Another year-end review, this time books I've admired

Around this time of the year many people rush into print or go on line or in front of the TV camera with their pronouncements about the 10 best books, best movies, best hamburgers or whatever, of the past year. I seem to have acquired a reputation as a reader and get asked for my ideas about books worth reading, so I'll have a go at compiling my own very short list.  I could use posts on this blog to jog my memory but I don't need to because the outstanding books are unforgettable.  In approximate order - only approximate because they are in different categories - here are my top five books:

The better angels of our nature, Historical social and behavioural science, by Steven Pinker
Bring up the bodies, historical novel about Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn by Hillary Mantel
Joseph Anton, a memoir of life under a Fatwa by Salman Rushdie
Mr g, a metaphysical novel about creation by Alan Lightman
A man of parts, a fictional biography of HG Wells, by David Lodge

I'll add an outstanding novel that I've reread this year for the second time, Cutting for Stone, about the intertwined lives of people with roots in India but living in Addis Ababa, by Abraham Verghese.  I've discussed almost all of these books in posts on my blog  I could add a dozen or two dozen more, some light, some heavyweight. Alexander McCall Smith's latest episode in the life of Isobel Dalhousie, editor of the Journal of Applied Ethics and her family and friends in Edinburgh flagellates all my nostalgia for that lovely city; Neil Turok's Massey Lectures on cosmology and much else stretched my mind comfortably until he left me struggling out of my depth in the last few pages of the final lecture. Ian McEwan's latest novel, Sweet Tooth is up to his usual excellent standard, confirms his place as one of the best, perhaps the very best, of contemporary British novelists. Annabel Lyon's follow-up after her prize-winning novel about Aristotle's life during the period when he was tutor to Alexander the Great is another very good novel about Aristotle's daughter Pythias, giving the author a chance to ventilate about the status of girls and women in Hellenist Greece 3 centuries before our era - not much different from the status of girls and women in modern Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan. JK Rowling's very adult novel, A Casual Vacancy, is an excellent social - and political - study of almost uniformly unpleasant people in a small English town, a dark but believable story that focuses mainly on the youths of the town, randy, sexually active, amoral, unprincipled. Only one character seems to possess a spark of human decency, and she comes to a bad end. I wish JK had created at least one character like the youngsters who give me hope for the future.

There is much more to say about several of my top 5 + 1. Steven Pinker provides good evidence to support his claim that violence among humans has declined in the past 500 years. He attributes this to increasing empathy of humans for one another. I've reflected a great deal on changes in human values during my lifetime; some of my reflections and speculation about reasons for changes in values have been subjects for posts on this blog. My conclusions, although tentative, accord with Pinker's. I could put it even more simply. As knowledge grows, so does empathy. Pinker's book is a very important contribution to our understanding of the human condition, and offers some guidelines on ways we could enhance the human condition further. Unfortunately it's unlikely that any action towards this end will materialize. National leaders have other priorities than reducing violence and enhancing empathy, and the slightest hint that achieving such aims might require investment by what these leaders describe as "taxpayers" probably dooms the suggestion before it is even made. As I wait impatiently for Hillary Mantel's third novel in her trilogy about Thomas Cromwell and his times flashes of memories from Wolf Hall, the first volume, and Bring up the Bodies, the second volume, bubble to the surface. These are two superb novels, both worthy recipients of their Booker Prizes. They are much more than historical novels. They are political, psychological studies as well as meticulously researched histories of Tudor times in England.   I'm sorry I gave away my copy of Wolf Hall, because I'd like to reread it, even though with my short remaining lifetime I probably shouldn't allow myself the luxury, as I've just done for instance with Cutting for Stone, and will doubtless do again before long with other much-loved books.

I got much more from my second reading of Cutting for Stone no doubt because it was more leisurely,  more reflective than first time. I noticed among other things the son's relationship to his father, much like my relationship to my father, and the subtle yet profound differences between Ethiopians and Eritreans. And the profound differences between the front-line New York hospital where Marion Stone works, and the luxurious Boston hospital where his father works. I am more convinced than ever that this novel will become a classic.  

