Bookworm, no. 156
John Zada reviews Chris A. Rutkowski’s “Canada’s UFO Secrets.” Greg Hudson on Mark Abley’s “Numb.” Inside the July/August issue.
Canada’s UFO Secrets: Disclosing Government Files on What Is Happening in Our Skies
Chris A. Rutkowski
Dundurn Press
256 pages, softcover and ebook
Chris Rutkowski’s Canada’s UFO Secrets is a comprehensive survey of UFO phenomena in Canada. Despite its suggestive title, it is not an exposé on otherworldly visitors. Its central subject is how bureaucrats, politicians, scientists, the military, and aviation authorities have handled sightings over the past eighty years. Rutkowski stresses that an unidentified flying object—sometimes called an unexplained aerial phenomenon these days—is merely an occurrence or object not known at the time of reporting, rather than proof of extraterrestrial origin. Most instances are explainable. Nonetheless, UFOs matter, Rutkowski argues, because people keep seeing them. They require attention in the name of airspace security.
Thanks to institutional ambivalence and overlapping mandates, Canadian UFO policy has always been fragmented and ad hoc. At various times, the Royal Canadian Air Force, Transport Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and others have investigated the subject—albeit skeptically. Reports were frequently shunted between organizations. Some were filed away, while others were explained, dismissed, or handed off to independent investigators like Rutkowski.
The author occupies an interesting position in this history. He began as an astronomy student in Manitoba in the 1970s. Because government agencies were uncomfortable owning the subject, Rutkowski became a kind of unofficial civilian clearinghouse for reports. UFOs may not reveal anything sensational about life outside our planet, he writes, but they can tell us much about institutions, the earth sciences, and the psychology of human perception and belief. He advocates for better and more transparent reporting mechanisms and a public conversation that is less conspiratorial. Because the truth really is out there.
—John Zada
Numb: The Politics of Overwhelm
Mark Abley
Baraka Books
102 pages, softcover and ebook
In Numb: The Politics of Overwhelm, the poet, journalist, and editor Mark Abley must discuss the barrage of depressing news that leads to numbness without inspiring the same in his readers. The list of distressing realities he cites, which cause media consumers to shut down emotionally, is long and predictable: Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, climate breakdown, economic fractures, artificial intelligence, and, of course, an American president with authoritarian tendencies. Abley wades through these issues but manages to avoid too much heaviness by keeping a brisk pace.
This is not a self-help book: “If you’re looking for ‘Ten Easy Ways to Stave Off Numbness,’ you will search here in vain.” Still, Abley manages to offer some strategies to help alleviate our shared problem. He points to the example of a zebra in a London Zoo in the 1870s. Looking at a photograph of this long-dead animal, Abley recognizes its vacant stare. It had become numb, and it’s no mystery why. It was trapped in a tiny enclosure, away from its home and herd, without another to keep it company. Don’t be like that zebra, Abley urges: touch grass, participate in a community, and, most of all, choose to resist in any small way you can. “Resistance demands a capacity to imagine,” he writes. It requires hope.
Such sage advice makes for a cathartic read. But even as a slim work, Numb feels padded out in places. Abley appeals to experts and activists, which makes sense, but he just as often quotes friends and acquaintances. While these lay folks say some interesting things, they lack the weight of authority, leaving us to question why they were chosen to speak over literally anyone else.
—Greg Hudson
Inside the July/August Issue
“Trading Fate reels off the ‘wins’ for ‘Team Britain’ that ultimately ‘saved’ British Columbia for Canada. It is natural to read today’s nation-state back into the past and to celebrate the stages of its apparently inevitable formation. But if we leave Graeme Menzies’s chipper patriotism aside, some of these wins look like disasters.” Michael Ledger-Lomas considers how a province avoided annexation.
“Like most of Johnston’s fiction, the book is sad and funny, but at times you’re not quite sure which.” Tom Jokinen reviews Wayne Johnston’s latest family drama, The Novice of Holloway Hall.
“Those in her generation are so glued to their devices, where actual pornography is but a click away, that there’s something charming about imagining them finding subversion in the stacks. More plausibly, this ban is just the latest episode in the MAGA-fication of Alberta politics, as the UCP imports American-style culture wars by catering to anti-vaxxers and putting limits on the school sports trans kids can play.” Amanda Perry on the danger of graphic novels.
And much more!
I love this!