Blog

Gosh, that was some “penitential pilgrimage,” wasn’t it? Now that his visit to Canada is over, Pope Francis must be counting his blessings. After all, the historic and long-awaited papal apology on native land—an act of contrition for the terrible injustices that Indigenous children experienced in Church-run residential schools—went off pretty much as he might have planned it. His Holiness enjoyed saturation media coverage during a slow news week in ...

The people knew nothing about Putin. And in three months he became president. Of course, we thought it was cool. We thought we’d saved the country from the Communists, from Primakov and Luzhkov. But now it’s not clear which outcome would have been worse. —Former Kremlin banker Sergei Pugachev, quoted in Putin’s People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on The West, by Catherine Belton (Farrar, Straus ...

After a first pandemic year in which I buried myself in novels and non-fiction for much of the time I wasn’t working, I didn’t expect to read more books in 2021. But that’s what happened. What follows is a sampling, with the usual eclectic mix of subject matter. If you’re looking for titles about the world’s biggest health issue, though, you’ve come to the wrong place: I didn’t read a ...

It’s only in uncertainty that we’re naked and alive.                                                                                                                        —Peter Gabriel, ...

May 28, 2021 It’s a deal! I’m very pleased to announce that Marc Côté and Cormorant Books will be publishing my first novel, Double Karma, in Spring 2023. The publishing deal was posted on Quill & Quire’s website on May 27 with the following notice: “Cormorant Books’ Marc Côté has acquired world, dramatic, and audio rights to Daniel Gawthrop’s Double Karma. The first novel from the five-time nonfiction author is ...

More than two months into the unfolding nightmare of Burma’s latest military dictatorship, a grim new reality has become apparent to the people of this country, also known as Myanmar, and to others around the world who have been following events there with growing concern: the longer the national army (Tatmadaw) keeps killing innocent civilians and otherwise terrorizing the population while the United Nations does nothing, the more likely the ...

February 24th is National Pink Shirt Day in Canada, an occasion for schools and workplaces, teachers and students, parents and their children to raise awareness about the problem of bullying by wearing pink T-shirts in solidarity with its victims. Bullying is generally defined as a form of aggression that involves a power imbalance: the person doing the bullying has some kind of power—physical strength, a position of authority—over his or ...

Change has come to stay in Burma, but the question is whether a transfer of power will come through peaceful elections or by violence…Either way, the general consensus in Burma in the spring of 1990 is that the movement towards democracy which began exactly two years ago is irreversible.
—Bertil Lintner, “Outrage” (1990) One morning in Rangoon during the Fall of 2013, as heavy sheets of monsoon rain pelted the ...

Writing about some of the books I’ve read over the past twelve months feels a bit strange, as 2020 has seemed like two different years: the one that began on January 1 and the one that began in mid-March, when the world awoke to the reality of COVID-19 and nothing was the same again. Steeped in isolation by pandemic distancing protocols, we’ve all had much more time to read while ...

Dear Daniel, How you love your tunes! Raised in a musical family, you took your first steps to the Beatles’ “Twist and Shout” and got into many different sounds, from Tchaikovsky to Sinatra to Edith Piaf. But rock and roll is your passion and you are, after all, fourteen. So here you are at boarding school in 1978, and your house mate, S., a kid from Piedmont, California (part of ...

The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century
By Thant Myint U
Norton, 288 pp In all my years of writing and journalism, the only time I recall ever being turned down for an interview at an arts event was when Thant Myint-U, pre-eminent historian on Burma and grandson of U Thant, third Secretary-General of the United Nations (1961-71), snubbed me before ...

So, they’re really doing it. On August 1—a time of year when most players are on golf courses, water skis, or houseboats, enjoying a final month of freedom before the next season’s training camp—twenty-four of the National Hockey League’s thirty-one teams will begin competing for the 2020 Stanley Cup. At least, that’s the plan until the realities of a global pandemic take over. Yes, at a time when U.S. deaths ...