Month: June 2025

27. Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This explores a contradiction. On one hand, for 80 years or so, many if not most people, especially Western liberals, have understood that genocide is wrong. Few of us would argue that the slaughter of thousands of human beings is ever acceptable. But, on the other hand, most of us do nothing while a genocide unfolds in Gaza. Doing something would cause us some inconvenience, so we don’t bother. That contradiction, and the hypocrisy of people who claim to have a moral centre while turning away from mass murder, enrages El Akkad, but despite this book’s incandescent anger, it remains coherent, thoughtful, and even self-reflexive. Its moral clarity is bracing and, for me, compelling.

El Akkad was born in Egypt and lived in Qatar and Canada before moving to the United States. His anger is partly directed at the Democratic Party, which claims to be the lesser evil in American politics; the fascists who now run the Republican Party are at least aware of what they are. They can openly advocate the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and its redevelopment into a Levantine coastal resort for profit, even if they add, as a fig leaf, the notion that such a 21st century version of the Madagascar Plan is the best thing for Palestinians. (That outrageous idea isn’t in the book, which seems to have been written before Trump took office.) The Democrats, however, claim a moral compass that’s entirely fictional. That’s not surprising, since various kinds of hypocrisy are built into empire.

As I read—I’d forgotten how much reading I can accomplish on a plane, although I’m going to need to mail the books I’ve finished home, rather than dragging them around for the next ten days—I kept marking particularly powerful passages that I might include here. There ended up being too many. How could I choose just one? And yet, because I want to give some small sense of what this book is like, here are a couple of sentences from the conclusion that stood out:

One day there will be no more looking away. Looking away from climate disaster, from the last rabid takings of extractive capitalism, from the killing of the newly stateless. One day it will become impossible to accept the assurances of the same moderates who say with great conviction: Yes the air has turned sour and yes the storms have grown beyond categorization and yes the fires and the floods have made of life a wild careen from one disaster to the next and yes millions die from the heat alone and entire species are swept into extinction daily and the colonized are driven from their land and the refugees die in droves on the borders of the unsated side of the planet and yes supply chains are beginning to come apart and yes soon enough it’ll come to our doorstep, even our doorstep in this last coddled bastion of the very civilized world, when one day we turn on the tap and nothing comes out and we visit the grocery store and the shelves are empty and we must finally face the reality of it as billions before us have been made to face the reality of it but until then, until that very last moment, it’s important to understand that this really is the best way of doing things.

This book is hard to read. Jeremiads usually are. Few people, not even El Akkad himself, escape being caught up in its argument. But that’s what makes One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This such an important book.

26. Adrienne Gruber, Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes: Essays on Motherhood

Sometimes, I like reading creative nonfiction because I can imagine myself in the story that the author is telling. I don’t have Robert Macfarlane’s physical courage, but even though I would never swim in the ocean in the Outer Hebrides, as he does in The Wild Places, I can imagine doing it—not enjoying it, but doing it. But other times, the experiences that the author describes are so alien to me that I cannot imagine them. Adrienne Gruber’s luminous essays in Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes are that kind of writing. Pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood: these are experiences from another world, or at least another body. That’s one of the reasons I like this book so much. I want to learn about things I would otherwise never understand. Like Adrienne’s daughters, I want to witness it all.

Adrienne and I are in the same writers’ group, which meets on Zoom every month or so, which means I read some of these essays in draft form. How amazing it is to see how they have changed and developed. I wish I could write like this—that I could find the poetic associations Adrienne does between, for instance, an old car and the tired body of a mother after the birth of her third child. And I’m inspired by her frank honesty. As I read these essays on the first leg of my flight to Halifax, I realized how much my own writing has been influenced by Adrienne’s. I aspire to write this beautifully, this bravely. I hope I get there eventually.

I should’ve read this book on Mother’s Day, rather than on Father’s Day, but better late than never.

25. Robert MacFarlane, Is a River Alive?

I’ll admit it: I’m a fan of Robert Macfarlane’s writing. I haven’t read all of his work, but I loved The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, The Wild Places, and Landmarks. I intend to read Underland this summer. Maybe I should’ve turned to that book before tackling his latest, Is a River Alive?, but all the attention it’s getting—the reviews and interviews—encouraged me to get a copy and start reading. I’m glad I did.

