Page 6 - Boca ViewPointe - November '20

Page 6, Viewpointe November 2020
Book Review

Election Issue: Deja View (PR) you can come home again and reclaim your U.S.
citizenship. Dr. Shainbart welcomes the lower price by half
Stephen Shainbart. I Actually Did It: Becoming Canadian of rentals in the central hub in Toronto as compared to New
Because of Trump. Canada: Keeler Press, 2020. York City; and Jordan, in his father’s telling, can look forward
Hugh Raffles. The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on to a quality university education seemingly at 1/10th the cost
Lost Time. New York: Pantheon Press, 2020. over four years. Shainbart embraces all with a grain of salt,
“The stones will cry out.” Habakkuk 7:11, Luke 19:40. and to his credit presents his journey not as tragic, but as the
“All progress depends upon the unconventional man.” comedy of human foibles and struggle for survival. The book
George Bernard Shaw. is being very well received by his new Canadian neighbors,
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our and he hopes that his misadventures will provide a vicarious
exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the experience for the aboot sixty plus million citizens whom he
place for the first time.” T.S. Eliot has left behind.
Hugh Raffles reacts to the precipitous death of Franki his
By Dr. Ronald J. Meyers younger sister who died in childbirth and his eldest Sally,
while other ladies evoke humorous bafflement as he seeks to a suicide, within months of each other, and seeks comfort
Stephen Shainbart accommodate the eccentricities and quirks confronting the in the immortality of stone. A scientist and geologist, who
and Hugh Raffles have middle aged male date-seeker. previously wrote classic studies of insects and the Amazon,
rea c te d t o e xt re m e Then there are the bureaucratic hurdles. As a professional he embarks upon a journey to undertake what he aptly terms
personal disappointment with a successful twenty year career in New York, he learns unconformist speculations about time. Unlike plant and
with their unconformities. that he needs the recommendation of his earliest mentor, who animal life, which need to progenerate, stone survives, “the
Dr. Shainbart, a clinical stubbornly seems to have forgotten him and refuses to offer absolute mode of being” as characterized by the twentieth
psychologist, chose to her support. Then there are requisite English exams, medical century scholar of Religion, Mircea Eliade. Pliny the Elder
abandon the U.S.A. as exams, ex-wife’s concurrence, and oodles of paperwork, in the first century opined: “Nature has given rocks a voice
an outcome of the 2016 which leads him to pay a lawyer to help him complete the that echoes, or rather interrupts that of Man.”
election. Dr. Raffles, a Brit process. All accruing to his advantage since it will, in the end, Bafflement with the insecurities of life led primitive
raised in London immigrated to America, now a professor provide him with a specialization in helping other immigrants man to construct monoliths, to devise ancient mathematics,
at the New School in New York City, motivated by deep navigate the challenging shoals. and gauge the earth’s relationship to the universe. He likely
personal loss, set out as a geologist to seek meaning Everyone who has been to Canada will attest to the worshipped stone’s perceived permanence and so ritually
from the biologic stones in the corners of the world. Both excessive politeness of our northern neighbors, in addition acknowledged human mortality in the contrasting presence
authors expose the wounds of children whose families were to their sawree and their flattening diphthongs (aboot) in of these fixed creations. The stones that geologists study not
desiccated by the Holocaust. pronunciation. Telephone and cell service to our northern only contain the secrets in the abyss of time, but represent
Dr. Shainbart, a graduate of Cornell University with a neighbor is likely free, included in your cell plan, but snail the earliest ingenuities of men, revealed in survival of the
Ph.D.from Fordham University, transitioning from New York mail might take awhile, particularly in these times. What Egyptian Pyramids, England’s Stonehenge, and the Easter
City to Toronto, laments in a very personal memoir filled with might further persuade future never-Trumpians to take Island Moai.
comic lapses: “Why can’t people see other people’s perspectives advantage of some of the economic facts. One need not
more clearly?” As with any significant social activity, there are surrender American citizenship; as a Permanent Resident Book Review on page 7
hurdles, mishaps, and disappointments. His first concern, as a
divorced father enjoying joint custody of a teenager, is that his
son be at one with his choice. He brings him to Toronto to sell
him on the idea, and Jordan pleasantly concurs: comparing the
density and hustle bustle of the big apple to his new domicile,
“it is like going to the country.” “Canada,” an Asian date
instructs him “does all the stuff that America talks about doing,”

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