by Stephen T. Lewis

The lives of the members of The Band, all of whom are no longer with us, have been heavily documented. Levon Helm started it off with an excellent autobiography. Robbie Robertson wrote one that's pretty interesting. Joe Forno Jr. wrote a good book about Helm; he was also a friend of Richard Manuel, and helped him sort out his business affairs, same as he did for Helm. Steven T. Lewis has weighed in with an extensive biography of pianist, singer, songwriter, and drummer Richard Manuel.

I have one criticism of this book, and will give it to you up front; Lewis sometimes goes overboard with the flowery prose. Some examples: "Now stood Richard, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and singer, an equal member of a cadre of men who were on their way to becoming one of the most respected musical groups in the world." He described their concerts at the Fillmore East in 1969 "as close to perfection as a rock group could get." "Woodstock cemented the Band's legacy and introduced them to a magnitude of live performance previously unknown to musicians." Lewis claims that the Hawks and The Band were the best groups of their time. Well, that's his opinion, but fans of the Allman Brothers, Chicago, and Jethro Tull, just to name three, could easily disagree.

By Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair

This is the second book of a series by Kozinn and Sinclair. I reviewed the first one here. Like the first one, it's a door-stopper: 760 pages, of which 41 pages are bibliography and notes.

It isn't quite as interesting as the first one, simply because there wasn't as much that went on from 1974 to early 1980 as there was from 1969 to 1973. However, there is still a lot here of interest to hard-core McCartney and Beatles fans.

The book starts with the aftermath of the "Band on the Run" album, and the struggle to separate from Allen Klein and Apple. It covers the recording and release of "Venus and Mars", "Wings at the Speed of Sound", "London Town", "Back to the Egg", and ¨McCartney II". He also recorded a solo album by his brother, Mike McGear, assisted with an album of Buddy Holly covers by Denny Laine, and some singles by Suzy and the Red Stripes, a.k.a. Linda McCartney. For each of these projects, there are extensive details on how and where every song was recorded. Required reading for music geeks, might be boring for everyone else.

This book was published in 2008, and the author died in 2011. However, the film "A Complete Unknown" has created a resurgence of interest in Bob Dylan and the 1960's Greenwich Village scene.

I could reduce this review to one sentence by writing, if you liked "A Complete Unknown", you will like this book.

Still reading? Then, let's start with who Suze Rotolo was. She was on the cover of Dylan's second album, "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan", and the songs "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" and "Ballad in Plain D" were written about her. However, the book doesn't have all that much to say about her relationship with Dylan, other than her mother didn't like him, and she broke up with him because she got fed up with the lying and cheating. However, Rotolo was a political activist, and was definitely an influence in the social conscience songs that Dylan was writing at the time.

You can attract police attention for practicing journalism in either place.

I went to Cuba in 2014. Among the things I did there was to attend three baseball games - two in Bayamo, and one in Havana - and write stories about them. I needed some pictures to accompany the stories, so at the first one, in Bayamo, I asked one of the assistant coaches of one of the teams if I could go onto the field and shoot some pictures of his players during the pre-game warmup. He said it was OK, so onto the field I went.

Unfortunately, I caught the attention of an inmigración policeman. His job was to keep an eye on tourists, and since Bayamo doesn't get a lot of them, he had plenty of time on his hands. He disapproved of me communicating with the coaches and players; perhaps he thought I was a scout for the Mariners. He escorted me to a room under the bleachers, and, after consulting with his superior, demanded that I sign a statement acknowledging that I was in Cuba on a tourist visa, not a journalist one, and I was not to practice journalism in Cuba. (I didn't know about this distinction at the time, but had I applied for a journalist visa, it's unlikely they would have given it to me.) I had to repress the desire to tell this cop to take a long walk off of a short pier, but the reality was, had I been arrested for shooting pictures at a baseball game, no cavalry would be coming to rescue me.

