Einstein Wrote Back

My Life in Physics

Enter the bare-knuckle world of battling theoretical physicists, whose cartoonlike antics emulate “the antisocial behaviour of the electron.”

Author John Moffat is a self-taught theoretical physicist who was admitted to a doctoral program at Cambridge without having previously attended university.

In the course of his unorthodox career he met some of the biggest names in 20th century physics, including Bohr, Dirac, Pauli, Salam, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Higgs, Gell-Mann – Nobel winners all – as well as Hoyle, Penrose, Oppenheimer, and others.

The first thing he learned from these giants was that rude, boorish, and abrasive behaviour was acceptable. Schrodinger called Einstein an old fool and Bohr accused him of being an alchemist. Hoyle despised the Big Bang theory, Pauli openly jeered at other physicists, Gell-Mann planted his big feet on Moffat’s knees under a restaurant table, Oppenheimer tried to poison his supervisor at Cambridge, and Dirac was scolded by his wife: “Paul, you are so stupid! You can’t even put on your own trousers.”

But it's not just a gossipy narrative. Moffat pays tribute to the many physicists who helped further his unusual career, and explains in simple terms how his life’s work bucked the “herd instinct in physics” by developing theories that did not invoke dark matter, dark energy, or the Higgs particle.*

Perhaps most shocking of all is his “heretical suggestion” that the speed of light is not constant.

Remarkable Childhood

The opening chapters are among the best in the book. He grew up in Great Britain during the war and narrowly escaped death during the blitz. A peripatetic upbringing resulted in his attending 13 schools with instruction in two different languages – English and Danish. When tested for his suitability to attend university, he failed miserably.

After highschool he worked at a number of deadend jobs until he developed an interest in abstract painting and spent a year in Paris being tutored by Serge Poliakoff. On returning home in Copenhagen a couple of popular science books led to an infatuation with physics and “strange visions of the structure of the universe and the fabric of spacetime.”

In a single year he taught himself enough math and physics to find what he considered a flaw in Einstein’s quest for a unified field theory. When he gave a talk about it at the Niels Bohr Institute, he was ridiculed for his choice of topic. Stung, he wrote to Einstein, whose response provided the title for this book. He was only 19 years old.

Canadian Connection

After working in England, the US, and at CERN in Europe, he came to Canada and lived in Toronto for 40 years while working in the U of T physics department. He is currently Professor Emeritus there, as well as Adjunct Professor of physics at the University of Waterloo, and a member of the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, where he now lives.

Einstein Wrote Back came out in 2010 and was shortlisted for the Lane Anderson Award for the best science writing in Canada. It includes eight pages of photos, mostly of his famous colleagues.

* Two years after the book was published, the Higgs boson was finally found by CERN's Large Hadron** Collider.

** Not Hardon, as Maclean’s and other media sources reported, to the delight of many.

Carpet Sahib

“The tiger is a large-hearted gentleman,” Jim Corbett wrote in his intro to Man-Eaters of Kumaon.

It sounds Hemingwayish, but there's none of Ernest's macho posturing in Corbett's writings. In fact, he comes across as a very large-hearted gentleman himself.

Youth

His parents were born in India and after the Mutiny settled in Nainital, a "hill station" in the heavily forested Kumaon region of the Himalayas of northern India. Corbett was born there in 1875.

His first firearm (received at the age of eight) was a double-barrelled muzzle-loading shotgun with a split barrel and cracked stock. By ten he was lugging around a .450 Martini, a rifle capable of stopping an elephant. He was still a boy when he shot his first leopard.

Railway

At the age of 17 he left home to work, shouldering responsibility for his widowed mother, sister, half-sister, and three young children (a brother, a niece, and a nephew).

He found work with the Bengal & North-Western Railway, first in charge of a large labour force felling timber, then transshipping goods by steamer across the Ganges at Mokameh Ghat. He worked there for 22 years. On his holidays he hunted and fished, and returned to Nainital to visit family and develop business prospects there.

