bruce kirkby: adventure man

Bruce Kirkby was in town recently and we coffeed over his new book, The Dolphin's Tooth. Tall, jovial and both tanned and bleached by the sun, the 37-year-old Kirkby was born too late. At heart he is the quintessential Victorian explorer, even meeting his fiance on a cycling trip in Tibet.

The Dolphin's Tooth is the story of Kirkby's adventures (and travails) in some of the world's most remote spots, and about his inner journey from unhappy baby engineer to explorer. Since quitting his cubicle-based day job 15 years ago, Kirkby has trekked Mongolia on horseback, cycled Pakistan's Karakoram Highway, rafted Africa’s Blue Nile Gorge, walked across Iceland, summitted Denali (twice), supported the 1997 Canadian expedition to Mt. Everest, and crossed Arabia's Empty Quarter on foot and camel (recounted in Sand Dance.)

Kirkby sent me Sand Dance after our interview and I read it in one sitting this last weekend. It's exciting to find a new author as engaging as Kirkby and I can't wait for his next book. It may be awhile, he says, because Kirkby is off to explore surfer culture. Here is his site.

graeme gibson's flights of fancy

Graeme Gibson was in town yesterday with his new book, The Bedside Book of Birds: an Avian Miscellany. The acclaimed author of Communion, Perpetual Motion and Gentleman Death (and spouse of Margaret Atwood), talked to me over calamari and Glenmorangie at my favorite haunt, Victoria's. We have a shared interest in parrots - I have a cockatoo, he once had an Amazon parrot - so more than an hour and a half didn't seem nearly enough time to talk about his gorgeous book and all things avian.

"Humans developed as a species in a world full of birds," writes Gibson in his forward.

This book . . . isn't so much about birds themselves as it is about the richly varied and sometimes very intimate relationships that we have established with them during the hundreds of thousands of years that we and they have shared life on earth."

The Bedside Book of Birds is a richly textured mix of illustration, prose and poetry that is uplifting, thought-provoking and sometimes a little dark. Perfect not only for bird fanciers but for fans of literate writing. I read it cover-to-cover but recommend keeping it someplace central, so you can dip into it whenever the fancy strikes.

mild-manner lawyer doubles as globe trotting mystery writer

lunched yesterday with the guru of oil and gas law, John Ballem. What's interesting about that, you ask? Well, Ballem also writes popular crime thrillers, 12 of them, to be precise. His latest, The Oil Patch Quartet, is an omnibus of his previously published The Barons, The Devil's Lighter, Oilpatch Empire and Death Spiral.

Although somewhat dated - The Devil's Lighter was written in the '50s and the female love interest drives a Rambler - the plots hold up. I know this because I read the first 50 pages and woke up two days, and 751 pages, later.

But what makes the 70-something Ballem so interesting is what he does with the rest of his life. Having done a pre-interview Google search, which yielded nothing more interesting than Ballem's interest in horses and service as a Navy pilot, I was gobsmacked to find that he has been to the North Pole and Antarctica (and plans to return south next year). Ballem was one of the key players in early Calgary Zoo years and made wildlife films in Africa, where he spent time with Louis Leakey. He drives a vintage Corvette and a Jag now, but his story (in The Devil's Lighter) of an engineer who's truck breaks down in the bitter Arctic cold, thus exposing said driver to certain death by freezing, was written from experience.

If you live in Alberta or Texas, or have an interest in oil and gas history, The Oil Patch Quartet is for you. If not, check out Manchineel (set in the Caribbean) or Murder as a Fine Art (set in the Rockies).

yay david bergin!

congratulations David Bergin! He won the 2005 Scotiabank Giller Prize for The Time In Between. Hoping to get my interview with Bergin up soon . . .

Friendly Fire tragic but a page turner

coffeed today with National Post reporter Michael Friscolanti. His book, Friendly Fire, is the story of the 2002 bombing of Canadian troops by an American F-16 pilot in Afghanistan. Friscolanti covered the story from day two and writes a flagrantly unbiased account of the incident/accident/tragedy. He uses the results of more than 100 personal interviews and boxes of classified documents to let the players tell the story in their own words.

The result of Friscolanti's even-handedness is that I still can't decide if Major Harry Schmidt, who dropped the 500-pound, laser-guided bomb, is a victim or a murderer. I lean toward murderer (what part of "hold fire" did he not understand?) but you should read it and make up your own mind.

The first half of Friendly Fire is so gripping that, even though I knew what happened and who died, I couldn't put it down. This is journalism as it should be. Friscolanti shows every player warts and all, unspins the details, and lets the reader decide.

fascinated by victorians

interviewing Ken McGoogan (Lady Franklin's Revenge) the other day piqued my interest in Victorian life. History has always lacked detail for me. Sure, there are billions of books on every nuance of the world's big battles, but what about daily life? I always want to know what people ate, how they shopped or, for that matter, how they went to the bathroom.

McGoogan kindly highlighted for me some of the books in his bibliography and last week I ordered Judith Flanders' The Victorian House through abebooks.com. Subtitled "Domestic Life from Childbirth to Deathbed" the London (England) Daily Telegraph said, it's "a fat, fascinating and fact-filled exploration of Victorian domestic life." I'm just into the second chapter and agree completely.

if a non-fiction book interests you, make a point of reading the bibliography or acknowledgements - you never know what interesting things you will find.

still moved by the last great war

lunched yesterday with Blake Heathcote, founder of the Testaments of Honour project. The project is recording, on digital video, the personal histories of Canadian veterans and has just published A Soldier’s View: the Personal Photographs of Canadians at War, 1939-1945.

A Soldier's View is a powerful collection of war photographs from the albums of veterans from all theatres of war; men and women in the navy, in the air force, in the army. With only brief introductions to each chapter, Heathcote has let the photos speak for themselves.

in his forward, artist Alex Colville wonders why we are still interested in events that happened 60 years ago. Heathcote and I pondered that question and discussed not only the grief of war, but the sadness of chronicling (and developing relationships with) aging veterans.

to read more about the Testaments of Honour project while breathlessly awaiting my author interview, go here.