Canadian Foreign Policy -- Plus Ca Change...

The Bedford Murder: A Medical Text that Doubles as a Murder Mystery

Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust by Richard Rhodes

Human Wreakage, Reviews of The Fall of Berlin 1945 by Anthony Beevor

But as a man who was born in Zimbabwe back when it was Rhodesia, and who still frequently visits  Africa, he is proud of his creation, Mma (pronounced "Ma") Precious Ramotswe. Ramotswe is the protagonist of McCall Smith's Africa novels, the first two of which, The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency and Tears of the Giraffe, have recently become available in Canada. The third in the series, Morality for Beautiful Girls, will be available here this month and a fourth, The Kalahari Typing School for Men, will be released as a Knopf hardcover in spring, 2003. "Women in Botswana, as in many African countries, are immensely resourceful and I just thought I would like to write about, and from the point of view of, one of these remarkable, resourceful people," says McCall Smith.

Two of the series were written in Vancouver, "that's another Canadian connection." He has two sisters  there and "I wrote one book in each of their houses." The books in question are Tears of the Giraffe and The Kalahari Typing School for Men, which was written during a visit last Christmas. "I spend a lot of time in Canada, I come to Canada every year. And I'll be in Montreal in November for a UNESCO meeting."

The earlier of the Africa series have been out in the United Kingdom for about five years. The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency was first published in Scotland by a small publisher and after it received excellent reviews, Tears of the Giraffe was released. Sales took off and at that point Random House in New York bought rights to all of the series, including future books. In a separate deal, Random House of Canada purchased them and in the U.K., Time Warner books acquired the series, which they will be releasing in other English-speaking countries. The books have sold well in France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Finland and Brazil. McCall Smith is now writing the fifth in the series, The Full Cupboard of Life, to be released in the U.K. in Spring, 2003.

Contrary to what the title of the first Africa novel suggests, the books "are not detective stories," says their author. "They are novels about Botswana, about Africa. It is just that the protagonist happens to run a detective agency." McCall Smith says he found the agency was a good vehicle for talking about "a particular society and people's interests and problems in that society. There are no crimes in these stories."

Though the tales are written from the point of view of a woman, McCall Smith says that, mercifully, he has heard no cries of "cultural appropriation" from the politically correct. "I think that those arguments are not particularly persuasive, anyway. I think that people are people. Of course one has to be careful that one doesn't get it wrong. But one can write about all sorts of people and that's what writers are all about. That's what we're supposed to do. So I'm really not moved by those arguments."

Other fiction works by McCall Smith include Portuguese Irregular Verbs, The Perfect Imperfect and At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances, a series revolving around three eccentric German philologists. These books have developed a cult following in the U.K. and will be republished next summer. "I'm very fond of those books. They're really just ... comedies." He has also written 35 children's books.

For fun, this 54-year-old father of two (his wife is a GP) plays bassoon for the "Really Terrible Orchestra," an orchestra made up of amateur musicians who are, by all accounts, really terrible. A recent "world tour" consisted of a concert in a town just north of Edinburgh.

McCall Smith's father was a public prosecutor in Rhodesia and the family lived there till McCall Smith was 17. His love of Africa was the motivation behind the Mma Ramotswe novels. "People are ready for a more positive view of Africa, a gentler approach," he says, adding that he counts among his favourite novellists Nadine Gordimer, John Coetzee, Alistair MacLeod and Robertson Davies, of whom he says "I think he was just a towering figure."

The most striking thing about the Africa novels is that McCall Smith's work as an ethicist is never out of the picture -- the characters ask important questions. "I would regard these novels as containing quite a lot of musing on right and wrong. The central character does think about these matters at some length." That central character is also "a very nice woman," her creator says. He adds that "there is no violence or aggression or crudity in these novels at all, which I think is one of the reasons they've taken off." Indeed, they have recently got on to the U.S. best-sellers' list and Random House has already done three printings.

