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Blogcritics book reviews: Rick Mercer and, um, more

Nothing better than a long weekend to catch up on writing my Blogcritics book reviews:

While I could have just not linked to this next one, instead I’ll bury it a little (it was published earlier). It’s quite possibly the worst thing I’ve ever written — a “review” of a book that was so far over my head, I couldn’t read it:

Remembrance of things past … and present

Remembrance of things past … and present

It’s a peculiar thing, but part of the reason I value books and TV and movies and the people who create them so much is that I’m often affected far more by a fictional account than reality. Reality is so … messy. All that extraneous information and digressions and chaos and distance. Fiction puts a story in a powerful box and gives weight to the important ideas contained within.

I feel as though I know far more about the Holocaust from reading Elie Wiesel than from taking history in school. I was certainly more profoundly affected by his tales than the facts I learned. World War I is alive in my mind partly thanks the post-Green Gables Anne books and that “Green Fields of France” song that makes me choke up every time I hear the final verse, when you realize the narrator resting at the fallen WWI soldier’s graveside has a more recent perspective:

And I can’t help but wonder, oh Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you the cause?
Did you really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame,
The killing and dying, it was all done in vain.
Oh Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.

When I was a schoolgirl, we were taught to honour Remembrance Day every 11th day of the 11th month with a minute of silence at 11 am — though since it was a holiday, the honour would actually take place over the intercom a day early or late, and the day itself was usually passed by sleeping in and enjoying the free day off.

My grandfather had exciting tales of adventure and camaraderie from his time at war, and proudly displayed a letter of gratitude from a town in the Netherlands that his Canadian regiment had helped liberate. He didn’t share any tales of horror with his young granddaughter, and I hadn’t yet heard the stories of how shell-shocked he was on his return. Like most children, I was idealistic. I knew war was a horrible thing, and adults were stupid for letting it happen, but the horrors of war weren’t real to me.

We wondered, my classmates and I, what would happen to our holiday when all the veterans of WWII and the Korean War had died off, as we watched impossibly old men march in parades and stand at cenotaphs. It never occurred to us that Canada could be involved in war again.

It’s different today, of course. Our young men aren’t being drafted. We haven’t declared war. But over 70 Canadian soldiers, men and women, have died in Afghanistan, many more have been wounded, and even more are in harm’s way, not necessarily with the best equipment we can offer.

I’m more of a defeatist than an idealist, now. I still think war is horrible, and we’re stupid for letting it happen, but I’ve lost that child-like certainty that it’s always avoidable. The reality is messy, though. Our reasons for being in Afghanistan and our effectiveness there are not necessarily clear-cut, and my instinct is to think that we shouldn’t be there.

But another fictional account has made the background at least clearer to me, if not clear-cut. Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, recently released his follow-up, called A Thousand Splendid Suns. It’s not about the war, exactly. It’s the story of two generations of women and how their lives intertwine over the backdrop of war after war in their beloved country. It’s an absorbing story of hope and hope dashed, and while the end point of the story of course cannot encompass the end of the current war, it offers a heart-wrenching perspective on what we’re fighting for … even if it’s not quite what the politicians are fighting for.

It’s no credit to me that it took reading a book to bring those issues to life, and it hasn’t turned me into a pro-war advocate — it’s not a pro-war book by any means — but it’s given me a taste of renewed idealism and the perspective of the people we’re theoretically fighting for.

Book Review: Send

My latest for Blogcritics is a book review of a guide to proper email use. I don’t get into this in the article, but my day job partly involves electronic communications, which partly involves things like creating an enewsletter to compile the all-staff emails in order to reduce email clutter, and coordinating an email etiquette campaign to tell people things like “stop hitting ‘reply all’ or I will rip your face off!” So anyway, that explains why I asked to review this one from Random House:

Book Review: The Complete Trailer Park Boys by Matthew Sibiga and Don Wininger

The Complete Trailer Park Boys is a book full of in-jokes and telling photos. It’s a book full of the joy and derangement of the show. It’s a book full of kitties and Coke-bottle eyeglasses. It’s a book full of subtitles: “How to Enjoy the Trailer Park Boys When Your Cable is Out!” and “The Official Sunnyvale Fan Guide” are splashed across the cover, along with the disclaimer: “Warning: contains language some may find @#$%ing offensive.”

