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magazine / jf12
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January/February 2012 issue |
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BOOK REVIEWS
Truth in wartime
HISTORY
THE CIVIL WAR OF 1812
American Citizens, British
Subjects, Irish Rebels, &
Indian Allies
By Alan Taylor
Vintage
640 pp.,
$20
softcover
What to make of a man
who financed the
American government’s
invasion of the British
colonies of Upper and Lower Canada in
1812 and then promptly demanded that
U.S. troops not interfere with his business
interests along the border?
Opportunist would be too charitable a
description of David Parish, a wealthy
German national who immigrated to the
United States in 1806 and purchased
80,000 hectares of land south of the St.
Lawrence River in what is now New
York State. He retailed that land to settlers,
who sold their flour, lumber and
potash to buyers in Montréal. War
earned Parish a tidy rate of interest on his
multi-million-dollar loans to the U.S.
government, but it also closed the border
to exports, and that meant his settlers
couldn’t make payments on the land he
had sold them. Parish demanded that
U.S. troops be withdrawn from the area
around Ogdensburg so that the profitable
trade — considered smuggling after war
was declared in the spring of 1812 —
could proceed apace.
“Parish wove a tangled web,” writes
Alan Taylor, a history professor at the
University of California, Davis, in his
authoritative study of the conflict.
“Although he privately denounced this
‘foolish and iniquitous War,’ Parish also
sought a government contract to supply
the [U.S.] navy at Sackets Harbor with
cannonballs made by his ironworks near
Ogdensburg.” When Parish was advised
that the British might destroy his ironworks
if he was making cannonballs, he
decided against it and wrote to the
British commander, offering to turn
down any U.S. munitions contracts if his
foundry was not targeted for attack. The
commander happily agreed.
The title of Taylor’s book — The
Civil War of 1812 — echoes the great
theme that runs through his account of
the war, which pitted greedy profiteers
such as Parish against those devoted to
the democratic ideals of the young
democracy and cast Federalist supporters
in New England states, who were sympathetic
to Britain, against warmongering
Republicans in the southern states. It
prompted American First Nations led by
Shawnee warrior Tecumseh to ally themselves
with the British. And, in perhaps
the greatest irony of the war, “while Irish
sailors escaped from the British warships,
regarded as floating prisons, American
slaves fled to those vessels as portals to
freedom.” The war exposed the deepest,
most intractable divisions within the
republic that festered and finally
exploded decades later in the even bloodier
American Civil War.
PIERRE BERTON’S WAR OF 1812
The Invasion of Canada and
Flames Across the Border
By Pierre Berton
Anchor Canada
928 pp.,
$29.95
softcover
The people who suffered the most
during the two long years of full-scale
battles, nighttime raids and probing skirmishes
were farmers and villagers on both
sides of the border. Brothers found themselves
on opposing sides, neighbour
denounced neighbour as traitor or smuggler,
and every battle left homes and
farms pillaged and torched.
In measured and descriptive prose,
Taylor details the suffering and the
hatreds engendered by the war. His pithy
character sketches deliver illuminating insights into the motivations of key leaders.
And his scene-setting anecdotes are
effectively deployed to illustrate broad
subthemes, such as the treatment of prisoners,
the role of the Irish and the training
and equipping of regular forces.
Although Taylor writes from an
American perspective, Canadians interested
in the war will learn a great deal
from this even-handed and critical
account of how, by invading one of
Britain’s most thinly populated colonies,
Americans fought what was then the
world’s most powerful military machine.
To mark the 200th anniversary of the
war, Anchor Canada has reissued Pierre
Berton’s two-volume popular history of
the war. Originally titled The Invasion of
Canada and Flames Across the Border,
they were published in 1980 and 1981,
respectively. Berton, who died in 2004,
was the author of some 50 books, many
of which were popular treatments of key
episodes in Canadian history. While
Taylor’s account sheds new light on the
genesis of the war, the political divisions
within the U.S. government and the
incompetence of U.S. military leadership,
Berton’s books are page-turners, rich in
detail drawn from diaries, letters and dispatches
of soldiers, farmers and others
caught up in the conflagration. They are
an accessible and gripping introduction
to the history of the war.
If your interest in the topic isn’t
exhausted by Berton’s 900-plus page
treatment of the conflict, then by all
means plunge into Taylor’s book. He
may lack Berton’s deft storytelling skills,
but he knows how to propel a narrative
and has plumbed an impressive range of
original sources to shape his arguments
about how the war unfolded, why both
sides were able to claim victory at its
bloody conclusion and its enduring
impact on American political culture.
— Rick Boychuk
Rick Boychuk is the former editor-in-chief
of Canadian Geographic. He lives in
Ottawa.
