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[Editor's note: To mark the announcement of the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Nonfiction yesterday, we're running reviews of the three nominated finalists, contributed by guest bloggers. The first review appeared last week. This is the second of three; look for the final one later this week.]

cover of Tim Cook's Shock Troops

BY CATE SIMPSON

Shock Troops: Canadians Fighting The Great War, the sequel to Tim Cook's Ottawa Book Award-winning At The Sharp End, picks up at 1917 where the latter left off.

Cook's skill as a historian and a researcher is evident in every page of Shock Troops, and the level of detail with which he describes the battles of the war's final two years is impressive. His ability as a writer though sometimes fails to live up to the stories he wants to tell. For the most poetic and vivid descriptions of war, Cook turns to hundreds of personal accounts from soldiers' notebooks and letters from the front, which nicely counterbalance and serve to personalize the mind-numbing statistics on Canada's war injuries and fatalities sprinkled throughout the book. But where Cook ventures into more poetic language himself he often misses the mark, lapsing into cliché or getting caught up in extravagant mixed metaphors.

Shock Troops is an account of war from the front lines. There are few digressions into the politics behind the conflict; instead, Cook concentrates on the planning and execution of battles in which the Canadian forces' involvement was significant. Some, like Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele and Amiens, have passed since the war into Canadian popular vocabulary.

Cook's painstaking descriptions of military tactics and strategies will turn off some readers, but their inclusion is necessary to the author's thesis that it was the sophistication of the Canadian forces' tactics and preparation that ensured their effectiveness. His accounts of the machinations of battle are often surprising in their familiarity with individual soldiers' experiences, although some aspects are hard to visualize in the detail Cook intends without some sense of the war's inherent geography, and the significance of those efforts to the war at large.

More interesting to some will be the collection of chapters focusing on trench culture and soldiers' downtime on the front lines. Cook doesn't spend much time on these discussions of shell shock, trench discipline and soldiers' superstitions, which have been covered far more extensively in other writing on the Great War. But they provide a welcome interlude between the battles of the first and second half of 1917, which are harder going and the book would be a struggle if its entire 648 pages consisted in them.

Shock Troops' length and lack of linguistic sparkle make it a sometimes tough ride, but its importance lies in the quality of the research, and the detail in which Cook's two-volume work lays out the years that arguably established Canada as a nation.

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February 06, 2009

Charles Taylor Prize Review Roundup #1: Angel of Vengeance

Posted by Graham F. Scott at 12:04 PM ET | Comments (0)

[Editor's note: To mark the announcement of the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Nonfiction on Monday, we'll be running reviews of the three nominated finalists, contributed by guest bloggers. This is the first of three; look for the other two next week.]

BY JORDAN HEATH-RAWLINGS

Like the best of historical narratives, Ana Siljak's Angel of Vengeance paints a vivid picture of pre-revolutionary Russia, while staying close enough to her characters to assure that it never veers towards textbook territory.
After beginning with an account of a fateful day during the winter of 1878 when a young noblewoman named Vera Zasulich calmly strode into the office of the governor of St. Petersburg, drew a pistol from her clothes and shot General Fedor Trepov, Siljak then pulls back her lens to offer a look at a country bubbling with unspoken anger.

Siljak's descriptions of life in the hierarchies of Russian nobility and poverty are as fascinating as they are depressing. The reader can almost see the hues of grey and brown that would be the cinematographer's best friends should Angel of Vengeance ever capture the imagination of a film studio.

And it should — not because it would allow for those depressing colours — but becuse Zasulich is a complex heroine who conducts herself with a quiet dignity that makes her failed assassination attempt and her subsequent trial (featuring a colourful lawyer who more than makes up for the more reserved nature of his client) that much more fascinating to behold.

Despite a revolutionary zeal, Zasulich doesn't come across as a grandstanding character, and Siljak — a professor of history at Queen's University in Kingston — simply presents her life, and the subtle differences between Zasulich's life and that of the average Russian noblewoman, and lets her actions speak for themselves, the same way her subject did 130 years ago in a cramped governor's office.

It's not difficult to find a solidly researched book about what life was like in a given place and time. What Siljak has captured here, though, is different. Her prose crackles with a life not often found in stories like these and her snapshot of a country quietly priming itself for upheaval fosters the sort of urgency in readers that is not often achieved in tomes that chronicle stories more than a century old.

It's easy to understand, by the time you're halfway through the book, why Zasulich became a martyr to the people of both her country and much of Europe, and an early face of revolution in Tsarist Russia. Siljak's chronicle of Zasulich's rise from ordinary noblewoman to the first female face of the revolution and subject of authors such as Dostoyevsky (who also attended her trial) is a fascinating examination of how, exactly, those smaller matches that start tremendous fires are sparked.