War

The railway refused to release him to fight in the Boer War, and by the time WWI broke out he was 38 and considered too old to fight. Instead he was given a wartime commission as Captain in charge of raising a labour corps which he took to France.  

When WWII arrived, he was in his mid-sixties. As before he contributed by recruiting a pioneer corps, and then by travelling to various bases in India to lecture troops on junglecraft. In aid of the latter, he crossed into Burma in 1944 to study flora and fauna there.

Business

He left his railway job at the conclusion of WWI and returned to Nainital, where during the 1920s he focused on business matters. These included a store that his mother and sister helped run, and real estate interests that included a farm in Tanganyika, which he visited every year, and the improving of a run-down village that he had bought.

Man-Eaters

Man-eating tigers were responsible for killing many hundreds of people and inflicting a reign of terror over wide areas, sometimes for years. He hunted his first ones while still working for the railway. More followed in the 1930s, but by then he was becoming conservation-minded and more interested in photography than hunting. The first nature preserve in India was established near Naini Tal (and renamed after Corbett in 1957).

By the time he retired from business, he had been awarded the OBE and made some very high-placed friends, including the Viceroy of India. Man-Eaters of Kumaon was published in 1944 and became an international success. In 1946 he was awarded a CIE, Companion of the Indian Empire.

Africa

Yet he and his sister Maggie were nervous about the coming Independence, and in 1947 left India for Kenya. Over the next 10 years more books came out, until he died in 1957. He was buried in Nyeri near the tomb of Baden-Powell.

Personality

He was quiet, honest, superstitious, patriotic, philanthropic, extraordinarily brave, and had remarkable physical stamina. He lived simply, and was held in great respect by the “hill folk” of Kumaon, but often looked down on by other Europeans.

He was white but had cast off his heritage in order to associate with and side with the native. He ate native food, followed native customs and religions, spoke a number of dialects fluently, understood the 'Indian mind' and was generally at home in his supposedly alien environment. To cap it all, he knew his way around the forests better than many a native tracker.

He never married, mainly due to the isolation of his railway job, and the efforts of his mother and sister, who were jealously protective of him.

Carpet Sahib

The title comes from a local mispronunciation, “Carpet” instead of “Corbett.”

The book has an index and a few appendices but no photos or map. In the Acknowledgements over 60 people are named, some of whom knew Corbett. In a few places there are quotes from his own letters and from those who knew him.

One omission is any mention of Maggie's final years. Even a single sentence would have sufficed. She was an important part of Corbett's life.

A few readers have posted critical comments on Amazon, but I got the impression they were expecting an exciting account rather than the usual dry detail of a biography. Others have claimed the book blackens Corbett's name, which I assume refers to the following:

• suggesting he had an affair with the wife of his friend Ibbotson
• questioning his account of the Chowgarh tigress as “far-fetched” 
• accusing him of “dirty" and “unsportsmanlike” tactics (poison, set-guns, and an 80-lb trap) in going after the Rudraprayag leopard

Of these criticisms, it seems to me that only the last one has merit. The leopard, after all, had killed more than 125 people over a period of eight years.

The Long Day Wanes

Playful erudition, pungent description, and savage satire characterize the first three novels published by Anthony Burgess.

They form a trilogy that draws on his time spent as an education officer in Malaya and Borneo during 1956-60, when Communist rebels were trying to force out the British.

Most of the characters are governed solely by self-interest. No race goes unscathed -- Malay, Tamil, Chinese, or Caucasian. Even when not undone by their own faults, Burgess punishes them with ironic situations beyond their control.

The central character is a British teacher named Victor Crabbe, whose first wife drowned when their car plunged into a river. This event happened before the trilogy begins but reverberates throughout it, beginning with Crabbe's fear of water and reluctance to own another vehicle.

Time for a Tiger

“It's time for a Tiger” is a slogan for a brand of beer brewed in Singapore. For Nabby Adams, it's always time for a Tiger. He's a police lieutenant in charge of transport, and a fine comic character always in debt and always in search of a drink. In one of the most amusing episodes in the book, he sells a vehicle he doesn't own to a man who doesn't want one -- Crabbe, who caves in to appease his second wife, Fenella, who doesn't share his enthusiasm for Malaya.