Is a River Alive? reflects on the recent shift in jurisprudence which began in New Zealand in 2017, when the Whanganui River was declared “a spiritual and physical entity” possessing a “lifeforce.” Alive, in other words. That idea had been circulating since Christopher Stone’s 1972 essay “Should Trees Have Standing?” It sounded radical 53 years ago, and to some it still does, but corporations are considered to be legal persons, and most of those who strain to understand the idea of ecosystems as living things have little trouble with that idea. Macfarlane explores the concept through three rivers, or perhaps river systems: Los Cedros in Ecuador, threatened by mining projects that would destroy the cloud forest that is its source; the Kosasthalaiyar, Cooum, and Adyar Rivers in Chennai, India, which are dying because of industrial pollution and the draining of their wetlands; and the Mutehekau Shipu or Magpie River in Quebec, which may be drowned by a hydroelectric project that would see several massive dams constructed. Los Cedros and Mutehekau Shipu have been declared by law to be living creatures; the fact that the three rivers in Chennai are dying suggests that they have the potential to be alive. The book also considers the chalk springs near Macfarlane’s home in Cambridge, England, which nearly died during a drought several years ago.

I like the way that Macfarlane struggles at times to accept ideas that his rational mind is troubled by. Not everyone has so much difficulty. His son, Will, asks him what the title of his book will be. Is a River Alive?, Macfarlane responds. “Well, duh, that’s going to be a short book then, Dad,” the boy says, “because the answer is yes!”

I consider related questions about our kinship with the world around us in my forthcoming book, Walking the Bypass: Notes On Place From the Side of the Road, but I don’t have as much difficulty, partly because the fact that humans share 40 to 60 percent of the proteins in their DNA with bananas tells me that we’re made up of the same stuff as the living creatures around us. As Mike Francis, a PhD student in bioinformatics at the University of Georgia told Alia Hoyt, “This is because all life that exists on earth has evolved from a single cell that originated about 1.6 billion years ago,” he says. “In a sense, we are all relatives!” Perhaps I found it a little easier, too, because trees and birds are obviously alive, whereas it could be argued that rivers are inanimate. Spoiler alert: Macfarlane finds his way to seeing the animacy of rivers. That’s not much of a surprise, though: it’s pretty obvious from the outset that’s where he’ll end up.

Macfarlane’s writing is gorgeous. I was amazed by the book’s introduction, which presents a biography of the chalk spring in Cambridge since its birth after the last ice age. The last chapter, which imitates the turbulent flow of Mutehekau Shipu through long, flowing sentences, is pretty great, too. The book makes its readers think, too, about the destruction our extractive civilization wreaks on the world we live in, the foolishness of considering hydroelectricity a form of “clean” energy, and the grotesque unsustainability of the kind of resource projects our federal government intends to fast track. Maybe that’s all obvious, but it needs to be said, repeatedly.

Macfarlane sometimes gets criticized for the way his work focuses on men. The Old Ways, for instance, almost entirely ignores women who write about walking, as Phil Smith points out. That might be less of an issue here; two of this book’s main characters, mycologist Giuliana Furci and poet Rita Mestokosho, are women. Still, most of the people here are men, and some will see the book as a brofest. I’m not as bothered by that, because we all have blindnesses, but I still see it.

Still, this is a wonderful book. I’m glad I read it, and I’m looking forward to reading Underland.

24. Matthew R. Anderson, Someone Else’s Saint: How a Scottish Pilgrimage Led to Nova Scotia

First, a confession: my response to Matthew R. Anderson’s Someone Else’s Saint: How a Scottish Pilgrimage Led to Nova Scotia isn’t exactly neutral. That’s partly because Matthew’s a friend of mine, and partly because I was part of one of the pilgrimages he writes about in this book. In 2019, my partner and I joined Matthew and, for a day, his wife, Sara, on a walk on the Whithorn Way, an ancient pilgrimage route to Whithorn, where St. Ninian, who may or may not have brought Christianity to Scotland, may or may not have lived. I loved that walk, even though (or, in hindsight, perhaps because) it was often difficult, and reading Matthew’s account of the journey kept reminding me of things that happened and people we met. “Oh, yes! That place!” I would mutter to myself as I read, or “Right! Peter! I remember him!” Reading Someone Else’s Saint was a little like flipping through an old photo album for me–if you remember those–and that was part of what I loved about this book.

