SaskBooks Reviews

Being Kurdish in a Hostile World by Ayub Nuri Published by University of Regina Press Review by Michelle Shaw $29.95 ISBN 9780889774940 When Ayub Nuri was a young boy, a piece of shrapnel hit his knee and cut it in half. At the time, he was sitting contentedly between his mother and grandmother threading the family’s tobacco crop. War was an ongoing part of life in Kurdistan. On this occasion, the war was between Iran and Iraq but Kurdistan had been a centre of conflict for many years. Nuri’s mother reacted first, screaming and causing the family to rush to the young boy. Nuri and his grandmother (whose face had been ripped open by the shrapnel) were taken in his uncle’s British-made Land Rover to the military hospital in the Kurdish capital of Halabja. Nuri mentions in an aside that during the war military hospitals were better equipped and had better doctors than civilian ones. It’s this juxtaposition between normal everyday life in a literal warzone that really struck me. Most of what I know about the Kurds and the Iraq conflict has been gleaned through western media. I clearly remember when the first Iraq war was going on (the…

Living Skies by Craig Hilts Published by Your Nickel’s Worth Publishing Review by Keith Foster $54.99 ISBN 978-1-988783-05-5 There’s nothing like lightning, baseball-sized hail, and tornadoes to get one’s adrenaline pumping. There’s also nothing like a serene sky after a rain to calm a viewer. Craig Hilts, in his hardcover coffee table book Living Skies, has experienced both. He invites readers to look skyward and enjoy a visual feast of pigmentation and textures, especially noticeable in the swirling colours of the aurora borealis. Some photos spread across two-pages, providing a panoramic view of prairie horizons. Occasionally Hilts combines two similar photos, merging them so precisely on facing pages that the combined photos appear as one seamless image. His more than 150 colour photos range from scenic landscapes to the tumult of angry skies. Sometimes the scenery can seem so calm while storm clouds churn above. No wonder Saskatchewan has earned the title, Land of Living Skies. Hilts notes that a green sky, eerie to behold, is usually a warning of an impending tornado and/or severe hail. He’s experienced the rapid-fire force of baseball-sized hail smashing into his vehicle, but fortunately the protective shielding he developed offered some protection. No stranger…

Holy War: Cowboys, Indians, and 9/11s by Mark Cronlund Anderson Published by University of Regina Press Review by Kris Brandhagen $27.95 ISBN 9780889774148 In his academic book, Holy War: Cowboys, Indians, and 9/11s, Mark Cronlund Anderson states that “the 9/11 event and the response to it, collectively the ‘9/11 story,’ are as old as the nation that was born fighting Native Americans.” He is uniquely positioned to take on this bold claim because of the vast extent of research used to back up his claims, and because he is an insider/outsider, being American born, but living in Canada. He asserts that “the media’s 9/11 story also derives from a deep mythical precedent: America’s frontier narrative. Its creation story. It serves up a contemporary retelling of America’s creation myth and serves the invaluable and necessary function of ritual symbolic rebirth.” It follows that school textbooks, the press, and popular culture have solidified the myth by repetition since the frontier wars. Anderson writes, “Americans have claimed divine succor and sanction for 400 years. Accordingly, the nation assumes the right to strike at its enemies with extreme force because the right of self-defense is embraced as timeless and universal.” He further states that…