Most Brits are portrayed as arrogant idiots with little regard for the country or its people. Nabby's boss and Crabbe's headmaster are both yawners, one “showing back fillings and a softly rising uvula,” the other “probably yawned in bed with his wife.” It's indicative of their intelligence and sense of commitment.

Crabbe on the other hand is a well-meaning bloke, but more devoted to work than his personal life, which includes a bored wife and a neglected mistress. Complications ensue when Alladad Kahn (Nabby's loyal underling), takes an interest in Fenella, and Crabbe's mistress tries to recapture his affection by means of a love potion, paying his flamboyantly gay houseboy to deliver it.

Towards the end there is an attack by Communist guerillas, a disastrous farewell party for the headmaster, and a winning lottery ticket that enables Nabby Adams to return to the country where he is most at home -- India. 

“I don't bath very much here, but I had a bloody good wash on the boat coming over."

The Enemy in the Blanket

Crabbe is now a paunchy headmaster at a different school, though he is soon challenged by a senior master, Jagnathan, who had been promised the position. He threatens to expose Crabbe as a Communist sympathizer, an allegation that is false until Crabbe discovers that his Chinese cook, Ah Wing, whom “he once caught eating a live mouse,” has been secretly sending leftovers to the guerillas.

Crabbe's former classmate, the financially hard-pressed Rupert Hardman, converts to Islam in order to marry a wealthy twice-divorced Malay woman, who disproves “the European superstition...that the women of the East are down-trodden.”

In a typically ironic episode Crabbe and Hardman visit a dying Muslim, Mahalingam, who has requested the last rites from a Catholic priest. When he recovers, Mahalingam denounces the priest to Islamic authorities, resulting in the priest's ejection from the country.

On the romantic front, Crabbe's marriage is floundering again, and he ends up bedding Anne Talbot, wife of the State Education Officer. At the same time a wealthy potentate called the Abang, who has his feet bathed in goat's milk, decides to acquire Crabbe's car and wife.

Subsequent events include Fenella's testing of Crabbe's love by pretending to drown, and the Abang sending a Falstaffian policeman to protect the Crabbes.

“If you continue to abuse me, I shall call the police." The word started something off in his slow mind. "Police. By god, I am the police."

Beds in the East

Independence is nigh and the British are pulling out, leaving the Malays, Tamils and Chinese to squabble among themselves in ways that are amusingly petty and vindictive. Keeping track of them, however, can be challenging for the reader.

The Tamils include Arumugam, Kularatnam, Parameswaran, Sockalingam, Sundralingam, Vythilingam. The Malays: Nik Hassan, Syed Hassan, Syed Omar, Azman, Hamzah , Zainab, Maimunah. The Chinese: Robert Loo, Loo Kam Fatt, Lim Cheng Po.

A symbolically deluded character is Rosemary Michael, a much pursued woman who longs to marry an Englishman. One of her suitors is a Turk who reminds her that he's European (“I sick man of Europe”) and repeatedly enjoins her to “come make jolly time.” When she finally goes to bed with him, he falls asleep.

Crabbe -- now middle-aged with a receding hair line -- is repeatedly turned to for assistance, though his generosity is never rewarded with gratitude. Eventually he is sent upcountry to report on the death of a schoolmaster, and meets a loopy anthropologist who criticizes him for laughing at butterflies, and a bibulous beer salesman who knows Nabby Adams.

More significantly he also meets an American “linguistician” who provides an update on Fenella, now in England and a published poet who lectures on Malaya; and (in a play on their last names) George Costard, from whom he learns a devastating piece of information about his first wife.

It was the job of the British to help the Malays. That was well known, that was in the history books. And if Crabbe was slow in helping, there was always blackmail.

Misc

The novels are enriched by the author's polymathic command of music, languages, and literature. There is a Malay glossary at the end, and you may need to check an English dictionary for words like bathycolpous, edentulous, exophthalmic, and rhotacismus.

