HE’S GOT GAME!

One Game At A Time by Harnarayan Singh, McClelland & Stewart, $32. BoninoBoninoBonino! Ask a hockey fan if they have heard the wonderfully electric call of Nick Bonino’s overtime-winning goal from the 2016 Stanley Cup final and they will almost surely answer with a resounding yes!

That’s because video clips of the Hockey Night in Canada Punjabi broadcast immediately went viral, amplifying the profile of Harnarayan Singh, the voice behind the call.

One Game At A Time is the story of how the boy in a turban got to be a part of a game he loves when his dad was the only hero he had growing up who wore a turban to work, and as a teen, he watched the Sikh community being caught up in the anti-immigrant rhetoric that swept the US and Canada in the wake of September 11.  

But none of that came in the way of his love for hockey and the little boy who called imaginary games with a toy microphone – there’s the cutest photograph of him doing that! – would go on to interpret the game for thousands of viewers. The vocabulary he developed with his team for the show was embraced by the community. Chapared shot (for slapshot), in particular, is a big hit.

It is also the story of his love for playing the tabla and for kirtan, both of which he continues to make the time for. He has played on stage with legends of the kirtan world like Bhai Jiwan Singh Ji, Bhai Niranjan Singh Jawaddi and Bittu Ji.

“It was something I could definitely have made a career in, but mom said it was something I should do as seva, not get paid for it,” he said in an interview.

This faith in seva informs all of his work and his response to situations as he shares how he overcame the social and cultural hurdles and broke through the long-standing barriers and biases of the sport.

I don’t play or follow hockey but I loved this book full of heart and humour.

Singh blends his unabashed love of hockey with a refreshing and necessary positive message about what it means to be a Canadian in the world, reminding us of hockey’s power to unite.

• More on Harnarayan Singh here.

WORLDS APART

Between The World And Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Text Publishing. The story of race in America is a brutally simple one, written on flesh: it is the story of the black body, exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, still disproportionately threatened, locked up and killed in the streets.

What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? How can America reckon with its fraught social history?

Between The World And Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer those questions, presented in the form of a letter to his 16-year-old son. Racism is a visceral experience, he writes. “It dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscles, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this.”

Coates grew up in a world very different from what he saw on television shows. A world in which, “children did not regularly fear for their bodies”. While not grasping the relation between that world and his own, he was, nonetheless, aware of a cosmic injustice, “an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape”.

His parents pushed him “away from second-hand answers – even the answers they themselves believed”, pointing towards books to seek his own answers. That vast knowledge gleaned from a galaxy of authors, he distills into this slim book, sharing his own experience of growing up Black in America.

Serious history was the West, and the West was white. This was all distilled for me in a quote I once read from the novelist Saul Bellow....“Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?” Bellow quipped.

It was not until much later that he discovered the answer in an essay by Ralph Wiley.

“Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,” wrote Wiley. “Unless you find profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.”

First published in 2015, the book is prescient in addressing the issue of the so-called police reform. 

You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity, training and body cameras. These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is a real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them.

It’s gut-wrenching to even begin to imagine what those growing up in a home where the parent says the choice lies between him beating his child or the police doing it must be like. To beat your child to prevent him being broken by the system.

Or to be a parent and watch the fear wash over your child’s face when you lunge to protect him from a violent act.

I remembered someone standing off to the side there, bearing witness to more fury than he had ever seen from me – you.

This book, as Toni Morrison says, is required reading.

 A TOWN CALLED MARIPOSA

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town by Stephen Leacock, Penguin Random House, $22. I don’t know whether you know Mariposa. If not, it is of no consequence, for if you know Canada at all, you are probably well acquainted with a dozen towns just like it.

Stephen Leacock’s Mariposa is not a real town, but the characters in this place are everyday Canadians. Here you will meet the local priest and the politician, the entrepreneur and the braggart, the barber with endless stories, the strict judge and romancing couple.

As fresh, funny, and insightful today as when it was first published in 1912, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town made me want to break free from the pandemic restrictions and go for a long drive.