As to be expected, McCall Smith has sold the movie rights to the novels and Anthony Minghella (responsible for The English Patient) is in charge. A screenplay has been written overall, he says he's happy with what he has seen. "I'm just really terribly pleased that Mma Ramotswe has been taken up so internationally."

Copyright National Post 2002 All Rights Reserved.

Red is stop, green is go: Rick Gallop's GI diet makes room for proteins and carbohydrates, but notes that not all carbs are the same. Best of all, there's a colour code

Learning from the Geese A review of The Snow Geese: A Story of Home by William Fiennes

There is, however, no mistaking Berton's redeeming love for Canadian history, or his desire to go beyond a mere listing of statistics where Canada's involvement in four wars -- the Boer War, the two world wars and the Korean War -- is concerned. The events leading up to each war are covered, somewhat unevenly, and lively descriptions of the Canada that was give us a picture of our country struggling first with England, then the United States and, never-endingly it seems, with itself. If you can tolerate the lapses into multi-metaphor traffic jams -- "the army was on the move again, strung out for 10 miles like a huge khaki snake, undulating over the veldt, crawling ... squirming ... writhing over ridges ... " -- or into the hackneyed -- "... Canadians locked in battle in a strange and distant land whose language they could not understand" -- there is much to be gleaned here.

Colourful portraits of characters of the day will keep those not keen on battles interested. One is the story of Kit Coleman, a columnist at the Toronto Mail and Empire, who became the first woman accredited as a war correspondent and travelled to Cuba to cover the Spanish-American War. A harrowing look at life inside Buchenwald, through the eyes of John Harvie, an RCAF navigator who ended up there under sentence of death, is worthwhile, if painful, reading. And the chapter on Dieppe shines.

The beginnings of CanCon are described; between the two world wars, newspapers and such took on a decidedly nationalistic tone. We are told, for example, that a magazine called The Canadian "promised to emphasize Canadian content rather than quality." Plus ca change, the reader is left thinking, depressingly enough.

Interestingly, Berton's vision of Canada is (after the mistakes) what most troubles this book. He seems, at times, out of touch.

Writing of turn-of-the-century Canadians, Berton says they tended to be "patronizing" about Americans and tells us that a satirical review of the day ran fierce anti-American satirical pieces, "none of which would be countenanced today." Not only would they be countenanced, of course, they would be hugely popular. Has he not seen, one wonders, Rick Mercer's Talking to Americans? We are every bit as patronizing as we ever were. He also asserts that "all Canadians" feel nationalistic when far from home.

My own experiences overseas (nine years on three continents) don't attest to that. If anything, living overseas made me realize how very American I was. (And I always say I only stuck a maple leaf on my belongings so pickpockets would know my money wasn't worth anything.) The chapters covering the Korean War, in particular, smack of anti-Americanism, naively dismissing Cold War concerns as exaggerated, and vastly underestimating the threat that Communism was to all of the West, Canada included. We should, Berton insists, have stayed out of Korea.

Looking at history backwards this way, saying, "Gosh, that one didn't play out the way we would have liked so we shouldn't have gone," is even more of an exercise in subjectivity than most interpretations of history.

Berton also compares Korea to Vietnam, which is in the words of Stanley Karnow, a Pulitzer Prize winning author of several books on American history, a "dangerous" analogy to make. Glibly stating that the Americans "learned nothing from the Korean War, as their experience in Indo-China shows" is making pretty simple hay out of a mighty complicated situation.

Ironically, after stating that Canadians grew up during the years the book encompasses, Berton ends it by claiming some kind of moral superiority for Canadians. The United States, Berton says, continue to fight imperialistic wars, but "we are not a belligerent people ... We save our aggressive emotions for ice hockey and rejoice in the new title of peacekeepers, a proud and honourable name." Well yeah, but we are not a powerful nation, and should we ever come under threat again, we would not hesitate to look to those imperialistic Americans for help. As an anecdotal history and a vivid look at times gone by, Marching as to War has great value. For overall historical analysis and study, caveat lector.

