An Inspiring Book List

Del Dickie, A Thunder Bay avid reader, sends us a marvellous list.

David Bodanis, Passionate Minds (2006). As the sub-title says, “The great love affair of the Enlightenment, featuring the scientist Emilie du Châtelet, the poet Voltaire, sword fights, book burnings, assorted kings, seditious verse, and the birth of the modern world.” But it also centres on Emilie, an innovative scientific theoretician long-neglected because of her gender. Mind-boggling.

Sylvia Brooke (the last Ranee of Sarawak) Queen of the Head Hunters (1970). The lonely daughter of a very upper-class English family who lived next door to Windsor Castle. She played with the Royals as a child and in her youth corresponded with GBS. Sylvia had a happy marriage to the last White Raja of Sarawak, despite his philandering. Fascination observations of English and Malayan life from before WWI to after WWII.

Adrienne Clarkson, Bethune (2009). An eloquent paean of admiration for Bethune’s life as inventor of surgical instruments, a pioneer in the use of mobile blood transfusion units in the Spanish Civil War, provider of medical services to the Chinese in their war against Japanese aggression, a Canadian Communist and selfless martyr still honoured in China.

Lois G. Gordon; Nancy Cunard: heiress, muse, political idealist (2007). Granddaughter of Samuel Cunard, Nancy was a brilliant poet whose many lovers included Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and Pablo Neruda. Promiscuous, bohemian and heavy drinker, she rejected London’s high life to edit Negroes, a ground-breaking anthology by and about the world’s Blacks, to report from battle in the Spanish Civil War and expose France’s inhumane treatment of Republican refugee soldiers. She died alone and penniless in Paris. Thanks to the author for resurrecting this amazing woman.

Jane Hamilton, Disobedience (2001). By reading her e-mails, a 17-year old follows his mother’s passionate affair with a Ukrainian refugee violinist and violinmaker. The mother is a talented pianist, his father a left-wing high school history teacher, and his younger sister a fanatical Civil War re-enactor. He himself is in the midst of his first big relationship. Witty and intelligent look at middle class family life in liberal America. Given my years of work at a living history fur trade site, I loved its spoof on re-enacting.

Lawrence Hill, The Book of Negroes (2007. Even though this run-away bestseller is fiction, it is grounded in the nasty facts of the British slave trade. The title comes from the real “Book of Negroes”, an inventory of slaves whom the British promised freedom in Nova Scotia during the American Revolution. This inspiring yet painful story takes 11-year old Aminata Diallo from West Africa to South Carolina, Boston, Nova Scotia, Sierra and London, England where she dies. Illuminating sweep of a shameful period in our history.


Hill’s Any Known Blood (2001) follows five generations of an African-Canadian-American family from the slave trade of 19th-century Virginia to the white suburbs of today’s Oakville, Ontario of all places—once a final stop on the Underground Railroad. As it explores the narrator’s attempt to unearth his family’s past, it reveals much about himself in spellbinding prose. With deserter Joshua Kay, Hill also wrote the non-fiction work, The Story of an Ordinary Soldier Who Walked Away from the War in Iraq (2007). Key spoke in Thunder Bay a few years ago but where is he now? Probably hiding to avoid being sent back to the US.

Khalid Hosseini. A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007). Afghanistan as experienced by two young female victims of wars and of traditional attitudes towards women. The writing sings but it also stings.

Irene Howard. Gold Dust on his Shirt. (2008). The author tells of her Scandinavian family, pioneering immigrants to Northern British Columbia in the early 20th century. Her Swedish father was a hard-working gold-miner and her Norse mother, a full-time “domestic engineer” coping without the amnenities of modern life. It is about struggles for justice in the mines and struggles to raise children decently despite hardship. Set in the social, economic and political context of the times, it is an inspiring read.

John Lc Carré. A Most Wanted Man (2008). Le Carré’s books are much more than exciting spy thrillers. They are morality tales in which the good guys and the bad guys are indistinguishable. Set in today’s Berlin, this novel tells how the deviousness and deceit of German, British and American spy agencies led to a fictional “rendition”, an all-too common violation of human rights in the real world – by our side.

James Levine, The Blue Notebook (2009). The diary of a young girl taken by her father into prostitution at Mumbai, this novel is harrowing yet haunting. A British-born doctor at the Mayo Clinic, Levine witnessed the plight of child prostitutes in India. Proceeds from his book sales go to their aid.

Qiu Xiaolong, Red Mandarin Dress: An Inspector Chen Novel. (2007). Serial deaths of young women wearing red mandarin dresses in today’s Shanghai with repercussions from the Cultural Revolution. Lots (too much) of poetry and amazing (even revolting) descriptions of sumptuous meals. Fascinating look into the complexities of modern China.

Charles Wilkins. In the Land of Long Fingernails: A Gravediggers Memoir. (2008) A hilarious but grizzly/gruesome coming-of-age account of Wilkins’ summer job in 1969, complete with misfit fellow workers and corrupt goings-on in the funeral business. (PS. Never buy second-hand false teeth!)

And don’t forget Jean Morrison, Labour Pains: Thunder Bay’s Working Class in Canada’s Wheat Boom Era (2009)! The story of class relationships, unions and strikes, municipal ownership and military intervention, socialist, labour and old-line political parties, ethnicity and the Social Gospel. Book available at the Thunder Bay museum or Jean Morrison, 98 Peter Street, Thunder Bay, Canada P7A 5H5
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