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Nonfiction Punishment is to go on living THE ODYSSEY OF ECHO COMPANY: The 1968 Tet Offensive and the Epic Battle to Survive the Vietnam War By Doug Stanton 313 pp. Scribner Reviewed by Tom Glenn Doug Stanton knows combat. His bio makes no reference to military service, but he brings alive on the page the grisliness of the battlefield so graphically that he must have experienced it. And Stanton writes better than any other author on Vietnam that I have read. He uses the techniques of fiction to tell of the carnage, but the events he catalogues really happened. His prose is clipped, precise, and pointed; his paragraphs lean and sharp; his vocabulary incisive. Nor does he shy away from describing the unspeakable—the wounds and deaths of soldiers on both sides of the conflict, the dragging of bodies away from the battlefield, the scattered body parts. His naked realism combined with his flair for words makes for riveting reading. The prose of Odyssey locked me in from the first page with ...

Thou Shalt Do No Murder by Kenn Harper Iqaluit, NU: Nunavut Arctic College Media, 2017. ISBN 978-1-879568-49-1 Reviewed by Jonathan Dore For more than thirty years Kenn Harper has been writing historical books and journalism that skilfully combine the archival sources available in southern Canada with the rich oral histories of the Inuit, among whom he has lived for half a century. In doing so he’s shown the journalist’s unerring instinct for finding compelling human stories that are emblematic of the cultural exchange, and often cultural collision, between the two. But he’s also shown the historian’s ability to step back from his immediate subject, seeking its roots in the longer term and the broader view, with an impressively unpartisan sympathy for all the characters, Inuit and European, who fall within his view. In 1986 he first told the story of Minik, the Inuit boy swept along in the wake of Robert Peary’s polar monomania ( Give Me My Father’s Body, republished in a new and much...

Fiction The wretched empress THE IMPERIAL WIFE By Irina Reyn 276 pp. St. Martin’s Press Reviewed by Dennis Rizzo The Imperial Wife  leaves us pondering the lives of Catherine the Great, Russian Empress, and Tanya Kagan Vandermotter, Russian Arts Specialist for fictional, upscale New York auction house Worthingtons. Either way, we are immersed in a world of immeasurable wealth, hauteur, and emotional ennui. Early on, we see that the label “imperial wife” could refer alternately to Tanya or Catherine. In fact, Reyn organizes the book as a series of back-and-forth chapters; at one point talking about Tanya’s rising star and failing marriage, at another discussing Catherine’s rising fortunes and despondent regal fiancé. Tanya’s entrance to wealth and privilege may as well refer to Catherine’s entrance into the world of Czarist Russia.   Can you even imagine an immigrant girl who finds herself in a gilded auction house, a junior cataloguer trainee in a palace of glass and white wal...

Fiction Fungus among us THE GENIUS PLAGUE By David Walton 384 pp. Prometheus Books Reviewed by Eric Petersen Sci-fi/horror master David Walton is back with his third novel. Like his previous novels Superposition and Supersymmetry , (also reviewed on this site) it features the common theme of humanity facing a potentially catastrophic alien threat. Unlike the novels that preceded it, which deal with an alien threat spawned by experiments in quantum physics, the alien threat in The Genius Plague shares our planet with us. In fact, it’s been here for millions of years. The story begins in the jungles of the Amazon rainforest, with Paul Johns, an American mycologist, ready to return to civilization after spending nearly a week on his own collecting samples of fungi. On his way to catch a riverboat, he runs into a fellow American named Maisie – a bored rich girl in search of adventure. The two strike up a friendship as they wait with some tourists for their boat, which picks up its passen...

Fiction The mussel quotes Kerouac ONLY THE ANIMALS: Stories By Ceridwen Dovey 248 pp. Picador Reviewed by Madison Bush The premise: what can we learn about the nature of human conflict looking through the eyes of animals whose fates are intertwined with writers of the past century?   Ten posthumous animal reflections interspersed with obscure cameos by lesser-known writers give us the answer: human conflict is a tragic, foolish waste that causes animal misery via domestication, subjugation, and carelessness.   Did we need ten stories to realize that? Probably not, but after a trip through time, beginning at the end of the nineteenth century in Australia, continuing to World War I in France and Germany, World War II in Poland and Hawaii, through the Cold War, and ending with the conflicts of the past twenty years in Mozambique, Bosnia, Iraq, and Lebanon, you will walk away certain of one thing: in the end, the world would be better left to the beasts.   Anyone who thinks t...

The IRB's Celebrating 10 Years of Intelligent Reviews October 2007-October 2017 Fiction Scrape his balls with a holystone THE BLOODY BLACK FLAG A Spider John Mystery By Steve Goble 237 pp. Seventh Street Books Reviewed by Eric Petersen Journalist turned novelist Steve Goble makes his debut with the first in a series of mysteries featuring one of the most unusual sleuths ever to grace the printed page – an 18 th century pirate. It’s October of 1722, and honorable pirate Spider John Rush is rowing off the Boston coast along with his best friend Ezra Coombs and some other men on their way to the pirate ship Plymouth Dream , where they’ve signed on to work: As they rowed, in a rhythm they’d reached without the aid of a cadence or chantey, Spider threw many a nervous glance shoreward. He sought signs of a lantern or torch, and listened for shouts or musket fire. They were well away from the Massachusetts Bay Colony coast now, and the full moon showed nothing but its own ...

Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage By Ken McGoogan Toronto: HarperCollins, 2017 Reviewed by Kenn Harper Ken McGoogan has produced yet another worthy northern book. Dead Reckoning sets out to tell, as its sub-title proclaims, “The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage.” The book is peopled with the usual suspects in the history of Arctic exploration and the search for the elusive Northwest Passage. I needn’t name them here; if you are reading this, you already know who they are.  But this book introduces other names that will be unfamiliar to many readers, even some well-versed in northern history. Their stories are the “untold stories” of the sub-title. McGoogan points out in his Prologue that orthodox history only grudgingly acknowledges non-British explorers - he specifically mentions Amundsen, Kane and Hall - as well as “short-changing” fur-trade explorers - and here he mentions Hearne, Mackenzie and Rae. He has mentioned these explorers before, of course...