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Polemics and Elegies

Non-fiction writers pour their hearts into topics that matter to them — and to us

By Brian Bethune

Originally appeared in Macleans

BY ITS VERY NATURE, Canadian non-fiction can never offer the thematic unity often found in CanLit. But every year writers pour as much passion as any novelist or poet -- and considerable literary skill -- into topics that matter to them. The best also deserve our consideration. Some recent highlights:

Passion is certainly the defining emotion of Alan Young's Justice Defiled. A Toronto law professor, criminal lawyer, media commentator and self-proclaimed defender of "hookers, druggies, gamblers and minor criminals," Young calls his book a "professional suicide note." (He may well be right about that, considering he takes as his guiding light the famous declaration of Shakespeare's Dick the Butcher: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.") Young's tone of moral outrage never wavers. There are far too many lawyers, he argues, precisely because the Criminal Code is obscenely bloated. Why, asks Young, does the code contain a section on "theft in general" and 59 other sections on specific types, including "theft from oyster beds?" It is, in fact, ridiculously easy to become a criminal in Canada: simply get caught waterskiing at night. That might be dangerous and even negligent, but it would be better dealt with through bylaw regulation than the same array of legal procedure as an accusation of murder.

The core of Young's argument is that "lifestyle" offences -- drugs, prostitution, gambling -- should be removed from the code. It's morally wrong, he contends, to criminalize people for the pursuit of pleasure, a human drive that will never be stamped out. It cruelly misuses resources -- in 1992 the Toronto police budget allocated $7.3 million for the morality division, six times the funding for the sexual assault squad. And it fosters hypocrisy and corruption among lawyers, judges and cops, all members of high-stress professions who, studies show, indulge in intoxicants and buy sexual services at least as much as the rest of us.

Justice Defiled offers few practical remedies. (Young doesn't really mean superfluous lawyers should be killed -- at least, I don't think he does.) And those he does come up with, like informal neighbourhood courts for judging low-level offences, have a scary potential for abuse. But that doesn't vitiate the core of moral truth in his description of a dysfunctional system.

An equally valuable book is Saskatchewan historian Bill Waiser's All Hell Can't Stop Us (Fifth House), an exhaustive reconstruction of the 1935 Regina Riot, one of the most dramatic events of the Depression. In April of that year hundreds of single unemployed men walked out of federally run relief camps in the B.C. Interior, places where they had cleared forests, built roads and dug ditches in return for food, board and 20 cents a day. The men were determined to wring a "work for wages" program from Ottawa. But then-Prime Minister R. B. Bennett found it easy to ignore protestors thousands of miles away, and the men decided to take their demands to him.

On the nights of June 3 and 4, almost 1,400 men began the On-to-Ottawa Trek in Vancouver by climbing aboard eastbound trains. With the trek widely expected to pick up hundreds of new recruits as it approached Ottawa, a worried federal government decided to make a stand in Regina. The railways were pressured into refusing to carry the men further, and the government bolstered its RCMP manpower. On the evening of July 1, while Regina citizens and trekkers gathered in the city's Market Square, Mounties and local police, many wielding sawed-off baseball bats, charged the crowd in a bid to arrest the leaders. The trekkers quickly responded with volleys of stones and bricks, or bats of their own. City police eventually fired into the crowd.

The toll from the Depression's bloodiest day: hundreds injured, including more than a dozen who were shot, and two dead, one a policeman killed by a blow to the head and the other a trekker who died later. An inquiry quickly absolved the authorities of any blame, but Waiser's well-written account exposes that conclusion for the whitewash it was. The Regina Riot was a classic police-provoked disturbance. But All Hell Can't Stop Us is more than a work of solid scholarship; at a time when mass demonstrations and policing are again hot issues, Waiser's book is also a provocative cautionary tale.

A far less sombre tone marks Kim Vicente's The Human Factor (Knopf). Vicente is an engineering professor at the University of Toronto, a leading figure in the emerging field of human-centred technology, and an enthusiast who believes good design can bridge the growing gap between technology and our capacity to control it. He points to success stories like aviation. Sixty years ago, flying was even more dangerous than driving still is. The death toll -- not in combat, but in training -- during the Second World War prompted the USAF to make pilot-friendly changes to cockpits. Identical but diametrically opposed switches were changed in shape or moved apart so a pilot would not flip the wrong one by accident. What Vicente calls "mechanistic" thinking became rare in global aviation. By 2001, despite a massive increase in traffic -- and the four terrorist-caused crashes on Sept. 11 -- total airline crashes around the world fell to their lowest level in half a century.

Nor does Vicente overlook small steps on the way to a better future. He's delighted by the urinals in Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport. It has always been possible to design urinals that minimize splashback, though no one bothered. But Schiphol goes one further, combining engineering skill and knowledge of human psychology (guy variety). There's a fly etched into the porcelain at each urinal's "sweet spot," the point of curvature that creates the least amount of splash. Men instinctually aim for the bug.