Copyright National Post 2001 All Rights Reserved.

Jaffe, 42, is perhaps best known as a writer for Seinfeld. He is responsible for -- among many others -- two of the show's most famous episodes, the one where George and Jerry weasel a ride in a limo that happens to be carrying neo-Nazi passengers, and the one where Elaine realizes her Christmas card picture is revealing a little more than she might like, namely, one of her nipples. The nipple episode is based on a true story. Jaffe's brother-in-law sent out a Christmas card which included a picture of his family on Christmas morning, sitting by the tree. Jaffe's brother-in-law, in his bathrobe, was, it seems, "hanging out." But before someone noticed that fact, the card had been sent far afield to friends and family. "I'm not sure what upset my brother-in-law more," says Jaffe, "that he was hanging out, or that it took a while for someone to notice."

Impressive comedic resume aside, Jaffe found that when he went to parties with his wife, Karen, her stories would get bigger laughs than his. "And that's when I thought about writing this book." Jaffe used many of his wife's stories, but also interviewed other doctors. He includes many stories of medical mishaps as well. "I didn't want it to be just a book where I was saying, 'Look at this stupid patient, and this one, and this one.' Doctors do some stupid things, too, and a lot of them were willing to tell me about those stupid things. Provided I changed their names, that is." Patients' names were changed, too.

Jaffe, his wife and their three young daughters (the oldest is 10) live in Cleveland, an odd place for a comedy writer, but not so odd for his wife's practice. "Karen and I both grew up in Cleveland, we met here, and once we started having kids we decided it was a better place to raise them than Los Angeles."

Not to mention that Karen's practice was already thriving there when Jaffe got his gig writing for Seinfeld, and that they had just bought a house. And "most years," says Jaffe, "she makes more money than I do. OK, every year. She's the consistent breadwinner whereas I do it in fits and starts." When he wrote for Seinfeld he did a lot of commuting between Cleveland and Los Angeles -- at first. "That's when I decided to just contribute scripts here and there, rather than being on staff.

I wanted to be around for my kids more."

Jaffe is somewhat of a Mr. Mom to his daughters, "which is just great. But some mornings, when you're trying to help a six-year-old figure out what shoes go best with a certain dress, you really wish you had boys. Boys only need one pair of shoes."

Jaffe has also written scripts for Mad About You, and done other writing for Paul Reiser. For six years he had a newspaper column that was syndicated across the United States. In the early and mid-eighties, he did "the stand-up thing," during which time he met and befriended the likes of Dennis Miller, Gary Shandling and Bob Saget as well as Reiser.

He continued to do stand-up on his return to Cleveland in the late eighties. There he met his "longtime buddy" Drew Carey, who was acting as an emcee one night when Jaffe was headlining at a local comedy club. "The roles have kind of switched since then, but Drew was always hysterical, no matter the  circumstance. I always knew he'd do well."

Some of his wife's stories nearly made it into Seinfeld scripts, Jaffe admits, but "it's a question of finding a story to fit Elaine or whoever else. You can't force it." He was particularly tempted, he says, by one of the stories in the book, about a doctor's assistant who was sent to buy a gross of condoms at a nearby pharmacy. The assistant happened to be pregnant at the time. "So it didn't exactly match any of the characters on Seinfeld."

Karen Jaffe was nervous about the book, but also "happy and excited," says her husband. She did, however, ask him to remove a couple of the stories because she was afraid people would recognize themselves. The book was released last year in the United States (it has just been released in Canada), and the only complaints Jaffe or his wife have heard are from "patients who were upset their stories weren't in it!"

Jaffe is currently working on a book that chronicles his attempts to run a six-minute mile. "I think the training involved makes good fodder for humour."

He will take a break from that training to visit Toronto July 23 for book signings. But it is not really a publicity tour. He is taking his oldest daughter to a summer camp near Bracebridge, Ont., the same camp he spent his summers at as a kid.

As for his daughters, they may be too young to understand Sleeping with your Gynecologist, but he dedicated the book to them nonetheless.

