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, made several trips to the Chilcotin, originally at the request of the Xeni Gwet'in nation (one of the six Tsilhqot'in nations), to evaluate the situation. 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.

I have had the privilege of attending two lectures by Wade Davis, and he knows how to hold the attention of an audience. I have also read several books and magazine articles by him, and they are all excellent. Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest is especially good.

The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World originated with a CBC Massie Lecture, delivered in 2009. This book was published about the same time. If anything, the message is more important now than it was 15 years ago.

Now, Davis is a scientist. He doesn't believe that the Earth rests on the back of a very large turtle, and neither should you. He also doesn't mention that ancient cultures had some traditions such as human sacrifice and pedicide that most people find abhorrent. That's because the cultures Davis describes have managed to exist for thousands of years without killing each other, starving to death, or destroying their habitat, things that our society hasn't figured out yet. As he put it, "to acknowledge the wonder of other cultures is not to denigrate our way of life but rather to recognize with some humility that other peoples, flawed as they too may be, nevertheless contribute to our collective heritage, the human repertoire of ideas, beliefs, and adaptations that have historically allowed us as a species to thrive."

I was listening to CBC Radio Monday afternoon, and the topic was the proposal from the Federal Liberal Government to increase Canada's capital gains inclusion rate from 50% to 67% for individuals earning more than $250,000 in capital gains in a year, and on all capital gains realized by corporations and most types of trusts.

Mike de Jong, a former British Columbia cabinet minister who is now a candidate for the Conservative Party of Canada nomination in Abbotsford-South Langley, was brought in to comment on it.

What de Jong said was very predictable. He's against it, as is Official Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre and the rest of the CPC. He started off by saying that the Liberal Government is spending too much money, and should be cutting spending instead of increasing taxes.

At that point, I was wishing that I was the one asking the questions. The obvious question is, what would the CPC cut?

This is a story of two men on road trips toward Woodstock, New York in 1986. This is not the Woodstock made famous by a music festival; that was actually near Bethel, 90 km. away. This Woodstock, including nearby towns Bearsville and Saugerties, was the sometime home of Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Todd Rundgren, and Albert Grossman. Also located there is the Big Pink house, which served from 1967 to 1973 as a home and rehearsal space for The Band.

One of these two men, Klokko, is fictional. He is directionless, except that he loves music and Beatrice, his cat. He drives a 1971 Oldsmobile Delta 88. It has an old eight-track tape player (if you’re under the age of 60, Google this), and his tape collection of excellent music is a big part of his life. He especially likes the ones by The Band. He would like to have been a musician, but he never got the opportunity, or perhaps didn’t have the talent.

The other man is Richard Manuel, pianist, sometime drummer, and singer with The Band; one of the highlights of his career was “I Shall Be Released”. He had very serious drug and alcohol problems, was in several serious car accidents, and made several suicide attempts. The last one, in 1986, was successful.

There are some stories I never get tired of hearing. One of them is the formation of the Jefferson Airplane; how they were rehearsing twelve hours a day and seven days a week, because they knew that they were creating something brand new.

The early history of The Beatles is another example. How John, Paul, and later George originally got together, their apprenticeship in Hamburg, the influence of Sir George Martin, and on and on. Philip Norman has written several books that cover this territory and much more. The best known one was Shout!: The Beatles in Their Generation, originally published in 1981 and revised in 1996, but he has also written two biographies of John Lennon, one of Sir Paul McCartney, as well as Sir Elton John, Mick Jagger, Buddy Holly, Eric Clapton, and Jimi Hendrix. George Harrison: the Reluctant Beatle is his most recent work.

The prologue gives a detailed account of the “Concert for George”. If you haven’t watched this, do so. While you're at it, give “The Concert for Bangladesh” a watch, too. (More on this later.) Then, watch this rendition of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”.