Not sure if it's worth reading...

The Ottawa writer's festival is coming up this month, so I thought I'd write a little bit about books. I've started reading another of the extraordinary Canadians series, this time on Glenn Gould. It's been interesting to read the whole series, not as much because it gives a good overview of some important Canadians, though it does, but more as a meditation on the biography as a form. There is much in the Gould biography that speaks to the more philosophical and intellectual challenges the biography produces. This is not perhaps particularly surprising as the author is Mark Kingwell a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto.

The biographies themselves are relatively short, but interesting and the series is really about giving you a quick, taste of this particular cast of characters.

The other book that I guess has made quite a splash in some circles is Fearful Symmetry by Brian Crowley.The premise seems interesting if misguided. It's all Quebec's fault because Canada started engaging in trying to buy Quebec nationalists in the 1960s, and so we moved from a nation of 'makers' to a nation of 'takers', and the various regions of Canada now engage is trying to capture their fair share of national wealth.

This kind of claim, and book could only be written by an economist. Fittingly Crowley is President on the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS) [think Fraser institute for Atlantic Canada].

The reason I say that it could only be written by an economist, is because of its lack of historical understanding and nuance. Now to be fair I haven't read the book. I was seriously thinking about it, but having read the review in the LRC, I'm not sure I want to.

The premise is based on the idea that we had strong work Anglo protestant values before the 1960s and now we don't. Or some variant of this idea.

According to the review he refuses to engage in a debate about how society has changed since the 1960s. He doesn't engage with the fact that the development the welfare state is actually a Western phenomenon. He doesn't talk about multiculturalism and how this has impacted our ability to have a 'cohesive' national 'character'. These are important factors!

Canada in 2009 cannot go back to the old boy's club that it was earlier in the 20th century.

That being said I think that he may be on to something interesting in terms of the idea of buying off the nationalists. But to ignore the cultural impacts of the quiet revolution, to ignore the international context in which these things occur, to pretend that the huge amounts of immigration from outside Europe we have experienced have not changed our ability to have a 'national character' seem to me to be pretty serious omissions.

Not sure if it's worth my time reading the book, but we'll see.

I've got quite a few other books on my shelf for the moment.

Ottawa International Writer's Festival

So I've been volunteering and enjoying the Ottawa International Writer's Festival over the past few weeks.

It's been a blast and it ends today, so I thought I'd post about some of my highlights. (I have a feeling that the two sessions I'm going to today, will be fantastic as well.)

One of my favorite sessions actually came unexpectedly, it was a session on "Our Urban Future" with Alan Broadbent and Jeb Brugmann.

Now I read Alan Broadbent's recent book and wasn't too impressed and I found the same thing about his presentation. It made me think about the importance of presentation skills. It wasn't that his ideas weren't good (though everything he said was extremely Toronto centric) , it was that he wasn't a very good speaker.

It was even more evident because the first presentation was so good. I'd never heard of Jeb Brugmann before, but I will keep an eye on him in the future. He was fantatsic, read from his new book. Being a writer's festival of course the authors are there to sell their book, and he really sold me on his. He has a conception of "ubranisms" and the global city which were new to me and seem quite exciting.

I'm not all that interested in urban theory and having recently bought the "Canadian" edition of Richard Florida's new book Who's Your City, and that has just about filled up my desire for urban books, but this one is a welcome exception.

Another session that i enjoyed was with Andrew Cohen and Nino Ricci about leadership. It was a bit disappointing to hear how dismal they thought our current political leadership is. It was interesting because they are both authors of biographies in the current Extraordinary Canadian series. ANdrew Cohen wrote a biography of Lester B. Pearson, while Ricci did a biography on Pierre Trudeau. Both were great.

Finally I was lucky enough to get the last question to Michael Ignatieff after his presentation about his new book. I asked about how he feels about the fact that his call for national unity goes over better in some parts of the country than others. While I disagreed with his answer I was surprised that he wouldn't repeat his comment about I think "it's ok for "Quebecois" to be Quebecers first and Canadians second, or Canadians first and Quebecers second" in English, and only said it in French.

I enjoyed the festival and I'm hoping that there's some good sessions left. Joseph Heath is presenting today on his nwe book Filthy Lucre, and a former professor of mine Heather Menzies is promoting her new book, about dealing with her mother's dementia.