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The Wager is a masterclass in story-telling
By Ken McGoogan / Special to the Toronto Star In March 1741, during a ferocious storm at the foot of South America, a creaky wooden ship called the Wager sailed into the Drake Passage — the most notorious channel in the world. The gunner on board, John Bulkeley, felt the vessel “hurtling on an avalanche…
Read MoreFlora MacDonald sojourns in Nova Scotia
[Nice to see a new biography of Jacobite heroine Flora MacDonald hitting the bookstores. Wonder if it will have anything to say about her sojourn in Nova Scotia. Here we have a few paragraphs that, in the final version of Flight of the Highlanders, I expanded considerably.] We drove sixty-five kilometres north out of Halifax,…
Read MoreParks Canada en route to the fate of Franklin
Wonderful to see that CBC Yellowknife is all over the search for the long-lost Franklin expedition. First, thanks to producer Peter Sheldon, they did a radio interview asking me about items salvaged from Erebus last summer. That spawned a TV interview on Northbeat, and then a news story in print, widely distributed through Canadian Press.…
Read MoreAnswering a screed on Canadian nonfiction
Ken Whyte is trolling, I know, but I can’t help responding to that scattershot screed he published by David Lemon. Some of what Lemon writes about Canadian nonfiction, let me be clear, I agree with. But much of it, speaking as a writer of historical and biographical narrative, much of it I reject. Lemon asserts…
Read MoreMemoir sings of the natural world
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL Reading the Water: Fly Fishing, Fatherhood, and Finding Strength in Nature, by Mark Hume (Greystone Books, 276 pages) When he was just a tyke, Mark Hume lived on a farm in the Okanagan Valley where “a big Barred Rock rooster … attacked any perceived threat” to his flock of…
Read MoreRemember Michael Collins on the day he died
Excerpt from my book CELTIC LIGHTNING: Remembering Aug. 22, 1922. . . 100 years on. We got lost in the dirt roads north of Clonakilty. We were looking, Sheena and I, for the spot where Michael Collins got killed in an ambush. According to historian Tim Pat Coogan, Collins was “the man who made Ireland.”…
Read MoreCanadian book trade abuzz about signing?
So I offer this graphic in lieu of a photo of me doing my happy dance. Trust me, this is better. The occasion? I have just signed a contract with Douglas & McIntyre to publish my next book – number sixteen. I am thrilled because British Columbia-based D&M is rightly described as “one of Canada’s…
Read MoreRushdie after the ban, before the fatwa
In October 1988, after the Indian government banned The Satanic Verses, but before Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa condemning Salman Rushdie, I interviewed the author in Toronto. He almost cancelled on me because suddenly he was mired in politics. But on the phone, before we met, I told him the truth: that as…
Read MoreLetters of the Lost Franklin Expedition
Special to the Globe and Mail May We Be Spared to Meet on Earth: Letters of the Lost Franklin Arctic Expedition; Edited by Russell A. Potter, Regina Koellner, Peter Carney, and Mary Williamson (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 481 pages) From out of England and the mid-19th century, place names come whirling at you: Greenhithe, Bedford Place,…
Read MoreAn Open Letter to Explorer John Rae
Dear Dr. Rae: You have been gone from us since July 22, 1893 – precisely one hundred and twenty-nine years. I write from the future to mark the day of your passing. What to report from 2022? Six years ago, I relayed the news that searchers have found the two long-lost ships of Sir John…
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