Zoomer Magazine August/September 2021

I returned to Canada from my sister’s Istanbul funeral with two possessions dear to Donna that our mother thought I should have – her diary and her charm bracelet. I have never read the diary and never will, on principle, as Donna valued her secrets. And after reading “A Charmed Life” (pg. 70), Nathalie Atkinson’s examination of the timeless allure of the charm bracelet, I feel even more regret at misplacing my sister’s in the blur of my peripatetic youth. The heavy bracelet’s multi-layered trinkets were gathered in souks, bazaars and markets in Europe and the Middle East. It made me feel closer to the life she led the few years we lived apart before a 1990 car crash claimed her. Emotion, memory and nostalgia are often unconsidered side-effects of possessions…

OF THE ZILLIONS OF PHOTOGRAPHS taken of the Queen, few images capture the emotions of the woman holding up the Crown. Chris Jackson, the royal photographer for Getty Images, chose his best pictures from nearly 20 years spent jockeying for position in press scrums around the world for his book Elizabeth II: A Queen for Our Time. His selections capture the fleeting moments when the Queen’s game face slips, letting us connect to her humanity. The book publishes in September, timed to land just ahead of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, the 70th anniversary of her ascension to the throne in February, 1952. Jackson, who is married to Natasha Archer, the personal assistant to Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, is sometimes offered special access to the Windsors, but remains in awe of their Royal…

Inspector Armand Gamache is back in Three Pines after a Paris sojourn in 2020’s All the Devils Are Here. The 17th book in Louise Penny’s wildly popular series, which has won seven Agatha Awards for mystery writing, comes out Aug. 24. In The Madness of Crowds, the head of homicide for the Surété du Québec is asked to protect a visiting professor with an abhorrent solution to the financial instability wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, and, of course, there’s a murder to solve. The other Penny drops Oct. 12, when the Knowlton, Que.-based writer publishes State of Terror, co-written with her friend, former U.S. first lady, Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, about a new U.S. president who chooses a political enemy as his secretary of state. Former CBC journalist…

AT 64, FIRST-TIME author Michelle Good understands the irrelevance of age when it comes to writing a book. “If you have a story that you feel must be told, what difference does it make if you’re 10 or 90?” she said in a recent interview from her home near Kamloops, B.C. Case in point: her 2020 novel Five Little Indians, which won the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction in English and the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. It is a story of intergenerational trauma told through the braided narratives of residential-school survivors Kenny, Lucy, Maisie, Clara and Howie. It couldn’t be more germane, given hundreds of unmarked graves were discovered at former residential-school sites run by the Roman Catholic Church in B.C. and Saskatchewan. When…

All you need is love At 112, Puerto Rican Emilio Flores Márquez is confirmed as the world’s oldest man, telling Guinness World Records he attributes his longevity to a life full of love and free of anger. What, you’ve never seen a 93-year-old woman dressed as a donkey riding a broomstick? Japanese nonagenarian Kimiko Nishimoto, who took up photography at 72, is an Instagram sensation thanks to her hilarious photos taken in costume. Stroke of fortune After she was temporarily paralyzed on her dominant right side, a New York woman, 63, discovers she’s a gifted left-handed painter. A study in the U.S. journal Aging showed lifestyle and dietary changes in participants aged 50 to 72 reduced their biological age by three years in just eight weeks Which means that, after 120 weeks of…

THE DEFENCE never rests, especially when renowned Toronto criminal lawyer Marie Henein is wearing the robes. That holds true outside the courtroom, too, as Henein will publish a memoir called Nothing But the Truth on Sept. 28 that promises to defend her much-maligned profession and underline why she chooses to represent controversial clients like former CBC personality Jian Gomeshi (acquitted of choking and sexual assault), former Ontario attorney general Michael Bryant (charges withdrawn of criminal negligence causing death, and dangerous driving) and former Vice-Admiral Mark Norman (breach of trust charge stayed). “Her most successful cases made her a lightning rod in some circles, confirming her belief that much of the public’s understanding of the justice system is based on popular culture and social media, and decidedly not the rule of law,” says…