone, and I was left wanting to know much, much more about the people to whom I had just been introduced, their lives, their hopes and dreams.

I guess what I’m really trying to say is this was a great book, but it would be an even better 3 or 4 books!

Absolutely worth a read.

Shantaram

By Gregory David Roberts

I think The Seattle Times reviewer nailed it: “Shantaram is a true epic. It is a huge, messy, over-the-top, irresistible shaggy-dog story.”

Shantaram is based on Roberts’ own personal history and his love of the city where he spent most of his fugitive years during the 1980s and where he now lives and works.

We meet the protagonist, Lindsay, when he arrives, for the first time, in Bombay. From then on, we follow his voyage of discovery of the city and its people. We see the city through his eyes. We smell it through his nose. We experience it through his life. In many ways, this is as much a story about Bombay as it is about Lindsay himself, and in the end, I think, every reader will also come to love Bombay at some level, although few would presume to have the attachment for it that Roberts so clearly has.

Lindsay’s journey really starts with Prabaker, a freelance Bombay guide who insinuates himself into his life by grabbing his bags as Lindsay exits the airport shuttle bus in downtown Bombay. A fast and enduring friendship is born from that chance meeting and it is Prabaker who introduces Lindsay (and the reader) to his city, his world. Lindsay, in response, embraces the city and the people and comes to know and love them both.

From living in the slums to consorting with prostitutes, freedom fighters and the Bombay mafia, Lindsay becomes part of the warp and weave of Bombay life, and Bombay becomes part of him: “Everyone in the whole world ... was Indian in at least one past life.”

In the beginning, when Lindsay is still somewhat in awe of the city, the book has a lightness and underlying sense of discovery and humour that offsets some of the misery and poverty that he encounters in his travels. To a large degree, that is due to the fact that Prabaker is still a major presence and influence in his life and in many ways continues in his role as Lindsay’s guide. However as Lindsay becomes more and more involved in the Bombay mafia, and with Prabaker’s untimely and accidental death, the story loses that sense of joy and wonderment and becomes progressively darker. Lindsay’s life becomes bleaker and more desperate, and it’s only periodically that we get to see flashes of the humanitarian Lindsay who set up and ran the medical clinic in the slum, or who marvelled at the resilience and joy to be found among even the most desperate of Bombay’s impoverished millions.

A great, rambling tale, Shantaram grabbed me from the very first page and kept me up well past my bedtime on more than one occasion. Highly recommended.

Touch the Top of the World

By Erik Weihenmayer

The sub-title of this book says it all: A blind man’s journey to climb farther than the eye can see.

I’m always a little leery of autobiographical books as they are frequently little more than the results of a narcissistic impulse gone wild. I can only take so much Me! Me! Me! at once, especially when it’s written by someone whose only real accomplishment has been being born and becoming a star or rising to some high political position through family contacts. I’m reminded of the expression, “he was born on third base and thought he hit a triple” every time I pick up one of the latest “best sellers” of that ilk.

But this book was different. Sure it’s simply written, and some passages are a bit hard to accept at face value, for example when he describes doctor’s visits when he was less than two years old as if he is recounting them from first-person memory. But those are minor nits. The real story here is how a young man, totally blind since his teenage years, refuses to accept the limitations of blindness. He discovers his passion for mountaineering and through his climbing comes to terms with his disability and, one may say, his life.

It’s a story of struggle and passion, success and failure, fear and bravery. His descriptions of his experiences on the mountains put the reader right there with him, feeling for the next hand hold or foot placement to avoid a potentially fatal slip, or at best a wild swing on the end of a rope several thousand feet above the rocks below.

It’s also a story about friendship and respect. His climbing partners put their lives in his hands, and he in theirs, every time they climb together, so one can only marvel at the level of respect they must have for his abilities and skills on the mountain. And their friendship helps carry them all through some very difficult times on the mountain, and back on the ground.

I devoured this book, right up to and including the final chapter where the author describes his summiting of Mount Everest in May 2001 – the first blind climber to ever reach that peak.

Truly an excellent read.

Regeneration

By Pat Barker

Appropriately, I bought this novel in the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres and read it while touring some of the First World War battlefields of the Ypres Salient and the Somme. Perhaps heightened by my physical proximity to some of the locations and events described in the book, I found that it offered a particularly chilling and compelling perspective on the war and its psychological effects on many of the young men who experienced its horrors first hand.

At the core of Regeneration is the relationship between Siegfried Sassoon and Dr. W. H. R. Rivers, an army psychologist, during Sassoon’s hospitalisation at Craiglockhart in 1917. According to official military channels Sassoon was suffering from shell shock, but in reality he had run afoul of the military authorities when he had the audacity to question the political motivations behind the war in his Soldiers Declaration, which had become public. Wanting to avoid the publicity of a courts martial, the authorities had him diagnosed with shell shock (How else to explain his Declaration?) and sent him to Craiglockhart to be rehabilitated under the care of Dr. Rivers. (This is all factual.)