But each triumph, large or small, described in The Human Factor is matched by a defeat. The mirror image of the Schiphol urinal is the Mercedes-Benz electronic oil-checker, which requires five counter-intuitive steps, including one in which the user has to push a button twice within one second. (No wonder most Mercedes drivers stick to the tried-and-true dipstick.) More ominously, aviation's success is equalled by medicine's failure. A mismatch of overworked humans and needlessly complex technology causes up to 98,000 preventable deaths in American hospitals every year. (The Canadian toll is assumed to be proportionate.) By turns enchanting and disturbing, Vicente's marvellous book is full of advice on how to make this a more elegant, as well as safer, world.

Vesselin Nedkov lives in Montreal now, but on Oct. 23, 2002, the Bulgarian-born M.B.A. student was celebrating the last night of a trip to Moscow. He and a Russian friend were halfway through watching the blockbuster musical Nord-Ost when 48 Chechen terrorists -- including 18 female suicide bombers -- seized the theatre. They held 800 audience and cast members prisoner for 2 1/2 days before Russian forces pumped gas into the theatre and stormed it, a rescue that killed all of the captors and 129 hostages. 57 Hours (Penguin) is Nedkov's harrowing account of being caught between two unstable adversaries -- the Russian government is as unpredictable and as bloody-minded as the Chechens. Nedkov, ably abetted by well-known Canadian writer Paul Wilson, is starkly honest about his naïveté and emotional confusion then and now. But his essential decency and, above all, his desire to know why make Nedkov's wrong-place, wrong-time narrative extraordinarily affecting.

Biographer Charlotte Gray has a connoisseur's taste for old letters and a historian's eye for the telling detail in them. In Canada: A Portrait in Letters 1800-2000 (Doubleday), Gray presents 217 of the 3,000 letters she read during her research. There were early immigrants who wrote home in good cheer, if only to entice others -- particularly female relatives or prospective brides -- to follow them. The lack of women was a perennial problem in all frontier societies. In late 1800 Joseph Willcocks reported to his brother Richard in Dublin that he had finally met a pretty girl in Muddy York. Unfortunately she was too poor for his ambitions: "Love and runaway matches may fill the belly of women but not of men."

The prevailing themes in the early pioneers' correspondence, though, were loneliness and struggle. Later, as life became easier and more settled, there were accounts of big-city balls and picnics, the arrival in villages and towns of the railway and telegraph, and tragedies large and small. On Nov. 11, 1890, Springhill Mines general manager Henry Swift wrote his daily account of events to his boss in Halifax: "Found gas, nothing serious." The next day, in the worst mining disaster Canada had yet known, Swift and 124 others died when a powerful explosion ripped through a shaft. On the whole Gray's letters yield little about the grand sweep of Canadian history: there wasn't a single mention of Confederation in any of the 1867 correspondence she found. But for the everyday moments of ordinary lives, the actual building blocks of the nation, her book is a treasure trove.

We are luckier than we realize that we can still understand the words our ancestors spoke two centuries ago. That's not the case for millions of people around the world, as documented in Mark Abley's Spoken Here (Random House). Some 6,000 languages are still used by humankind; many are down to a handful of speakers, and within a century, linguists lament, perhaps half will be gone entirely. That's thousands of unique and irreplaceable ways of looking at reality, a loss to planetary diversity as grave as the extinction of plant and animal species. Or is it? Abley is remarkable for looking at matters not just once or twice but even a third time in his exploration of the relentless ironies of linguistic politics. Languages have always died -- it's been some time since anyone held a conversation in Hittite. The Irish, who overwhelmingly speak English, remain Irish. Concerted efforts by speakers of Welsh and even Hebrew -- a dead language only a century ago -- have made their tongues flourish, while other minority languages seem bogged down in sterile quarrels over spelling.

But when it comes to Aboriginal languages, under severe threat everywhere, Abley makes a persuasive case that language is absolutely necessary for cultural survival -- "a 1-800 number to my ancestors," in the modern idiom of a Mohawk activist. Some of the stories here are unbearably sad, like that of Patrick Nudjulu, an old man who lives outside the northern Australian town of Wadeye. He's one of two people still fluent in Mati Ke, the language of a people who have lived in that area for tens of thousands of years. The other elder, a woman named Agatha Perdjert, lives in Wadeye itself. On the rare occasions Patrick comes to town, the author writes, you might think he'd look up Agatha, so they could help one another remember words, proverbs or snatches of ancient songs. But it cannot be: Agatha and Patrick are brother and sister, and Mati Ke, the culture precariously preserved in them alone, forbids brothers and sisters from conversing after puberty. "When they die," Abley writes in his elegiac book, "the soul of a language will die with them."