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
IMAGINARY LINE
Life on an Unfinished Border
By Jacques Poitras
Goose Lane Editions
344 pp.,
$19.95
softcover
Bordering on the absurd
For most of its length, most of the
time, the Canada–U.S. border has
been a clearly defined uneventful
boundary between friendly neighbours.
But not always, and not everywhere.
Much of New Brunswick’s border with
Maine is formed not by an arbitrary line,
like the forty-ninth parallel, but by very
real waterways and dense woods. The
early-19th-century disputes over which
rivers and lakes would form the boundary
were a geopolitical chess match played
out between an imperial London and a
rising Washington, replete with verbal
sparring and political jousting.
Reputations were on the line.
Benjamin Franklin’s choice was the
Saint John River, which would have
placed Fredericton solidly within the
United States. The British, had they had
their way, would have incorporated
much of what became the twenty-third
state into their growing empire. The
United States sent soldiers to the border
at one point, but the two sides never
came to blows. In time, quarrels over the
imaginary line were forgotten and the
border’s significance faded. For the
remote communities it bisected, proximity
trumped all. Friends, family, work
and cheap shopping all lay on one side or
the other of a vague frontier. The most
salient theme in Jacques Poitras’
Imaginary Line is of that line’s hardening.
In just a few decades, writes Poitras —
a veteran Fredericton-based CBC reporter and the author of The Right
Fight: Bernard Lord and the Conservative
Dilemma and Beaverbrook: A Shattered
Legacy — the border has morphed from
practically non-existent into a very real
division that increasingly confines
Americans and Canadians to their respective
countries, severing ties between families,
friends and communities. The
change was gradual but took a quantum
leap after Sept. 11, 2001, when the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security was
created and the remote forests and waterways
that characterize the frontier came
to be seen as a threat to American
national security. False reports that 9/11
hijackers had slipped past a road checkpoint
here were widely accepted, fuelling
paranoia about Maine’s northern woods.
Drawing from academia and numerous
interviews, much of Poitras’ analysis
aims to convey the absurdity of increased
security, but he paints a somewhat
uneven picture of its impact. The communities
that span the border’s northern
and southern extremes are explored in far
greater depth than those in between. The
effects of the reduced interaction between
francophones in Maine and New
Brunswick are discussed at length, as is
the conflicting ecological ethos in
Passamaquoddy Bay, home to wellheeled
Canadian communities and their
economically depressed American counterparts.
Despite this flaw, the book
works as a deeply rooted local history of
this fascinating stretch of border. By
highlighting what makes this part of the
world unique, Poitras brings alive the
quirks of communities whose cross-border
heritage defies narratives of identity
in both Canada and the United States.
— Tyrone Burke
Ottawa-based writer and editor Tyrone
Burke was raised in New Brunswick. His
obtuse philosophical musings in response to
border agents’ questions earned him intense
scrutiny at the Maine–New Brunswick border
years before it was the norm.
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
CARTOGRAPHY
Life on an Unfinished Border
By Jacques Poitras
Goose Lane Editions
344 pp.,
$19.95
softcover
The man who
loves maps
Where were you on Sept. 11,
2001? Or when the Berlin
Wall fell? In Maphead, a
book that charts the reaches of map culture,
author Ken Jennings shows how we
are programmed to frame these landmark
events in terms of our location. This situates
us in place as well as in time and connects
us with history — at least, in our
own minds. While Maphead takes a serious
look at such basic human behaviour,
it’s also a consistently funny, absorbing
book about our geographic impulse to
chart the world. “Maps,” writes Jennings,
“are just too convenient and too tempting
a way to understand place.”
Jennings, who won a record-setting 74
consecutive games on “Jeopardy!” in
2004, has been obsessed with maps and
geography since early childhood, yet the
self-proclaimed “cartophile” never alienates
less atlas-savvy members of his audience.
Maphead is jammed with enough
anecdotes and trivia to captivate any
interested reader. Consider the reference
to Nunavut’s Victoria Island, which features
the world’s largest island in a lake
on an island in a lake on an island — a
triple island!
Jennings explores with relish the subcultures
of antique-map collecting and
thievery, the painstakingly contrived
“unreal estate” of fantasy fiction, the
National Geographic Society’s edge-ofyour-
seat (really) annual geography contest
and the flourishing competitive world
of geocaching, a giant GPS game of hiding
and seeking. Looking to the future of
maps, GPS and world-imaging technologies
are ever more evocative of George
Orwell’s 1984, but the true apprehension
in this book centres on how many people
have sacrificed a comprehensive spatial
ability (and paper maps) to “enslavement”
by GPS systems that simply tell us how to
get from A to B.