In a brief review of these novels, Bernard Bergonzi had this to say about Burgess: "Among contemporary writers no one is blacker, or more comic."

Bear

Notorious when it was first published in 1976, and notorious again today after a cover image (not this one) went viral, Bear by Marian Engel has just been reissued.

The novel feels much more substantial than one might expect from its 141 pages. The backstory covers several generations, rather like a mini-epic in the manner of Robertson Davies.

There are frequent literary and cultural references to bears, and the important semi-wilderness setting is captured deftly and without fuss.

The characters are few but indelible. The protagonist Lou is a book-sheltered woman who meets a likeable rustic named Homer, and an ancient native woman who offers this advice:

"Shit with the bear. He like you, then. Morning, you shit, he shit. Bear lives by smell. He like you."

Combine all these elements with perfect pacing and an aura of danger, and you'll have an idea of just how good this book is.

Names

The story is a modern fairy tale with a feminist subtext. The men have iconic names reflecting their status as males: Colonel Cary, Joe King, and the Director.

Homer's name suggests his role as a folksy patriarch, but despite his helpfulness he's not much different from other men in Lou's life. The way she resolves an issue with him is a key aspect of the story.

The three most important female characters all have masculine names. In addition to Lou, there is Lucy Leroy the native woman, and in a particularly clever touch the daughter of Colonel Cary, her given name bestowed upon her at birth to circumvent a will. Thus, she is Colonel Jocelyn, a tough capable woman "with big hands like a man" who could skin a lynx.

The bear, on the other hand, has no name. But it too is male, and in a scene I thought particularly humorous, acts like a typical guy:  

She put honey on herself and whispered to him, but once the honey was gone he wandered off, farting and too soon satisfied.

The Cover

When Bear first came out in Canada, the hardcover's dust jacket was bland and the paperback's cover lurid.

In reissuing the book, the publisher came up with a different cover for the trade paperback, and in a clever publicity gimmick invited several artists to submit alternative designs. You can see them on the publisher's website.

For Canadian Notes & Queries, artist Joe Ollmann created an illustration in comic-book style. You can see the full page by clicking here or here.

Bear in Mind

Animals are fascinating, but their Disneyfication sometimes blinds people to their potentially dangerous nature. I myself have seen people do very stupid things, like feeding polar bears by hand at the Churchill dump.

People, don't be stupid.

If you want to get close to bears, do it by reading. Here are a couple of books that I recommend. In The Bear Went Over the Mountain by William Kotzwinkle, a bear named Hal Jam becomes a famous author. And in a dark fantasy called Shardik by Richard Adams (he of Watership Down fame), a bear is worshipped as a deity by a primitive society.

The Odyssey

A Pop-Up Book

Even the simplest pop-up books are fun, but when done by an artist like Sam Ita they bring smiles to readers of all ages. He's produced several adaptations of classic texts like Frankenstein, Moby Dick and 20,000 Leagues under the Sea.  

Pop-ups, hidden flaps, and pull-tabs provide a sense of discovery, and engage the reader in a way that's almost magical. Often it's necessary to go through the books more than once to uncover all their secrets. (Somehow I kept bypassing the Trojan horse.)

Here's a look at the more spectacular pages in Sam's version of The Odyssey. What fun!

The sack of Troy

Escape from the Cyclops

Scylla attacks

Zeus intervenes

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

On the Tracks of the 
Great Railway Bazaar

“Writing about travel,” says Theroux, is “the nearest I will come to autobiography.” This book seems more personal than others because it reprises the 1973 journey that first brought him fame, The Great Railway Bazaar.

Back then he didn't mention the “domestic turmoil” the trip had caused, but in 2004 he “relived much of the pain.” Railway Bazaar, he tells us now, was written “in an agony of suffering.”

Other personal details include a gouty knee, double cataract surgery, his mother's verdict on his first book (“trash”). He reports the criticism of his former students in Singapore “who said, in so many words, what a horse's ass I had been,” and “rubbished” him “for having been a poor teacher.”

