animal spirits

In his 2005 film, “Grizzly Man,” Werner Herzog reconstructed the final years of Timothy Treadwell, an animal advocate who went into the Alaskan backcountry to live among the bears he loved, and — in an unanticipated form of bonding — was eventually devoured by one of his subjects. Herzog was fundamentally dismissive of Treadwell’s project, finding “no kinship, no understanding, no mercy ... only the overwhelming indifference of nature.” He believed Treadwell’s death was pointless. Those of us who have ever loved a pet may feel otherwise. Animals — wild or domestic — are sentient creatures and have much to teach us about our own emotional lives.

To the spiritually inclined, this is old news. In the classic training manual “How to Be Your Dog’s Best Friend,” by the monks of New Skete, in upstate New York, is this quote from the Book of Job: “Ask the beasts and let them teach you, and the birds of the air and let them tell you.” Buddhism in particular stresses a compassion for all living creatures, transcending the boundaries of species.

For anyone unfamiliar with these traditions, here is “Samsara Dog,” a lovely and surprising picture book by Helen Manos, an Australian writer. The book illustrates the twin Buddhist concepts of samsara (the cycle of rebirth) and nirvana (fulfillment, or more literally, the extinction of earthly desires) in the story of a dog: “Samsara Dog lived many lives. Some of his lives were very long, some lasted only a few days. ... Dog lived each life as it came until, finally, he learned the most important lesson of all.”

In matter-of-fact language, this is the story of a dog’s journey from violence and anger to companionship and love. Watercolors by Julie Vivas, an award-winning illustrator, complement the text with soft washes of color. Samsara Dog — who clearly has some dingo in his ancestry — sports a fox-colored pelt (recalling the saffron robes of Buddhist monks?), and the face of his final companion, a small boy, has the smooth androgynous geometry of an ancient statue. In the end, the dog devotes himself to the boy, saving the boy’s life and in the process attaining nirvana.

The dog’s death — his final departure from the cycle — may have some children in tears (not to mention some of the adults reading to them). But Manos, a practicing Buddhist whose previous books include “Lucky Baby Yak,” a story of ethnic displacement in Tibet, published in Australia, has an insight and sensitivity that make her an excellent guide to this difficult subject.

Of course, our kinship with dogs reflects a samsara of sorts, a shared evolutionary history, while our social evolution has pulled us along a path increasingly insulated from the wild. Werner Herzog may have dismissed the value of Timothy Treadwell’s quest, but he accurately assessed its hazards: some boundaries are crossed only at peril. In “The Snow Leopard,” Jackie Morris visits a land where respect for the wilderness is a fact of life. The book is set in the western Himalayas, where shamanistic traditions are preserved in the folklore of isolated mountain valleys. The craggy, ice-covered slopes are home to ibex, blue sheep, eagles and of course the fabled snow leopard. It is feared as a predator, revered in legends as a shape-shifter, and the upper zones of its domain are entered only with great caution.

Morris’s flowery text follows the well-worn tracks of the language of myth: “From the beginning of time, out of the silence, Snow Leopard sang the stars to life, the sun to rise and the moon to wax and wane. High above the hidden valley, her song clothed the world in white and built a crackling fortress of snow, buttressed with ice, to keep all things safe and secret.”

Down in the valley, a girl sleeps while marauding soldiers come. The leopard leaps down to shelter her, and there’s an odd moment of mutual recognition: long ago, it seems, the leopard was once human. The leopard carries the girl away and begins to teach her sacred mountain secrets. After an ethereal apprenticeship, the girl becomes a snow leopard herself, guardian of the mountain domain, while the old leopard retires to the heavens, her song “a whisper of starlight,” and the cycle is complete.

The book succeeds largely through vivid watercolor illustrations that meld ink-brush abstraction and subtle detail into a gorgeous fantasy. Morris, who has illustrated more than two dozen books, paints a dramatic portrait of the snow leopard and her environment; the big cat glides from flatness to depth across a landscape dressed in stark blue-whites and blue-blacks. With its focus on a severely endangered animal at a time of global warming and species eradication, “The Snow Leopard” sends a valuable message about the beauty and power of the natural world.

