Dirty Oil and the Future of Canada: New Book on the Tar Sands Environmental Disaster

Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent

In upper Canada there is currently an environmental war taking place over what are known as the Tar Sands. A new book by Andrew Nikiforuk demonstrates just how contentious this environmental war is, and how important it is to you.

A cautionary note to government and industry: If Andrew Nikiforuk disappears in the middle of the night it will only prove his point.

The Calgary author's latest book, Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent,suggests Canada (Alberta especially) is starting to resemble the petrostates of South America and the Middle East -- nations rich with oil but short on democracy and freedom of speech.

With no shortage of evidence, Nikiforuk also contends Alberta's tar sands development is mismanaged, environmentally toxic, bad for Canada's autonomy and short on long-term benefits.

Of course, this is not Putin's Russia and Nikiforuk is safe to say so -- safer than he probably was driving the not-so-well-planned Highway 63 to interview residents of Fort McMurray. But his analogy between Alberta and petrostates is intriguing. "Oil-addled governments" tend to protect the prevailing system by discouraging thought, debate or dissent. Such states, we are told, are less democratic because governments get oil revenues, cut taxes, and then feel beholden to the oil industry rather than voters. They use wealth and influence to buy or sway voters. Along the way voters stop voting because . well, what's the point?

Nikiforuk cites evidence that this "paradox of plenty" has also existed in U.S. states like Wyoming, Texas and California.

Alberta has had one-party rule for 38 years, low taxes and high resource revenues. Provincial voter turnout is the lowest in Canada (21 per cent in Fort McMurray), and Alberta has "one of the most secretive governments in Canada." Nikiforuk sees ministers moving freely between public office and corporate appointments, and a Public Affairs Bureau used "much like the Politburo in the former Soviet Union." We are reminded of Fort Chipewyan's doctor John O'Connor, who suffered "political persecution" after voicing health concerns downstream of the tar sands; and the hiring of "spies" by the supposedly impartial Energy Resources Conservation Board to monitor rural land owners who opposed development.

Nikiforuk has a point, and he has guts. He also explains the tar sands in a straightforward way -- something the cheerful websites of government and industry have been slow to do, apparently with reason.

Read the rest of Jon Midgley's review here, or get a copy now!

How One Reporter Overcame Drug and Alcohol Addictions: David Carr's Amazing Personal Journey

The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of his Life--His Own

From my local paper the Daily Camera, Bette Erickson offers a review of David Carr's new book The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of his Life--His Own


Author David Carr really isn't a guy many of us would want to spend much time with. His character flaws include being a recovering drug addict and alcoholic, and admittedly abusive to former girlfriends. But to his credit, he lays it all out in his book The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of his Life--His Own. If you're not a fan of tell-all memoirs, Carr's book will bore the britches off of you. But if you or someone you love is wrestling with drug addiction or alcoholism, this book may be of interest.

The New York Times columnist set out with a video camera to record what former and current acquaintances had to say about his behavior during the many years he was abusing drugs and drinking. Carr writes how memory is tricky, subject so much to interpretation. He notes how he doesn't particularly remember an episode with a gun -- who had it, who pointed it at a friend (thus, the book's title). Turns out it was his gun and he's the one who pointed it at his friend. Fortunately, that horrific episode led to recovery, in addition to the birth of his twin daughters.

Carr and a girlfriend, Anna (also struggling with recovery), experienced an unplanned pregnancy during the height of their methamphetamine-fueled alcoholism. He introduced Anna to crack cocaine, he writes. They became so thoroughly addicted that just as her water was breaking, he was handing her a crack pipe. To readers' great joy, the twins thrived and are currently in college. While not planned, the babies were not unwanted. Carr's friends and acquaintances make that clear throughout the text.

Good writing and fresh style characterize Carr's narrative. It helps mightily that he knows what he writes. He describes how he started his career in journalism reporting on municipal police and government activities by day -- and freebased cocaine at night. This is a page turner of unparalleled proportions. Do people really act this way?

Read the rest of Bette Erickson's review here, or get a copy now!

The Last Khan of Mongolia: New Book Bloody White Baron

The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia

James Palmer's The Bloody White Baron,his life of Baron Roman Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg, is the story of "a loser - albeit an upper-class one" - who turned himself into a visionary psychopath in the Russian far east. Uncomfortable but fascinating reading, it weaves together the weird alliances, murderous dreams and improbable careers that emerged in the aftermath of World War I and the fall of czarist Russia.

Mongolia is the focus, at a time when it was nominally free of Chinese rule after the 1911 revolution that overthrew the Qing dynasty and ushered in a failing republic. The Japanese, flush with victory against the Russians in 1905, were groping toward the expansionist, pan-Asian dream they articulated a few years later, while the Russians were caught up in the vortex of the Bolshevik revolution. Into this terrible shifting world of alliance and double-cross came Baron Ungern, a czarist Buddhist anti-Semite with messianic objectives.

