Stuart McLean. Home From the Vinyl Cafe (1998)

     Stuart McLean. Home From the Vinyl Cafe (1998) The 2nd Vinyl Cafe collection. It includes Dave Cooks the Turkey, probably the most requested of the Dave & Morley stories. The seasonal arrangement gives the effect of an episodic novel. As before (see Vinyl Cafe Unplugged), I found reading the stories more of a pleasure than hearing Stuart McLean read them. Recommended. *** (2012)

Stephen Hawking. The Theory of Everything (2002)

     Stephen Hawking. The Theory of Everything (2002) I like reading Hawking. His disability makes writing tedious and slow, and encourages an economy of words that makes for astonishing clarification of difficult ideas. The style also shows that these ideas are difficult only in that they are unfamiliar and often counterintuitive. Simplicity is more difficult to grasp than complexity. Hawking has a playful and sometimes mordant wit, which adds to the pleasure.
     The book outlines the current state of cosmology, reminding us how tentative such theories must be. The result is a vision of the Universe as a grand drama, whose plot we discover as we live through it (at least in the minuscule scenes in which we play a part), but which has no purpose beyond its own existence. As recently as the 1990s, that existence was guessed to be limited; time would eventually have a stop. Now, it’s not so obvious what may happen. The latest theories suggest that the Universe is much larger than what we can or could observe, though what “larger” means in this context is somewhat less than clear. Highly recommended, but if this is your first excursion into this realm of ideas, you will have to read the book at least twice to make sense of it. **** (2012)

John Toland. Hitler: the Pictorial Documentary of his Life (1978)

     John Toland. Hitler: the Pictorial Documentary of his Life (1978) Well, it’s a documentary, and a good one for giving an overview of the man. Toland begins each chapter with an excerpt from his biography, and captions round out the narrative. The book is apparently intended for an audience of students and the casually interested, and for them it fulfills its limited purposes.
     However, by presenting a chronicle rather than a story, the book may encourage deeper study. It raises questions. For example, why and how was Hitler able to achieve his goal of political power and domination of Germany? This question unanswered tends to perpetuate the popular misconception that he used some kind of force (never specified in this story, however). For us, the most important lesson is that Hitler ensured that at every step he had at least quasi-legitimate justification for what he did. Legality mattered.
     The political images are almost meaningless without knowledge of the events they portray, but the private, personal life is intelligible to anyone aware of his own milieu. The overall impression is that Hitler’s personal life was that of a man with limited taste who yearned for the apparent sophistication of the moneyed classes. An odd miasma of lower-middleclass respectability hangs over it all.
     The reproduction of the photos is average. Many original photos were of poor quality, or apparently exist only as poor copies of the originals, which doesn’t help. ** (2012)

Wendy Northcutt. Darwin Awards II (2001)

     Wendy Northcutt. Darwin Awards II (2001) Another collection of confirmed and unconfirmed reports of people voluntarily removing themselves from the gene pool and so reducing the stupidity quotient a minuscule amount. There are also a number of urban legends. Good if gruesome fun. One wonders how the families and friends of the fools reacted. My usual reaction to stupid avoidance of safety rules is anger. **½ (2012)

Omer Lavallee & Ronald Ritchie. Narrow Gauge Railways of Canada (2005)

     Omer Lavallee & Ronald Ritchie. Narrow Gauge Railways of Canada (2005) Since Lavallee wrote the book, much additional information has been found about Canada’s narrow gauge railways. Ritchie provides some of it, and many added photos. Most interesting are the obscure, short, and short-lived lumber and mining railways in the Maritimes. It’s a pity that for many of these all that’s known are a few written references or old maps; no pictures. For some (eg, the Kaslo & Slocan) I have data in my clippings collections, which I will insert. A well done book, a pleasure to leaf through, a pleasure to read, and a pleasure to consult. *** (2012)

John Mortimer. Charade (1947)

     John Mortimer. Charade (1947) Mortimer’s first novel, reissued in 1987 around the time the Rumpole TV series peaked. The plot concerns a young man who is given a job with a documentary film unit charged with making a film about soldiers training for the assault on Europe. The boy thinks an accident that kills a disliked sergeant was murder, but it’s left up to the reader to figure out the answer, if any. Cryptic hints about prior relationships may be clues, or then again maybe not. It’s possible that Mortimer avoided details that might have made the characters more interesting. The book is loosely based on his experiences with the Crown Film Unit, and too much detail might have allowed identification of the innocent.
     If you know only Rumpole of the Bailey, this book will confound you. It is not nearly as well written, with thin characters, and insufficient background and backstory to clarify motives. It does generate enough mysteries that I kept on reading just to find the answers to the questions. There were precious few, however. ** (2012)

Michael Macrone. Brush up Your Shakespeare! (1991)

     Michael Macrone. Brush up Your Shakespeare! (1991) If you like compilations of odd facts, you’ll like this book, even if Shakespeare’s not your favourite playwright. It’s a dictionary of Shakespeare quotes. Macrone gives you the speech, the context, original meanings of words, how we’ve misunderstood or misappropriated Shakespeare’s words, and occasionally puns or other witticisms. He also reminds Shakespeare and theatre lovers why they keep returning to this most archaic of story-telling modes. There are a few typos of the kind that spell-checking software misses, but they don’t detract from the score: *** (2012)

Update 20230621: Reread this recently, enjoyed it perhaps even more than the first time. Made me go back to the scripts, read most of Richard III.