I need one more book like

a hole in the head. But this makes me want to pick up a copy of The Fatal Conceit

"Fear the Boom and the Bust: A Hayek vs. Keynes Rap Anthem"

A good war

Farley Mowat was a writer of dubious renown in our house. Dad’s father — an RCMP officer in the territories in the forties and fifities — felt that People of the Deer was off the mark.

When I got around to studying the Italian campaign in the Second World War though, Mowat’s memoir And No Birds Sang was a terrific resource. Mowat’s Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment spent a good deal of time at the pointy end as the Allies took Sicily and then fought their way up the ankle of Italy in 1943. Mowat gives a terrific account of the key battles — Grammichele, Assoro and Nissoria — in Sicily, which proved an education for both the invaders and the defenders ( read: the Germans, who, for the record, were also invaders.)

The book opens when war is declared in 1939, Mowat enumerates the ways he tries to get into the air force before he accepts his fathers help getting into the Hasty Pees, the same outfit his father served in the first go round. For 45 pages, until Mowat leaves for Sicily in 1943, the book reads like (flighty) school boy hijinks. Throughout the campaign in Sicily there is a dreamlike quality. Over the course of a few pages Squib goes from identifying birds by their song to identifying guns by their various whistles, whines and bangs.

However in Mainland Italy, as winter descends and the Germans refuse to withdraw it becomes both real and nightmarish. It comes down to Squib facing what he calls the Worm That Never Dies, the fear of fear itself. Everyone feels it and everyone sympathizes, usually by pouring rum ration into the man most afflicted.

Mowat took some pretty literary liberties with the memoir. There are only two distinct voices in the book: Mowat’s, rather Squib’s as he is called by the Regiment, and Captain Alex Campbell of Able Company, the toughest, angriest, Hun-hatingest man in the Hasty Pees. Everyone else starts to sound, well, if not like Squib, like a character in a Mowat story. In the end, Mowat takes liberties with Alex too.

Even letters from Mowat’s father sound like a mature man talking to his younger self. And No Birds Sang was published in the ‘seventies when Mowat was in his fifties. So that could be the case. On the other hand father and son could very well be that similar. At some point I’ll get around to the second volume, My Father’s Son.

It would be fair to describe And No Birds Sang as one of — if not — the Canadian Second World War memoirs. But Squib was by no means an intrepid leader or an instinctual soldier — Alex probably would have been. But that maybe what makes it so Canadian.

Stray Observations

- Shout out to the Mantova Division! — It was one of six divisions to go on to fight the Germans on the Allied side. But we’ll cover that in more detail when I get around to the 300 books I have on that topic.

- Spoiler alert — I had the good fortune to go on a Canadian Battlefields Foundation study tour to Italy in 2003. I seem to remember that Alex Campbell was killed by a booby trap as the Hasty Pees cleared out Ortona. Not that I would expect Mowat to let the facts get in the way of a good story.

-My Grandfather fought in Italy, he was with the service corp. Everytime Squib get’s in a jeep, I think he might have had something to do with it.

-I’m not sure how I would have gotten through this book if it weren’t for wanting to to write about it. I have barely made it as far as the straits of Messina before but I still believe it’s brilliant and I recommend it often.

The Most Interesting thing about King Charles the First —

— is that he was five foot six inches tall at the beginning of his reign and four foot eight inches tall at the end of it. (“Oliver Cromwell,” Monty Python’s Flying Circus)


For Christmas, Mum and Dad gave me Rebels and Traitors by Lindsey Davis. I had finished the last of Ariana Franklin’s Mistress of the Art of Death books (Grave Goods) Christmas eve — in time to give it to Mum Christmas morning. Any how got to work on Davis' 741 page epic novel of the English Civil War straight away.

It's big. I kept dropping it on my face when I read it before bed.

Lindsey Davis is a master of the Ancient History murder mystery. Her hero, Marcus Didius Falco, ranks among my favourite detectives. He is a Sam Spade for the first century. That is if Spade had functional relationships with women and a very large extended family.

Davis wrote Rebels and Traitors before she created Falco but publishers weren’t all that interested at the time. She wrote another one The Course of Honour, also set in Ancient Rome, before striking gold with Falco.

Rebels and Traitors is not as tightly crafted as the Falco books — or packaged as compactly, they make nice pocket paperbacks — but it has a lot of the same spark. Juliana Lovell, the heroine, is an adventuresome, intelligent and practical woman. Gideon Jukes, the hero, shares M.Didius Falco’s republican politics if not his poetic flare. Jukes is a printer and he is well aware that poetry does not pay. Orlando Lovell is a rakish, charming nemesis for Jukes. Col. Sexby and Bevan Bevan are both good and villainous, nice and despicable.

Here’s the thing — what I loved about this book is also the biggest problem with this book. It sprawls across time, geography and politics. It isn’t very evenly paced. Half a dozen narratives intertwine. Davis walks us through the milestones of the war, the plots, the battles, the debates, whether important characters were involved or not.

Despite that, I ate it up. The strategic overview of the campaign slows Davis’ usually brisk pace to a crawl but I really appreciated the primer —So that’s why the Irish hate the English —So that’s why England doesn’t have a standing army. Before this, nearly everything I knew about the English Civil War I learned from the Monty Python bit quoted above and The Children of the New Forest.

Stray Observations
-Juliana inherits a house on Fountain Court!
-Ranters, Levellers, Diggers etc. — downright Italian in its factionalism.
-When was the Great Fire? Jukes’ London doesn’t sound anything like the London I have visited.
-I’m almost certain that printed embroidery patterns do not go back that far. Knitting patterns certainly do not. but I suspended my disbelief til just now.

I fancy myself a great reader but in reality I am not as a good reader as much as I am a great collector of books. I haven’t read as much of the books in my place I would like or as much I let on. So here’s the plan. I am going to read every book in my apartment and keep log of it. That includes cookbooks and magazines but I am drawing the line at newspapers. As a journalist I am obliged to keep too many as it is.

The challenge isn’t just in the sheer volume of volumes. I have quite few a French books, mostly novels and poetry, that I use to keep my French in practice. But I have four volumes of official histories of the Italian Army and my Italian is rusty. I have two German histories and a libretto from the Magic flute and I don’t speak German. That’s what happens in Grad School. You never say no to a book. Will I learn German? Not bloody likely, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

It isn’t just Grad School. A few weeks ago I picked up War In The Liberal Conscience, a volume of First World War poetry and Chester Wilmot’s The Struggle For Europe out of a box on Winchester St. I dusted the snow off them. I was pleased as punch. Maybe it’s the people who go to Grad school.

I did my master’s in Military history — I wrote a thesis on the Italian Army in the Second World War — so there is a lot of history to read. A lot of it will be Italian and a good deal of it military. Oh dear. I am going to have to read my own thesis.

Getting through the fiction section makes me a little nervous. Whether by aspiration or obligation I have acquired a shelf full of literary fiction that I have never gotten around to reading. To be honest, my taste in fiction also veers towards the historical. There is a special place in my heart and my library for the ancient history murder mystery.

Wow, I have a lot of books. Before accounting for acquiring books this will take years.