Born in 1885 and raised at the other periphery of the Russian Empire, in Estonia, Ungern belonged to the minor German aristocracy that supplied the czarist armies with officers. His military career was hardly glorious, although his cavalry service on the Western front proved his idiotic valor. Russia's collapse in 1917 found him in the Russian far east, where he joined in wild exploits of daring with another White commander, Captain Grigori Michaelovich Semenov, which brought him notoriety and some recruits.

The atmosphere was apocalyptic, right down to the cheapness of human life. Millions had died on the Western front. Russian nobles were fleeing with their jewels to China. Local Buddhist rulers were vicious and corrupt. "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" was being read by everyone from the imprisoned czarina downward.

Read the rest of Jason Goodwin's review here, or get a copy of The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia now!

Interview With Author Len Deighton: Man of Mystery and Mysteries

‘When I wrote The Ipcress FileI didn’t want to be a writer at all. I don’t like writers, they give me a pain in the butt. They’re always whining and whingeing and telling you their sales aren’t good enough. For goodness sake, it’s better than driving a truck, as Elvis Presley said about singing.” Len Deighton gives the satisfied chuckle of a writer who knows how to make his sales good enough.

Deighton is famously publicity-shy, and I did wonder whether getting to interview him would be what the acronym-loving secret service bureaucrats of his early spy novels would call a high D of C (Difficulty of Completion) mission. But here he is, relaxed, jolly, indecently sprightly for a man who will celebrate his 80th birthday this week, and quietly pleased that HarperCollins will, from June, be reissuing several of his novels (with new cover designs by his old friend, the Oscar-winning documentary-maker Arnold Schwartzman), culminating in a golden jubilee edition of The Ipcress Filein 2012. He looks like a well-preserved retired don, but doesn’t sound like one, his cockney accent undiluted by four decades of living away from England. We are in the lobby of a London hotel, a mile or so from where he grew up in a mews at the back of Montagu Square.

“My mother was a cook and my father was a chauffeur … One day he said to me, ‘I won’t punish you for the terrible reports you bring home from school if I see you reading.’ That really did push me into reading books. I played truant all the time and I usually went to the Marylebone Reference library and I would just sit there all day long and read. A terrible kind of sedentary childhood I had, when I think about it.”

He did two and a half years’ National Service in the RAF, worked as a railway clerk, a BOAC steward and a press photographer, and studied at the Royal College of Art. He became a successful illustrator, so why did he take up what he calls the “goof-off profession” of writing?

“I was on holiday, I was restless, I started this story, then I put it to one side and got on with my life. And then I met a guy at a party and he said ‘I’m a literary agent.’ He was a literary agent like I was a writer, to tell you the truth.” Jonathan Clowes, his agent to this day, sold what became The Ipcress Fileto Hodder & Stoughton. “It might have sunk without a ripple but Harry Saltzman had just made the first Bond film [Dr No, 1962] and it did very well, but that was really because the critics used me as a blunt instrument to beat Ian Fleming over the head.” Saltzman bought the film rights to The Ipcress File,and Deighton found himself a professional author.

His first four novels are a wonderful mixture of the exciting and the amusingly humdrum, narrated by an unnamed working-class intelligence officer from Burnley who spends as much time trying to reclaim his expenses as he does searching for kidnapped scientists. His Eton- and Oxbridge-educated superiors are usually incompetent – “what chance did I stand between the communists on the one side and the establishment on the other” – or treacherous. Much is made of the fact that he is overweight: in Billion Dollar Brain (1966) he is told he has been chosen to go on a mission to Helsinki because he is “the one best protected against cold”. Well, James Bond may be thinner, but so is his dialogue.

Read the rest of Jake Kerridge's interview with Len Deighton here, or get a copy of his spy thrillers and mysteries now!

Interview With Urban Fantasy Author of Kitty Norville: Carrie Vaughn

Think your weekend in Vegas was wild? You haven’t got anything on Kitty Norville, title character of Carrie Vaughn’s New York Times bestselling series of urban fantasy concerning the alpha female werewolf of Denver who hosts a call-in radio show for supernatural beings.

With four installments published between 2005 and 2008, Vaughn is publishing two KITTY books this year: Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand,released in February, and Kitty Raises Hell,to be released in March, both by Grand Central Publishing.