This movement away from comprehensive
knowledge and ability is rampant
in academia. The once-revered study of geography has been phased out of many
top universities and colleges. An academic
world that moves relentlessly
toward niche specializations is a less and
less hospitable place for the geographer,
who must be a master of all disciplines as
viewed “through the lens of place.” In a
feeble show of solidarity with Jennings, I
am determined to smooth out my badly
folded road maps the next time I head
out of town.
— Nick Walker
Canadian Geographic editorial intern
Nick Walker is working toward a master’s
degree in English at the University of
Ottawa. He doesn’t trust a GPS unless it
speaks with a British accent.
BRIEFLY NOTED
STORM OF THE CENTURY
The Regina Tornado of 1912
By Sandra Bingaman
CPRC Press
118 pp.,
$29.95
softcover
On June 30, 1912, the deadliest tornado in Canadian history gouged out the middle of burgeoning Regina. Three city blocks wide, the tornado reached wind speeds that rank it in the second highest category of the Fujita Wind-Damage Scale, F4, or “devastating,” with wind velocities from 333 to 418 kilometres per hour. It killed 28 people, injured nearly 200 and left 2,500 homeless. Storm of the Century is an exhaustively researched and painstakingly detailed description of the tornado by Sandra Bingaman, a retired University of Regina English professor. The book is replete with telling before and after photographs, and Bingaman draws on the city’s three newspapers for numerous accounts of the destruction, human loss and seemingly miraculous survival and testaments to the resilience of the prairie dweller’s spirit (from a time when reputable newspapers could still use words such as “thither”). Storm of the Century features many moving and surprising anecdotes, and each chapter begins with a sepia-toned map that charts the storm’s catastrophic path and contextualizes individual reports of the disaster. But this short book’s relentless attention to detail may limit its general appeal; the greater part of the story moves at a rigidly chronological pace, and too many incidental details are given weight. Much of Bingaman’s work is compelling, nevertheless, and serves as a fine 100-year anniversary commemoration of an event that brutally tested and reshaped Regina.
— Nick Walker
ARE YOU READY?
How to Prepare for an Earthquake
By Maggie Mooney
Greystone Books
168 pp.,
$17.95
softcover
If the thought of stockpiling a dozen litres of water in two-litre soft-drink bottles disinfected with bleach and caching enough canned tuna to last three days strikes you as paranoid, you may be suffering from a case of denial and perhaps even fatalism. Or so goes the argument presented by Maggie Mooney in Are You Ready? How to Prepare for an Earthquake. Mooney, who has a master’s degree in counselling psychology and is the author of Canada’s Top 100: The Greatest Athletes of All Time, claims that preparation will not only help but also allow us to mentally get set for a quake, which will keep us from running screaming into the street with arms flailing if it does strike. She lays out a comprehensive four-week plan with which to tackle the tedious and exacting process of preparing, everything from assembling the basics of an emergency kit to strapping your water tank to the wall with sheet-metal bands and planning a safe pet evacuation. Each week includes tips about how to involve the kids and finishes with a page-long earthquake FYI, including legends and literary descriptions of major disasters. Mooney’s informal tone and empathy for apathy help her to outline a program that seems doable without reading like a public service pamphlet. With 40 percent of Canada’s population living in regions with moderate to high risk of an earthquake, picking up a few extra cans of tuna at the grocery store may not be quite so paranoid after all.
— Carolina Novotny
STORM CHASER
Canadian Prairie Skyscapes
By Ian Sheldon
Argenta Press
168 pp.,
$49.95
hardcover
The title Storm Chaser may accurately describe the way Ian Sheldon gathers source material for his dramatic paintings of dark prairie skies pregnant with cloud, but this collection of his work feels less like a first-hand account by a storm-tracking addict than a love letter to the artist’s native prairies. The University of Cambridge-educated Edmontonian began his career doing watercolours of the historic British campus, but after living in South Africa and Singapore, Sheldon returned to the prairies and has spent the past decade creating skyscapes on glass and on canvas. Storm Chaser features both a sample of his photographs and a series of oil paintings. Although the works follow a similar construction — the bottom quarter of each painting portrays grass, wheat and canola fields in bright greens and yellows capped by a sharp horizon line, while the remaining three-quarters features turbulent skies of cloud and rain — they depict a variety of moods, from the dark and threatening clusters characteristic of mid-storm skies to the calming warmth of magenta-hued evening rains. The paintings are paired with descriptions of Sheldon’s own emotional response to the landscape throughout the seasons and with poetry by authors such as Sharon Butala and Wallace Stegner. “Rain takes any mood you want to give it,” writes Lorna Crozier, “sadness or grief or exaltation or the longing for a lover far from home.” Perfect for a book that celebrates both the tranquility of the prairies and the chaos of storms.
— Carolina Novotny
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