2012

Christmas morning is as good a time as any to reflect on the year that is about to end.  2012 has been a sad and discouraging year for many people all over the world, but I am encouraged by the youngsters whose company I enjoy often enough to keep me going, like the medical students whom I encounter occasionally in seminars. These students, and my grandchildren, reinfect me periodically with enough youthful enthusiasm to sustain me. I am 86 years old now, well past the average life expectancy of my birth cohort, and I am contented as I approach the end of a long and thoroughly enjoyable, worthwhile and interesting life. My beloved Wendy has been dead just over two years, and today I would be happy to follow her, except that I remain curious about what my grandchildren will do with their lives. All three are interesting young adults and full of promise.  I have an incentive to live another 10 years to see which direction their lives take, despite reminders from my aging body that various organs and tissues are wearing out.

I'm curious about and interested in much else. Theoretical physics and the Higgs boson, for instance.  I got seriously interested in theoretical physics in my last year at school and first year at university and I've stayed in touch by occasional immersion in the works of Richard Feynman, Freeman Dyson, and others who can clarify this arcane discipline for amateurs. I understand why the large hadron collider at CERN has enough reason to justify the enormous expense of its construction because it has proved the existence of the Higgs boson, and I can understand that the Higgs boson is the essential keystone holding together all the other particles  that comprise every atom in the universe. I can understand the concept of the quantum computer and why it is orders of magnitude more powerful and versatile than the digital computer on which I'm tapping out this note to post on my blog. The theoretical physicists at the Perimeter Institute of Waterloo University say quantum computers are only a few years away from being a practical reality. Perhaps that's the ultimate in Good News to have emerged from 2012, which I have to agree with many pundits, has been a bad year on the whole.  

As I tap out this note I'm listening for the second time this Christmas to a performance of Handel's Messiah. I resonate to the aria "Why do the nations so furiously rage together," and I wonder whether humans will ever learn how to settle disputes by amicable discussion rather than by killing and maiming each other. Today the death toll in Syria has reached 45,000 according to latest UN estimates, and there is no sign of resolution to this ultimately futile conflict. 

Christmas Day is turning out as it should, bright sun shining down on crisp dazzling white snow, no wind, a day when it's good to be alive.   

How do values change?

The latest school massacre in the USA - 20 little children and 6 of their teachers shot in cold blood by a deranged 20-year old kid in a quiet town in Connecticut - has justifiably sparked more agonized discussion than any of the previous school massacres in recent years. It's been horrific enough to convert some gun-loving law makers to a more rational view of the need to restrain access to lethal weapons, and to show in stark reality the insanity of a gun lobby spokesman who asserted that if all the kindergarten teachers were armed, they would be able to defend themselves, or better yet, 'take out' deranged attackers before they had a chance to perpetrate a massacre.  The absurdity of this argument is so obvious nobody but a psychopath would be taken in by it - and nobody but a psychopath would offer such an argument in the first place.

Unfortunately the 'right to bear arms' is so deeply engrained in American values that the nation as a whole isn't likely to change its ways.  The moment of truth that Wendy and I experienced in Burlington, Vermont in 1964 when we discovered that we alone among all those present at a large dinner party of seemingly civilized staff people at the University of Vermont didn't keep a loaded handgun in our home, played a part in our decision to reject the USA as a suitable place to raise our children, to choose Edinburgh rather than Baltimore for the next phase of our family's development; that decision was entirely based on values. We simply didn't see the 'right to bear arms' as relevant to our way of life.  Most Americans seem to regard it as  profoundly important: an integral aspect of survival strategy, or akin to religious beliefs, or both. There were other reasons why we turned our backs on the USA in the mid 1960s, but the gun culture, the resort to guns as the best way to solve problems, the last resort in all other civilized nations but the first for many Americans, was a powerfully persuasive reason for Wendy and me to leave behind the higher salary, material comforts, and career opportunities, to embrace instead the rugged, more spartan and financially constrained conditions of academic and social life in Edinburgh. 

