As instability threatens to sweep across the globe, leadup to previous wars offer lessons for today’s powers

Author Odd Arne Westad probably has more degrees than a thermometer. However, he seems to think us ordinary folks are smarter than we are — at least some of us — because in his new (and 18th) book The Coming Storm he leaves out some critical, basic information.

Nowhere in his book does Westad list the world’s Great Powers, as he calls them, all together. He writes about five of them all at once, and in a manner that leaves the mistaken impression that’s all there are. Later, more of them pop up here and there, if you can keep track. It’s distracting and needless.

Secondly, Westad speaks often in his book of multipolar/multipolarity. But he never unpacks what it is.

Westad, a historian at Yale, is already celebrated for his sprawling 2017 book The Cold War: A World History, his intensive study of the causes of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union from 1945 to 1991. He has also taught at Harvard and the London School of Economics; his multilingualism (he speaks six languages) helps him research efficiently.

Story of women in apartheid-era South Africa a welcome addition to a genre lacking voices

Kagiso Lesego Molope’s fifth novel We Inherit the Fire is set in South Africa during the dying days of apartheid in the late 1980s. Schools and neighbourhoods are being desegregated, and people are reckoning with the past and taking stock of what they have lost.

Despite these themes, this is a quiet novel which examines the life of one family.

Molope is an Indigenous novelist and playwright of the San people of Southern Africa. She won the 2019 Ottawa Book Award for Fiction for her young adult novel This Book Betrays My Brother and, in 2014, she was the first Black author to receive the Percy FitzPatrick award for the best South African childrens’ book in English. She lives in the Ottawa area.

The story centres around teenaged Kelelo and her mother Kewame. In Kewame’s own teen years, she started a protest that turned into a riot and led to her imprisonment. She is now known as the “Mother of the Nation,” revered by the Indigenous Black population. However, years of incarceration have taken their toll, and Kewame struggles to be a present and active mother to her four daughters, while also dealing with a failing marriage and the impending death of her beloved grandmother.

Lukas prizes honor books on homelessness, the US Census and ancient India

NEW YORK (AP) — Books on homelessness, the U.S. Census and ancient India are among this year's winners of prizes handed out by the J. Anthony Lukas Project, named for the late author and investigative journalist.

The winners were announced Tuesday by the project's administrators, the Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

Jeff Hobbs' “Seeking Shelter: A Working Mother, Her Children, and a Story of Homelessness in America” won the Lukas Book Prize, a $10,000 honor given for exemplifying “literary grace, commitment to serious research and social concern.” The Mark Lynton Prize for history, a $10,000 award for combining “literary grace, commitment to serious research and social concern,” was given to William Dalrymple's “The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World.”

The Lukas Work-in-Progress Awards, for which each winner receives $25,000, went to danah boyd, for “Data Are Made, Not Found: A Story of Politics, Power, and the Civil Servants Who Saved the U.S. Census” and Karim Zidan for “In the Shadow of the Cage.”

David Suzuki is turning 90. Environmentalists may have ‘lost, big time,’ but he still has hope

David Suzuki admits defeat — at least in some respects.

The geneticist-turned-environmentalist, who is days away from his 90th birthday, reflected on his legacy as he prepared to release his latest book, "Lessons from a Lifetime," which compiles photos and stories from his life, as well as testimonials written by those he inspired.

"To me, the important legacy that I want to tell my grandchildren is, look, I tried. I love you. I did the best I could for you. And I tried," he said on a video call last month.

"The measure of a person is not whether they succeeded — because we've lost, environmentalists have lost, big time — but that we tried."

Author Margaret Sweatman mines dreamworld before striking gold in ‘Night Birds’

Margaret Sweatman didn’t initially set out to write an eco-thriller about the perils of global capitalism. The Winnipeg novelist, lyricist and playwright started out writing Night Birds, her seventh novel, around the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic and initially had other ideas.

Haddon’s illustrated memoir details troubled upbringing — and a yearning for peace in the present

The international success of Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time propelled the British writer and artist into literary stardom, yet failed to quell his internal discontent and depression. In his illustrated memoir Leaving Home, Haddon reveals how his unhappy childhood, anxious adolescence and generally troubled adult years have directed his writing.

The Curious Incident won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award as well as Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction. Adapted as a Tony Award-winning play, it was staged at the Royal Manitoba Theatre Centre in 2016. Haddon also wrote the bestselling novels A Spot of Bother and The Red House, as well as a poetry collection, and has written and illustrated children’s books.

Haddon grew up near Northampton in the 1960s. He and his younger sister Fiona were raised by a father who, despite training as an architect, primarily earned his living through designing abattoirs. Their mother likely suffered from undiagnosed and untreated depression, and to the young Haddon her unhappiness and unending criticism led to his feeling of being unloved.

He includes one colour photo showing his mother as a beautiful, smiling young woman, and wonders why she changed and became so discontented. “She radiates something I never saw her radiate in real life, nor in any later photos, even those in which she is smiling and appears happy… Maybe the picture’s deceptive, but I think that soon after it was taken some kind of light died in her.”