Both “Samsara Dog” and “The Snow Leopard” tackle a profound problem of the modern era: how to address our increasing alienation from one another and from the other living creatures of our world. By way of response, each book depicts a stewardship of sorts — the dog and his boy, the cat and her girl. Whether one is a cat person, a dog person or not a pet person at all, the two books hint at a way forward toward a more responsible relationship with nature, born of love and understanding, which is to say, compassion.

Bruno Navasky is a teacher and writer in New York City.

ballerina dreams

This portrait of five girls “who dreamed of being ballerinas” depicts the challenges of an unusual ballet class in Queens. The director, Joann Ferrara, runs the class for children with cerebral palsy and other disorders, and Estrin (a staff photographer for The New York Times) documented the class as the girls prepared for their first recital — tutus, tiaras and all. The simple text fills out the background of the class, and the pictures convey the girls’ progress and delight.

odd man out

This is another superb novel by Sarah Ellis. Odd Man Out is a multifaceted story full of imagination, suspense, family, fun, and even fear. While his mother and new stepdad go on a honeymoon, Kip travels to BC's west coast to visit his Gran at her island home. Sharing a house with his five girl cousins is only one adventure Kip faces during his stay. From writing on walls and building a yurt to being buried alive on the beach and discovering a mysterious binder that once belonged to his late father, Kip encounters a world where, downstairs, anything goes, girls rule, and ideas abound, and upstairs, in his attic, solitude comforts him, a mystery unfolds, and Kip struggles with his own ideas and memories.

Kip retreated to the living room and closed the door to an indignant ballerina duet of "But we are dressed!"

His head was buzzing.

A phrase popped into his mind. The female of the species. He was used to females. Correction: he was used to one female, his mother. Just the two of them. Except it wasn't just the two of them anymore. Kip put that thought in a box and shelved it.



Odd Man Out will appeal to readers of all ages. This book has something for everyone: pure summer silliness and fun at the beach, espionage, issues of complex family dynamics, and conflicting thoughts and emotions swirling around in a boy's mind. One of the biggest strengths of the novel, aside from its solid plot, is in its characterization. The girls are boisterous, precocious and entertaining, though Kip doesn't always think so.

The kitchen was full of steam and girls. The Sea Urchin of Doom was boiling a big pot of water for corn.

"I told you," said Alice from atop her ladder. "He's got to be building a climbing wall. I tried that but the holes just kept crumbling."

"Nope," said Hilary. "He's making a den of iniquity."

"No fair," said Emily. “I want a den of iniquity, too."

"Do I hear whining?" said Gran.

"You don't even know what a den of iniquity is," said Alice.

"Do, too. It's like a doghouse."

Kip fingered the key hanging around his neck.

"Kip will reveal all when he's ready," said Gran. "Meanwhile, we've got some things to plan."



Gran is also a compelling character as she facilitates debates and encourages the discussion of ideas as a means of cultivating creativity, responsibility, critical thinking, and empathy. She is also fun loving, laid back, and open minded, for the most part. I guess she would have to be adventurous to allow the girls to give her a new hairstyle which requires a lot of hair gel and a vacuum cleaner.

Rich-Gran was shocked but she kept her cool. She tried to enlist Hilary as the police but Hilary just pulled her sun visor low over her face and hid behind her book. After lengthy negotiations the ransom, consisting of half a package of mints, was paid. The kidnappers divided them up fairly. They included the bossy kidnapper and even the prisoner himself because they were not, after all, really wicked, just very, very greedy.

The prisoner made a powerful escape in a shower of sand and then everyone, young and old, rich and poor, joined him in a final swim.

They dripped all the way home.

Another salient theme in the book has to do with blurring the lines between what is imagined and what is real. These more complex themes combine with a sense of the playfulness to add a refreshing dynamic to Ellis' familiar familial themes. As well, inquiring young minds will be satisfied by the interspersed factoids and "rarely asked questions."