If indeed the American people are more hospitable this week than they previously were to the notion of some restraint on untrammelled access to assault rifles, rifles fitted with grenade launchers forsooth, then this will be a vivid illustration of how suddenly societal values can change. It's usually a slower process, but there have been past examples  of sudden value changes when a single event shocks an entire population into awareness that past values and behaviours must change.  The Earl of Shaftesbury and other social reformers in 19th century England achieved success in the campaign to abolish child labour in factories and mines, but it was a slow, incremental process.  In Canada the DNA evidence that proved the innocence of David Milgaard, and the Montreal student massacre had similar success (although the latter, sadly, has proven vulnerable to the ideological blinkers and demagoguery of the present government). It's too soon to say with confidence that Americans have been shocked into a common-sense attitude towards guns by last week's massacre, but present evidence and pronouncements by previously committed supporters of the 'right' to bear arms do suggest that a sea-change in societal values might be feasible in the USA.  If this does happen, it will be interesting to see whether it has any beneficial impact on the Canadian Conservative government's lassaiz-faire values and legislative actions regarding access to guns.   

Annual Report 2012

Adhering to a family custom that dates back over 50 years, I composed a brief report of the highlights of 2012, illustrated with photos and a picture of the cover of a book that's coming out in February 2013.  I posted this to 35-40 people, and emailed roughly 200 more.  The pictures didn't come through in the email version, so here they are again in this blog post:

                                Annual Report

I hope 2012 has been a happy year for you and all your family.

It’s been a good year for me.  One unexpected happy event was announced in a phone call in late May. On a day of many irritating phone calls the phone rang yet again. “Call display” revealed that a government official was calling; fortunately I didn’t snarl but answered politely. The call came from Rideau Hall, home of the Governor General of Canada; his secretary was calling to inform me that I was to be admitted as an Officer of the Order of Canada, in recognition of my contributions to public health and epidemiology. This led to much rejoicing, but also sadness that my beloved Wendy wasn’t here to share the glory. The public announcement came on June 30 and the investiture followed on 23 November.

John celebrating at the investiture, November 23 2012

 

 At the investiture. L-R: Jonathan, His Excellency David Johnston, John, Richard, Rebecca, David

No exotic travels in 2012, just two short out of town trips.  I flew to Waterloo on Bearskin Airlines with its evocative list of destinations in remote parts of this huge province of Ontario, to perform for this year’s intake of MPH students; and I flew to Toronto where Karen Trollope Kumar met me, drove me to Hamilton whence we had two trips to the Shaw Festival Theatre in Niagara on the Lake.

Finally, another book has my name on the cover and the title page: 

Several years ago I signed a contract with Oxford University Press to write a descendent of Public Health and Human Ecology. Aware that I’ve fallen behind the growing edge of public health sciences, I recruited Frank White and Lorann Stallones as co-authors. Then Wendy fell ill. For over a year I was preoccupied caring for her, and for many months after she died I was mourning her, in a state of mind akin to depression. I’d written first drafts of 2 of the 4 chapters I had originally agreed to contribute, and left it to Frank and Lorann to close the gaps. I think they have done a splendid job and the finished work will come out early in 2013.

