Keeping Time
by Stacey McGlynn
Seventy-seven-year-old Daisy is reaching a critical point in her life. She's not as able as she once was, and her son and his new wife are pressuring her to sell her family home and move into a senior care home. Daisy loves her independence and can't bear to leave her home and be relegated to some apartment, so she decides to take care of things herself. She won't call her son to mow the lawn and won't ask him to fix the dripping faucet.
She'll just do it herself.
Unfortunately, things don't go as smoothly as planned. Daisy manages to fix the faucet, but causes a home renovation disaster in the process. Her son Dennis is firm - she's a hazard to herself and to others. It's time to put the house up for sale and move to a retirement home.
At this juncture, Daisy leaves Dennis behind to go on a quest to discover her first sweetheart, a young man stationed in England during the war. She sets off for a visit to New York to meet some long lost relatives and track down Michael Baker, who would be in his late 70s himself. In the process, Daisy and her dysfunctional family relations learn to slow down and appreciate life and family and love.
Keeping Time is Stacey McGlynn's first novel. Her background as a screenwriter comes into play in this book, since it seems to be written almost like a script. Readers might find the effect distracting and choppy rather than something that smoothly lets the characters play on the screen of their imagination. Get past the writing style, however, and Keeping Time is a warm book for women of all ages. Find it in the adult fiction area at the Prince George Public Library.
- reviewed by Rachel Huston,
marketing and development assistant
at the Prince George Public Library
Lies My Teacher Told Me
by James Loewen
Forty years ago, the United States declared a national holiday to coincide with Canadian Thanksgiving. Columbus Day is one of just two American holidays to honour a specific person (the other is Martin Luther King Day in January).
It's sadly ironic our southern neighbours would choose to glorify Christopher Columbus.
The myth of Columbus is the myth of America - ambition, courage, intelligence and fortitude conquering a new frontier. Greed, theft, slavery and genocide are swept under history's carpet in the interests of patriotism and a day off.
As James Loewen points out in his excellent book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, it's certainly not the fault of American schoolchildren to have such a glossy impression of Columbus. The noble, heroic two-dimensional portrait of Columbus stresses 1492 and his "discovery" of Haiti as the beginning of a new, golden era for humanity. And it was ... for white Europeans.
For the estimated three million Arawaks living on the island of Hispaniola in 1492, it was the beginning of the end. Spanish explorers like Columbus read The Requirement in Spanish to the bewildered inhabitants upon arrival.
It basically said "convert to Christianity now or we'll make you all slaves and if you're hurt or killed in the process, it's your fault." The Arawaks didn't convert and were forced into slavery.
Columbus and members of his family would visit Haiti often in the next eight years, desperately looking for gold. Arawaks who didn't serve their Spanish masters had noses, ears and hands cut off as a lesson for the rest. They were hunted for sport and killed for dog food. Columbus would reward his top men with Arawak women to rape.
By 1516, the Arawaks numbered just 12,000. By the middle of the century, they were wiped off the face of the Earth.
Loewen stresses that these atrocities are not the product of a historian's overactive imagination but from the journals and letters of Columbus himself and members of his expeditions.
It's partly unfair to judge Columbus through the hazy fog of history, with five centuries of ethics on our side. Slavery was a growing industry in his time and the brown heathens native to the New World were just obstacles to the riches awaiting God's chosen people. Although there was opposition in Europe to slavery and the extermination of the native population, it was a small minority.
Even his reputation as the man who "discovered" the Americas is false. If the millions of Aboriginal people hadn't lived in North America already, there's still ample proof that expeditions from Indonesia, Japan, China, Siberia, Egypt, Morocco, Britain, Ireland and West Africa, not to mention the Vikings, beat Columbus to the New World by hundreds or thousands of years.
As Loewen soberly concludes, Columbus is historically important not for his "discovery" of the New World but for what he did when he got here. Countless others would follow his template to riches well into the 20th century: appropriate the territory from the indigenous populations in violent fashion and either make them slaves or bring them in from elsewhere to harvest the land's bountiful resources.
Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen is in the adult non-fiction section of the Prince George Public Library.
- reviewed by Neil Godbout
administrative communications co-ordinator
Prince George Public Library
