Island of Seven Cities - Book Review

The Island of Seven Cities
By Paul Chiasson
St Martins Griffin PB 2007
Random House HC 2006
Website

This book is written by a Canadian Architect (actually he is a French-Canadian of Acadian origin) with a keen interest in history. Like most people of Acadian origin, his family comes from Cape Breton Island MAP, just off the northern end of Nova Scotia.


In 2002 Paul was taking a walk around Cape Dauphin (see Cape Breton Map - on the east coast north of Sydney) and after climbing a hill, he discovered some stone walls and a road. This led him to beleive that this used to be an old town. The question became - Who built it and when?

Paul spent the next 3 years investigating the old records and documents that cover the history of Cape Breton Island. He eventually had to rule out the Portugese, the French, the English and Spanish. The answer that he came up with - the Chinese - may surprise you. But it also makes a lot of sense with all the evidence he provides. If it is ever accepted as true, this discovery will totally flip Canadian "official" history upside down.

While Paul was writing this book, he was reading a book called 1421 The Year the Chinese discovered the World by Gavin Menzies. In this book, Menzies posited a theory that the Chinese built large boats and sailed all the oceans, before they isolated themselves. The exporation was encouraged during the Ming Dynasty.

I enjoyed this book very much. It has a lot of history, and a lot of research, but it is NOT written in an academic or scholarly style. It is easy to read and understand.

Paul presented his research at a Symposium on Chinese Naval Expeditions at the Library of Congress in Washington DC in 2005. It was received very well.

When Paul tried to inform the Nova Scotia Government and the provincial Museum about his discovery, the Nova Scotia Museum wrote back telling Paul that they were not interested because (and I quote) "There were hundreds of archaeological sites on Nova Scotia and many such claims were received each year. Sincerely etc..." Paul was stunned. If you remember your stories of treasure hunts, The Oak Island Treasure Pit is also in Nova Scotia.

I have already found several refutations (if thats the right word - to refute) of Paul's research.

The CBC reported this story in 2006 just after Paul's Book was published.
No Chinese ruins in Cape Breton (say) archeologists

The archeologists say Chiasson's wall is really a fire break from the mid-20th century. "The first part was constructed in the mid-20th century", Christianson said, "but the major portion of the road was built as late as 1989."

There are also historians out there who say that the Chinese NEVER sailed around the world, because there is no evidence, and there are no written records in Chinese archives.
The Island of Seven Cities - is not true.

It becomes obvious that Chiasson has never seen the remains of a medieval Chinese city, and a single piece of archaeological evidence is sufficient to disprove his theory: with fleets of huge junks harboured in St. Ann’s Bay and thousands of people living for years in a nearby hilltop city, the sand beaches and rocky pastures of the area should be littered with millions of shards of Asiatic crockery, yet not a single one has been reported during centuries of farming, and none were noticed in the author’s many examinations of the site.”

Its up to the reader really to decide who to beleive. Do you beleive on the evidence that Chinese did settl and live on Cape Breton Island for a while, leaving only when the Europeans started sailing west. Or do you think its all a hoax and that the stone walls are really 20th century fire breaks.

I read this book for the Canadian Challenge.

Pride and Prejudice - 50 Greatest Books

Pride and Prejudice - by Jane Austen

I'm posting the entire article today because this book is probably the most famous and well know of all Jane Austen's books.

The 18th-century novel was a baggy, sententious affair before Jane Austen gave it bones. Pride and Prejudice has a classic three-part structure, one that modern readers respond to effortlessly. In certain other respects, the novel is more typical of its time. Reading it after watching the 2005 film starring Keira Knightley (a lively version that puts the livestock into the phrase "gentleman farmer"), you're struck by Austen's lack of sensory detail. Dialogue was her medium, and all she needed. The vividness and complexity of the characters, as revealed through conversation alone, is electrifying. Pride and Prejudice makes you believe in the reality of the past, to the extent that you doubted it.

We tend to say that Jane Austen wrote about lives lived in drawing rooms because that's all she knew. And yet (as Carol Shields points out in her gem of a study for the Penguin Lives series), Austen's family offered all sorts of other material: two brothers fighting in the Napoleonic wars, an aunt thrown into prison for stealing a piece of lace from a shop, a cousin's husband guillotined in the French Revolution, a sister's fiancé dying of yellow fever in India. Austen shoved all of this to the side, along with bereavement, religion, servants and children (though as a maiden aunt, she spent years as nursemaid).

Instead, for that "little bit of ivory (two inches wide) on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces so little effect after so much labour," Austen separated out the most poignant strand of her experience - the fact that a woman's station in the world, her independence, her very survival, depended on the uncertain and often demeaning enterprise of attracting a man who could accept the size of her dowry.