He provides updates on two of the more memorable characters from Bazaar. Molesworth, who later complained that Theroux had not used his real name, and Mr. Bernard, who read about himself with much pleasure and whose hotel profited from being mentioned in the book. Theroux is fondly remembered by Mr. Bernard's son: “We talk about you all the time. We have a copy of your book. You were up there in room eleven.” Theroux adds:

Nothing like this had ever happened to me among my own family.  Was this a motivation, the embrace of strangers, in my becoming a traveller? ... Without daring to anticipate such an event, it was the sort of reunion I had hoped for when I set out to repeat my trip.

Fame

Author photos from the two books

In 1973 Theroux was a minor novelist. In 2004 he's an established author who's asked to give talks in Istanbul, Ankara, Ashbagat, and Singapore.

His works are everywhere: Russian translations in Moscow bookstores, bootleg copies in Phnom Penh, and a guidebook that dismisses his views as “caustic.”

On the train he notices a fellow traveller reading Mosquito Coast, and in India chats with Prince Charles about the premiere of the movie based on it. His Singapore novel, Saint Jack, and the movie based on it, are finally available there.

Literature

One of the great pleasures of Theroux's travel books is how literary-minded they are. He always serves up a wide variety of quotes and references. A nice example: Thoreau's mention of ice from Walden pond ending up in India.

He hobnobs with other writers: Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shaka in Turkey, Haruki Murakami and Pico Iyer in Japan. Their conversations are delightful, their literary gossip fascinating especially when the subject is other travel writers. Jan Morris is esteemed, Chatwin “a boaster,” and Hunter Thompson “one of the most timid travellers I've ever known.”

In Sri Lanka he visits Arthur Clarke, “so frail, so vague, his mind drifting,” his appearance “like the sort of alien he had described in his prose fantasies.” He also visits the bungalow where Leonard Woolf lived, and glimpses the small island where Paul Bowles wrote his Tangier novel, The Spider's House.

War

American foreign policy dictates some route changes. In 1973 he visited Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, but in 2004 he swings around them via Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. 

In 1973 the Vietnam war was still raging, which prevented him from reaching northern Vietnam and Cambodia. Now he is able to visit Hanoi and Angkor Wat, and talks to former soldiers from both sides. Two Viet Cong vets, now construction workers, share a joint with him.

He quotes an alarming statistic from British historian J.M. Roberts: “a heavier tonnage of bombs dropped on North Vietnam than on Germany and Japan together in the entire Second World War.” In Japan, Murakami supplies this alarming fact: “the firebombing of Tokyo...killed more people than the atom bombs.”

Food

Stuffed grape leaves in Turkey and “an eggplant dish so delicious its name is a catchphrase, imam bayildi, 'the imam fainted'”

Spinach pies in Turkmenistan and pigeon eggs in Uzbekistan

“...amok, one of Cambodia's delicious national dishes, the snakehead [fish] simmered in coconut milk with spices”

Vietnamese eel soup (recipe included) and “snake wine (each bottle with a coiled cobra pickled inside)”

“Woodka” and “pissing dumplings” and bags of smoked omul in Russia

Architecture

Thanks to the Internet and Google Earth, there has never been a better time to be an armchair traveller. I was particularly keen to check out the following places:

Chatrapathi Sivaji Terminus in Mumbai
“one of the grandest railway stations in the world”
 
Kuala Lumpur Railway Station
“a marvel of good design...any American city would have been proud to have such a station”

Palace of Congresses in Bucharest
“an impressively ugly and gigantic example of megalomaniacal architecture”

Shimoly Station in Tashkent
“one of the largest railway stations I saw on my entire trip, possibly the grandest, lovely even”

Todai-ji Temple in Japan
“this 18th century structure was the single most imposing building I saw in the whole of Japan”

Vladivostok Railway Station
“a weirdly pretentious example of Russian railway design”

Cities & Countries

Ashbagat 
“a city without benches, the subtle message being: keep walking”

Cambodia 
"I was not prepared for people so poor to look so beautiful...even as beggars they had dignity”

Georgia 
a “wolfish landscape”

India
“...the paradox, that India's poor were her wealth”

Istanbul 
“one of the most...hospitable cities in the world”

Myanmar 
“...perhaps the only country I passed through where I met nothing but generosity and kindness. And the Burmese were the most ill-treated, worst governed, belittled, and persecuted of any people I met...”

