The fragile future of work

page 22

$6.50 Vol. 19, No. 6 July/August 2011

Keith Oatley

Fictions mind-altering effects

A L So I N Th I S I S S Ue

Christopher Moore

Our forgotten founding fathers

Pamela Palmater

Judging aboriginals
Doug Saunders

The rights of refugees

Davi

Arm chair geta ways Pick ! s by

N s, Jes atalie Z . sica Gran and t mor e

Publications Mail Agreement #40032362 Return undeliverable Canadian addresses to LRC, Circulation Dept. PO Box 8, Station K Toronto, ON M4P 2G1

PLUS: non-fiction Donald Songer on the Supreme Court + James Coutts on prairie political cultures + Florin Diacu on the West Coasts seismic future + Donald Dutton on domestic abuse fiction Joseph Kertes reviews David Homels Midway and Norm Ravvins The Joyful Child + Mark Fenske reviews The Evolution of Inanimate Objects poetry Victoria Mohr-Blakeney + Moez Surani + gillian Harding-Russell + Tim Mook Sang

Literary Review of Canada 170 Bloor Street West, Suite 710 Toronto ON M5S 1T9 email: info@reviewcanada.ca reviewcanada.ca T: 416-531-1483 F: 416-531-1612
Charitable number: 848431490RR0001. To donate, visit reviewcanada.ca/support

Vol. 19, No. 6 July/august 2011

Editor

Bronwyn Drainie editor@lrcreview.com

3 The Rights of Refugees

A review of Frontier Justice: The Global Refugee Crisis and What to Do About It, by Andy Lamey, and Cultures of Border Control: Schengen and the Evolution of European Frontiers, by Ruben Zaiotti Doug Saunders

18 Brainchild Bio
A review of The Evolution of Inanimate Objects: The Life and Collected Works of Thomas Darwin (18571879), by Harry Karlinsky Mark J. Fenske

Contributing EditorS

Molly Peacock Anthony Westell

ASSoCiAtE Editor

Robin Roger
PoEtry Editor

Moira MacDougall
CoPy Editor

5 The Nine
A review of Mighty Judgment: How the Supreme Court of Canada Runs Your Life, by Philip Slayton Donald R. Songer

19 Middle Men
A review of Midway, by David Homel, and The Joyful Child, by Norman Ravvin Joseph Kertes

Madeline Koch
onlinE EditorS

Diana Kuprel, Jack Mitchell, Donald Rickerd, C.M.

ProofrEAdErS

20 Our Hidden History

An essay Christopher Moore

7 Why Fiction Is Good for You

An essay Keith Oatley

Diana Bayko, Mike Lipsius, Alyssa McLeod, Heather Schultz, Robert Simone, Rob Tilley, Jeannie Weese
rESEArCh

22 Free-Fall Employment
A review of Working Without Commitments: The Health Effects of Precarious Employment, by Wayne Lewchuk, Marlea Clarke and Alice de Wolff Rachel Pulfer

Rob Tilley
PubliCity And MArkEting CoordinAtor

11 Courting Controversy
A review of Bad Medicine: A Judges Struggle for Justice in a First Nations Community, by John Reilly Pamela D. Palmater

Naoko Asano publicity@reviewcanada.ca

EditoriAl ASSiStAnt

Gavin McGown
dESign

14 Imaginary Getaways
Ten armchair excursions Bronwyn Drainie, Antanas Sileika, Lesley Krueger, Alexander MacLeod, Natalie Zemon Davis, Patrick Watson, Jessica Grant, Kyo Maclear, Donna Bailey Nurse, Robert Charles Wilson

24 The Big One

A review of Cascadias Fault: The Deadly Earthquake That Will Devastate North America, by Jerry Thompson Florin Diacu

James Harbeck
AdVErtiSing/SAlES

Michael Wile ads@lrcreview.com

MAnAging Editor And ASSoCiAtE PubliShEr

26 Three Provinces, Three Cultures

A review of Code Politics: Campaigns and Cultures on the Canadian Prairies, by Jared J. Wesley Jim Coutts