And they are, says Jaffe, very thrilled with that. "Now any time they have to write a composition at school or something, they always insist on dedicating it to someone."

Copyright National Post 2001 All Rights Reserved.

On D-Day, June 6, 1944, Sugarman was a 23-year-old naval ensign and former art student who landed on the beach at Normandy as part of the greatest military invasion in history. Waiting for him at home in the United States was his bride, June. Her parting gift for her husband, months earlier, had been a package containing sketch pads, pens and a tin of watercolours.

Sugarman made good use of the gift, sending home to his wife not just letters, but drawings of everything from the small English towns where he was first stationed to portraits of his fellow officers and heartwrenching scenes of a life-swallowing storm in the English Channel.

When Sugarman finally returned from the war -- his ship left Europe on the day of FDR's death in April, 1945 -- he and June looked at the drawings and more than 400 letters he had sent -- and then packed them away. "I was eager to start up my life and I just wanted to put the bad stuff behind me."

But in 1994, as the 50th anniversary of D-Day approached, June brought the pictures out. Together they looked at the collection and realized they had something special. Sugarman called a friend, sculptor Stanley Bleifeld whose statue The Lone Sailor is part of the Navy Memorial in Washington, D.C. -- and Bleifeld was knocked out. "He told me, 'These are archival.' " Through Bleifeld, the navy invited Sugarman to put his drawings and letters up at the memorial as part of the celebrations for the 50th anniversary of D-Day.

The Sugarman exhibition was scheduled to be up for a week, but proved to be so popular that it stayed up for four months. The MacNeil-Lehrer Report dedicated a segment of their show to the phenomenon and when it came time for the collection to come down, the people at the memorial had news for Sugarman. "They told me they had received countless inquiries as to whether any of the exhibit could be purchased." A book project was suggested, but Sugarman was so busy with other commissions at the time, he put the idea on a back burner.

Two years ago, when June died from a heart attack, Sugarman began to think such a book would be a wonderul tribute to her. The result is My War, A Love Story in Letters and Drawings (Random House, $45), a historical document, a personal account of a young man's wartime experience, a love story, and, with over 80 illustrations, a visual treasury. "The book is touching people," says Sugarman.

To start up his book tour he had a reading in his hometown, Westport. About 200 people showed up, to his astonishment. It was an emotional reading -- so many of the guests knew June -- and Sugarman wondered if he would get through the rest of his appearances. He has, but says "it has been humbling. The response, all across the States, has been uniform. And Gulf War and Vietnam vets tell me, 'That's how I felt, that's what it was like for me.' This book seems to be meaningful to a lot of people."

His two grown children and three grandchildren have also had powerful reactions. "They keep saying, 'You never told us about that' and you know, most veterans don't talk about it. It was a terrible time in our lives."

After the war, Sugarman pursued his dream and became an artist and illustrator. His work has appeared in numerous American magazines and newspapers and his paintings of the space shuttle Columbia are part of the NASA Smithsonian collection. In 1964, when students marched for civil rights in Mississippi, Sugarman went along and made over 100 drawings, which were collected in a book called Stranger at the Gates.

But his wartime experience remains unique. "War is an insane way to settle things. But I thought, and still think, that World War II was absolutely vital and we had to win it. For a kid over there it was thrilling and frightening. And you just had to believe you were unstoppable."

Sugarman remembers that when he and June and their kids went to Europe on vacation in the 1950s, June asked him if he would like to visit the beachhead. "Over my dead body" was his reply. After he finished the book, however, it seemed appropriate to go back. "What was so striking to me last September was that I had had 56 springs, summers, falls and winters that those kids hadn't had."

Copyright National Post 2001 All Rights Reserved.

The Battle of Amiens, in particular, had everything for a good war film -- secret missions, the excitement of new weaponry, the mud of the trenches, cavalry, colourful leaders and fiercely brave soldiers.