Saigon 
“one big bazaar of ruthless capitalism”

Singapore
“good manners are suspect” and blaming "a national vice”

Tokyo 
“more machine than city”

Turkmenistan 
“an emptiness of lizards and a landscape like cat litter“

Vietnam 
“travel in Vietnam for an American was a lesson in humility”

Vladivostok 
“one of the Siberian centers of skinhead gang activity”

Caveat

 “Travellers are always inventing the country they're travelling through.”

Maps

The Avro Arrow

The Story of the Great Canadian Cold War Combat Jet -- In Pictures and Documents

Published earlier this year, this book is proof that the Avro Arrow didn't die when the plane was scrapped in 1959.

It still exists in the numerous video clips that can be found on the Internet, in the feature-length film with Dan Ackroyd, and in the many publications that it continues to inspire, one of which -- Storms of Controversy -- is now in its 4th edition. The Arrow even has its own Heritage Minute.
 
But if you're new to the subject, this slim volume by Lawrence Miller is a great place to start. It's along the lines of a photo album and can easily be read in a single sitting. Even those familiar with the story will find in the photos a compelling visual statement.

The Arrow was produced by Avro Canada, which in the 1950s was a world leader in aircraft design. The plane was a revolutionary supersonic interceptor, its purpose to counter long-range bombers from the USSR that might penetrate Canadian airspace on their way to the US.

But the Arrow had the bad luck to be rolled out on the very same day that Sputnik was launched. Suddenly the Space Age had begun and warplanes seemed on the verge of obsolescence. Production of the Arrow was cut by the government after only six had been produced. Avro at the time was Canada's third largest employer, and released 14,000 people. Including subcontractors, 40,000 to 50,000 workers suddenly found themselves jobless.

Miller's book brackets the main story with interesting details about some of Avro's other projects, including the Jetliner that came out prior to the Arrow, and the “flying saucer” that it worked on afterwards. The former was a jet-equipped airliner much admired by Howard Hughes and the American press, but it too was stepped on by the Canadian government.

The Legend Grows

The government not only scrapped the Arrow, it ordered every vestige of the project be eradicated. Even the airworthy Arrows were cut up and destroyed. Later (with a smacking of foreheads) the government realized it needed interceptors after all, and had to make do with a number of used Voodoos, an airplane that it had rejected years previously.

Just how good was the Arrow? Well, more than 50 years later, Major-General Lewis Mackenzie claimed in the National Post that “the Arrow’s basic design and platform still exceed any current fighter jet” and was a cheaper alternative than the problematic F-35 with its ever-spiralling price tag.

Miller's book doesn't dredge up any of the tantalizing conspiracy theories surrounding the Arrow, or the persistent rumour that one of them escaped the cutting torch.

The Arrow remains a thorn embedded in our national psyche. Its sheer physical beauty, cutting-edge technology, and savage dismemberment have turned it into an aeronautical unicorn.

t zero

A protean character named Qfwfq -- previously introduced to readers in Cosmicomics -- reappears in many of the stories here.

The book is divided into three sections.  The stories in the first are surreal, while those in the second address the reader directly with rambling, playful, convoluted discourses about identity, love, and cellular reproduction.  

The last section, which is the one I enjoyed most, approaches stories like problems in physics.

Part One – More of Qfwfq

The Soft Moon
Mucus-like biological matter drips from the approaching Moon and covers the Earth. When the Moon recedes it takes with it pieces of glass and steel captured from Earth.