They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but they hadn’t seen The Complete Trailer Park Boys, published by Random House Canada, when they said that. You know exactly what you’re getting before you even crack open the book, from the mugs of Ricky (Robb Wells), Julian (John Paul Tremblay) and Bubbles (Mike Smith) staring out at you on the front, to the explanation of what’s inside the covers on the back – things like episode reviews of seasons one through six, character features, photos, and of course Trailer Park Boys-esque humour: “It’s okay, if you like book learnin’ ” is the glowing testimonial from Ricky on the back cover.

Sibiga and Wininger had access to the cast and producers, even got roles as extras in the show, but few behind-the-scenes peeks made it into the book. The episode reviews are straight descriptions, with no humour or cleverness except in the sidebar features that surround them, like the Rickyisms, best lines, and “nomesayins” – mangled quotes or trivia from the episode – and the “bad boys scale,” which uses icons and words to indicate the relative levels of booze, weed, and guns in each episode.

Now that season seven has begun, though, it’s already out of date. Which brings up the book’s main fault, and it’s a big one to me and I’d think to anyone with an Internet connection: this book is a fansite in print form. I’m all about the book learnin’, but it feels like a quaint relic, trying to hold on to something better suited to that new-fangled Internet medium. You could Google “Trailer Park Boys” and come up with websites with similar but ever-evolving content. The book has the advantage of glossy pages and prettier pictures, but the major disadvantage of being static.

Still, hardcore Trailer Park Boys fans will get a kick out of a book that’s so faithful to the spirit of the show, and if nothing else, it would make a good gift for the hard-to-buy-for fan. You can’t gift-wrap a website, after all. Though I wouldn’t put it past the boys to try.

Book Review: Thirty Years of The Rockford Files by Ed Robertson

Thirty Years of The Rockford Files: An Inside Look at America’s Greatest Detective Series could just as well have been subtitled “Everything you wanted to know about The Rockford Files – and some things you really didn’t.”

The book benefits greatly from the participation of the series creators, Roy Huggins and Stephen J. Cannell, as well as star James Garner and others who contributed to the show’s success, such as writer/producer David Chase (Sopranos).

Author Ed Robertson draws on interviews, archive material, candid photographs from the set, and an exhaustive look at each episode to create the more-than-definitive guide to the show that aired on NBC from 1974-1980, winning five Emmys and spawning a series of TV movies on CBS in the 1990s.

All the episode information is presented in a skimmable format, with a comprehensive table of contents guiding readers through the book. So it remains accessible to the most casual Rockford fan and to those interested in a slice of television history, while aiming to satisfy even the rabidest of rabid fans.

Robertson includes minutia that only those die-hard Rockford fanatics would care about. For example, the episode descriptions contain a Rockford Fun heading that presents information that is far from fun, but is instead a fairly tedious account of all the insider names that were used on the series. It seems every writer, producer, actor’s assistant, and possibly director’s mailman’s sister-in-law was used as inspiration for naming background characters. And Robertson lists every last one. More fun is the inclusion of every answering machine message that began the episodes.

The skimmable format makes it easy to bypass that kind of detail, and also means there’s some repetition in the facts presented from section to section. It works best as a reference book rather than a cover-to-cover read, though the season analyses do offer the behind-the-scenes story of the series.

A top 20 show in its first season, the ratings plummeted when, Robertson argues, the show lost its footing. While he maintains it regained that creative footing, it never managed to regain the ratings ground. The Rockford Files aired in a far different television landscape than we have today, when a 19.9 rating – a number American Idol doesn’t reach now – meant falling in the middle of the heap.

Robertson is an unabashed fan of the show, and sometimes comes across as an apologist for it and for Garner, who was reported to have clashed with creator Huggins, causing him to leave the series after its first year, and who was later embroiled in lawsuits with the network after being unable to complete the sixth season.

But Robertson never completely loses the critical perspective, though it’s supplemented with a fair amount of admitted assumptions and guess work about what actually happened in some of the behind-the-scenes maneuverings. Most rewardingly, he makes a solid case for The Rockford Files influential place in television history, with roots in the anti-hero of Maverick – also created by Roy Huggins, and played by James Garner – and inspiring the anti-heroes we see on television today, including Rockford writer David Chase’s Tony Soprano.

Robertson grasps the key to the series’ fresh take: “At a time when network TV was saturated with flatfoots and gumshoes, Rockford took all the cliches and turned them inside out.” His book provides an entertaining and exhaustive look at that process.