Not to mention that Amiens is the battle many military historians credit with precipitating the end of the war. Initially conceived to liberate the Paris-Amiens railway, it became the first in a series of Allied victories and was followed by the signing of the Armistice only a hundred days later. Prior to Amiens, the fighting was expected to continue till mid-1919 or later.

In Amiens: Dawn of Victory, Canadian military historians James McWilliams and R. James Steel present a detailed, extensive and vivid portrait of the battle, emphasizing the considerable role Canadians played. McWilliams and Steel (whose grandfather, Lieutenant Robert James Steel, was one of the Canadian casualties at Amiens) have collaborated on two other books about the Great War (Gas! The Battle for Ypres, and 1915; The Suicide Battalion) and it is clear in Amiens that they know their business.

The first day of the Amiens offensive, Aug. 8, 1918, came as such a shock to the unprepared Germans that General Erich Ludendorff, their commander-in-chief, referred to it as "the black day of the German Army in the history of the war." The authors do well to inform us that the Canadian soldiers at Amiens were almost entirely amateurs.

Yet consider that Sir Julian Byng, the British General who commanded the Canadian Corps at Vimy Ridge, told his successor, Ontario native General Arthur Currie, that the Canadian work at Amiens was the finest operation of the Great War. (Vimy Ridge is almost always spoken of as Canada's greatest triumph of the war, overshadowing Amiens, which was surely sweeter.)

Currie is portrayed as extremely able and not flashy -- not a MacArthur or a Patton in appearance. "There was nothing theatrical about Arthur Currie; he was just another grim-faced Canadian, but his men worshipped him and never once doubted his ability to lead them to victory and protect them from useless casualties."

Where casualties are concerned, no book about Amiens would be complete without some discussion of the tank revolution. The first tank was used in 1916, and Steel and McWilliams point out that some military officials laughed off the idea as a fad, convinced the horse would always be the vehicle of wartime. Two years later, at Amiens, more than 500 tanks, including Whippets (certainly a misnomer), were used.

Using survivors' eyewitness accounts, published and unpublished journals of soldiers, generals, socialites and politicians, Amiens manages, with its personal touches, not to be a book only of interest to military enthusiasts.

Consider the words of Australian Lieutenant Williams: "Sleep was soon interrupted by the unmistakable drone of German bombing-planes ... We could hear horses kicking and plunging at their tethers, some neighing and one poor brute screaming ... the near explosion of an aerial bomb of any size seemed to tie one's intestines into knots."

Or for another point of view, a German princess complaining about wartime rations: "We ourselves have little to eat but smoked meat and dried peas and beans, but in the towns they are considerably worse off. The potatoes have come to a premature end."

Or better yet, German Admiral von Muller's account of Kaiser Wilhelm's self-centred concerns when he realized defeat was certain: "the Kaiser admitted he had not closed an eye all night. He had seen visions of all the English and Russian relatives ... marching past and mocking him."

The Kaiser would have more to contend with than mocking relatives once Amiens was over. During the three months after Aug. 8, the Canadian Corps liberated 1295 square kilometres of territory including more than 200 cities, towns and villages. The Corps captured 31,000 prisoners and almost 600 guns and trench mortars.

As the great British military historian Liddell Hart wrote: "August 8 was the climax of the war, and what happened subsequently was the natural sequel."

This clear-minded account of the days leading up to that sequel is overdue and welcome.

Copyright National Post 2001 All Rights Reserved.

Downer, a 39-year-old journalist from England, writes for The Wall Street Journal Europe, the Sunday Times and many other publications. Her other books include a Japanese cookbook, At the Japanese Table: New and Traditional Recipes, and The Brothers: The Hidden World of Japan's Richest Family. The latter is a portrait of the Tsutsumi brothers -- the Rockefellers of Japan, two men who own department stores, baseball teams, hotels, airlines, golf courses and much more.

