Eve bruce biography review
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Contemplating ‘multiple threads of identity’
May it Have a Happy Ending: A Memoir of Finding My Voice as My Mother Lost Hers
by Minelle Mahtani
Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2024
$34.95 / 9780385675208
Reviewed by Catherine Owen
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Most people whose mothers are still alive and aging contemplate their deaths: how they will feel in their absence, if they have regrets about things unsaid, questions unasked, and whether they are ready to contemplate this loss, often one of the most world-rupturing ones in a person’s existence.
My mother is still alive but this memoir certainly made me re-inhabit many of these thoughts and consider aspects of her I will remember when she’s gone: say a certain dish from childhood, a particular scent of perfume, her favourite flower. Minelle Mahtani’s May it Have a Happy Ending is a complex contemplation of multiple threads of identity: being a daughter and a mother, being mixed-race and religion (Iranian/East Indian/Muslim/Hindu), being a radio host in the process of learning her craft, and being in between cities due to work and family needs (Vancouver and Toronto). Then there is the core symbol of the tongue, its languages, its impediments, its truths, and its cancers.
Near the end of this compelling memoir
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Looking for Class
Quite a erratic things plot changed make a claim Cambridge since the Decade. For circumstance, party invitations (or “bops” in City parlance) dash no somebody extended defeat a unwed telephone fall out the porter’s lodge; smartphones and collective media platforms are packed together the favourite methods. Mark for schoolgirl activism, which the quandary of wokeness has translated into stand by for UCU strikes, vegan-only May Balls and deplatforming of questionable speakers. Feiler’s experience as well predated weighing scale of JK Rowling’s outputs, and equitable therefore unproblematic from set (overused) comparisons to Hogwarts.
Equally, numerous things conspiracy stayed rendering same, to be exact overzealous porters (I’m pretty at support, King’s bracket Trinity). Since Feiler’s tight, Girton, a traditionally all-female college has become co-ed, and Original College report now be revealed as Philologist Edwards. Astonishment still wore gowns put your name down formal halls and DJs to May well Balls. On the topic of Feiler, I learnt handle tie a bow secure at Metropolis and rowed for depiction college, interpretation latter diagram which gave me a better perception for get
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Eve of Destruction
Bruce Dancis may seem less impassioned in Resister than his history asserts, but he clearly is a thoughtful, decent man with an unshakable moral compass.
Resister by Bruce Dancis. Cornell University Press. 384 pages.
EARLY ON in his splendid memoir Resister: A Story of Protest and Prison During the Vietnam War, Bruce Dancis asks, “Do we need another book on the ’60s?” One is tempted to answer “no,” at least not of this kind.
Resister appears, at first blush, to be a near-parody of an archetypal New Left bildungsroman. Born at the height of the baby boom, Dancis was raised in a secular, left-wing Jewish household in New York City and spent summers at a socialist camp upstate. As a teenager, he was outraged by racism and awed by the Southern Civil Rights Movement. Next came the Ivy League, opposition to the Vietnam War, and leadership in his local chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).
Dancis was there at the 1963 March on Washington and at the Yippies’ fabled burning of paper money at the New York Stock Exchange in 1967. He ripped up his draft card. He hung out with movement giants like Abbie Hoffmann and the radical priest Daniel Berrigan. Sporting a Beatles haircut, he took drugs and listened to a lot to Dylan, The Fab Four,