Eric Wright. Death by Degrees (1993)

     Eric Wright. Death by Degrees (1993) Salter’s father suffers a stroke, and partly to distract himself from his anxieties, and partly to delay the boredom of writing a report on gambling, Salter takes on a case of poison-pen letters implying that the death of a recently elected college dean is murder, and not the side effect of a botched robbery. Salter’s investigation turns up a nasty mess of campus politics, which suggests there may have been a murder. Which it was.

     Wright’s dissection of academia, though set in a mere technical college, is clear-eyed and somewhat gentler than I would expect (he was a teacher at Ryerson for many years). He has a knack for quick character sketches that leave us with the impression of more than what was shown to us. Salter’s on-going family soap opera is dealt with a little more thoroughly than in other books. His relationship with his father is not resolved into sweetness and forgiving delight, but remains touchy and mutually armoured to the end (he will go home to be tended by May, his common-law wife). Annie and Charlie do what they have to do, because the old man is family; Charlie eventually can forgive himself for not having the kind of mutually affectionate relationship with his father that Seth has with his grandfather. A good read. *** (2010)

Jay Ingram. The Science of Everyday Life (1989)

     Jay Ingram. The Science of Everyday Life (1989) Ingram was the host of CBC’s Quirks and Quarks for many years. This is one of several books that indirectly came out of that show: a collection of bite-size explanations of common experiences, ranging from yawning to the change in pitch when you stir cream into your coffee to the mathematics of parties. He takes care to provide the latest and best research, with references. Better yet, he indicates when the phenomena are still not fully understood.
      Fun, enlightening, and above all an excellent primer in the scientific stance: The world is marvellous place, and asking questions about it makes it more marvellous still. That’s a great antidote to the pseudo-romantic notion that science destroys the mysteries of the cosmos. Actually, it replaces mystery with wonder, and the answers almost always add even more mysteries. Science is a journey without end.
     This book is out of print, but it’s worth searching for. ***

Akutagawa Ryunosuke. Rashomon and Other Stories (1959)

     Akutagawa Ryunosuke. Rashomon and Other Stories (1959) Specially translated for the Bantam Classics series, this is a good introduction to Akutagawa’s work. The introductory essay reprises his life, and places him in the Japanese tradition. It appears that Japanese writers often lifted stories from old books; their skill lies in the reworking of the story to suit both the reader’s tastes and their own preoccupations and weltanschauung. In this, Japanese literature resembles that of Europe before the Renascence, after which authorial originality became an admirable feature rather than a defect. It’s no accident, I think, that the shift towards the personal in art and literature coincides with the shift towards new discoveries in the sciences and technologies. I gather from reading the occasional review that Japanese literature is becoming “modern” in the same way. These stories not only offer a few hours entertainment but also insight into a different view of the world. **½ (2010)

Alan Coren, ed. Punch Book of Crime (1976)

     Alan Coren, ed. Punch Book of Crime (1976) Towards the end of its long run, Punch’s essays became more and more serious. At times, they sounded like leaders in the Guardian. Even the few fictional pieces in this collection exude a rage at a broken and barbarous system that fails to rehabilitate and punishes prisoners gratuitously merely for the misdeed of being cooped up. The cartoons are up to the old and rarely equalled standard, but the prose by turns enrages and nauseates, not by its style, but by its subjects. ** (2010)

Eric Wright. Charlie Salter mysteries

     Eric Wright. Charlie Salter mysteries as follows: A Single Death, Smoke Detector, A Body Surrounded by Water, A Question of Murder, Charlie Salter, dogsbody in the Special Cases Centre of the Metropolitan Toronto Police, is a nicely ordinary man, whose tenaciousness and knack for asking useful questions produce the successes chronicled in these books. He has a good sense of the politics of his organisation, and the good sense to stay out of that game. Married with two sons, an irascible father, and a daunting family of in-laws (big names on PEI), he worries about the right Christmas presents, the best way to deal with the boys’ adolescence, and so on.He and Annie have a good relationship, grounded in love and mutual respect, which carries them over the inevitable spats.
     Charlie is a bit obtuse about personal relationships and women’s sense of grievance, but no more so than most men. Basically an amiable and friendly man, he tends to fall into liking some of his suspects, which in a couple of cases misleads him (and stretches the story to book length). The cases themselves have the ring of truth, for Wright avoids fanciful and ingenious methods of murder, and concentrates on the characters of victims and suspects. Charlie and his helpers slog through the process, and eventually sift out the nuggets of real information that justify the tedium.
     Wright is good on the background, both of Toronto (which he describes in nicely done brief tour-lectures for the non-Canadian readers), and both the particular and general social setting. I like this series very much, and read all except the first one in one go. They would make a nicely laid-back, wry and comic series, if done with a tone and p.o.v. similar to The Last Detective. *** (2010)