The cover comment is accurate in that it describes Odd Man Out as a "many-layered novel" that is "quirky, funny, smart, insightful, and surprising." In the end, Kip finds some answers to his questions (he even finds answers to questions he never thought of!), but his journey is one that readers won't soon forget.

This is another successful and high quality novel from BC writer, Sarah Ellis, and, without a doubt, Odd Man Out deserves a spot on every library and classroom shelf.

The Ashes

There have been good novels about living in the post-9/11 world (Ian McEwan’s “Saturday”), pretentious ones (Don DeLillo’s “Falling Man”) and sentimental ones (Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”). But sorting through the pile of so-called 9/11 novels is a sad exercise, one that grows more pointless by the day. They’re all 9/11 novels now.

It’s impossible, though, to stop scanning the horizon for something else — the bracing, wide-screen, many-angled novel that will leave a larger, more definitive intellectual and moral footprint on the new age of terror.

Joseph O’Neill’s “Netherland” is not that novel. It’s too urbane, too small-boned, too savvy to carry much Dreiserian sweep and swagger. But here’s what “Netherland” surely is: the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we’ve yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell. On a micro level, it’s about a couple and their young son living in Lower Manhattan when the planes hit, and about the event’s rippling emotional aftermath in their lives. On a macro level, it’s about nearly everything: family, politics, identity. I devoured it in three thirsty gulps, gulps that satisfied a craving I didn’t know I had.

O’Neill, who was born in Ireland, raised in Holland and now lives in New York, seems incapable of composing a boring sentence or thinking an uninteresting thought, whether he’s writing about dating (“We courted in the style preferred by the English: alcoholically”) or the darker stuff that keeps us awake at night, like the nuclear plant just up the river (“Indian Point: the earliest, most incurable apprehensions stirred in its very name”).

O’Neill’s prose glows with what Alfred Kazin called “the marginal suggestiveness which in a great writer always indicates those unspoken reserves, that silent assessment of life, that can be heard below and beyond the slow marshaling of thought.” And O’Neill knows how to deploy the quotidian fripperies of our laptop culture to devastating fictional effect. There’s a moment in “Netherland” involving a father, the son who has been taken from him, and Google Earth that’s among the most moving set pieces I’ve read in a recent novel. The father hovers over his son’s house nightly, “flying on Google’s satellite function,” lingering over his child’s dormer window and blue inflated swimming pool, searching the “depthless” pixels for anything, from thousands of miles away, he can cling to. O’Neill’s novel is full of moments like this: closely observed, emotionally racking, un-self-consciously in touch with how we live now.

The plot in “Netherland” runs on two tracks. The first tells the story of a family. The narrator, Hans van den Broek, is a Dutch-born equities analyst (he compares himself, in terms of influence if not infamy, to Henry Blodget) who lives in a TriBeCa loft with his British-born wife, Rachel, and their son. When 9/11 forces them to flee farther uptown, they end up living, almost by accident, in the shabby-glamorous Chelsea Hotel, and it is there that their marriage slowly cracks apart.

Rachel wants to take their son back to London and her family. He’ll be safer there, far from George Bush and the United States, a country she has begun to think of as “ideologically diseased.” Hans, unsure of his feelings, starts to believe he is “a political-ethical idiot.” O’Neill writes beautifully about what it sometimes felt like in the months after 9/11, when you couldn’t attend a dinner party unless you were intellectually armed for hours of bitter debate: “For those under the age of 45 it seemed that world events had finally contrived a meaningful test of their capacity for conscientious political thought. Many of my acquaintances, I realized, had passed the last decade or two in a state of intellectual and psychic yearning for such a moment — or, if they hadn’t, were able to quickly assemble an expert arguer’s arsenal of thrusts and statistics and ripostes and gambits and examples and salient facts and rhetorical maneuvers. I, however, was almost completely caught out.”

What Hans and Rachel are trying to avoid, he tells us, is “what might be termed a historic mistake. We were trying to understand, that is, whether we were in a preapocalyptic situation, like the European Jews in the ’30s or the last citizens of Pompeii, or whether our situation was merely near-apocalyptic, like that of the cold war inhabitants of New York, London, Washington and, for that matter, Moscow.” It doesn’t matter. Rachel and their son are soon gone, while Hans stays behind in New York.