There are a lot of smart, self-reliant young women out there who are passionate about Pride and Prejudice. This is partly due to Jennifer Ehle, who played Elizabeth Bennet (in the 1995 BBC miniseries) with an irresistible combination of serenity and mirth, in spite of the dreadful armpit-waisted muslin gowns she was forced to wear. Why does this novel resonate so powerfully with women who have so many other options in life?


I blame Pride and Prejudice for the fact that the hero of every romance novel is rotten to the heroine the first time he meets her. In my heart, I also blame it for our persistent and anachronistic tendency to regard a man as an embodiment of personal destiny. Well, not Pride and Prejudice alone. But we carry stories around in our bones, and among novels about the sexes, it's the best there is: Elizabeth snagging Mr. Darcy is romantic heroin for the discriminating reader.

Maybe I'm wrong. There are lots of reasons to love Pride and Prejudice, reasons that have nothing to do with romantic identification: Austen's swift and exact insights into character, her lack of sentimentality, her delicious satire, her fluid, intelligent sentences.

And Elizabeth Bennet is a terrific heroine for any age. Witty, spirited and outspoken, she risks everything in being adamantly who she is. At first, she's too rash in acting by her own lights, but in the end, her fidelity to herself is fabulously vindicated. Mr. Darcy's wealth is both beside the point and to the point: He values Elizabeth for her intelligence and unconventional spirit, which is all we require - but this is payback time.

I did ask a 28-year-old friend about her love for Pride and Prejudice, and most of her appreciative comments came back to its language. The attraction between Elizabeth and Darcy is a talky, civilized, celebration of minds: witticisms over the pianoforte, painful disclosures alone in the drawing room, letters deconstructed strand by strand. By the time they plight their troth, the two have gone some distance down the relationship road. Not so much in learning to know each other as in learning to see their own imperfect selves in the mirror of their interaction. How much more interesting their life together promises to be than the lives of lovers in those turgid 19th-century novels, where passion and mystery (i.e. sex) rise like mist off the moors. At 21, astonishingly, Jane Austen knew that talk is the enduring heart of a marriage.

The Historian - Book Review

The Historian
By Elizabeth Kostova
Little, Brown June 2005

I purchased my copy of this book a year ago for my last birthday. I'm sad to say that this book sat on my shelves and I never read it. Last week was my birthday so I decided that I really better read it. At over 600 pages, it took me 4 days. And I ended up actually enjoying it - very much. Which is not too surprising really, considering that I have always loved history.



It starts off with Paul telling his young daughter, the story of his search for his missing thesis professor in 1953-54. Paul follows the trail of the Professor's research and eventually ends up in Turkey where he meets Helen. Together Paul and Helen both visit Hungary and Bulgaria (both communist countries at the time).

As well as searching for the Missing Professor, Paul is also searching for someone else. A well know historical Eastern European Ruler who died in 1576. His grave has never been found.

The story is told following two timelines. The 1954 timeline as mentioned above takes up most of the story. The second timeline is in 1973 where Paul tells his daughter his story of his search. We know nothing about the daughter as she is never named. We do know that she was named after her maternal grandmother. In 1973 Paul himself goes missing, so the daughter sets out to find him. Her trail leads her to Southern France, where she finds both her father and mother and together they all find the grave of the medieval ruler.

The Critique of Pure Reason - 50 Greatest Books

THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON, BY IMMANUEL KANT

Kant was a terrible writer. He was honest enough to admit it, and gracious enough to publish his longing for the elegance and clarity of style with which two of his contemporaries - David Hume and Moses Mendelssohn - were born. Kant knew The Critique of Pure Reason was a problem, and his later attempts to revise or summarize it only made things worse. Still, the book is the single greatest work of modern philosophy, and has but one rival - Plato's Republic - in the history of thought. It's not only general readers who are put off by its clumsy, sluggish writing; most university courses spend so much time on the first half that they stop before reaching what Kant said was the point.

So I've taken a quote that many readers never get to, but it shows the Critique at its heart. The book seeks to determine what it means to be real. Unlike many contemporary philosophers, Kant wasn't interested in skeptical puzzles. For him, what is real and what is not was a matter of great moral and political import. The Enlightenment contested the reality of superstitions: Though witches were no longer burned in the 18th century, you could still be sent to jail for denying the reality of demons in free-thinking Holland. Other superstitions were less dramatic but more dangerous: As long as people believed that poverty and illness were God's punishment for one sin or another, they were unlikely to explore ways of eliminating them.

I have vaguely heard of Immanuel Kant, but usually in relation to philosophy - I think. Otherwise, I have never read any of his books.

Harry Potter has performed a new vanishing act

What's a bestseller list with no Harry?
Toronto Star May 06, 2008


For the first time in nearly a decade, the New York Times bestseller lists will be without a title featuring J.K. Rowling's hugely popular young wizard. And the character is finally disappearing from the Canadian rankings as well.

This Sunday's New York Times will be Potter-less for the first time since Dec. 27, 1998, when Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (as series opener Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was titled in the U.S.) made its debut on the paper's bestseller list. The streak has ended with the dropping of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, published last July.