The Origin of Birds
The sudden appearance of birds on Earth is described in comic-book form, and Qfwfq marries Queen Or after travelling to the Land of the Birds in the following fashion:

The frame is empty. I arrive. I spread paste on the upper right-hand corner. I sit down in the lower left-hand corner. A bird enters, flying, from the left, at the top. As he leaves the frame, his tail becomes stuck. He keeps flying and pulls after him the whole frame stuck to his tail, with me sitting at the bottom, allowing my self to be carried along.

Crystals
The sudden formation of crystals -- "an invasion of angled blossoming" -- creates a rift between Qfwfq and his wife Vug, who appreciate them differently.

Blood, Sea
Swimming through a primeval sea/driving with another couple in a Volkswagen, Qfwfq and Zilphia fall to "fertilizing with a will" to outcompete the other couple with "me-sardines" and "Zilphia-sardines."

Part Two – Priscilla

Mitosis

Qfwfq, in love with Priscilla, remembers his life as a cell in the grip of reproductive forces.

To tell you properly the way things proceeded I must remind you of how I was made, a mass of protoplasm like a kind of pulpy dumpling with a nucleus in the middle. Now I'm not just trying to make myself sound interesting, but I must say that in that nucleus I led a very intense life.

Meiosis
"Characters are multicellular organisms." In this case, camels.

Death
Reproduction and the desire to remain eternal is a battle that spills onto the printed page.

Part Three – t zero

t zero
A hunter with a notched arrow faces a leaping lion. "In a second I'll know if the arrow's trajectory and the lion's will or will not coincide at a point X crossed both by L and by A at the same second tx."

The Chase
A man is pursued by another man in heavy traffic. As he tries to plot his escape and anticipate the countermoves of his pursuer, it becomes unclear who is chasing whom.

The Night Driver
The narrator, who lives in A, quarrels on the telephone with his girlfriend Y, who lives in B. On being told she is going to call his rival Z, the narrator repents and jumps in his car to see Y in order to patch things up. On the way he tries to anticipate possible outcomes:

it would be terrible if I were to run to Y jealous of Z and if Y were running to me, repentant, avoiding Z, while Z hasn’t remotely though of stirring from his house.

The Count of Monte Cristo
Edmund Dantes is imprisoned (in a cell, of course) in an Escher-like Castle d’If. At one point a hole appears in the ceiling, and another inmate, the Abbe Faria, emerges and walks across the walls like a fly. Eventually Faria burrows into the study of Alexandre Dumas.

Unravelling the Franklin Mystery

Inuit Testimony

Discovery last month of the Erebus is good reason to plunge into this exhaustive analysis of Inuit testimony, though even dedicated Franklinophiles may require extensive page-flipping to check maps and keep straight (for example) the difference between Ukjulingmiut and Utkuhikhalingmiut.

And yet I read compulsively, for in these pages are the only eyewitness accounts of the Franklin expedition's demise. I felt closer to actual events than any with other Franklin book I've read.

True, the accounts are confusing and contradictory, but there are reasons aplenty for this. The physical evidence of the expedition’s passing is cryptic, and not just the muddled picture offered by the bones and relics, but also the few puzzling sentences on a single sheet of paper which is the only surviving written record.

Finally, with regard to Inuit testimony, cultural differences and translation difficulties cloud the issue, as well as references to other expeditions and the use of similar names in different circumstances.

For example, Woodman cites four locations known to the Inuit as Shartoo, all containing wreckage. Then there is Aglooka, "he who takes long strides," identified by Charles Francis Hall as Crozier, second-in-command. Yet the name was also bestowed by Inuit on at least four other Europeans: John Ross, James Clark Ross, William Parry, and John Rae.

So, with a quote from Sherlock Holmes and "a little judicious cropping," Woodman pieces together a cohesive scenario which...

...allowed use of all of the native recollections, solved some troubling discrepancies in the physical evidence, and led to some significant new conclusions as to the fate of the beleagured sailors.

But he does not claim to have reached "incontrovertible conclusions."

Even the picture thus formed is incomplete, a corner here, a bit of coherent background there. These too can be arranged in other patterns to reach quite different results.