My warmest seasonal greetings to you and yours, as ever,

                                                                                                                  John

11A/300 Queen Elizabeth Drive, Ottawa, Ontario CANADA K1S 3M6

jmlast@uottawa.ca    or oldwhitebeard@gmail.com       http://lastswords.blogspot.com 

Official photos of the investiture

Here are four photos taken by the official photographer at the investiture and banquet at Rideau Hall on November 23 2012

The Governor General, His Excellency the Honourable David Johnston, congratulating me after presenting the insignia of Officer of the Order of Canada

L-R: Jonathan, His Excellency the Honourable David Johnston, John, Richard, Rebecca, David, at the reception after the investiture

Newly inducted members, officers and a companion of the Order of Canada with the governor general at Rideau Hall before the banquet on the evening of November 23 2012

David Johnston presenting me with Queen Elizabeth's Jubilee Medal at the Banquet at Rideau Hall,
Friday evening November 23, 2012

The Adelaide Star

The Adelaide Star

It was fitting that the Adelaide Star, the freighter on which I hitched a ride back to Australia in 1954, was named for my home town. She was a refrigerator ship, 12,000 tons burden, carrying general cargo from Tilbury Docks in London via Teneriffe in the Canary Islands, around the Cape of Good Hope to Adelaide, the first Australian landfall.  As the ship's surgeon, I had to continue beyond Adelaide to Melbourne and Sydney where I got my discharge papers and certificate of good conduct.

In previous posts on this blog I’ve waxed eloquent on the delights of long ocean crossings (see posts in July 2010).  This voyage in 1954 was undoubtedly one of the highlights of my life, rich in sensory experiences in climates ranging from cool temperate in the English Channel, balmy sunshine off the Canary Islands, baking hot, flat calm tropics as we crossed the equator, sunny and cool off Cape Town, then the cool to cold and blustery seas of the Roaring Forties deep in the Southern Ocean on the great circle route from the Cape of Good Hope to landfall off Kangaroo Island at the mouth of St Vincent’s Gulf as we approached Adelaide.  We had four weeks at sea without calling at any ports, long enough to get to know all the passengers and most of the crew of this small, closed community, long enough to read a great many books.

The Adelaide Star was a comfortable ship with a restful pitch fore and aft and little port to starboard roll, with a dining saloon forward, from which as we ate we could watch the bows plunging into heavy seas as they broke green over the forepeak. I’ve written about this in an earlier post so I won’t repeat myself. I got on well with the officers whom I met professionally and socially, especially the electrical engineer Gene Johnson who hailed from South Shields on Tyneside, John Mordecai, the chief steward who had been torpedoed several times, once spending a few weeks in a lifeboat in the Indian Ocean, and Jack Thomas the first mate, who sat at table with me. The passengers included Minna Lazarus, wife of a well-known Australian labour and criminal lawyer, Jack Lazarus; Miss Dunnett, the matron of the Royal North Shore Hospital, a wealthy pastoralist from Queensland, and several Brits on their way to jobs in Australia, or for three of them, New Guinea or Fiji. One of the passengers bound for New Guinea whose name I have forgotten, was a hard-drinking tough little man from Glasgow, who a couple of days after we had rounded the Cape of Good Hope, had a massive hematemesis, vomited up about a pint of bright red blood. That was when I discovered there was no drip chamber on board. I ordered him to stop drinking. If he’d continued to bleed he could have died but fortunately the bleeding stopped.

Before this, the day after we rounded the Cape of Good Hope, I took out the remains of one of the chief engineer's teeth. When I was a medical student, we had been required to do a great many procedures, getting each of them signed up in a document that resembled a larger and longer version of a school report card. Some of my classmates and I eagerly attended the dental clinic behind the Royal Adelaide Hospital, not because of the need to get signed up for the statutory number of dental extractions but because a remarkably beautiful young woman worked there as a chairside assistant to the dentist who taught us how to extract teeth. On hot days she worked wearing a white coat over her underwear but no dress, and some testosterone-laden medical students tried to invite her on dates.  No dates, but at least I learnt how to extract teeth, which one does by using the points of the dental forceps as wedges, pushing down hard on the tooth to loosen it in its socket. Since my student days I had used this skill once before in general practice at Angaston but that had been while the patient was under a general anaesthetic and a loose tooth threatened to choke her. This time it was different; the chief engineer was a curmudgeonly old man, and my life in this small closed and highly critical community wouldn't have been worth living if I had fluffed this simple operation, made necessary when he broke off the entire remaining cusp of a premolar tooth and was in agony with exposed nerve endings. Injecting local anesthetic around the gum was the hardest part, and luckily for me this worked well enough - with reinforcement from a stiff brandy or two. I gave the local and the brandy plenty of time to work, applied the forceps and pushed down as hard as I knew how. The remains of the tooth practically popped out into my waiting hand. Though I say so myself, it was elegantly done, and it established my reputation for competence among the ship’s company. It’s curious that the well-equipped surgery on the Adelaide Star had a whole kit of dental forceps, never before used by the look of them, yet lacked a drip chamber, because assuredly everything else imaginable was there, including a wide range of obstetric instruments, even the bizarre and horrific tools needed to perform a destructive operation on an undeliverable fetus.