There's a saying that no good deed goes unpunished. The sad thing about this incident was, my intention was to promote baseball tourism in Cuba, and then as now, Cuba is in desperate need of tourism revenue.

There's another old saying that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. A classic example of this happened to me on May 26, 2025, Memorial Day. Not in Cuba, but in Lewiston, Idaho.

I am stating up front that there is no pretense of objectivity in this review. The Chilcotin is my favourite area of British Columbia, and I had the good fortune to see a herd of the wild horses that are the subject of this book. They were magnificent.

This book addresses several topics. One of them is, where did the wild horses come from? The genetic studies show that the horses in the Brittany Triangle, an area that includes Nunsti Provincial Park, are descendants of horses brought to Mexico by Spanish colonists during the 16^th century. They were traded to First Nations further north, and this trade eventually extended to western Canada. The key point here is that they were already present when European explorers and settlers arrived in the British Columbia interior. (Mackenzie's expedition was 1792-93, and Simon Fraser's expedition was in 1808.) The wild horses east of the Brittany Triangle have a more diverse lineage; there was deliberate breeding with horses brought from Eastern Canada.

This is significant because the horses were regarded by several interests, including the Government of British Columbia, as an invasive species. Several attempts were made to eradicate them, including paying bounties for killing them. The author of this book, Wayne McCrory, worked part-time for the Xeni Gwet'in nation (one of the six Tsilhqot'in nations) in varying capacities over a period of twenty years. He debunked the "invasive species" claim on several counts. One of them was the long-standing cultural and practical connections of the Xeni Gwet'in to the horses. Another was the balance of the horse population with predators such as wolves and cougars. And as for the effect of grazing, McCrory pointed out that it's hard to argue that grazing by 2,800 wild horses has any significance compared to 24,000 cattle.

One of the candidates in the 2024 presidential election organized an uprising to storm the Capitol to prevent Congress from certifying the 2020 election result. There was a conspiracy to substitute slates of fake electors for the real ones. That candidate phoned Georgia's Secretary of State and asked him "to find 11,780 votes". He took home classified documents without any authorization, an act that would normally result in prison time for a government employee, and kept them in his bathroom. He attempted to coerce Ukraine President Zelenskyy into supporting a conspiracy theory about President Biden, an act that resulted in his first impeachment. He has been convicted of felonies for falsifying business records in the State of New York. He has been indicted for 52 charges in Florida, Georgia, and the District of Columbia. He has threatened violence against journalists and political opponents; he said that former Rep. Elizabeth Cheney should be put in front of a firing squad. During his first term, he mismanaged the COVID pandemic; he suggested drinking bleach or injecting disinfectants as a form of treatment, and later accused Dr. Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, of costing the U.S. economy "one trillion f**king dollars." He appointed three justices to the Supreme Court who lied when they said that Roe v. Wade was "settled law", and once they were on the court, they voted to overturn it. He said that Adolph Hitler "did some good things" and that he needed Hitler's generals. He has threatened to pull the US out of NATO. When the existence of Project 2025, a platform with, among other things, serious restrictions on civil liberties, was revealed, he initially claimed that he had nothing to do with it. A week later, in front of a different audience, he praised it.

This is a collection of 13 essays by Canadian anthropologist Wade Davis. There isn't any overall theme to them, other than they are all well worth reading.

Two of them, "Of War and Remembrance" and "The Crowning of Everest", cover some of the same ground as Davis' excellent book Into the Silence. That book and "Of War and Remembrance" provide the most graphic description of the horror of World War I that you will find anywhere.

The longest essay, and, in my opinion, the most important one, is "Beyond Climate Fear and Trepidation". The primary message is just how difficult it's going to be to reduce the causes of global climate change. I'll start by saying that there are some things in here that I disagree with. Davis is skeptical about electric vehicles, and I'm suspicious about the data he uses to support that point of view. I don't know why Davis gave any oxygen to Bjorn Lomborg, a non-scientist who gets paid by a Republican vulture capitalist to talk nonsense.