On the night table: Jenna Diubaldo

Jenna Diubaldo

Partner/blender, Sons of Vancouver Distillery

I have an audiobook I’ve been listening to by Adam Rogers. He wrote Proof: The Science of Booze, which is one of my favorite alcohol books. In that book he tackles really nerdy science aspects of alcohol, but anecdotally, finding interesting stories that teach you things.

Lately I’ve recently been listening to his most recent book, Full Spectrum: How the Science of Color Made Us Modern.

Len Deighton, author of bestselling spy thrillers, dead at 97

LONDON (AP) — Len Deighton, a prolific writer whose tough, stylish spy thrillers featured on bestseller lists for decades, has died. He was 97.

Deighton’s literary agent, Tim Bates, said he died Sunday. No cause of death was given.

Deighton’s first novel, “The IPCRESS File,” helped set the tone of cool and gritty 1960s thrillers and was made into a film starring Michael Caine that helped launch both author and actor to long and stellar careers.

“Len was a Titan,” Bates said Tuesday. "He was not only one of the greatest spy and thriller writers of the 20th century but also one of our greatest writers in any genre.”

Jarman’s short stories offer dazzling literary landscapes

In his new powerful collection of short stories Smash & Grab, New Brunswick-based writer Mark Anthony Jarman continues his mastery of the form, with seemingly no limits to his fervid imagination.

All 14 stories show Jarman brilliantly and seamlessly tackling any genre, from memoir to offbeat sci-fi to manic surrealism. One among many of the great pleasures in reading him is being absorbed into the wide emotional turmoil of his protagonists’ embattled worlds. As one critic correctly put it, “(his) style is the work’s substnce, its DNA.”

One senses that his prototypical narrator, a rough-hewn, enraged but also surprsingly tender man, wants to exist in an endless story surrounded and enshrined by literary/musical references, but unfortunately lives in this concrete world of crumbling architecture and despoiled nature.

This is seen powerfully in both The Cutpurse of Venice and the book’s final story, The Bailiffs Arrive With Their Grey Eyes, both of which deal with trips to Italy. To the narrator, the central history of that country’s place in Western culture has been reduced to a chaotic mix of tourists, resentful Italians and, in Venice, bold pickpockets.

Toast St. Paddy with TV, books that celebrate the Emerald Isle

In time for St. Patrick's Day, take any of these five suggestions to get a dose of Irish spirit.

Resilient trio of young Ugandan abductees star in Bitek’s Free Press Book Club pick

The Free Press Book Club and McNally Robinson Booksellers are pleased to welcome Kenya-born, Kingston, Ont.-based author Otoniya J. Okot Bitek to the next virtual meeting on Tuesday, March 31 at 7 p.m. to read from and discuss her critically lauded novel We, the Kindling.

Published in 2025 by Alchemy by Knopf Canada, We, the Kindling first introduces readers to a trio of women — Helen, Maggie and Miriam — who were just children when they were abducted from their homes and schools in northern Uganda the mid-1990s and forced to be part of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a militant religious extremist group.

The story begins with the women as adults, trying to rejoin society after years of brutalization and trauma at the hands of the army leaders, before flowing into vivid flashbacks which explore the circumstances of each abduction and the consequent journey of the women (then just girls) to find their way to safety, both physically and emotionally.

We, the Kindling utilizes the fictional, first-person accounts (which also includes several other women in addition to the main trio) rooted in fact to fully illustrate the intensity and violence of the time, but also uses the monsters and dangers present in folk tales to parallel what the girls are experiencing.

Brian Stewart memoir among books shortlisted for Shaughnessy Cohen Prize

TORONTO - Broadcast journalist Brian Stewart's memoir is one of five books in the running for this year's Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing.

The Writers' Trust of Canada released its short list on Wednesday, with jurors saying "On the Ground: My Life as a Foreign Correspondent" features Stewart's "extraordinary perspective on our times and on Canada’s place in the world."

Other books up for the award include Don Gillmor's "On Oil," which explores the petroleum industry's role in the fabric of Canada; and "Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community" by Maggie Helwig, which jurors call a "necessary, on-the-ground view of Canada’s homelessness crisis."

Rounding out the short list are "On Book Banning: Or, How the New Censorship Consensus Trivializes Art and Undermines Democracy" by Ira Wells, which the jury praises for "pairing the ridiculous with the brilliant;" and "Women Who Woke up the Law: Inside the Cases that Changed Women's Rights in Canada" by Karin Wells, which demonstrates how recent the move toward women's equality in Canada is.

Exploration of latter-era Dylan attempts to unpack songwriter’s enduring genius

Anyone who has paid serious attention to Bob Dylan in the past couple decades knows that the bard of Minnesota is a force of nature unrivaled by few artists of the 20th and now 21st century.

Yet the casual music fan likely thinks he hasn’t penned a memorable song in 40 or 50 years.

At the 2016 ceremony in Stockholm for his Nobel Prize in Literature, the Bobster’s stand-in, Patti Smith, performed A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, which dates from 1962.

The mission of this exhaustive and often exhausting work of mainstream scholarship is to debunk this popular misconception.