RIGHT AT HOME: Nautical decor with modern panache

On the night table: Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead

Author, Cool Machine

I’ve been reading Caroline Fraser. She has a book called Murderland about serial killers that came out last year. Her previous book, Prairie Fires, was a biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder. She’s a new author for me, and I’m going through that biography now. I never read Wilder’s books, but I liked the TV show when I was a kid; it’s one of those books that’s about a person’s life, but also pulls back to get the larger cultural panorama of America, talking about frontier life and and prairie life — it’s really interesting.

Colson Whitehead will launch Cool Machine, the third book in his Harlem trilogy, on Tuesday at 7 p.m. in the Muriel Richardson Auditorium at WAG-Qaumajuq (300 Memorial Blvd.) in an event presented by McNally Robinson Booksellers.

Nemat’s novel chronicles grandmother’s harrowing life in Russia and Iran

Mistress of the Persian Boarding House is the most enjoyable book I have read in the more than 15 years since I began reviewing books for the Free Press.

Author Marina Nemat’s prose, inspired by her paternal grandmother’s life, flows smoothly, like a babbling brook down a mountain.

Nemat is an Iranian-born Canadian writer and human rights activist known for her bestselling memoirs Prisoner of Tehran and After Tehran: A Life Reclaimed. Arrested at 16 for opposing Iran’s post-revolution regime, she endured torture and forced marriage in Evin Prison before emigrating to Canada in 1991.

Nemat’s grandmothers were both Russian, and she was brought up in a Russian Orthodox Christian family in Tehran. With their Iranian husbands, whom they had married before the Russian Revolution of 1917, both grandmothers fled from Russia to Iran as part of a massive wave of migration.

Culture minister’s pledge sends officials on hunt for money to fix Islamic centre after apparent hate crime

Government officials were left scrambling Friday to explain why the province is paying for repairs at a mosque recently targeted in a potential hate crime after a $1 million security enhancement fund was fully allocated in June.

As wildfire season rages, new book explores the frontlines of battling Canadian blazes

Mother Nature’s talking but we haven’t been listening, according to Jesse Winter, author of Wild Fire: Dispatches from a Country Ablaze, a book, released earlier this summer detailing Canada’s wildfire woes.

Currently, almost 1,000 wildfires across Northwestern Ontario, British Columbia, the Prairies, Northwest Territories and eastern provinces are burning in Canada. Forest fires also continue to wreak havoc in France, Spain and other European countries, and in the U.S. states of Oregon, California, Florida and Texas. While 2023 still rates as the world’s worst wildfire season, 2026 is hot on its heels.

Winter, a Vancouver-based, award-winning climate disaster photojournalist, spent more than two years on Wild Fire, his first book. In-depth research included working with firefighting crews and environmentalists as well as talking to researchers, politicians and evacuees. He says we need to rethink our views on wildfires or be prepared to watch more land go up in flames.

Canada, Winter writes, is “a country almost perfectly designed to burn.” At least 70 per cent of boreal forests, which cover one-third of the country, are stuffed with highly flammable spruce, fir, pine and tamarack trees as well as aspen, poplar and birch. With a wealth of available fuel, it’s no surprise, he writes, that an area twice the size of Vancouver Island burns every summer in Canada.

RIGHT AT HOME: Nautical decor with modern panache

Designers are playing with the idea of nautical decor in new ways, with furnishings and style notes that say "classic contemporary" instead of "kitschy cute."

There might be life preservers on the wall, but they're probably vintage, and paired with modern chairs. There might be art, but instead of the usual beachy tableaux, there are close-up wave prints, or oversize photos of sea creatures.

It's a look that still pays homage to a home's waterside location — actual or aspirational — but in a stylish way.

New York designer Ghislaine Vinas recently did a project out in the sandy seaside enclave of Montauk, New York. A fresh palette of white and blue was accented with Vinas' signature punches of bright orange, green and yellow. Beach-chair-style stripes of colour adorn furniture pieces and shower tile. Porthole-style mirrors in various iterations anchor bathroom vanities. And scattered throughout the home are nautical references given a playful spin. For example, in the open plan living area, Vinas hung a group of white sphere light fixtures suspended in blue netting; they look like boat buoys.