Alastair Cheng
PubliShErS

16 To a Wood Tick
A poem Gillian Harding-Russell

16 The Night I Slept in Your Throat (an excerpt)

A poem Victoria Mohr-Blakeney

28 An Ongoing Battle
A review of Violence Against Women: Myths, Facts, Controversies, by Walter S. DeKeseredy Don Dutton

Mark Lovewell lovewell@ryerson.ca Helen Walsh h.walsh@reviewcanada.ca

AdViSory CounCil

17 Bombay Morning
A poem Moez Surani

30 Letters and Responses

Mel Cappe, H.V. Nelles, Delia Fagundes, Neil Seeman and Patrick Luciani

17 The Mosquito
A poem Tim Mook Sang

Michael Adams, Ronald G. Atkey, P.C., Q.C., Alan Broadbent, C.M., Chris Ellis, Drew Fagan, James Gillies, C.M., Carol Hansell, John Honderich, C.M., Sandy Houston, Donald Macdonald, P.C., C.C., Trina McQueen, Susan Reisler, Grant Reuber, O.C., Don Rickerd, C.M., Rana Sarkar, Mark Sarner, Bernard Schiff, Reed Scowen
PoEtry SubMiSSionS
For poetry submission guidelines, please see <reviewcanada.ca>.

LRC design concept by Jackie Young/INK Founded in 1991 by P.A. Dutil

The LRC is published 10 times a year by the Literary Review of Canada Inc.

AnnuAl SubSCriPtion rAtES

Cover art and pictures throughout the issue by Wes Tyrell.

Wes Tyrell is a Toronto-based illustrator and cartoonist. He can be reached at <westyrell.com>.
From time to time, the LRC may allow carefully selected organizations to send mail to subscribers, offering products or services that may be of interest. If you do not wish to receive such correspondence, please contact our Subscriber Service department at literaryreview@cstonecanada.com, or call 416-932-5081, or mail P.O. Box 8, Station K, Toronto ON M4P 2G1.

Individuals in Canada $59/year. (Libraries and institutions in Canada $72/year.) Canadian prices include GST/HST. Outside Canada, please add $10/year to prices above if paying in U.S. funds, or $30/year if paying in Canadian funds, for extra postage.

SubSCriPtionS And CirCulAtion

Literary Review of Canada P.O. Box 8, Station K, Toronto ON M4P 2G1 literaryreview@cstonecanada.com tel: 416-932-5081 reviewcanada.ca 2011 The Literary Review of Canada. All rights, including translation into other languages, are reserved by the publisher in Canada, the United States, Great Britain and all other countries participating in the Universal Copyright Convention, the International Copyright Convention and the Pan-American Copyright Convention. Nothing in this publication may be reproduced without the written permission of the publisher. ISSN 1188-7494 The Literary Review of Canada is indexed in the Canadian Literary Periodicals Index and the Canadian Index and is distributed by Disticor and Magazines Canada.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Periodical Fund (CPF) for our publishing activities.

Funding Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the assistance of the OMDC Magazine Fund, an initiative of Ontario Media Development Corporation.

reviewcanada.ca

Literary Review of Canada

The Big One

Credible new studies show that British Columbia may be in for the continents worst megadisaster.
FloriN Diacu

Cascadias Fault: The Deadly earthquake That Will Devastate North America Jerry Thompson HarperCollins 329 pages, hardcover ISBN 9781554684663

n February 4, 1975, an earthquake of magnitude 7.3 struck the city of Haicheng in northeast China, killing more than 2,000 people, injuring almost 28,000 and damaging 90 percent of the buildings. In spite of this tragic outcome, the local authorities claimed victory. Six hours before the event, seismologists had warned about the disaster, and most inhabitants stayed outdoors. Had this prediction not been made, some 150,000 people may have died during the cataclysm. The news pleased people in Chile, Japan, Tibet and other areas of the world recently touched by major earthquakes. But their hopes for a safer future were short-lived. On the night of July 28, 1976, a magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck the city of Tangshan, east of Beijing, without warning. How many people perished is not known. Some sources put the number at 250,000; others indicate more than twice as many. The success in Haicheng was never repeated, and later proved to have been a lucky overlap of events. In the late 1960s, the State Seismological Bureau in China had identified the province of Liaoning, where Haicheng is situated, as a seismicprone zone for the next few years. Consequently the region was carefully monitored. Several tectonic movements, including a land shift in the nearby Bohai Sea area, led in 1974 to a forecast for a major earthquake within two years. An intense educational campaign kept the population on alert, so when some experts issued a warning after several foreshocks, a combination of organized and spontaneous activity drove people out of their houses. At 7:36 p.m. local time, when the earthquake struck, most citizens were neither at work nor asleep, and they stayed outdoors. An analysis published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America in 2005 called the Haicheng prediction a blend of confusion, empirical analysis, intuitive judgment, and good luck. The best predictions seismologists can do these days are probabilistic. On February 2, 2007, for instance, they warned of a higher than usual risk

Florin Diacu, a mathematics professor at the University of Victoria, is the author of the awardwinning Megadisasters: The Science of Predicting the Next Catastrophe, published by Princeton University Press in 2009.

