I read Go Ask Alice forty years ago and as a diarist myself I enjoyed peeking into the private world of another teen. My own strong sense of living clean steered me clear of drugs so the diary did not influence me as a moralistic horror story to just say no. Only after I read Alice’s diary did I start doing my own research and discovered that the entire diary was a hoax. I have been interested in the real story behind Go Ask Alice for decades, and was immediately drawn to the new library acquisition Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behin ..read more

  Each trip to Nova Scotia means a stop at the Peace by Chocolate Boutique on Lower Water Street in Halifax. I buy more chocolate there to use as gifts than I buy for myself, and now that I think of it I cannot recall any time when I went there for purely selfish reasons. I chose Peace by Chocolate to supply the small gifts to those who attended my own wedding. In fact, on one shopping trip there, I had bought so much that I qualified to receive a free T-shirt (that may have been in March of last year). Thus I was well familiar with the company and the family that est ..read more

Yoko Ono: An Artful Life by Donald Brackett was a short biography (249 pages) and, although I was familiar with the life of Yoko Ono, this was a slower read than I expected. Dewey classified the book as an artist biography (at 700.92) yet our library system preferred 782.42166 (rock musicians biography). I would say that Dewey got it right (and even the Toronto Public Library thinks so) and will let my library’s cataloguing department know about my assessment. That said, the author is from the art world and is a curator, art dealer and critic, so he came to the subject matter with exemp ..read more

Too Many Men on the Ice: The 1978-1979 Boston Bruins and the Most Famous Penalty in Hockey History by John G. Robertson is the second sports book I have read in the past month written by a member of the Scrabble community (following Wild and Outside). When I first saw Too Many Men on the Ice, a large-format paperback at 202 pages, I wondered how Robertson could write about a penalty for that long. While he certainly wrote about the penalty that likely cost the Boston Bruins the Stanley Cup in 1979, he also provided an extensive backstory, outlining the Bruins’ rivalry with the ..read more

I know Omer Aziz from the Mississauga Central Library and also from the nextdoor YMCA. I admired his passion for books as I always saw him reading in the library as well as in the gym. He was genuinely interested in what I was reading too. I am always enthusiastic to talk about books and while my tastes, as seen in my blog reviews, are all over the subject map, Omer kept more to the classics. I could see that he was reading from the panoply of world literature. He even took books into the Y’s sauna and I worried that dripping sweat would damage them. How could you read comfortably when the p ..read more

  I have always loved poring over atlases and maps, and The Phantom Atlas: The Greatest Myths, Lies and Blunders on Maps by Edward Brooke-Hitching was different from all others in that the places depicted in it never existed. It was a pleasure to look over all the ancient maps to see the places–especially the islands–that fooled explorers and cartographers, sometimes for centuries. The maps, densely illustrated with both geographic features as well as the mythical monsters supposedly dwelling within, were not easy to read or look at without a magnifying glass, and I read the e ..read more

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps that Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics by Tim Marshall is the 2015 edition dealing with Russia, China, USA, Western Europe, Africa, The Middle East, India and Pakistan, Korea and Japan, Latin America and The Arctic. The first chapters were more relevant to the thesis: how a region’s geography confines it in ways that are unavoidable, such as dealing with mountain ranges, rivers, deserts and oceans. I felt that the author drifted from the “prisoner” relationship in the later chapters, but that may only be because the first region ..read more

   JP Floru spent nine days in the DPRK in early 2016 and The Sun Tyrant: A Nightmare Called North Korea is his travel diary. It was irresistible to compare travel experiences since I spent nineteen days travelling throughout the country in 2011 yet saw far more than Floru. His book seemed sorrowfully lacking and rather dull since tour companies do offer more extensive packages which unfortunately he didn’t take. I did recognize many of the sights and could anticipate what would happen next, as the museums and war memorials are mandatory stops on any tour. To compensate f ..read more

George Harrison on George Harrison: Interviews and Encounters was a hefty book of 573 pages, compiling interviews conducted with Harrison between 1962 and 2001, the year of his death. In the spring of 1980 when I fell in love with the music of the Beatles my first favourite member was John. As I listened to more of the Beatles’ oeuvre I changed my obligatory favourite Beatle to George. I recall when I bought the Revolver album in the summer of 1980 that A&A Records had a promotion where customers could pick a button of one of the individual Beatles with every purchase. Alt ..read more

In this compilation of short essays from 2015, 48 authors wrote over sixty stories about the area known as The Ward. Bordered by College and Queen to the north and south and Yonge and University to the east and west, The Ward housed immigrants in densely populated, yet often rundown homes. For over one hundred years from the 1840’s until the Second World War, waves of immigrants, most specifically Italians, Jews, Chinese, Irish and blacks came to settle in The Ward and set up their businesses. The Ward provided an area where these immigrant populations would be welcomed, and various authors ..read more