Review: The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom

The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom by Corrie ten Boom
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is actually a re-read and a timely one because this book is one of our summer book club books at church this year. The story is of a Dutch family, caught up in the time of the Nazi occupation, who chose, instead of ignoring the terrible things around them, sought to have compassion and help those who were being persecuted, especially Jews. It is a story of courage and faith and, yes, suffering.

Without giving spoilers, we follow Corrie Ten Boom, unmarried and in her fifties, as she inadvertedly became the centre of a resistence cell in her home city of Harlaam. She introduces herself to her very devout Christian family and how they lived their values before the war and how their seeking how to live it in the war led them to continually opening their door to help those who were in danger around them. The cost, as we'll find is heavy, but we also find faith in the endearvor.

The story is inspiring and hard to put down. Some may doubt the sheer saintliness of the family, perhaps, but it is hard to ignore their courage.

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Review: Wînipêk: Visions of Canada from an Indigenous Centre

Wînipêk: Visions of Canada from an Indigenous Centre by Niigaan Sinclair
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

We've actually had this book in our library for awhile, so it's been on my list to read. However, earlier this summer, we headed out to Manitoba on our bi-annual trip to see my wife's relatives. So, reading about Winnipeg from an Indigenous point of view seemed a good fit this year.

Winipek is a compilation of articles by Niigaan Sinclair, journalist and activist, who writes extensively on Indigenous issues in Winnipeg. The essays are clear and thoughtful, so they give a good sense of the recent issues, the people and politics in Manitoba. They cover a lot of ground, so it is really difficult to give a good sense, but there is an immediacy to the essays which is both helpful and appealing. It also helps that many of the essays talk about places I've been or know, even including the small towns around where my my mother in law lives. I was glad to learn more about my almost home province by marriage and to connect better with what is happening to the Indigenous peoples there.

This is definitely a good collection to read, if you want to understand the issues driving Indigenous life in the 2020s, especially in Manitoba, but also in Canada in general.

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Review: The Prairie Chicken Dance Tour

The Prairie Chicken Dance Tour by Dawn Dumont
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is another of the book club choices for my Indigenous literatures course, so I thought I should get around to reading it, even though that particular book club is over (next year, I have even more sections).

The novel itself is based (very loosely) on the tour of a group of Indigenous dancers to Europe in the 1970s. The book is really funny. I mean, laugh aloud in the middle of a scene, funny. But it is also a sensitive character study in the multiple perspective format that is getting more and more popular among many writers, Indigenous or not. I'm trying to avoid spoilers, but the book explores what it can mean to be reconciling one's Christian faith to the realities of residential school trauma, reconciling sexual orientation as well, as well as reflections on colonialism and European attitudes to Indigenous peoples. And Dumont does this, as I noted above, with humour and honesty .

All this makes a book well worth reading, whether for school or not.

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Review: The Prairie Chicken Dance Tour

The Prairie Chicken Dance Tour by Dawn Dumont
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is another of the book club choices for my Indigenous literatures course, so I thought I should get around to reading it, even though that particular book club is over (next year, I have even more sections).

The novel itself is based (very loosely) on the tour of a group of Indigenous dancers to Europe in the 1970s. The book is really funny. I mean, laugh aloud in the middle of a scene, funny. But it is also a sensitive character study in the multiple perspective format that is getting more and more popular among many writers, Indigenous or not. I'm trying to avoid spoilers, but the book explores what it can mean to be reconciling one's Christian faith to the realities of residential school trauma, reconciling sexual orientation as well, as well as reflections on colonialism and European attitudes to Indigenous peoples. And Dumont does this, as I noted above, with humour and honesty .

All this makes a book well worth reading, whether for school or not.

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Review: Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece

Thebes: The Forgotten City of Ancient Greece by Paul Cartledge
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I actually got this book as a teacher gift from a student a couple of years ago. I started trying to read it in March, while on a student trip to Greece, but I have the attention span of a squirrel on these trips because there's so much more to focus on (the logistics of the trip, student well-being, student shenanigans, the interesting sites etc). So, I decided I'd try again this summer, when I had more time to myself.

The book itself is really good on a topic that is actually a little tricky, as the title suggests. One of the biggest problems about understanding the Classical Greek period is that our sources are so deeply Athenocentric, so it is difficult to understand any other cities in Greece besides Athens, and, of course, seen through an Athenian lens, her great rival, Sparta. Thebes gets distinctly short shrift, even though its influence, especially in the fourth century, was really important. It was Thebes, not Athens, which ultimately eliminated the Spartan hegemony, by effectively splitting up Spartan dominance of the Peloponnese.

Because of the problems with the sources I alluded to above, Cartledge has to pull Thebes out of established narratives, using not only history, but poetry and tragedy (with their links to mythological Thebes) to try to understand this under-considered Greek city. The approach is effective, even when he is working with fragments, as he is until around the fourth century. It does make me think that our understanding of the Greek city state is likely distorted because it relies on Athens so much. Athens achieved a greater degree of centralization as a polis earlier than most Greek cities, even her great rivals, Sparta and Thebes. Thebes' road to domination in Boeotia was uneven and, at least, in the fifth century, Thebes was merely the most powerful of the Boeotian states. Its centralization coincided with its 'hegemony' in the 360s.

This is a good monograph, although it did strike me that, at times, even while trying to avoid it, the author is still writing the history of Athens. It's hard to avoid that in the fifth century, but frustrating.

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