It was frustrating to sail across the mouth of Table Bay without calling in, so close we could see the cables of the cable car that goes to the top of Table Mountain, could see people distinctly, see the colours of dresses the girls were wearing - several randy young officers said they could smell their perfume.

Deep in the Roaring Forties

I love the sea, and have many evocative sensual memories of life on ships. The smell of paint and tar pervaded the alleyways. The constant throb of the engines is like a heartbeat, overlaid by the creaks and groans of steel plates and rivets working imperceptibly like a living, breathing creature as the ship pitches and rolls. From time to time in a heavy sea, there is a crash and rattle as something that wasn't properly stowed slides from a shelf or cupboard to the deck, or a door bangs open and shut. In a really heavy sea, the ship shudders as she heaves herself out of the great waves that break over the deck, and the spray hisses against the portholes. I am a good sailor, and enjoy nothing more than a healthy spell of rough weather, of which we had plenty as we followed the great circle route from the Cape of Good Hope across the Southern Ocean in late winter. We went far enough south to see in the distance the high peaks of Kerguelen Island, and thereabouts we saw a rich profusion of seabirds, gannets, terns and the gracefully gliding albatross that accompanied us all the way from the Cape to Kangaroo Island as they hovered for hours at a time in the slipstream above the stern, not moving a muscle and staring inscrutably at us. One of the books I had with me was Apsley Gerry-Garrard's Worst Journey in the World which describes how to catch an albatross by trailing a line with a heavy weight on the end; the albatross thinks this is a fish as it bobs just below the surface in the ship's wake. It swoops to grab the fish, the line and lead weight tangle around the bird's leg, and the bird can be hauled on board.

We demonstrated to the captain’s anger that this system works. What upset the captain was that the albatross we hauled on board immediately loosened its bowels, making the most terrible mess. The captain ordered us to clean it up, so I and one of the junior engineer officers and the young English passenger who had shared this jape had to get buckets and brooms and spent several hours scrubbing before we had successfully disposed of this huge and smelly mess of guano. The albatross seemed bewildered by the experience and wouldn’t fly away, remaining perched at the stern, gazing balefully at us and occasionally loosening its bowels again - now leaving a trail of excrement down over the stern, out of the captain's sight. Eventually one of the deck officers launched it by running along the deck into the wind, as if launching a kite into a gale.

There was a rich profusion of other life in the sea in those high latitudes. We saw whales, and some huge basking sharks, one that was asleep or perhaps floating dead on the surface that we sliced up with the bows and the propellers, leaving a great mess of flesh and blood in our wake, that created a boiling, screaming quarrel of gulls fighting over the remains until they all dipped below the horizon.

This was a hard-drinking shipload, the passenger who vomited blood was just one of a dozen or more who overdid it. I didn't overdo it - I have very rarely used liquor on that scale; I am a cheap drunk, getting the worse for liquor all too easily. As on other occasions in my life, once bitten twice shy: I indulged once just out of Teneriffe, and felt so awful for several days afterwards that henceforth I had only one drink a day. My sobriety gave me good opportunities to observe others the worse for liquor. It was never a pretty sight.

