Biographies “St. Diman - Catholic Online” plus 3 more |
- St. Diman - Catholic Online
- Lévesque and Trudeau in a new prize fight - Toronto Star
- Three bios, father's memoir vie for $25,000 book prize - Edmonton Journal
- Pride and Prescience - Spectator.org
| Posted: 05 Jan 2010 11:58 PM PST Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Lévesque and Trudeau in a new prize fight - Toronto Star Posted: 06 Jan 2010 01:31 AM PST Biographies of political archrivals Pierre Trudeau and René Lévesque are among the nominations for the $25,000 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, announced Tuesday in Toronto. John English's Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, 1968-2000, the concluding volume in a two-part biography of the Canadian prime minister, and Daniel Poliquin's René Lévesque, published as part of Penguin's Canadian Lives series, share spots on the short list with Kenneth Whyte's The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst and Ian Brown's The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Search for his Disabled Son. Citizen of the World, the first of the two Trudeau books by English, was a finalist for the same prize in 2007. Jury members Andrew Cohen, Tim Cook and Sheila Fischman selected the finalists from 125 books. The winner will be announced Feb. 8. Brown and Whyte are also in the running for B.C.'s $40,000 National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, which will be handed out Jan. 15. The Charles Taylor Prize, named in honour of the late author and foreign correspondent, is in its ninth year. Past winners include Wayne Johnston, Rudy Wiebe and Richard Gwyn. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Three bios, father's memoir vie for $25,000 book prize - Edmonton Journal Posted: 06 Jan 2010 12:19 AM PST Three biographies and a father's memoir about his disabled son have been shortlisted for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction for 2010 Tuesday in Toronto. The finalists are: - -Ian Brown for The Boy in the Moon: A Father's Search For His Disabled Son, published by Random House Canada. - -John English for Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, 1968-2000, published by Knopf Canada. - -Daniel Poliquin for Rene Levesque, published by Penguin Canada. - -Kenneth Whyte for The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst, published by Random House Canada. The four beat out more than 125 submissions who competed for a place on the 2010 shortlist. The prize consists of $25,000 for the winning author and $2,000 for each runner-up. Translator Sheila Fischman, former prize winner and historian Tim Cook and journalist Andrew Cohen will make up the jury. In its ninth year, the privately funded prize celebrates Canada's literary non-fiction authors. The prize was founded by Noreen Taylor in honour of her late husband, Charles, a noted journalist, author ( Six Journeys; Radical Tories) and prominent member of the Canadian literary community, who died in 1997. The winner will be announced at a gala luncheon Feb. 8 in Toronto. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Pride and Prescience - Spectator.org Posted: 06 Jan 2010 03:04 AM PST Buy the BookPride and Prescience Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy's Guide Now that Joseph Epstein's finely-written portrait of Alexis de Tocqueville is available in paperback, there's no longer any reason to pass up this contribution to understanding one of the most insightful, not to mention early, explicators of democracy's charms and pitfalls. Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy's Guide is part of the Eminent Lives series, brief biographies of the world's most important figures. The series includes, to name a few, Paul Johnson on George Washington, Bill Bryson on Shakespeare, Edmund Morris on Beethoven, and Francine Prose on Caravaggio. No footnotes. No indexes. No scholarly hedging and pettifogging. Just compact portraits of historical figures worth knowing about. Whoever promoted Epstein to write the Tocqueville entry deserves a promotion. To some extent the choice is counter-intuitive. Epstein is a graceful short-story writer and, no-contest, the finest essayist on active duty today. In fact, he likely single-handedly resuscitated this form, which has too often been the favorite vehicle of prigs, drudges, and casuists. But he's more of a literary man than a political writer. Appropriate for a guy who taught writing and literature for 30 years at Northwestern. In his stories and essays, which have graced the pages of such as Commentary, the New Criterion, Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the American Scholar, et al., Epstein has ignored the daily grub of politics and has shown his distrust of Big Ideas and the people who try to retail them at our expense. Partisans of "isms" find no ally in our Joe. But then Tocqueville shared Epstein's prejudice against systematic political thinkers, who too often come up with, well, systems. And systems have a way of leading to death by the millions, gulags, firing squads, and guys in ill-fitting suits who knock down your door in the middle of the night. Epstein has brought the erudite but accessible style of his essays and a deft treatment of political ideas to Tocqueville. He clearly knows his way around ideas as well as around poems and stories. He brings Tocqueville the political thinker and Tocqueville the complex and troubled man to life for readers. He gives us a look at a great mind at work. Tocqueville and his two volumes of Democracy in America have retained a claim on our attention for more than a century and a half because of the trenchancy of Tocqueville's analysis of American society and the prescience of his predictions regarding where America and democracy were headed, many of which are well known. His insights are the more remarkable as they were made by an aloof, French aristocrat who at age 26 spent a mere 271 days in America, a fair fraction of those days in arduous and dangerous travel as there were no business-class flights in 1831. Further, the two books on America, the first published in 1835, were written not with an American audience in mind but a French one. Democracy in America was about democracy more than about America, despite the spot-on predictions. (In addition to nailing so much about America, Tocqueville also predicted the 1848 Revolution in Europe a month before it took place. But he wasn't always right. He predicted the federal government in America would wither away as the country got larger geographically.) Less than two decades before Tocqueville's birth in 1805, his country, burdened with a parasitic aristocracy and a peasantry and middle class with a long list of grievances, had taken a bloody run at liberté, egalité, and fraternité, only to wind up with the Reign of Terror and Napoleon instead. Members of Tocqueville's family were executed during the period of Robespierre's change you can believe in. Tocqueville can be forgiven for being more than a little suspicious of democracy, even though he saw it as the inevitable future, as aristocracy was the past. Tocqueville understood the constant conflict in democracies between liberty and equality, and the threat too much emphasis on the latter poses to the former. He recognized the emotion of envy behind much of the high-minded talk about equality, which he once described as "generally the wish that no one should be better off than oneself." Tocqueville saw the soft tyranny of the smothering paternalism that democracies can impose, and the bureaucracies they can build. He understood that too much centralization of government is a one-way street to despotism. The proud and ambitious Tocqueville learned first-hand the discrepancies between democracy's lofty promises and its actual practice during his own frustrating and almost achievement-free, 13-year political career that spanned a couple of republics. Politics was almost a comically mischosen career for the cool, cerebral, and ethical Count de Tocqueville. On the basis of his research, Epstein describes him as "a tightly-wound man of volatile nature." He was a man with a talent for friendship, but a backslapper he was not. Not a guy who could work a room. He was totally free of what Epstein calls the "cozening familiarity needed to form strong political groups." His integrity was forever getting in the way. Tocqueville was crushed to learn that hardly any of his colleagues in the French Chamber of Deputies gave a rat's patootie about the general interest, but were tireless, often ruthless, in pursuing their own. They were, in effect, in business for themselves. He learned that the most important political questions had little to do with shades of difference in democracy versus dictatorship, or the centrality of an independent judiciary. No, the most important political question, on the evidence of the behavior of his colleagues, seemed to be, "What's in it for me?" Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
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