“True enough, the country is calm. Calm as a morgue or a grave, would you not say? -Vaclav Havel I recall an era where progressive politics in Canada was both exciting and a little bit dangerous for the wealthy elite and the power brokers. One of the first politicians who engaged my interest … [Read more...]
Juries as the Great Democratic Hope of the Criminal Trial
The greatest lawyer of the ancient world, Cicero, proclaimed that where there is life, there is hope. It seems to me that one can adapt that saying to the inspiration for retaining the right to a jury trial in the modern world, despite all the potential hazards that individual juries might present … [Read more...]
The Book That Didn’t Bark: Forster’s Maurice
You have no doubt heard the expression “the dog that didn’t bark – a wonderful phrase emanating from an old Sherlock Holmes story by Arthur Conan Doyle. I would like to conduct a little touch of literary sleuthing and ask why E.M Forster, eminent English novelist, declined decade after decade to … [Read more...]
Lawyers in Revolutionary Times: Doctor Zhivago
A remarkable manuscript was bundled out of the Soviet Union in the late spring of 1956. An Italian Communist journalist named Sergio d’Angelo had visited Boris Pasternak to discuss possible publication of his latest work. Pasternak was the famed Russian poet and survivor of the various purges and … [Read more...]
Sisyphus Ascending: The Remarkable Career of Raja Shehadeh
I have just read a wonderful narrative by the Palestinian human rights lawyer, activist, and now writer of the first rank, Raja Shehadeh. The author lives in Ramallah, in the West Bank, which has been under occupation by Israeli forces for 51 years and counting. The book, A Rift in Time: Travels … [Read more...]
Breaking the Code, and then Breaking the Spirit
Last month marked the 20th anniversary of the landmark Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms case, (Delwyn) Vriend v. Alberta. There was some fine reporting in the Edmonton Journal and elsewhere on the case, including where Delwyn Vriend is now and what his experiences have been in the struggle … [Read more...]
Second Person Singular by Sayed Kashua: Acquiring False Identities At Great Psychic Cost
Sayed Kashua wrote his novel, Second Person Singular, as an Arab-Israeli. He has since sadly reflected on his need to leave Israel for the US, after years of trying to find a place for himself in a society that treated him and other Palestinians as second-class participants in a country dominated … [Read more...]
Orwell on Law, Order and Corruption in Burma
George Orwell was an outstanding man of letters who is also quite likely the most influential political novelist of the 20th century. Best known for his satiric animal fable Animal Farm, and the dystopian novel 1984, he began his career as an unlikely candidate for literary stardom. His first … [Read more...]
A Not Insignificant Death: The Grass is Singing
Doris Lessing left Africa – Southern Rhodesia to be precise, to journey by ship to England with the most meagre of personal possessions – a suitcase, a small sum of money and a manuscript. It was the manuscript which would transform the life of this fearless colonial from the margins of the … [Read more...]
Leonardo Padura, The Man Who Loved Dogs
Leonardo Padura is a Cuban novelist, known first and foremost as one of the most exciting crime novelists of our time. In The Man Who Loved Dogs, Padura presents us with an epic, Tolstoyan novel that mostly succeeds in the ambitious goals he has set for the work. This year marks the 100th … [Read more...]