I had plenty of reading along on this voyage, and was glad of it. I worked my way through translations of many of the Greek classics, through all six volumes of Churchill's history of the second world war, novels by Stendhal, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and re-read Jane Austen and some Dickens.

It was also the occasion for me to think through what I had done so far with my life, and what more I might do in the future - but then as later, the future remained clouded. I had no clearer idea about what I would do with the rest of my life after pondering the matter for five weeks at sea than I had when we cleared Tilbury Docks. I assumed I would go into general practice but I had no money, no capital for a down-payment on a practice - not enough money even to buy a car; in fact I was coming home to Adelaide with no more money accumulated than I had when I set off three years earlier. All I had was many happy memories, an unsettling sense of the worth while places of the world all being far away from where I was heading, and a deep sense of detribalization, of alienation almost, from the former home town to which I was returning. It was a combination that boded ill for a stable future in general practice.

Investiture, November 23, 2012

November 23 2012 was a very special day that I would have given my right arm to have been able to share with my beloved Janet Wendy. I was thinking of her throughout the day, and if I looked sad when I should have been happy, if I seemed distracted when people engaged me in conversation, that was the reason. It was the day of my investiture as an Officer of the Order of Canada. The ceremony took place at Rideau Hall, the home of the Governor General of Canada.  Last time I was there was in 2003 to applaud Wendy when she got the Governor General's Caring Canadian Award in recognition of her dedicated volunteer activities, and a good deal of the time she was with me, in my thoughts, as the ceremony progressed. David drove me to Rideau Hall well before the scheduled time for the start of the day's festivities.  This was necessary because those of us getting the Order of Canada had been told to arrive in time for a briefing, which was detailed and of course in both French and English. We walked into the large "Tent Room" in Rideau Hall in procession, to the applause of family members and other guests.  The Governor General, His Excellency David Johnson, made a short, witty speech, welcoming us all to the "Snowflake Club" then one by one we were called up to stand beside him as our citation was read aloud to the audience. Then he presented each of us in turn with our handsome medal.  Members' medals, slightly smaller than Officers' medals, were placed on a sort of hook that had previously been pinned to their lapels; Officers' medals were hung around each of our necks, David Johnson (whom I'd met several times before when he was President of Waterloo University) said a few words to each of us, shook our hands warmly, we signed the honour roll of the Order of Canada, and returned to our seats.

Here's a photo from today's Ottawa Citizen of His Excellency David Johnson shaking my hand after hanging the handsome "snowflake" medal around my neck (photo complete with blemishes not to be seen in the flesh).

I will get a colour copy of this photo and several others eventually, as well as a DVD of the entire ceremony









After the ceremony, we had a chance to tour Rideau Hall, similar to the tour we made when Wendy got her award in 2003, and during this tour, one of the uniformed young soldiers from the Governor General's Foot Guards, took the only other photo I have so far, of David and me:

David is wearing his military medals and looks decidedly more handsome than I do. But I think my medal is larger than any of his, even the full sized ones rather than these miniaturized copies.  We were in the spectacular and very beautiful greenhouse of Rideau Hall.







In the evening, I returned to Rideau Hall with my "date" for the evening, David's wife Desre.  We had a magnificent, rather exotic feast at a banquet, during which David Johnson circulated among the guests  and presented each of the newly appointed holders of the Order of Canada with a second medal, Queen  Elizabeth's Diamond Jubilee Medal, which like the Order of Canada, I am expected to wear on ceremonial occasions.

With David's wife, Desre (Kramer) in the Reception Hall of Rideau Hall, after the banquet on the evening of Nov 23, 2012
















When I get more photos, I might add them to this post, starting with these two:

His Excellency David Johnson with Rebecca, David, Jonathan and Rebecca's husband Richard Guenette, and me too of course

Enjoying a glass of Perrier Water
after many chats at the reception