Downer grew up in England, the daughter of Canadian parents. Her mother was Chinese-Canadian, from Saskatchewan, and her father from Kingston, Ont. The two met just after the Second World War, and Downer's father, a talented linguist, went to London to study. He stayed and raised his family there. "So that's how I became English," Downer laughs. She was always interested in Asia and has travelled in China, but after a year teaching English in Japan 20 years ago, she decided to stay on for one more. One became five -- "I just became completely hooked on the place." When she moved back to London she felt homesick for Japan and would come up with journalistic excuses to travel there.

Working on Geisha permitted her five months' time in Japan and has allowed her to give readers an extraordinary look into a world so many, particularly in the West, misunderstand. There is, says Downer, what geisha think they are, what Japanese men think they are and what people in the West think they are.

Geisha literally means "arts person." This is how geisha see themselves. And indeed, they are rigorously trained in dance, music and theatre. To Japanese men, who spend their days working like hell and their evenings drinking like hell, geisha are hostesses skilled in the art of conversation, there to provide some respite and encouragement. A high-level Japanese businessman or politician will go to the tea house (where geisha entertain) after a hard day's work and talk about the state of the nation with geisha, rather than returning home to talk with his wife.

"Japanese men know geisha will never repeat anything they say, so they feel safe. Also, their wives may not want to talk about interest rates. So geisha can really be a major influence, though we won't ever hear that from them," Downer says.

Westerners, of course, think geisha are prostitutes. "Quite honestly," sighs Downer, "this just shows how barbarous we are. Western men are so like, 'We've gotta have sex,' and they can't believe you would spend good money on something other than sex." In Japan, says Downer, a man can go to a prostitute for sex. He goes to a geisha for something else.

Which is not to say geisha never sleep with their clients. "But no way," continues Downer, "will they do so just like that. They get a lot of money doing what they do, so why would they?" Very often what occurs, Downer explains, is that a geisha will have a danna, which is like a husband (except he usually already has a wife). A Japanese man becomes a danna by setting up a formal agreement through the proprietress of the tea house (she is sort of like the geisha den mother), who approaches the geisha union. If the union and the geisha in question agree, there is a verbal agreement (written contracts are relatively unpopular in Japan) and the danna will buy the geisha a house, give her an allowance, pay for her music lessons, buy her kimonos (extremely expensive) and so forth. "Yes, she is his mistress," says Downer, "but it is quite a serious arrangement, which has to be carried out through the right channels."

Geisha without danna earn a living from their dancing and singing. But for the ones with danna, the money they get from performing becomes nothing more than pin money.

All of this is costly for the danna -- approximately $200,000 a year. By the time a Japanese man can afford that, he may well be 70 years old and "not that interested in sex any more," adds Downer. More than anything, the danna/geisha relationship is a status symbol. "It's like, 'Wow, you have a geisha. You must be a heavyweight!' "

The geisha tradition began in the 1700s, when Kyoto was Japan's capital. There are still proportionately more geisha there than anywhere else. Tokyo, then called Edo, was "kind of like the Wild West," says Downer, a growing and rough merchant city, and the arts didn't hold the kind of sway they did in Kyoto. But there are geisha in Tokyo now and in other large Japanese cities. Geisha has always been an equal- opportunity career for Japanese girls. "As long as you're beautiful," points out Downer. "But if she is, a girl from any class of Japanese society can be a geisha."

The Western idea of geisha, with the ornate hairstyle, white face, luxurious kimonos and clogs, are actually maiko (literally, "dancing girls"), or geisha in training, usually girls aged 15 to 20. Once a maiko becomes a geisha, she will cut her hair shorter, wear a wig for a formal occasion and only wear the white makeup if it is specifically requested.

In the 1920s, there were 80,000 geisha in Japan. Now there are 2,000 serious or "posh" geisha, as Downer says. As well, there are about 3,000 onsen geisha, meaning literally "hotsprings geisha." (Onsen are Japanese hotsprings, popular with the natives and tourists and located all over the country.) Downer says the onsen geisha are good dancers and singers, but she is quick to add that the Japanese laugh a bit when you mention them. "They are obviously looked down on a bit and may possibly supplement their income with extracurricular activities rather late at night."

