SEEING THE FORESTS FOR THE TREES 

Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard, Allen Lane, $34.95. It’s a book about “discovering the wisdom of the forest” and its opening lines are startling:

For generations, my family has made its living cutting down forests. Our survival has depended on this humble trade. It is my legacy. I have cut down my fair share of trees as well.

From this, her childhood roots in the rain forests of British Columbia, days spent with her family cataloging trees for logging, begins the amazing journey of Suzanne Simard, and her intuitive early understanding that trees are not merely a source of timber and pulp, but are a complicated, interdependent circle of life.

It’s a walk in the forest. Simard holds your hand as you gingerly step into her world. Of trees, fungi, bears.

It doesn’t take long to realize that these towering giants, some thousands of years old, are self-aware, as intelligent as you and I, in their own ways.

They perceive one another. Recognize neighbours as their root systems touch and “feel” one another. They are aware of where they are, recognize dangerous pests and broadcast warnings in real time to their fellow beings. They mount defences. It’s a battle for survival. It’s also a nurturing, loving neighbourhood of families.

And, at the centre of it all, the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful forces that connect and sustain the others that surround them.

Trees compare and compete with one another, characteristics hitherto ascribed to human intelligence. They evolve by competing with one another – and also by helping one another.

Here’s a scene in Simard’s office. A lab report has just arrived. I sat in disbelief. Paper birch and Douglas fir were trading photosynthetic carbon back and forth through the network. Even more stunning, Douglas fir received far more carbon from paper birch than it donated in return.

Forestry is a male-dominant industry, Simard faces her share of doubters and naysayers – because of her gender and entrenched industry interests where profits come first.

But mercifully, science is a dominion of research, facts and demonstrable proofs. Her work becomes increasingly hard to refute. The prestigious Nature magazine calls her discovery the wood-wide web.

From felling trees to hugging them (for the want of a better description), Simard’s life comes a full circle.

Suzanne Simard takes the reader through the highs and the lows in the life of a forest – and shares her own professional triumphs and personal heartbreaks with equal frankness. It’s an intimate portrait of a world. Her world.

In the end, one can’t help but see the forest for the trees.

A GAY ROM-COM

The Other Man by Farhad J Dadyburjor, Lake Union, US$14.95. Ved Mehra – who is often compared to George Clooney – has been blessed with good looks and good fortune. He has it all. But is miserable from a recent breakup and still being in the closet.

He resists parental pressure for as long as he can.

“I’m still not coming over to meet Guruji,” Ved insisted, hoping that it would end the entire matter.

“Well, in that case, whichever girl Pamela aunty has in mind for you.”

With that, his mother hung up the phone.

And with that, the formidable aunty network swung into action.

Ved agrees to an introduction to a suitable girl, setting off a chain of events. It builds up to an almost Hindi movie style climax with secrets spilling out and everything being made right in the end.

Described as “most likely the first gay rom-com set in modern-day Mumbai”, The Other Man is a funny, big-hearted book about a man searching for the courage to be himself and for love.

AN ETERNAL TRUTH

That Good Night by Sunita Puri, Viking, $36. As the American-born daughter of immigrants, Dr Sunita Puri knew from a young age that the gulf between her parents’ experiences and her own was impossible to bridge, save for two elements: medicine and spirituality.

She witnessed the tension between medicine’s impulse to preserve life at all costs and a spiritual embrace of life’s temporality. As a physician, she found herself drawn to questions with no easy answers. Why were patients’ deaths considered medicine’s failure? What did doctors understand when patients used words like fighter and miracle? She was drawn to palliative medicine, to understand the border between medical intervention and end-of-life care.

Much like Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, this book explores some of the hardest decisions one might have to make for ourselves or loved ones with a gentle touch.

She begins with a quote from the Bhagvad Gita:

Therefore, because death stirs people to seek answers to important spiritual questions, it becomes the greatest servant of humanity, rather than its most feared enemy.

SISTERHOOD

I’ll Be Strong For You by Nasim Marashi, Astra House, $34.

Poupeh Missaghi’s translation from the Persian brings alive the beauty and the ache of I’ll Be Strong For You.

Where in our origin story and with what force did our foundation crack so deep that, without even realizing it and with just one breeze, we crumbled down on top of ourselves, unable to get back on our feet?

Against the backdrop of Tehran’s loud, bustling streets and the at times suffocating stillness and forced intimacy of their family homes, three young women struggle to find their footing as they enter adulthood.

Comparisons with Reading Lolita in Tehran are bound to arise. Suffice to say, this books takes one back to Azar Nafisi’s world skillfully and vividly.

I SPY

Secrets of State by Matthew Palmer, Putnam, $35.95. Sam Trainor stumbles upon an intelligence anomaly – the transcript of a phone conversation about the fastest ways to upend the delicate political balance keeping India and Pakistan from all-out war.

He believes the conversation can’t have occurred. As he digs deeper, he uncovers more than just bad intel. Someone is deliberately twisting the intelligence to stoke the simmering conflict between the nuclear-armed rivals.

Matthew Palmer, a veteran of the US Foreign Service, comes up with a page-turner that reads like a script  for the Mission Impossible movies.

JUNK FILE

Can I Recycle This? by Jennie Romer, Penguin, $29. Recycling rules vary widely from place to place and exceptions and caveats can leave us scratching our heads.

Can I recycle my pizza box? It’s a little greasy...

Can I recycle my paper coffee cup?

Can I recycle the netted bag my clementines come in?

Jennie Romer, one of the leading experts on single-use plastic reduction, takes readers on a quick and informative tour of how recycling actually works and answers questions about what can or cannot be recycled.

And shares scary information such as the fact that only 9 per cent of the plastic ever produced has been recycled.

This is the book for all of us who stand with an item in our hands, wondering if it goes in the green bin, the blue bin or in a black garbage bag – for everyone who wants to do right by the environment in other words.

THE LAST TREE STANDING

The Last Tree by Emily Haworth-Booth, Pavilion, $22.95. A cautionary tale about how a group of friends that lived and played among the trees in a forest needed wood to stay warm and build shelter. Then they needed more wood to build porches when summer returned and there weren’t enough trees to provide shade.

Soon it seemed the more wood they took, the more they needed to take. For ladders, tables, chairs, fences...until only one tree was left.

Would their children be able to save the last tree?

TEEN REVIEW

By KRUPA DAVE

 A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen, Neeland Media, $7.85. A Doll’s House is a three-act play by Norwegian playwight Henrik Ibsen written in 1879 that looks closely into patriarchal society.

The story follows Nora – a perfect wife and mother. The story takes a turn when someone reveals Nora’s darkest secret – the crime of forgery. As the play unfolds, the readers realize the truth of being a woman in a misogynistic society.

It’s hard to critique the morals and standards of society more than a century ago. But when her husband is made aware of Nora’s crime, his response proves his dominance as a male. His lines objectify his wife:

There is something indescribably wonderful and satisfying for a husband in knowing that he has forgiven his wife – forgiven her unreservedly, from the bottom of his heart. It means that she has become his property in a double sense; he has, as it were, brought into a world anew; she is now not only his wife but also his child.

Realizing that she is never treated as his wife, or as an equal, that she is manipulated like a doll her whole life, Nora leaves her husband and children behind in search of her own identity with a slam of the door.

The characters are based on Ibsen’s friend, Laura Kieler and her husband Victor. Though Ibsen was compelled to write an alternative ending where Nora is persuaded to stay after seeing her children, showing that she gives her husband another chance, his message for an egalitarian society was portrayed through all future adaptations of the play.

• Krupa Dave is a youth volunteer at Brampton Library.