While Sassoon, Dr. Rivers, and many of the other patients at Craiglockhart are historical figures, Barker has woven them into a fictionalized account that is compassionate and disturbing. Through her writing the reader shares the wartime experiences of some of these young men and gains a far deeper understanding and appreciation for their resulting mental conditions. Her descriptions of some of the “treatments” offered at Craiglockhart also provide an insight into the primitive state of psychotherapy at that time, equally disturbing to our modern sensibilities.

This is the first book in Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy. I will surely read all three. This is a good read, and particularly recommended if you have an interest in the stories of the men and women of The Great War.

Too Many Books - not a review

Having just finished a series of rather ‘heavy’ books – most recently Chantal Hebert’s French Kiss: Stephen Harper’s Blind Date with Quebec – I wasn’t up to yet another political, biographical, or military history book. It was time for a break, and so with the temperatures outside hovering around the 32C mark, it was off to the bookstore in search of some summer reading - a good page-turner.

Robert Ludlum’s The Ambler Warning was on prominent display so the decision was easy and I’m now enjoying this classic Ludlum thriller. But that will only last a few days and then it will be back to the store to choose something else from the myriad titles available – truly a daunting task given the number of new books being published every year.

According to Bowker there were 375,000 English language books published in 2004 (http://www.bowker.com/press/bowker/2005_1012_bowker.htm). Of that number, approximately 18%, or 67,500 were “Adult fiction, poetry, drama and literary criticism”. With poetry, drama and literary criticism being, I assume, a small part of the total, let’s say that adult fiction accounts for 50,000 of those new titles. With a further assumption that fiction has, on average, a shelf life of two years, that means I will have 100,000 titles from which to choose a few books to keep me company on the dock this summer.

100,000 titles. Even if I had the time to read 2 books a week, I could, at best, read 100 books next year - 1/10th of one percent of the books that are available. Clearly the odds are stacked against me picking the best fiction out there so I will do what most of us would do, which is to go with what we know. It’s not unlike eating at MacDonald’s or staying at The Holiday Inn - it may not be 4-star, but you know what to expect. Ditto with the popular authors - Ludlum, Grisham, P.D. James, Follett, Crichton, et al. While the list of books published by these authors can still be somewhat overwhelming (and confusing when books are republished years later with different titles) it’s at least manageable.

So when I’m done with The Ambler Warning, I will return to the bookstore, head to the fiction section and look for authors I know. If, in the process, I happen to come across something by another author that looks interesting, I may pick it up, but that will be by chance only. A pity really, as I know I’m missing lots of good reading, but I’m also missing a lot more bad reading.

Life’s too short to waste on bad books, so we make our choices accordingly.

Oil On The Brain

By Lisa Margonelli.

Well I’ve been somewhat remiss in the past week, not keeping my blog up to date. My only excuse is this nasty summer cold which has made me feel about as much like writing a blog entry or two as getting a root canal without anaesthetic (and I’ve had two of those so I know whereof I speak). But on the good news side of the ledger (mom always said to look for the silver lining) I have been able to spend some quality time reading my latest book – Oil on the Brain: Adventures from the Pump to the Pipeline.

Now this isn’t a book that would tend to jump out at you from the shelf – the cover is somewhat nondescript and the title is, well, not a real grabber, but recently while I was waiting for the spousal unit at the local Chapters, I picked it up and started browsing. Hooked!

The author takes the reader on a global tour of the oil business, literally from the pump back to the well and the oil-producing countries that are the source of this “black gold”. It's quite a trip, described with humour and spotted with interesting and fascinating facts. For example, did you know that it takes 1 ½ gallons of water to produce 1 gallon of gasoline? Or how about the explanation of how a US gallon of gasoline that weighs only 6 pounds manages to pump 19.5 pounds of CO2 out of your exhaust pipe (it’s in the way the carbon atoms link up with two oxygen atoms after combustion).

But most compelling are her descriptions of how oil has shaped, and some may say ruined, the social structures in countries where it has become the premier, or only, source of external revenue, generally in US dollars. Countries like Venezuela, where the national oil company PDVSA is actually larger than the state and provides schooling, housing, and medical services to the population – services that rightly should come from the state. Or Chad, where Exxon signed sweetheart deals with illiterate leaders as the country spirals into civil war. Iran, Nigeria, China, Saudi Arabia – it’s a long list and the author visits each of them in turn to uncover the corruption, graft and sundry abuses heaped upon the populations by, variously, oil multinationals, their local governments, and western governments (i.e. U S of A) quenching their unending thirst for oil at any cost.

It is an easy read, but a disturbing one, and it certainly gives one a far different perspective on the entire business than one gets at the pumps at the local Esso station.

Highly recommended.