But it wasn’t the only thing I loved, and readers who have never been to the southwest corner of Scotland, or who have never gone on a longish walk, will enjoy this book, too. Structurally, Someone Else’s Saint tells two linked stories about pilgrimages in honour of St. Ninian: the one in Scotland, and another, from Matthew’s home near Pomquet, Nova Scotia, to St. Ninian’s Cathedral at St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, some 20 kilometres away. The book thinks about the complexity of the interconnected histories of those places, linked by colonization, immigration and displacement, faith, and the complexities of their pasts, and their presents. Matthew finds comfort in the layers of stories about St. Ninian. “Ninian may be the first saint of Scotland,” he writes. “But he likely came from somewhere else, his story was celebrated first elsewhere, and his shrine owes much to the pilgrims from elsewhere who came to enrich it. By welcoming those who are foreigners or strangers among us, honouring what they bring, we are more in the company of St. Ninian than we think.” Those are important words, especially now, as our neighbours to the south are divided between those who want to expel those strangers, especially the ones with brown skin, and those who want to honour what those strangers have brought. Similar ideas circulate in Canada, too. Simple answers about identity and belonging are seductive to many of us, but when the world is complex, and when we are ourselves complex, such simplicity does us no favours. We end up believing stories that are simply untrue, and acting on those untruths in ways that are harmful to ourselves and others.

So Someone Else’s Saint turns out to be more than a book about walking–although it does an excellent job of conveying the experience of the walks it narrates in clear and sometimes poetic prose. It’s a book about the power of stories, the difficulty of identifying clear or straightforward origins, and the need to accept, even love, the messiness of the past. That messiness includes the reality of Canada’s ongoing colonial history, the way those of us who are descendants of settlers have yet to come to terms with our past and present behaviour towards the first occupants of this land.

I must confess that at first I thought that, as a character, I came across as a bit of an idiot in Someone Else’s Saint. That picture wasn’t inaccurate. I can be pigheaded. My boots got soaked early in the walk after a long day of rain, and they didn’t dry. I foolishly wore wet socks in my wet boots, arguing that dry socks would just get wet anyway. The result: blisters. I should’ve listened to my companions. That description isn’t Matthew’s fault; it’s accurate, unfortunately, and if the wet boot fits, I’ll have to wear it. But as I kept reading, I saw how generous Matthew’s characterization of me is. He gives me credit for insights I’m not sure I could’ve had. He’s just as generous to my partner, describing her precisely in a lovely paragraph:

Christine was a wonderful travel companion: good-hearted, positive, resolute no matter the weather, and always with something interesting to say. As a professor of film, she had an eye for the landscape. I don’t know how many times she’d bring my gaze up from the asphalt by remarking: “Do you see how many shades of green there are on that hill?” Or: “Look at those stunning cinquefoil . . . Ken, did you see those?” And Ken and I would look, and of course, she’d be right.

That is absolutely what she’s like, especially the point about her ability to appreciate the varied colours she sees in the world around her. I’m convinced that Someone Else’s Saint is just as accurate about the people and events it relates, even (or especially) the ones that are foggy in my memory.

As I read, I was reminded of an interview I listened to on The Spectator‘s “Book Club” podcast recently. Robert Macfarlane was being interviewed by the host, Sam Leith, about his new book, Is A River Alive?. The pair recall the review Leith wrote of Macfarlane’s 2012 book The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, in which he remarked, “Robert Macfarlane never meets a dickhead.” The point was that Macfarlane is open and generous when he writes about people. Macfarlane’s response: “I do meet dickheads, but I don’t like writing about them, because they get mic time aplenty.” I know that Matthew meets dickheads as he moves through the world–we’ve met a couple on our walks over the years–but demonstrates a similar openness and generosity and kindness when he writes about people. I’m impressed by that, and I want to follow his example.

As I noted at the beginning of this post, I’m not unbiased, but I do think this is a lovely book, and an important one. I recommend Matthew’s 2024 book, The Good Walk: Creating New Paths on Traditional Prairie Trails, too, for anyone interested in walking, pilgrimage, or thinking about how settler-descendants can live in a good way on land that isn’t really theirs.