of a strong temblor in Cascadia, the region that comprises parts of British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and California. A team of seismologists at the Geological Survey of Canada had noticed a series of slight tremors along Vancouver Island. This phenomenon was not new to them. They had registered it every 14 months since 1999. During the 10 to 14 days these tremors take place, big earthquakes are more likely than usual. Garry Rogers, one of the senior scientists on the team, pointed out that there is no reason to panic. He came up with a metaphor to suggest the level of danger. We drive cars knowing all the time we could have an accident. We also accept that collisions are more likely during intense traffic. Right now, Rogers said in 2007, we are in the middle of rush hour. Understanding the likelihood of a catastrophic earthquake in this region was not an easy feat. In Cascadias Fault: The Deadly Earthquake That Will Devastate North America, journalist Jerry Thompson describes how seismologists discovered the danger that threatens five large citiesSacramento, Portland, Seattle, Victoria and Vancouverand the communities spread among them. The effects of such an earthquake depend not only on its magnitude and the distance from the source, but also on the geological conditions. For Victoria and Vancouver, for instance, we have maps that depict the levels of risk, which vary considerably with the location. Apart from that, we know that wood houses may survive even large temblors, but it is not clear whether the tall buildings in downtown Vancouver and Seattle would withstand the resonance effects that may occur during the three to six minutes an earthquake of magnitude nine, or higher, lasts. As late as the 1970s, scientists believed that Cascadia was free of such disasters. What made them change their minds reads like a detective story in Thompsons book. They found out recently that some 20 such events took place in the past ten millennia, the last one hitting the region on January 26, 1700, producing a tsunami documented in Japan and recorded in the oral tradition of British Columbias First Nations. Thompson describes with masterly skill the events that led to this scientific breakthrough. A point he presents is whether these earthquakes cluster in time, an issue Simon Winchester also touches on in his foreword to Cascadias Fault. In fact, mathematicians have known for some centuries now that all probabilistic events cluster: it is very unlikely that they occur at equal time intervals. In spite of the books suggestion that some mysterious laws may lurk behind the timing of these earthquakes, the data do not justify any pattern. No useful predictions can be based on any statistical analysis. Thompson has dealt with catastrophes as a journalist and filmmaker for many years, and thus has had the opportunity to meet and interview scores of scientists who specialize in the tectonics of Cascadia. Since he lives near Vancouver, the

subject concerns him directly. His passion for it pervades his well-crafted writing. He also weaves science with stories about the people who make it and those who have witnessed extreme events in other parts of the world. Most of Thompsons rendering of science is accurate, showing a good understanding of what he learned from experts in seismology, fluid dynamics, radiocarbon and tree dating, topography, civil engineering, GPS tracking and other fields he encountered in his investigations. In a few places, however, he is not on top of his research. For instance, he states that an earthquake of magnitude 9.5 is more than 32 times stronger than an earthquake of magnitude 8.1. He founds his claim on the fact that a onepoint increase on the magnitude scale corresponds to approximately 32 times more energy. However, 9.58.1=1.4, which implies that the former earthquake is about 126 times stronger than the latter. Moreover, this number does not follow from what some studies have estimated, as Thompson writes, but from some simple mathematics.1 Fortunately, such slips are so rare that they do not diminish his achievements. The books strongest point is the convincing presentation of the scientific arguments that deem Cascadia to be North Americas most dangerous tectonic zone, implying that the next catastrophic earthquake will be the largest megadisaster ever encountered on the new continent. As a mathematician, I do not accept the truth of any statement, the more so of a huge one as this, without good arguments, which means that I must see why there is no other possible explanation for some established facts. Therefore I appreciate the efforts seismologists took to demonstrate, beyond any doubt, that Cascadia went through dramatic earthquakes in the past and will experience them in the future. Thompson definitely understands the importance of getting the proof right. He also advises you what to do when the Big One strikes. He tells you, for instance, to brace for a tsunami after a large earthquake if you are near the coast. Be informed about the evacuation routes; do not wait to see the wave or hear the warning siren, but move to higher ground immediately. Act quickly to save your life. Cascadias Fault is an engaging volume, which conveys how important science and mathematics are for survival. I learned many things from it, and, at times, I could not put it down. This book is a mustread for every Cascadian and for all those who want to be up to date with the latest research about tsunamis and earthquakes.

Note
1 The difference in energy between earthquakes of magnitudes M and m, with M larger than m, is given by 103(M-m)/2. This formula explains, in particular, why an earthquake of magnitude 9 is 1,000 times stronger than an earthquake of magnitude 7.

24

reviewcanada.ca

Literary Review of Canada