Over the years, the Potter books became such prominent mainstays on the New York Times bestseller lists that the paper kept creating new categories to accommodate the phenomenon, first introducing a children's list in 2000 and then, four years later, breaking the children's list into sub-categories, including a separate ranking of series books.

"Most publishers and booksellers welcomed the change, because the Potter phenomenon was keeping new titles off the fiction list," wrote senior editor Dwight Garner on the paper's book blog. "Some observers, though, felt Rowling was unfairly evicted – after all, they pointed out, adults read her books."

In Canada, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows last made it onto Quill & Quire's monthly children's list in March.

"It's relative," said Quill & Quire editor Derek Weiler. "If Harry Potter is petering out as a reading phenomenon, it's petering out from being the biggest reading phenomenon of the last 10 years. I'm sure the books are still selling in healthy numbers."

40 Days and 40 nights - Book Review

40 Days and 40 Nights
By Matthew Chapman
Harper Collins 2007

When you think of 40 days and 40 nights, I'll bet your first thought is Noah's Ark and the Flood, right? Well in this case, you would be wrong. In this book the title refers to a court case - about creationism and evolution.



The USA has a Consitution on which most of its laws are based on. One of the most important amendments (or additions) to the Constitution is the first one.

It says - Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Source - Wikipedia.

The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment prohibits the establishment of a national religion by Congress or the preference of one religion over another, or religion over non-religion.
Source - Wikipedia.

This is why America has had Freedom from Religion for the last 200 years. Anyone can decide for themselves whether or not to beleive, and everyone has the right to not be harrased because of whatever they do decide to beleive.

But in 2004 the Dover Area School Board decided that the students needed to learn a balance about how the universe was formed. Up until then, there was only one accepted theory of the origins of life - Evolution. That is what the students were taught in school. The School board decided that their students needed to learn a balanced view so they started planning to teach their students about Intelligent Design.

Until now, if religions wished to teach their students another version of the origins of life - they were free to do so outside of school. Most of this learning was done at church, sunday school and at home by the parents.

When some of the parents found out what the school board was planning, they were horrified. Not only was this bringing religion into the classroom, this was also breaking the First Amendment of keeping the church and the state seperate.

So eleven parents filed a lawsuit against the school board and the case came to trial in Dover, Pennsylvania, in late 2005. The case went on to have national repercussions, all the way up to President Bush, who said he believed intelligent design should be taught as "an alternative theory" to evolution.

Matthew Chapman (a film writer and author), spent several months covering the trial from beginning to end. Through his in-depth encounters with the participants, [creationists, preachers, teachers, scientists on both sides of the issue, lawyers, theologians, the judge, and the eleven parents who resisted the fundamentalist proponents of intelligent design] Chapman tells an interesting, horrifying, and moving story of ordinary people doing battle in America over the place of religion and science in modern life.

Transcripts and Trial Documents.

And just to make things more interesting, Matthew Chapman is the great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin.

On the last day of the trial, someone stood and asked the Judge this question.
"Your Honor, I have one question and it's this. By my reckoning, this is the fortieth day since this trial began and tonight will be the fortieth night, and I would like to know if you did that on purpose?"
The Judge's reply was instant - That is an interesting coincidence, but it was not by design.

Chapman also included a few timely paragraphs from the Scopes trial of 1925 which was essentially the exact same battle. This was a very interesting book and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The Darwin Conspiracy - Book Review

The Darwin Conspiracy
By John Darnton
Anchor Books 2006

This is a novel involving two conspiracies. One regarding Darwin's voyage on the Beagle and his theory of evolution. Was it really his idea? The other about a member of Darwin's own family. This novel is written in 3 different timelines. One is the Voyage of the Beagle, the second is a Journal written by one of Darwin's daughters and the third is the search for these journals in the present day.


The novel starts off with Hugh and Beth both looking for a new research angle on Darwin - something different that nobody else has published before. While Hugh is perusing the Darwin papers at the Manuscripts Room at the Cambridge University Library, he comes across a small accounts book with what looks like a journal written on the back pages.

Hugh "borrows" the journal and eventually discovers that it was written by Elizabeth Darwin, one of Charles's daughters. A daughter about whom very little is known, other than she never married and had no children.

Beth was raised with a family tradition that said she was descended from Charles Darwin. She wants to know exactly how she was descended from them.

The historical narratives in this novel consist of excerpts of Lizzie's journal and the Beagle voyage. Mixed in with these narratives are two very interesting and shocking secrets.

The real characters from the Beagle crew are used in the novel, except one. The surgeon in this novel is named Robert McCormick. According to Charles Darwin's book "Voyage of the Beagle" the real surgeon on board the Beagle was named Mr. Bynoe.

I enjoyed this book very much. There is a lot of infomation on the Darwin family and on the Beagle voyage.