Geisha numbers are dwindling for social reasons -- the changing role of women, for one -- but primarily, Downer believes, for economic reasons. Post-war Japan's economy has turned into an employee-manager system, whereas prior to the war many more Japanese men owned their own companies. "Obviously," says Downer, "you can't use your expense account to pay for geisha. As a result, only 20% of geisha now have a danna." And Japanese Boomers do not take the idea of geisha for granted. "It's not part of their mentality."

Other things have changed dramatically since the war. "Once upon a time," says Downer, "decent Japanese girls got married and there were geisha." Now, there are just plain old regular mistresses. One of the Tsutsumi brothers that Downer profiled has five mistresses -- generic mistresses, not geisha. (Interestingly, the other Tsutsumi brother is married to a former geisha.) So geisha are being elbowed out by a more mundane version of themselves. Times change, sighs Downer. "But I mean, you see these elderly geisha in Kyoto, these grand old, 90-year-old dowagers, and they're just so proud of that respected tradition. It would be sad to see it gone."

Copyright National Post 2000 All Rights Reserved.

When I was 15, my formative-dating-years-spent-in-the-'60s sister-in-law gave me The Birth Control Book for a Christmas present. I wouldn't need it for another five years and in retrospect I can honestly say she wasted her money. She gave me a book about the easiest part of any relationship -- the not getting pregnant part. The hard part is everything else. This is where Breakup Girl comes in handy. Sprung from breakupgirl.com, a Web site devoted to relationships (although with a distinctly Gen X flavour) the book tackles everything else head on.

Matters of the heart are addressed for all: teens, grownups, gay, straight, halfway through your sex change, in a wheelchair, whatever. Breakup Girl is Lynn Harris, a superhero/Dear Abby figure who flies through the air -- and cyberspace -- at breakneck speed, attempting to prevent romantic disasters; or at least help with damage control. Got a problem with your beloved? She'll be right there, she says, "cause I've been there!"

Drawn largely from the huge volume of e-mail she receives, Harris deals with the obvious -- breaking up, whether to forgive infidelity, contending with your boy/girlfriend's family -- and the often overlooked: how to get your stuff back, whether or not to wreak vengeance on the one who broke your heart, how to lose baggage.

Breakup Girl provides an antidote to some current, unfortunate ideas about romance. On the topic of staying friends after a breakup, for example, Harris offers choice words that a couple of my ex-beaux could stand to hear: "Many of the 'friendships' that folks perpetrate/connive/contrive/salvage/salivate over post-breakup are anything but." Harris goes on to decry the "misleading" model of Jerry and Elaine on Seinfeld, and blames them for contributing to "the prevailing fool's gold standard/imperative about remaining friends." Quelle relief, especially for the old fashioned among us who believe in hating all the people we break up with. While Breakup Girl is clearly aimed at those whose attention spans have been destroyed by MTV, some of her advice would be appreciated by the latter's parents, not to mention grandparents. She discourages those still in high school from having sex and in one of her many witty turns of phrase, suggests that casual "generally works best as a dress code, not a relationship." Gosh, are the 1970s finally over?

Harris has no time for Mars and Venus or "The Rules" though she has her own, which refreshingly have more to do with good manners than anything else: 1) Be nice. 2) Take "no" for an answer. 3) Whoever invited pays. 4) No dates at Hooters. Would that more of us subscribed to such a philosophy. She also, wisely, includes a section on dating practices that are legal but tacky. For example, dating your roommate's ex without so much as a fair warning. This, she says, is technically legal but "Melrosically tacky."

Like Ben Savage's "Savage Love" alternative newspaper column, although without the hit-you-over-the- head-God-I'm-so -cool posturing, Breakup Girl may help you tread safely over the romantic thin ice that's been daunting you. Or at least, it'll help you get your stuff back.

Copyright National Post 2000 All Rights Reserved.

