If You Lived In the Days of the Wild Mammoth Hunters
I remember seeing this book in the equivalent of middle school, when I was 12 or 13. It's largely about the first people to populate and inhabit the Americas... which is to say, I suppose, the ancestors of the First Nations, as we call them in Canada. Aside from the revelations about how they lived and hunted, which were all on their own fascinating, the artwork was striking. Pastels or chalk, overlaid with just enough inkwork to provide force, direction, and definition. I'd never seen anything like it and the effect was singular. It was one of those perfect little gems that still stands out in my mind. Years later I was able to find a copy of it in, if I remember correctly, a used book store. Pure, delightful serendipity.
Cosmos
There's no overstating the impact of this book on me. A companion to the series that ran on PBS back in 1981, it might be the first hardcover book that I ever saved up for and bought on my own. As I recall, it cost me something like $13 or $14 at the time; something around $40-50 today, I'd guess. In a day when we didn't have a VCR yet, this was as close as I could come to having the series in my hands.
Cosmos was a revelation to me. It literally helped me to understand the universe in a way I hadn't before. It made it all bright and exciting and fascinating. I think the most remarkable realization that ever came out of it, for me, was the fact that just about every element heavier that hydrogen in our bodies was created in the forge of stars; stars that long, long ago blew themselves up in titanic supernovae that seeded the galaxy with the heavier elements from which the planets, and ultimately, we, formed. When Carl Sagan said that we were all literally "star-stuff", I was enthralled and enchanted. That we come from the most titanic of events, and probably dozens of them, is still an idea that can give me goosebumps. If I could only hand down a half a dozen books to a future generation that had forgotten everything about us, this would unquestionably be among them.
SuperWorlds
My Aunt Betty gave me this book for my 13th birthday. That was less than a year after we moved to Hamilton, and that was the first year in my life we actually had family close enough to us to see on a regular basis. As a kid who, until then, had grown up with relatives as a once-or-twice-a-year (if that) kind of thing, finally having them just across town, or a few hours up the highway, was a gift of inestimable price. This book is very much a symbol of all that for me.
It's a book in the same vein as Cosmos, but a little more speculative. In part, it talks about what advanced civilization on other worlds might be like, but it also has a deep, respectful grounding in physics. Oddly enough, it's this book, rather than Cosmos, that I remember introducing me to the concept of stellar "generations"; that is to say, stars that arise from the ashes of previous ones. A first generation star can be gleaned by checking its spectrum and finding no markers for any element as heavy as iron, or heavier. This means it's an original star... not one that arose from the guts of some other supernova event(s) that strewed such elements across space. Our own sun has iron in it, but it can't be iron fused in the sun itself... the sun is both too young and too small to fuse iron, and as soon as a star begins to fuse iron, it begins to die, because that process consumes more energy than it creates. That's how we know the sun is a second or third generation star in our galaxy. Fascinating idea even now. So the book has great value to me, both instructional and sentimental.
The History of the Atomic Bomb
I saw this book in the same school library as the mammoth hunters one above. This was a fascinating book that told the story of the Manhattan Project, the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and how Klaus Fuchs gave it all away to the Russians to put us all on the brink ever since. In its early chapters, it also tells the story of how modern atomic theory was developed; the discovery and use of x-rays; the work of the Curies; and the amazingly casualness of the creation of the first atomic pile at the University of Chicago under Enrico Fermi's guidance. Still a fantastic book, and one that I found on eBay nearly 20 years ago now, and still have.
The Steven Truscott Story
I read this back in grade nine in the early 80s. It's the story of one of the great modern miscarriages of justice in Canada. Steven Truscott was a 14-year-old boy in southwestern Ontario accused and convicted of the rape and murder of classmate Lynn Harper in 1959. He was essentially railroaded, and despite his youth, sentenced to hang (to spare you the suspense, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by the federal cabinet of Prime Minister Diefenbaker not long his imprisonment). The book tells of his watching leaves falling off the tree outside his cell in the autumn of 1959, making a wager with himself that if any of them were still on the tree by a certain date (not sure if it was Christmas or New Year's), his life would be spared, and rising each day to see how many "traitors" among the leaves had deserted him. His case was reviewed by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1966, but it found no fundamental error in the trial; jurisprudence being what it was at the time. A model prisoner, he was released in 1969 and lived for a time with the family of the prison chaplain before changing his name and settling down to a steady job and raising a family of his own.
When I read this book in the early 80s, what happened to Steven Truscott shook me up. It was hard to believe this country would let all that happen to a boy pretty much exactly my age at the time.
Steven Truscott never stopped proclaiming his innocence and spent years trying to get his case reopened. In 2000, CBC's documentary program, The Fifth Estate, produced an hour-long show about the case and re-introduced Truscott to the country. It reviewed the mistakes made in the case, the flawed logic used to implicate Steven in Lynn's murder, the eyewitnesses to his innocence among other children who were ignored, and a strong suspect overlooked at the time. Largely as a result of that, his case was reviewed, and while too much evidence had been lost, destroyed, or degraded over the years to proclaim his actual innocence, the court was able to declare Steven Truscott not guilty in law, which at least removes the stain and the conviction. He's still alive today and makes periodic appearances to speak out for the wrongly-convicted.
The Usborne Book of the Future
This was actually a compendium of three books put out by the British children's publisher Usborne... Future Cities, Robots, and Star Travel. The timelines in the book were, as these things typically are, somewhat optimistic. For example, it predicted the advent of electric cars in the 1990s, a revolution that's really only just kicking in right now. But it did give a kid in the early 80s a glimpse of what to look forward to on the way to middle age. The one thing that particularly and consistently surprises me is how no one really seemed to see the internet coming. That seems to be something no one quite predicted, at least not as the single, convergent-technological phenomenon that suddenly appeared in the early 90s and is so ubiquitous and indispensable today. Just one of those blind spots, I guess. Given how much of life seems very much the same as what it was when I was a kid in the 70s, it's surprising how much really hasn't changed, and how vastly different life is in small but highly significant ways thanks to the net.
Six Seconds In Dallas
And finally, there's this one. This is a bit of a cheat, because I wasn't really a "child" when I encountered it. I was 19 and just starting university when I found this book in the campus library. It dates from 1967 and was one of the first books to lay out the problems, inconsistencies, and oversights of the Warren Commission's findings. I practically owned this book for the four years I was in university; I almost always had it signed out except in the summer when I had to, well, y'know, give it back. I won't labour the point by going over all the things Josiah Thompson laid out in the book (which has had a recently-published sequel by the same author, which I also own, reviewing new information while putting some of the older theories to bed). I'll only say that, while I'm no conspiracy nut, I am persuaded that there was more going on in John Kennedy's assassination than the Warren Report concludes, and regardless of who did or didn't pull the trigger(s), that he almost certainly died as the result of a conspiracy, probably at the hands of the mafia working at the behest of rogue elements of the US intelligence community. We'll probably never know, but to me, that's the likeliest explanation for how it was accomplished and covered up. I think it's not insignificant that CIA director Allan Dulles was fired by Kennedy, and then wound up in the Warren Commission, directing aspects of the investigation and questioning of witnesses. Just sayin'.
So, these have been many of the major books that helped shape who I am today, in various ways and to different degrees, from the wistful to the profound. If you've made it this far, I'd like to thank you for your time and attention, and I hope that one or two have piqued your interest enough to go looking. :)