In Dead Man's Hand, which debuted at number 13 on the New York Times Paperback Mass-Market Fiction Best Sellers List, Kitty and her fiancé Ben—a former werewolf hunter turned werewolf—decide to tie the knot in Vegas to avoid the hassle of a big wedding. But the vampires and lycanthropes of Sin City have other ideas, and Kitty’s nuptial plans give way to deadly encounters with ancient beasts, seductive were-creatures, mafiosos, a possibly reincarnated Elvis and an angry gang of bounty hunters of the undead in town for a gun show.

Urban fantasy doesn’t get much cooler than this.

Clever devices aside, Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand,is a vibrant read. Vaughn is skilled at pacing, and her books have an uptempo narrative that engages the reader from start to finish. Dead Man's Hand,and Kitty Raises Hellare excellent weekend reads—you’ll find yourself reading for hours at a clip.

Especially when you realize that, after Kitty’s Vegas vacation, what happens in Vegas just might follow you back to Denver—especially if it’s an ancient evil.

For those new to urban fantasy, be warned: This is not horror in the traditional sense. KITTY has horror trappings, such as vampires and werewolves, and even gives a nod to H.P. Lovecraft, but for Vaughn, the supernatural is not synonymous with the monstrous. Hers is a world where vampires and werewolves have day jobs. Or at least night jobs. They live, they love, they visit the in-laws. They own local businesses.

But they still bite, as Kitty learns the dirty little secret behind Sin City’s vampire hierarchy and draws the wrath of an ancient goddess of chaos.

With two new KITTY novels hitting the shelves—and the bestsellers list—Vaughn sat down with Fangoria to discuss her new books.

Read the interview on Fangoria, or get one of Carrie Vaughn's books now!

Susan Sontag: An American Cultural Critic

Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

IF, DAVID Rieff writes in the introduction to this book, his mother Susan Sontag was still alive, she would never have allowed this book to be published. She might well, he says, have burned the journals and notebooks of the title – and he'd have understood if she had because they contain "much that I would have preferred not to know and not to have others know".

In many ways these scrappy entries justify Rieff's doubts – not because the material is raw, with its accounts of lesbian sex and feelings of wretchedness, but because the writing is.

Sontag seldom gives us any hint here of the great cultural critic she would later become. Her writing wasn't spontaneous; her intellectual ferocity was dressed and belted before it was allowed out. Here everything is in a dawn disarray. Only very rarely does it manage the prickly splinter of insight we associate with her work.

More serious, perhaps, these bits of diary mostly lack what can give value even to the most private and personal examples of the form: inner vision of an outside world. Virtually the only outside we get here, even in Sontag's accounts of her marriage and two extended affairs, is in the way it affects her feelings. We are not looking through her eyes, we are looking at her eyes, mainly inflamed.

Take her marriage at 17 to Philip Rieff, an academic for whom she did research. There is virtually nothing about him, or about their life together until it falls apart. Instead there are epigrams about the universal oppressiveness of marriage: "It is an institution committed to the dulling of feelings. The whole point of marriage is repetition."

Read more of the review by Richard Eder here, or get a copy now!

First Lady Mrs. Lincoln: The Wife Behind Abraham Lincoln

Mrs. Lincoln: A Life

Last week I featured a review by Catherine Mallette of Abraham Lincoln in honor of his 200 birthday. However, what many historians often seem to neglect in their biographies of President Lincoln is that there was a lady behind some of his genius. To follow that up the review on Abraham Lincoln, below is a review of Lincoln's wife.

Mrs. Lincoln — the very title of historian Catherine Clinton’s biography signals a portrait of a woman noteworthy only as the wife of a great man. Moreover, as Clinton notes, “while Abraham Lincoln became immortal in the American imagination, Mary Lincoln would become infamous.”

As First Lady, she was suspected of being a Confederate spy, ridiculed for attending séances and criticized for extravagant shopping, decorating and entertaining. As First Widow, she was viewed as mentally disturbed and was committed to a private mental asylum by her son.

Generations of biographers, historians and “Lincolnistas” (as Clinton calls the great man’s fans) have portrayed her as everything from shrewish First Virago to persecuted First Victim. Clinton’s meticulous study is meant to restore Mary Todd Lincoln to the historical record with fairness and compassion. Sadly, it also shows how much her significance depended on her husband’s glory.

Well-educated and well-dressed but neither an intellectual nor a belle, Kentucky-born Mary Todd was ready to settle down when she met Abraham Lincoln. Marriage brought out her resilience, especially in the difficult early years when she lived in boardinghouses, nursed her sons and gave her husband encouragement. But after Lincoln was elected president in 1861, she found herself the target of malicious gossip. There was sniping when she turned to clairvoyants for consolation after the death of her son Willie. She was mocked for her addiction to shopping and her taste for low-cut, unflattering gowns.

Read more of Elaine Showalter's review, or get a copy now!