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.

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.

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.”

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.

On the night table: Margaret Sweatman

Margaret Sweatman

Author, Night Birds

I just read Madeleine Thien’s novel The Book of Records. Holy mackerel, that is a masterpiece. It’s so good. When she does delve into this kind of realism with characters interacting, or the war, it’s engaging. And then she goes into this other realm… it’s incredible.

Another recommended book is Jeremy Thomas Gilmer’s This Rare Earth: Building the Dams, Mines and Megaprojects that Run our World, a beautiful book of non-fiction. It’s about a man working in mines; his job is to make sure the dams aren’t going to collapse. It’s a fantastic book by Vehicule Press. I had to order it from them; you might not find in the bookstore, but I would recommend it.

Former volleyball star recalls struggles for gay rights during 1980s

In 1981, tennis star Martina Navratilova made international headlines off the court for coming out as a lesbian. Around the same time, a less prominent Canadian athlete named Betty Baxter was beginning a public battle for equality.

Baxter was well-known in the queer community, having played on the national Canadian women’s volleyball team at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. She caused a media frenzy a few years later when she became the first female and youngest ever coach of the same team.

Less well-known was that after only 18 months as coach she was fired, behind closed doors, as rumours swirled that she was a lesbian. Baxter had not come out publicly; she lost her job for not denying she was a lesbian.

She was told by a human rights lawyer that she had no recourse. This was common practice before sexual orientation was enshrined in the Human Rights Act in 1996; contemporary readers may have a difficult time imagining how brave it was to come out publicly in the ‘80s.

Trotsky’s killer devoted to Stalin, communism

Leon Trotsky was a leading light of the Russian Revolution (1917) and subsequent civil war.

Pioneering scientist Suzuki reflects on his life’s work

It is hard to believe that Vancouver’s David Suzuki, an internationally renowned geneticist and environmental activist best-known in Canada for his popular television series The Nature of Things with David Suzuki, turns 90 years old on March 24.

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.

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.

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.

Shanghai Gothic novel a delight

A change in circumstances can help people reinvent themselves — or reveal who they really are. In The Fourth Princess: A Gothic Novel of Old Shanghai, Janie Chang uses the genre of a Gothic novel to show how people’s choices can affect not only their own lives, but also those of the people around them.

Chang is the author of historical fiction novels such as Three Souls, Dragon Springs Road and The Porcelain Moon. She is originally from Taiwan but has lived in the Philippines, Iran, Thailand and Canada (she’s now in B.C.). Her family history and ancestral stories are frequently inspiration for events in her novels.

The Fourth Princess is set in Shanghai, China, mainly in 1907 and 1911. The story begins with a sale notice for Lennox Manor, a house just outside the city, before describing the actions of Lisan Liu, an orphan who has been raised by the kindly but distant guardian Master Liu.

Lisan has no memory of her early life. As the story begins, she is on her way for a job interview — an initiative she has taken without her guardian’s knowledge — with Caroline Vessey, an American. When she returns home after a successful interview, her guardian and his brother hold secret discussions about Lisan before finally allowing her to become Mrs. Vessey’s live-in private secretary at Lennox Manor.