mete ee 22 - Wednesday, January 18, 1989 - North Shore News Penguin book brings battle to life HAVING STUMBLED into adolescence during the pre- hippy portion of the sixties, | was of course subjected to the popular folklore of the waning Dark Ages. Among other truisms foisted-orf on my acne-pitted and vulnerable psyche was the admonition that ‘certain behavior’ would, at the very least, cause blindness (and at this | considered myself most for- tunate — a close friend, brought up ina strict religious home, was advised that his very sou! was in mortal jeopardy). MIKE STEELE book reviewer Still, one road to sightlessness never mentioned by me dear old mum (nor, apparently, the Steele brushes dust off new parks board history HOW DO you convince the Van- couver Parks Board that its history has the potential to be deadly dull? Not easily. Just ask the author of the recently published The First 100 Years, Mike Steele. in July, 1987, the parks board commissioned Steele to come up with a book detailing its history in commemoration of the board's 100th anniversary. And that had Steele sifting through five million numbingly-dry words of park data and wiping the dust off close to 16,000 old photographs. “tt was very demandin Wg and exhausting but a source of more satisfaction than most writers get,’ Steele says of the time spent in diligent research, “Il was totally absorbed in the beok.” And despite his ordeal — with two and a haif days off in 10 mon- ths — the 38-year-old North Vancouver author and book reviewer has resurfaced with a very readable and visually pleasing souvenir book which details the 1352 Lonsdale, N. Van. " EXCITING GREEK PERSIAN CUISINE OPEN 7 DAYS A WEEK LICENSED PREMISES 984- 73 1 1 f SUSHI ORIGI! history of Vancouver's parks. The First Hundree Years is the first compiled history of a park system in North America. Before that, ‘‘Nobody had even attempted to synthesize the material generated by the Parks board,” says Steele. Working with any material he could find in the Vancouver and University of British Columbia Ar- chives, Steele managed to dig up some interesting anecdotes about the parks board such as violent disagreements between board members, scandals, and animosity between City Hall and parks board superintendents,(which once resulted in an outright fist-fight.) The book’s conclusion, which makes a disturbing point about the future of Vancouver parks , is food for thought. Steele, a freelance journalist who lives in North Vancouver, is the North Shore News’ book reviewer. He is also the author of The Stanley Park Explorer. AM SCEAN OF ORIGINAL ARD CLASSIC SESHSS LOVINGLY PREPARED W J0y oor raiabew rel — a delicionsly colowtal reli uf : senecl, cacanes, saluse, snapper and tiie | TAKE-GUT and § CATERING AVAILABLE | 280-1510 180 East 2nd, North Van. Church) was reading Penguin books. In retrospect this omission strikes me as a Bross parental failure. Now don’t get me wrong — I've been a loyal and devoted fan of Penguin paperbacks for Jo these many years (with a special fond- ness for the Classics series). No other publishing house has con- tributed as much to the preserva- tion and dissemination of humankinds’ history and literature as this venerable company. But one tradition | can well do without is its neo-puritanical ad- herence to a microscopic type- face. ‘No pleasure without pain’ might well be a company motto judging by the evidence. Now | should hasten to add that, at a hoary 38 years of age, | am blessed with perfect vision. This is both a source of pride and sadness: pride because vanity will grasp at any straw and sadness because, well, you lied, mum. The reason for this lengthy tirade-cum-preamble is the latest crop of Penguin paperbacks now sprouting in bookstores and posing a renewed threat to eyes the world over. Once again, ‘small print’ is a Penguin trademark. One of the many new Penguin titles is Martin Middlebrook’s The Peenemunde Raid ~— 17/18 August 1943, (265 pp.; $12.95). This definitive work details the preparation for and execution of the mass-attack on Nazi Ger- many’s experimental rocket works by Sritain’s Bomber Command. On the night of August 17/18, nearly 600 airplanes converged on this important enemy site, dropp- ing over three million pounds of explosives in an attempt to eradicate or at least cripple Ger- many’s highly successful ‘secret weapons’ production. Among Bomber Cu. _1and’s intended vic- tims was a German scientist who would fater be a key figure in the U.S. space program: Professor Wernher von Braun. While other books (notably David Irving’s The Mare’s Nest) have dealt at length with the im- portance of Peenemunde, never before have the events of the ac- tual raid by Britain’s Bomber Command been examined in such depth. The author has painstakingly compiled data from both German and British sources to present an extremely clear image of a Second World War action that quite liter- ally affected not only the development of German weapons systems and the course of the war, but also, if indirectly, man’s ex- ploratian of space. The Peenemunde Raid provides rare insights into the lives of the men and women who fought this historic battle. Through the use of numerous personal anecdotes and recollections, the reader is trans- ported inte the cockpits and con- trol centres of the German Luft- waffe and British Bomber Com- mand. So complete is the mass of detail contained that any armchair histo- rian can reconstruct this entire episode in mankind's sanguinary exploits from beginning to end. Its only failing as 2 book may be that The Peenemunde Raid is su replete with technical and other €otails that some readers may find their interest waning under the constant onslaught of data. see Then there's the other side of the Second World War: the fic- tional! side. Daddy begins in the pre-war thirties with a fortune in Jewish funds smuggled out of the Third Reich by a conscientious banker. Later caught and tortured, the banker commits suicide rather than divulge the access codes to this $350 million fortune to his captors. The latter suspect tat the deceased’s granddaughter holds the key to this mystery and initiate a ruthless, cross-Europe hunt for the woman. Little do they know that the ac- tual repository for the essential in- formation is the dead banker’s 11-year-old great-grandson, a boy named Thomas. Loup Durand’s Daddy (Willard/Random House; 374 pp.; $26.75) is an entertaining and suspenseful yarn, although natu- tally enough for this genre, the Nazi thugs are uniformly a psychotic and perverse lot. Fun Seekers USE THE NEWS he North Shore NOW section of the NEWS provides readers from 18 to 80 with the information they need to plan their weekend. From what’s hap- pening around the North Shore to places to dine, or just something fun to do, the NOW section THE VOICE OF HONTH AND WEST VANCOUVER ne shore SUNDAY + WEDNESDAY = FRIDAY We work for you! will point you in the right direction. There’s also the complete week’s TV listings, an entertainer profile, as well as book, record and video reviews in every issue. When you're looking for a better way to spend your leisure- time or just a little fun and excitement, USE the NEWS.