Bad Ideas

Heather Pringle, The Master Plan: Himmler’s Scholars and the Holocaust (London: Fourth Estate, 463 p., $28, 2006) Vancouver writer Heather Pringle’s interesting new book, The Master Plan, tells the story of a very bad idea whose time had come. The bad idea was that there is a superior race of people, the blond-haired, blue-eyed, tall and muscular Aryans, whose alleged descendants are destined to rule the world. The time for bad ideas that had come was 1933-45, the era of Nazi Germany. The man who most... 
[Read more...]

Edmund White’s Own Story

I One of the more useful ways to think about gay writing and its most important writer, Edmund White, is to first locate them in relation to the trajectory of contemporary gay political and literary history. It’s more than a quarter-century since gay writing emerged from the rights’ movement that noisily burst onto the North American scene with the 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York (an event at which Ed White, then 29, was present). As White wrote to friends during the semi-accidental birth of... 
[Read more...]

The ABC’s of the World Cup

BERLIN—Yesterday, I had to cash a traveller’s cheque at American Express, whose west Berlin offices are located in Wittenberg Square (or Wittenbergplatz, as it’s known in localspeak). The underground train was filled with people in yellow T-shirts and blond hair. They were all getting off at Wittenbergplatz, too. Turns out they were Swedes, or pro-Swedes, and they were holding a pep rally in the square in order to get properly revved up for that night’s game in Berlin’s Olympic Stadium against Paraguay.... 
[Read more...]

Disappearances

Terry Glavin, Waiting for the Macaws, and other stories from the age of extinctions (Viking Canada, 318 p., $35, 2006) As I was re-reading the title chapter of Terry Glavin’s Waiting for the Macaws, an episode that takes place in the forests of Costa Rica, a blackbird landed in the feedbox on the balcony of my apartment and began poking around for the last crumbs of yesterday’s bread. The feedbox, an unused planter hanging from the balcony railing, is also periodically visited by neighbourhood sparrows,... 
[Read more...]

Conquest for Dummies

George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 467 pages, $36.50, 2005) More than three years ago now, in March 2003, I was marching in the streets of downtown Vancouver, in the company of about 100,000-or-so like-minded people, to protest the impending American invasion of Iraq. Maybe “marching” puts it too strongly: it was more of a duty trudge, since the war was by then inevitable and most of us understood that our protestations were unlikely to have significant impact.... 
[Read more...]

Blind Man’s Bluff

Ryan Knighton, Cockeyed: A Memoir (Penguin, 263 p., $25, 2006) Ryan Knighton is my first blind guy. He’s 33-years-old, has a shaved head, frequently wears a black porkpie hat, has a gym-developed hard-body, sports some this-generation tattoos, teaches English at Capilano College in North Vancouver, B.C. (which is where I also work), and taps around the universe with a long white cane. Knighton has retinitis pigmentosa (RP), a genetic eye disease that’s progressively reduced his sight to about one per... 
[Read more...]

Atheists in Foxholes

Julian Baggini, Atheism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 119 pages, $US 9.95, 2003) I The other night, while watching the American network CBS’s version of the evening news, I saw what has to qualify as an early contender for the most macabre and nutty “strange news” item of the nascent year: military funeral protesters! Apparently, there’s a Christian fundamentalist minister named Fred Phelps, who runs the Topeka, Kansas-based Westboro Baptist... 
[Read more...]

Everytime Stephen Harper Says the Word “Change” . . .

Canadians can be forgiven for thinking that the forthcoming January 23, 2006 federal election is an unnecessary exercise in snow and slush, totally devoid of issues, and featuring political leaders that no one really wants to vote for. That formulation is more or less true, with one small exception, namely, that the election, wanted or not, will actually happen and therefore will have consequences for the country. Alas, it matters. Now that we’ve had more than a week of the snoringly-long, two-part (pre-... 
[Read more...]

Feasting with Oscar: from De Profundis to Post-Queer

I In cell number “C.3.3” — it almost sounds like an e-mail address, C-dot-3-dot-3 — on the third tier of Reading Gaol, a prison about 60 km. west of London, in the early winter months of 1897, 42-year-old Oscar Wilde, serving a two-year sentence for the curiously named crime of “gross indecency,” began to write what would become one of the remarkable documents in the history of prison literature as well as one of the most memorable... 
[Read more...]

No Landslide in Germany

If ever an election was designed to produce a landslide, it was Germany’s national contest last week. Didn’t happen. Why not? Glad you asked. All will be explained bye and bye, but first a little background music (maestro, some Nachtmusik, please): Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s Social Democratic (SPD)-Green Party governing coalition, in office since 1998 and seeking a third mandate in the beleagured and bogged-down economic engine in the heart of Europe, entered the race some 20 points behind their... 
[Read more...]

« Previous Page — Next Page »