The book’s second story line, and perhaps its more resonant one, is about the solace Hans finds in the vibrant subculture of cricket in New York, where he is among the few white men to be found on the hundreds of largely West Indian teams in the city, teams that fan out, in the hazy summertime, across scrabby, lesser-known public parks.

O’Neill seems to know all there is to know about this sport. He writes about it with casual grace, describing, for example, the cricket batsman’s array of potential strokes: “the glance, the hook, the cut, the sweep, the cover drive, the pull and all those other offspring of technique conceived to send the cricket ball rolling and rolling, as if by magic, to the far-off edge of the playing field.”

The cricket these men play is, they realize, not quite the game they fell in love with back in the Antilles. The New York fields are too small, and not well tended. Here is more of O’Neill’s lovely writing about the game: “This degenerate version of the sport — bush cricket, as Chuck more than once dismissed it — inflicts an injury that is aesthetic as much as anything: the American adaptation is devoid of the beauty of cricket played on a lawn of appropriate dimensions, where the white-clad ring of infielders, swanning figures on the vast oval, again and again converge in unison toward the batsman and again and again scatter back to their starting points, a repetition of pulmonary rhythm, as if the field breathed through its luminous visitors.”

O’Neill cracks open a teeming world on the fringes of Manhattan, and through it we witness the aspirations of countless men who otherwise are invisible to wealthy Manhattanites. (“You want a taste of how it feels to be a black man in this country?” one character asks. “Put on the white clothes of the cricketer. Put on white to feel black.”)

Hans’s guide through this alternative city is Chuck Ramkissoon, a talky, street-smart Trinidadian who is alive in ways Hans is not. Some of Chuck’s business practices are shady (he runs an old-world “weh weh” gambling ring and intimidates his rivals), but he’s a Gatsby-like American dreamer as well, a man who hopes to build a world-class cricket arena in Brooklyn.

Chuck wants to make a killing on his cricket center, but he also has bigger ambitions: he essentially wants to save the world. “All people, Americans, whoever, are at their most civilized when they’re playing cricket,” he explains. “What’s the first thing that happens when Pakistan and India make peace? They play a cricket match. Cricket is instructive, Hans. It has a moral angle. ... I say, we want to have something in common with Hindus and Muslims? Chuck Ramkissoon is going to make it happen. With the New York Cricket Club, we could start a whole new chapter in U.S. history. Why not?”

Some of the best parts of “Netherland” are Chuck’s rambling political and cultural monologues, delivered as Hans drives him around the boroughs. (Ostensibly, Chuck is helping Hans prepare for his driving test. Unwittingly, Hans is Chuck’s chauffeur, shuttling him to some of his least tasteful business dealings.) The book’s few lesser moments occur at the Chelsea Hotel, where a cast of eccentrics — including a man who wears angel’s wings and a wedding dress — are asked to carry cheap metaphorical freight.

Chuck’s vast cricket plans don’t pan out, and he vanishes under murky and ultimately grisly circumstances. Did he kill himself? one friend asks. Another responds: “You idiot! Chuck isn’t a suicide guy! This guy has more life inside him than 10 people!”

“Netherland” is a bit like the wily and ebullient Chuck Ramkissoon. It has more life inside it than 10 very good novels.

Gemma Doyle Trilogy

The Gemma Doyle Trilogy books written by Libba Bray are some of my favorite novels ever. Mostly because they're entertaining, well-written, and include magic, secret societies and mysterious and beautiful worlds.
In the beginning of the first book, A Great and Terrible Beauty, in India Gemma's mother has just committed suicide and her father has become depressed. So, she is sent to a girls' boarding school in the England countryside. There she begins to discover her powers (I forgot to mention that she has some) and begin a friendship with three other girls. Also, she is continually under surveillance from a member of a secret society.
As the series continues in Rebel Angles and The Sweet Far Thing the story progresses into something that is impossible to put down. Be prepared for excitement, intrigue, mystery, and magic.