On board the Franconia, Overton met Bader, who was her senior by a couple of years. He had come to Canada via England several years earlier as a refugee from Anschluss-era Austria. He was travelling to England to visit the family that had taken him in when he first left Austria.

Unembarrassedly, he remembers his first meeting with Overton as nearly love at first sight. Nine days later he proposed marriage. (He now says he wonders what took him so long.) She said no, but not because she didn't love him. Bader was Jewish, and she didn't feel she could convert, though they remained friends and saw each other in England as much as possible.

"Wartime price controls were still in effect," he remembers, "so I could afford to ask her out to dinner." For the next two years, they stayed in touch, mostly via letters. Bader even met Overton's family when he returned to North America.

Bader hoped Overton would change her mind but decided he had to settle his own life. He assumed that Overton must have another man in her life -- because, he thought, she was so beautiful, how could she not? -- and wrote less and less. Finally, in 1951, the letters stopped from both sides.

Bader moved on, founding Sigma-Aldrich, a chemical company in the States. He married, had a family and achieved huge financial success. (He has an extensive art collection of 16th- and 17th-century masters.) But hardly a day went by, he says, without a thought to Overton and all the what-might-have-beens. She, in the meantime, stayed in England where she taught at a girls' school and founded the Bexhill Costume Museum. She did not marry.

In 1975, Bader had a dream in which Overton's father appeared to him, chastising him and saying "How can you leave my daughter alone?" The week of the dream, Overton's father, then 93, passed away. Though still married, Bader set out to find Overton, contacting many of her friends, including one in Japan, trying to get her address. When he did, he wrote to her, asking if they could meet. Perhaps not surprisingly, she said no, knowing he was married and wanting to leave the past in its place. But after so many years, and after the dream, Bader would not be deterred. He kept up his lobby until 1977, when Overton capitulated.

Patience was a virtue both Bader and Overton needed to invest in, as it would be another four years before he divorced. Bader and Overton married in the early 1980s and she converted to Judaism. They have been together -- blissfully -- since. "They are the type of people," says friend Roseann Runte, the president of Victoria University, "who hold hands all the time. They act like a young couple who just met." They also, says Runte, firmly believe that Overton's father appeared to Bader in an attempt to help his daughter get her ducks in a row before he died.

Still, Bader, never one for small gestures (this is the man who donated Herstmonceux Castle to his alma mater, Queen's University) felt that their being together was not enough in itself. Wanting to do something out of the ordinary for his wife, he took her letters from 1949-1951 (his letters from that time were lost) and approached Runte, whom they knew from Isabel's involvement with Victoria University. "He asked me if I thought they would be of interest to anyone but himself." Runte did and helped Bader find a publisher.

The result is A Canadian in Love (University of Toronto Press, $36) on sale today at the Victoria University bookstore and, starting tomorrow, at most other bookstores. The book -- edited and with an introduction by Runte -- is being released in a limited edition of 1,000 copies. "Alfred wanted this to be special for Isabel, not something we'll see on airport bookstore racks in paperback in three years," says Runte. Proceeds from the book, in a nod to Isabel's devotion to Victoria University, will go to a scholarship fund named for Ann Lewis -- Runte's secretary, who typed up the original manuscript. (In case this weren't a big enough valentine, Bader has recently donated $6-million to the school for a theatre to be built in Isabel Bader's name.)

The book contains over 80 letters written by Overton to Bader. Runte believes the book will appeal to more than the romantics out there.

"Yes, it speaks to that belief we all want to have, that there is someone out there for each of us. But it also contains fascinating observations of postwar England; of the differences between Canada and England; of a Canadian woman's simultaneous homesickness and thrill at being in a new culture, exposed to great theatre, art and architecture."

There are two letters in the book not written by Overton. One is from her mother to Bader, written in 1951, telling him she knows her daughter loves and misses him and that she believes their religious differences can be overcome. The other is from Bader to Overton, written after their 1977 reunion, the letter in which he tells her he feels he has come home. It is the final letter in the book.

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