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January 18, 2009

Book Review: Elvin T. Lim's The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush

Posted by Daniel Tseghay at 09:54 PM ET | Comments (0)

In just a few days, Barack Obama will be sworn in as the 44th President of the United States. He'll be following George W. Bush, of course: a man that made a distinct impression in a number of ways. Bush's administration extended the powers of the executive branch to a level unseen in the modern era; his administration broke international law with an almost studied negligence; and Bush, the man himself, was an extraordinarily bad speaker. Now, we all know about his tendency to trip over his own words. Yet, his failure to follow basic grammatical rules distracts us from an important aspect of his rhetoric: its anti-intellectualism.

In The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush, Elvin T. Lim takes note of the growing anti-intellectualism in the rhetoric of presidents. Where once, they engaged their audience with complex arguments for and explanations of their policies, the rhetoric of the modern presidency is now characterized by its use of slogans, appeals to emotion, applause lines, and its unimaginative simplicity.

Lim, quite understandably, sees this as a serious problem and, even, a threat to democracy. If the president cannot, or will not, speak to the citizenry with any kind of complexity or depth, how can we expect an informed public? And if the president's rhetoric is detracting from, rather than contributing constructively to, public deliberation, on which basis are the people making their decisions?

There are some things to be hopeful about. Not only is Obama an articulate, eloquent, and elevating speaker, he's shown us he has the ability to speak about complex issues without "dumbing" them down. His speech in March of 2008 on race in America, titled "A More Perfect Union", is a good example of his willingness to engage the citizenry intellectually. Lim, though, criticizes Obama for the vagueness and imprecision that often creeps into his speech. "Barack Obama waxed poetic about his theme of 'change,' while leaving details of his inspirational rhetoric unspecified. Tellingly, he drew support from both ultra liberals (such as supporters of MoveOn.org) and moderate Republicans with this strategy."

Let's hope that with the end of Obama's campaign for the presidency, he'll feel less pressured to appeal to everyone and will speak to the people with directness, honesty, and a demonstrable respect for their intelligence.

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November 24, 2008

Book Review: Margaret Atwood's Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

Posted by Daniel Tseghay at 03:46 PM ET | Comments (0)

The economy is on a lot of people's minds as Canadian newspapers warn of recession and the United States deals with its subprime mortgage problem. And so this might be the perfect time to read Margaret Atwood's new book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. Consisting of five essays, each presented during this year's Massey Lectures, Atwood provides a discursive overview of the history of debt, lending and borrowing, fairness, and its related concepts.

Their common source, Atwood begins, is in our genes. We are fortunate enough to come equipped with a basic sense of fairness and, when it's violated, the feeling that someone is in debt and must do one thing or another to redeem themselves. By way of illustration, she discusses the capuchin monkeys who, in one experiment, were taught to trade pebbles for cucumber slices. They were perfectly happy with this rate of exchange. But, when one monkey received a grape (a much more desirable commodity) in exchange for a pebble, the rest of them revolted. They even refused to co-operate in future transactions, throwing their pebbles out in fits of rage. They appeared to have an innate sense of what was fair and of how things should be.

From here, she surveys literary and theological discussions of debt. She notes — with special emphasis — that the Lord's Prayer reads "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors" and that in Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus, the word for "debt" and for "sin" are the same. The once-sinful man, Ebenezer Scrooge, is then given a good hearing. This is a man who made his fortune by lending money with high interest rates and who then retained every penny - at the expense of the well-being of others.

In the end Atwood resolves the mystery of debt, saying everything must in the end come from Nature. Everything, Atwood says, is either taken or traded. The goods to be traded must first be taken from somewhere; and the goods taken can only come from Nature. Atwood describes a scenario starring a revamped version of Scrooge, named "Scrooge Nouveau", and set in a world of rapidly depleting resources. It is a world in which its most intelligent inhabitants (that's us, by the way) have consumed goods beyond their needs at costs exceeding their means. We have, that is, purchased large parts of our globe on credit with high interest rates that we must one day face. Atwood's implied imperative throughout the text: we'd be better off if we recognized this now and worked to strike a genuine balance between our only creditor, Nature, and its debtor, us.

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THIS MAGAZINE: BECAUSE EVERTHING IS POLITICAL

February 10, 2009

Charles Taylor Prize Review Roundup #2: The winner, Shock Troops

February 06, 2009

Charles Taylor Prize Review Roundup #1: Angel of Vengeance

January 18, 2009

Book Review: Elvin T. Lim's The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush

November 24, 2008

Book Review: Margaret Atwood's Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth