Book Launches and Events for the Fall Season

You write a few books, you get to know some people, and October and November can turn into a swirl of book launch and book prize events in Toronto.

So my social calendar for next week is an opportunity to note and promote some worthwhile books and launches (by friends of mine, mostly):

Monday, November 6:  At Ben McNally Books, the book launch bookstore for Torontonians, Beth Kaplan launches Mid Life Solo, the most recent in her memoire-fleuve series, a companion/sequel to her All My Loving and Loose Woman. There's a blurb from me on the back cover of this one, because Beth is a terrific writer.  Book details here.

Tuesday, November 7, 5:00 to 7:00 pm, downtown,The Osgoode Society for Canadian History, publisher of more than a hundred works of scholarly legal history that have transformed the landscape for legal and constitutional history in Canada, and its members will launch this year's titles.   This years books include the lead volume, Essays in the History of Canadian Law Volume 12: New Perspectives on Gender and the Law, edited by Lori Chambers and Joan Sangster; and two others, The Notorious Georges: Crime and Community in British Columbia's Northern Interior, 1909-1925 by Jon Swainger, and The Ontario Bond Scandal of 1924 Re-examined by Ian Kyer. Details here.

And same night at 7 to 9 pm, Ken McGoogan launches his new book, Searching for Franklin, at the funky Transac Club. I'm going to be interviewing Ken as part of that event, which is supported by Adventure Canada, for whom Ken has been an onboard speaker on many Arctic sailings. Details here.

Thursday, November 9, 4 pm- 6pm at the Blackhurst Cultural Centre, Heather Menzies comes to town with a focussed memoir, Meeting My Treaty Kin: A Journey to Reconciliation, an account of what she learned "learning to listen and relate while working with the Nishnaabeg of Stoney Point." Details here.

Tuesday, November 21, at Glenn Gould Theatre, The Writers' Trust hosts us invited literati at its annual Prize Giving: a ton of money for deserving authors in many categories.  I do love this event -- and The Trust, even though I've never won a penny of its largesse.  Details here.

 

Book Notes: Crean on Wong

Down the other night to the Gladstone Hotel -- inspiration for my favourite Paul Quarrington barroom rockers -- for the launch of Finding Mr Wong by my friend Susan Crean. 

Mr Wong (1895-1971), born in Taishen, China, came alone to Canada around 1911, paid head tax, and became, eventually, live-in cook and houseman to Crean's grandparents in Toronto's Forest Hill, and one of the pillars of Crean's childhood experience of the world. Crean, whose long career in writing and activism gives honour to that often derided phrase social justice warrior, tries in this book to do justice to Wong and through him, all the isolated bachelor immigrants who constituted the houseboy population of Canada.  She takes to her childhood, to his retirement rooms in Toronto's Chinatown, to her own later visits to his home village, weaving a history of Canadian class and race and policy-making throughout.

Our host at the Gladstone, Marc Glassman, is impresario of the Pages Unbound nonreading series. He explains that he often finds "readings" a rather 19th century in style, hearkening back to a time when many people had little actual access to books.  At his events he prefers conversation and complementary performances: in this case an interview with Crean by Carianne Leung, sociologist and equity scholar.  But we began with the Donald Quan jazz trio, improvising something that combined Chinese sounds and rhythms with allusions to "Danny Boy" or "Crofters' Lament" from Crean's Scotch-Irish heritage. They were kind of making it up as they went along, with much nodding and signalling between the players, but at one moment the flute player would put down his flute and take up the bagpipes, or Quan would cease shifting between keyboard and guqin zither and pick up a fiddle.  It was quite extraordinary as an contribution to the collision of cultures that is Crean's theme.

Not your average history book launch, is all I'm saying. 

Last chance to dine on Three Weeks in Quebec City

The wine is coming up from the cellar. The menu is set. Our host Patrice Dutil and I are planning a bunfight over who the real makers of confederation were.

And I'm told there are still some seats available.  Last chance.....