As Leacock sums it up in the preface, ours is, after all, “a land of hope and sunshine where little towns spread their square streets and their maple trees beside placid lakes almost within echo of the primaeval forest”.

EXPLAIN LIKE I’M FIVE

A Very Modern Dictionary by Tobias Anthony, Smith Street Books, $19.95. The transformation of language can often defy logic, writes Tobias Anthony in his introduction.
Contemporary usage of ‘literally’ is a perfect case study: the word has now come to replace ‘figuratively’, despite its original meaning being the polar opposite.

“It would make Shakespeare hang his head in shame, but that’s the world in which we communicate, so we best keep up, right?”

And to that end, Anthony presents a fun and fascinating collection of 600 words and expressions you never knew you didn’t know.

To wit:

ATM. At the moment. Common in all digital communication. No, Grandpa, it has nothing to do with an automated teller machine. Who even uses cash any more?

B3. Blah, blah, blah.

CSL. Can’t stop laughing.

And so on, right up until ZOMG, a sarcastic variant of OMG.

There are some old ones, too, that I was surprised to find in the collection. Are there still people who don’t know that AKA stands for Also Known As? Or that some of us learnt to refer to money as bread from the hippies?

And then there’s bee-tee-dubs. Just when you got the hang of BTW for by the way, they change it on you. Which, as Anthony writes,  is not only longer to type, it’s also completely idiotic.

He helpfully points out that parents reading this book might tap into some woke lingo and kids might want to highlight certain phrases that they’d rather their parents refrain from using in the company of their friends!

As for me, I’m tempted to adopt ELI5 (Explain like I’m five) when confronted with some of the abbreviations!

GET A LIFE

A New History of Life by Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink, Bloomsbury, $34.95. Our understanding of our world dates back to Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein.

Peter Ward and Joe Kirschvink seek to show that some of our long-held beliefs about the history of life could be wrong.

The development of life was not a stately, gradual process, they argue. Catastrophe shaped life`s history more than all other forces combined – from upheavals that caused the sudden extinction of dinosaurs to the Ice Ages and the oxygenation of earth.

Did life arrive on earth form Mars? Life consists of carbon, but what role have its silent partners oxygen, hydrogen sulphide and carbon dioxide played? Should we think of evolution in terms of species or in terms of ecosystems? The authors are provocative in their ideas and assemble evidence to further our imagination of how the story of life might unfold  deep into the future.

GINORMOUS FUN

Gigantosaurus The Lost Egg by Jonny Duddle, Candlewick Press, $16.99. Rocky, Mazu, Bill and Tiny set out to find the parents of a lost egg Rocky stumbles upon.

They ask every dinosaur they can think of. They ask spikey ones and scaly ones, stompy ones and slithery ones, but the lost egg didn’t belong to any of them.

And Rocky is getting impatient. He wants to get back to his game of tag.

 TEEN REVIEW

By SOPHINI SUBRAMANIAM

Ru by Kim Thúy, Random House Canada, $15.00. Ru, by Canadian author Kim Thúy,  explores the life of An Tinh Nguyen, a Vietnamese immigrant to Canada.

As migrant literature and a work of auto-fiction, Ru provides a fresh perspective on the experiences of a refugee – her unseen struggles, quest for an identity, and appreciation for elements of her past, present and future.

Nguyen was born in the peaceful city of Saigon, with a life that was expected to be an extension of her mother’s. However, the Vietnamese war led the Nguyen family to flee Vietnam. From a crowded boat departing Vietnam, to a refugee camp in Malaysia, Nguyen finally arrives in Granby, Québec.

She recounts her experiences in a nonlinear fashion, jumping between her life in Vietnam, struggles on her voyage and her present reality in Québec, allowing the reader to see how her memories intertwine.

Ru explores several themes such as identity, acculturation and family, to name a few, in a beautiful, lyrical manner. The continual flow of Nguyen’s thoughts is comparable to a stream, and the way they are poetically interlaced, to a lullaby. “Ru” in French means a stream, or symbolically a flow of blood/tears and in Vietnamese, a lullaby.

• Sophini Subramaniam is Alumna, Teen Library Council, Brampton Library.