We’d like to think that every book appearing in our pages is somehow important. That said, there are some we keep talking about long after putting their reviews to bed—the sort of books we wish there were more of, the sort we compare the latest titles to. As we did at this time last year, we revisit five books reviewed in the LRC over the last twelve months that seem most likely to become classics of their kind. The range is wide and the reasons unapologetically subjective: while John Bemrose’s The Island Walkers garnered popular acclaim, we feel the Backhouse sisters’ The Heiress vs. the Establishment will exercise a subtler sort of influence. Making this list demanded painful exclusions, and if you think a book has been unfairly left out, one of us more than likely agrees.
If This is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?
Finding Common Ground
J. Edward Chamberlin
Knopf
If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? is both a tribute to the power of stories and a plea that we learn how to respect them properly. A scholar of oral and written traditions, J. Edward Chamberlin balances his thesis on the knife edge of paradox, demonstrating that the central truth of all narratives is that reality consists of that which is—plus its opposite. Given this dilemma, holding on to grounding beliefs is as difficult as it is essential for a dignified life. For Chamberlin, “narrative” means not only the folk tales and fictions we invent, but also virtually every world view that rests on unprovable assumptions. This includes creations from every corner of the earth and every period of history, from the fanciful to the concrete, from the scientific to the poetic.
While his easygoing and chatty tone creates a Will Rogers persona—he never met a story he didn’t like—Chamberlin delivers a solemn exhortation: all stories, whether from oral aboriginal cultures or from print-based societies, are worthy of proper appreciation, which requires skill. Any hope of redressing prior injustices or creating future cooperation depends on learning that skill. Enriched with stories that illustrate the importance of stories, this book both celebrates and demands our enlightened appreciation. The collaboration of storyteller and storylistener is as significant as any other partnership in society.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt:
Champion of Freedom
Conrad Black
Public Affairs
In his annus horribilis, the one bright light for Hollinger ex-tycoon Conrad Black has been the publication of his massive and masterful doorstopper (1,280 pages) on U.S. president FDR. Using five researchers and us$8 million of Hollinger money to amass previously unviewed private papers, Black has constructed a portrait of FDR that manages to convey all his evasiveness, craft and duplicity along with his geniality and amazing self-confidence, portraying an exuberant national father figure on the one hand, a cool and ruthless political operator on the other.
The surprise of the book is Black’s championing of a man right-wingers have consistently attacked for his “destructive” intervention in the economy through the New Deal and his “weakness” on communism. By contrast, Black claims that without FDR’s leadership the market-economy democracies of Europe and North America might not have survived the Depression and war years. He further argues that the whole post-war world would have been far less stable without FDR’s leadership, because the United Nations was largely Roosevelt’s brainchild. Black’s personal interest in warfare brings particular credibility to his well-researched argument against those who continue to call FDR a traitor for “giving” Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union at the 1945 Yalta Conference.
The Island Walkers
John Bemrose
McClelland and Stewart
The finest novel we reviewed last year, The Island Walkers is that rarity in modern fiction, a story about the actual work of working-class people. Set in a fictional version of Paris, Ontario, a town dependent on the local textile mill for its marginal prosperity, it focuses on the moral quandaries bedevilling Alf Walker, a second-generation mill “fixer” who is wheedled by new management into spying on his fellow workers as the company tries to bust an incoming union. Every step Alf takes turns out wrong, and yet the novel’s strength is the extraordinary sympathy for him that Bemrose evokes in readers. And not just for Alf, but for his whole benighted family—especially his son, Joe, whose hopeless passion for a young woman who leaves the town provides a strange but compelling counterpoint to his father’s ethical struggles.
Our reviewer found that Bemrose’s sterling achievement was creating fully realized characters, creatures of the world with whom all readers can identify, who are simultaneously trapped with no power and little hope inside an exploitative mercantile system. In other words, this is a deeply political novel that time and again brilliantly transcends politics.
The Heiress vs. the Establishment:
Mrs. Campbell’s Campaign for Legal Justice
Constance Backhouse and Nancy L. Backhouse
University of British Columbia Press
Elizabeth Bethune Campbell, born into the Upper Canadian elite, went from debutante to the London Privy Council’s first self-represented woman plaintiff. Before what was then Canada’s final court of appeal, she won an unprecedented 1930 victory in pursuit of the uncle who plundered her mother’s estate. Attention faded with the flash bulbs, however, and rare copies of her self-published memoir, Where Angels Fear to Tread, were for a long time the most complete account available.
Constance and Nancy Backhouse transform Mrs. Campbell’s gripping story into an authoritative history by republishing the entire memoir, along with supplementary research and commentary, as The Heiress vs. the Establishment. Better yet, it remains gripping. We read about dubious wills, crooked trustees and legal cronyism in Mrs. Campbell’s own arch words. We follow raptly as she chases her uncle and his defenders through Ontario’s courts, exhausting distinguished counsel and appeals until she is led to teach herself jurisprudence in the reading room of the British Museum. Mrs. Campbell’s Privy Council vindication, however, proves a hollow victory: on her return, Ontario’s legal establishment closes ranks to leave her picketing Osgoode Hall with a token inheritance. Throughout, her story carries readers eagerly into the authors’ dense notes, which form both an exhaustive legal history and pointed analysis of institutional injustice.
Modern Social Imaginaries
Charles Taylor
Duke University Press
Eminent thinker Charles Taylor undertakes a sweeping synthesis of philosophy, sociology and history that explores how we moderns understand everything from referendums to high fashion. Modernity is more than just the subtraction of primitive tradition, he claims, and today’s West developed along with new self-understanding—all part of the cultural background Taylor calls “social imaginaries.”
He describes people’s slow disembedding from the chain of reciprocal relationships that had always characterized society, starting with the mid 17th century. Beginning with educated elites, people slowly came to see themselves as operating in the sort of moral order articulated by Grotius and Locke: they participated as individuals in both an economic system and a public sphere, their individual consent legitimizing the new authority of a “sovereign people.” Taylor traces how this powerful idea diffused into the broader imaginaries of western Europe and its colonies, converts merging variations with local institutions to reshape their lives radically. He pays particular attention to the American and French revolutions, among other violent collisions between social imaginaries, as transitional points in our long march from divinely ordered to secular societies.
Although Taylor draws valuable distinctions in the historical development of western modernities, his work also suggests the problem with exporting them. If democratic citizenship took at least a hundred rocky years to establish itself in France, what can we realistically expect in Iraq—or Russia?
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