   

Historian in the 'hood -- and other legal histories

Charlotte Gray's new book The Massey Murder is about a done-wrong servant girl who shot one of the Masseys on his own doorstep in 1915 -- and (not a spoiler, I hope) got away with it at trial. Charlotte G. may have found the perfect window into that elusive subject, Toronto and how it got that way. True crime, social class, gender, money and power and politics, and a courtroom drama -- I've been looking forward to it.  Turns out she is promoting the book tonight at the library just down the road from me in Toronto.  Go, Charlotte.

I'd been kinda reserving note of that book for a general note about this fall's books from the Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History, but here goes.  The Society, which has done an extraordinary work in creating legal history as a thriving field in this country, mostly publishes works that are pretty scholarly and specialized, as they should be. This is one of the years they have some mass-market vavoom too.  The Massey Murder is an Osgoode Society co-publication, and so is another window on Toronto, Lawyers, Families and Businesses by Ian Kyer, of which we took note a while ago.  Kyer's subject is the Beattys, Blackstocks, and Chadwicks, a crowd of lawyers from old-money Toronto, and what happened to the families and the law practice early in the twentieth century when a whirlwind of new money from Northern Ontario mining blew through it.

A third OS book this year is the Roy McMurtry memoir, Memoirs and Reflections. That would move a heap of copies even if only Roy's close friends bought it. Among his many other achievements, McMurtry founded and built up the Osgoode Society, as one of his chapters recounts.

The fourth OS book and the most scholarly this year is the eleventh in its Essays in Canadian Legal History series, this time a collection edited by Blaine Baker and Donald Fyson on legal history questions on the Province of Canada -- that is, Ontario and Quebec pre-confederation.  A little less buzzy than the others, maybe, but gonna be vital for those in the field.

(Conflict alert:  I'm currently working on a project funded through the Osgoode Society, and have friends and colleagues throughout this post, so not entirely dispassionate. So?)

Cultural history: Fetherling on CanLit

George Fetherling's Travels by Night (1994) is the best account of the cultural ferment of late '60s and early '70s Toronto, when so much of CanLit was being assembled.

His new book promises to be equally valuable testimony to a much longer period of Canadian literary history through the eyes of a vital participant.  The Writing Life: Journals 1975-2005 launches tonight at Ben McNally's in Toronto.  Many Canadian writers will be wondering if they are discussed in it or, indeed, not discussed in it.

From Then to Now

I love book launches. My favourite kind of party. It always floors me when I tell a non-academic friend that I'm going to a book launch and he or she makes a face. I do admit the launches I'm invited to that don't feature anyone I know or a book I'm likely to read are less appealing, though I still like to get invited. Partly because it makes me feel like a real academic--grad students have inferiority complexes. Partly because it is a great book alert system.

This week I'm thilled to be going to the book launch for Chris Moore's new children's history, From Then to Now.  I am looking forward to catching up with Chris in person, and I intended to buy the book in any case. Kids books are the best, and good kid's histories few and far between.

Though I do wish Chris had taken my advice and that he and his illustrator had done a graphic history book, which I think would be a terrific medium for introducing kids to history. When I was in high school, we used a graphic history of France in my French class one year. I think it was written for primary students in France. It had the Sun King on the cover, and I remember the pictures and the stories to this day.

The downside of the Sun King book, as I recall, was its extreme chauvinsim (in the original sense). I like the global, inclusive focus of From Then to Now:

From Hammurabi to Henry Ford, from Incan couriers to the Internet, from the Taj Mahal to the Eiffel Tower, from Marco Polo to Martin Luther King, from Cleopatra to Catherine the Great, from boiled haggis to fried tarantulas – this is no less than the story of humanity.

But just as important is the emphasis on chronology. Something the history curriculum in Ontario is sorely lacking, as well as the kind of history as story focus of the French history for little kids, is any sense of when things happen: as my friend Donna points out, kids go from the middle ages to pioneers without any sense that anything went on in between. Now I can see the curriculum designers may have wanted to stay away from linear Whiggishness, but some kind of temporal context or time-line is the essence of history. I hope there are many kids who are given copies of From Then to Now by their parents and grandparents--for their sakes as well as Chris's pocketbook.

PS:  Chris's interview with Erin Knight of OpenBook Toronto about this book is up today here.