Tama Starr. The "Natural Inferiority" of Women (1991)

     Tama Starr. The "Natural Inferiority" of Women (1991) "Outrageous Pronouncements by Misguided Males". Starr has assembled an astonishing collection of quotations illustrating the patriarchal theory that men are superior and women are inferior. Occasionally, they are witty, especially those put in the mouths of fictional characters, but mostly they are absurd, and occasionally bizarre. Reading so many misogynistic pronouncements all in one place confirms the suspicion that misogyny at one extreme is self-serving deliberate ignorance, and at the other is a mental illness. Technically, I think it’s a type of hysteria, which is ironic, considering the origin of that term.

     The collection also shows that religious leaders have a lot to answer for. In the soi-disant Christian West, Augustine of Hippo’s self-absorption had a very damaging effect on the early church. He believed, as narcissists have always done, that his experience is universal. When he got religion, he projected his disgust over his past life of debauchery onto his new-found ideology, and distorted the lessons of the Bible. Not that he was unique: religionists from all faith traditions have done exactly the same.
      I don’t know what impulse leads some men into fear and loathing of their women. Freud’s theories suggest an answer, but Freud himself would have resisted it: these men (including Freud himself) suffer from fear. There’s something about women that terrifies these men, and their only defence (per Freud) is to transform the object of fear into an object of loathed inferiority. By imagining superiority, such men prop up their faltering ego, which threatens to dissolve into abject terror. I suspect the fear is prompted in large part by the recognition that we are animals, a fact that humans tend to deny more or less indignantly. For some people, the animal in the human is a disgusting stain on what they believe is  a spiritual nature; so Woman, who reminds us of our animal nature by giving birth to us as all other mammals do, becomes the focus of that fear. That mothers wield practically absolute power over small children no doubt injects the note of impotent hate.
     Starr has arranged the quotations in something resembling an argument, which is (as she notes) circular. Women arouse men’s baser instincts, so women must be evil. Because women are evil, they arouse men’s baser instincts. That men may be responsible for allowing their baser instincts to be aroused seems to be an idea considerably beyond the intellectual capacity of all those clever theologians and philosophers who prove their superiority by producing elaborations on this fallacy.
     Starr compiled a companion volume, Eve's Revenge, which I haven't seen.
     Recommended. ***

P. D. James. Time to be in Earnest (1999)

     P. D. James. Time to be in Earnest (1999) A fragment of autobiography, and a pretty good fragment. James begins a diary in 1997 when she turns 70. This book consists of edited and recomposed  entries, many of them mini-essays on topics that interest her and that she know will interest her fans (I'm one).
     She is carefully reticent about her feelings, but not so much about her opinions, in which she displays a classic conservative cast of mind. She likes an orderly society, but doesn’t like injustice. She doesn’t like capital punishment, but thinks it deters murder. She thinks people should earn their way in life, but she also knows that many people are constrained by circumstances over which they have no control, and believes it is the community’s duty to help them. She’s well aware of how  great a role luck played in her own life: there was no guarantee that her first novel would be published, nor that it would be a success.
     Much of her time in 1997-98 was spent promoting A Certain Justice in book tours, and much of the rest in speaking engagements. She likes good conversation, and remarks often on what she and her table companions discussed. Occasionally she discusses the crime novel; she notes that forensics and police procedure are much more carefully described and followed than in earlier times. Jane Austen is her favourite author; she includes a talk she gave about Emma as a mystery novel.
     She loves her family and treasures her friends, and  can find pleasure and joy in landscape and weather and visits. If she converses as she writes she would be a delightful table companion. The last paragraph is worth quoting:
 The cells in my body must have renewed themselves countless times since that eleven-year-old walked round Ludlow Castle so carefully the letter which opened for her the delights and opportunities of a high school education. I inhabit a different body, but I can reach back over seventy years and recognise her as myself. Then I walked in hope – and I do so still. ***