The result is a variation on the "standard reconstruction" of events with minor differences in chronology, and a scenario that makes sense of the seemingly disorderly retreat of the crews. The departure for Back River on the mainland, as recorded in the note left by the expedition, may have referred to a hunting expedition, not a wholesale evacuation.

One of the ships is believed to have ended up in the vicinity of O'Reilly Island on the west side of Adelaide Peninsula. Woodman suspects it was the Terror, that it had been remanned, and that Kirkwall Island is a more likely spot to search for it.

Woodman also observes that the arrival of such a large group of men may have had serious consequences for the local Inuit. Their numbers appear to have declined drastically around this time, perhaps due to the depletion of game caused by the hunting efforts of the ships' crews.

Modern Searches

Since the book came out in 1992, Woodman has himself taken part in several searches. His "interpretation of the Inuit testimony," writes John Lorinc in the summer 2014 issue of Canadian Geographic, "has inspired most of the search missions undertaken since 1997."

In 2008 Parks Canada initiated searches of their own, and drawing on fresh Inuit testimony added a new search area -- Victoria Strait between King William Island and the Royal Geographical Society Islands.

The Erebus was found by the 2014 Victoria Strait Expedition, a discovery welcomed by many as a validation of Inuit oral history. The exact location of the ship has not yet been revealed.

Parks Canada search areas (Canadian Geographic, summer 2014)

Merging

Contemplations on Farming and Ecology
from Horseback

Bondrup-Nielsen got his first horse at the age of 11. He was living in Denmark then, and was taught to ride by a woman whose barn was cleaner than her home. At 13 he came to Canada and now, several horses later, lives in rural Nova Scotia at the north end of the Annapolis Valley.

It's the perfect setting for a day-long ride.

There are orchards and vineyards and fields of vegetables, patches of forest and salt marsh, dykes and tidal rivers, sandy beaches and crumbling cliffs, and a sizeable basalt ridge that separates Annapolis Valley from Fundy's cobbled shore.

He visits them all and, endlessly curious, muses about nature, farming, riding, and the idiosyncrasies of his horse, Bucephalus. He recalls the excitement of a simulated fox hunt, and remembers that horses in the past wore wooden clogs while working on the dykelands.

Being mounted contributes an extra set of eyes for spotting wildlife and also provides a useful metaphor. A good rider becomes one with a horse, each responding to the other's subtle changes of body position. "To me the relationship with a horse is one of symbiosis. Should it not be so with all relationships?"

That's not the case with large-scale industrial farming, whose practices are damaging soil that took thousands of years to create. Irrigation, pesticides, chemical fertilizers, the destruction of farmland for development (after which it can never be restored), the buying practices of large grocery chains -- all are contributing to the problem.

Our infatuation with economies of scale brings forth this observation from the author:

The most depressing picture I know of is not one of giant smoke stacks pumping out pollution, of extensive clearcutting in the Amazon basin or of urban sprawl, but rather a photograph of a small shorebird, a stilt, trying desperately to incubate an egg much larger than itself.

Yet the tone throughout is genial, not hectoring, and the book itself is a beautiful artifact with thick creamy pages, original pencil drawings, and a textured handprinted dust jacket.

There's interesting trivia -- earthworms are not native to North America, mammary glands are modified sweat glands, oxygen in 3 out of 4 breaths comes from oceans.

And unusual characters -- a Hungarian hussar, a farmer with brass knuckles in his pocket, an orchardist who controls the grass beneath trees by rolling around on it.

And, best of all, examples of successful strategies used by Valley farmers -- going organic, adding value (eg turning apples into cider), bypassing large grocery chains to sell directly to consumers at local markets. "Eat local" is a frequently heard rallying cry.

The disconnect between an urbanized population on the one hand, and nature and agriculture on the other, was underlined at the book launch last week when a teacher in the audience related an anecdote: a student on learning that milk comes from udders vowed never to drink it again.

Soil is irreplaceable. Farmers too.

Think about it.

Author's website

         Back cover                    Without the dust jacket