HOT TOPICS FOR THE BEACH Some big thoughts for big summer reading: Canadian foreign policy (or the lack of it), the denial of human nature, and everyone's favourite pastime, hating the French. If these tomes prove too weighty for the beach, they're perfect for a rainy day.

The American-led invasion of Iraq was preceded by an all-out verbal assault on Europe. With everyone from Donald Rumsfeld to Bart Simpson pitching in, the strongest invective was reserved for France. "The rat that roared" and "the petulant prima donna of realpolitik" were among the more polite epithets aimed at the French. A new book by a couple of McGill grads may help explain why the former allies were destined to disagree.

Jean-Benoit Nadeau, BA'92, and Julie Barlow, BA'91, lived in France for two years under the auspices of the New Hampshire-based Institute of Current World Affairs to report on why the French were resisting globalization. They soon discovered that this resistance was more imagined than real: the French were globalizing in their own way. Nadeau and Barlow learned that there were many misunderstandings about France, so with the blessing of the ICWA, the pair set about studying the country's history, culture and social structure in order to challenge some of the accepted wisdom. The result is Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong: Why We Love France But Not the French.

One common assumption is that the French workforce is highly unionized and prone to frequent strikes. In fact, only 9% of French workers belong to a union (vs. 14% in the U.S. and 37% in Canada) and in 1996, 11 times more work days were lost to strikes in the U.S. than in France.

Barlow and Nadeau argue that North Americans expect the French to be like themselves -- and judge them accordingly. Yet the French are different. They are suspicious of rampant individualism and free enterprise. They are happy to have a rock-strong central government and view the Canadian model of a loose federation as complete anarchy. They encourage an élite among civil servants and politicians, demanding little accountability. (Until 2002, the Prime Minister doled out 15,000 euros to each of his ministers for discretionary purposes every month.) They consider social conversation a combative exercise -- it's all about arguments, clever use of language and scoring points at others' expense. Our standard ice-breakers (your name, what you do) are deemed private matters, perhaps to be broached only at the end of an evening. Privacy extends to the home: while the French are warm hosts, they'd be unlikely to invite you to tour the house.

Like a pair of anthropologists, Barlow and Nadeau examine major and minor aspects of French life and times, providing fascinating insights into this often paradoxical people. While their entertaining and absorbing book may not spell the coup de grâce for freedom fries, it clearly explains who the French are and how they got that way.

Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong, Sourcebooks, by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow.

When people in countries as diverse as the United States, China and Kenya are asked to look at paintings and choose their favourite, the winner is consistently a serene landscape showing grazing animals, trees, water and humans. What's the root of such consistency? And how much of our behaviour is actually hard-wired?

In The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker, BA'76, DSc'99, cites over a thousand studies (including two on art choices) to illustrate the complex patterns of thought and behaviour that make up human nature. While many people would not dispute the fact that these patterns evolved with our species, some boggle at the implications. In gender and race politics, the notion that we start out fundamentally different from each other is feared as a threat to equal opportunity. Thinkers who build on the implications of nature plus nurture are seen as incendiary. Pinker wants to show that such fears are based on unclear thinking and that "an acknowledgment of human nature does not, logically speaking, imply the negative outcomes so many people fear."

Pinker is director of MIT's McConnell-Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. His basic field -- language and cognition -- has yielded fundamental insights in the last half century, notably into the subtlety of the interaction of nature and nurture. In this book, he branches out to discuss child-rearing, violence, gender issues, politics and the arts.

He reviews the origin of three outdated but persistent ideas: that the human mind at birth is a tabula rasa ("blank slate"), that primitive people were more peaceable than moderns ("the noble savage"), and that higher mental functions, like conscience, are separable from our material nature ("the ghost in the machine"). His premise is that "like the Victorians'embarrassment about sex," our refusal to acknowledge human nature "distorts our science and scholarship, our public discourse, and our day-to-day lives."

Throughout The Blank Slate are tasty samples of an astonishing mix of intellectual history, popular culture and always-opinionated readings of current behavioural research. Look for delightful snippets about adopted twins separated at birth, including two, raised in different families, who both formed the habit of dunking buttered toast in their coffee.

Once Pinker opens our eyes to the complex patterning that shapes human behaviour, he beseeches us to share his horror at fuzzy thinking all around us. He offers examples of how evolution in fact seems to have favoured independence of thought, and cites studies of the violence endemic in primitive cultures to show that humans who resolve conflicts have the edge in the long term. "With violence, as with so many other concerns, human nature is the problem, but human nature is also the solution."

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Viking Press, by Steven Pinker.

Prime Minister Jean Chrétien may cockily advise the European Union and the U.S. to model their economic selves on Canada at G8 summits. He may wag his finger at George Bush over foreign policy, or make diplomatic recommendations to the UN Security Council. But governments around the world may in turn say, "Who is this man and how did he get in here?"

Canada's recent successes at reducing deficits and a temporarily strong economy notwithstanding, former Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Cohen argues in While Canada Slept that we are quickly becoming irrelevant on the world stage and have created a "Potemkin Canada," with pretensions to international importance but of little real influence. Refusing to go to war in Iraq? Our crippled military couldn't have managed much even if we had wanted them to. Peacekeeping in the world's trouble zones? Bangladesh has more peacekeepers. Foreign service and international diplomacy? The diplomatic corps is demoralized and in tatters.

In his introduction to While Canada Slept, Cohen, BA'77, quotes John Manley, then Minister of Foreign Affairs, shortly after September 11 on Canada's role in the world: "We are still trading on a reputation that was built two generations and more ago... You can't just sit at the G8 table and then, when the bill comes, go to the washroom."

The chapters that follow constitute a polemic somewhat in the spirit of George Grant's classic Lament for a Nation. Cohen has looked at the country's foreign policy and what he sees saddens him. He takes former prime minister and Nobel Peace Prize winner Lester B. Pearson (along with two lesser known colleagues and contemporaries, Hume Wrong and Norman Robertson) as representing a foreign relations golden age in Canada. He then examines the country from the military, foreign aid, diplomatic and trade perspectives.

Most Canadians are aware by now of the trouble our military is in, but the case as set out by Cohen is truly damning. On foreign aid, he argues that we are much less generous than in the past, with the aid that is given being spread too thin among too many countries. And he points out that our international trade isn't very international: 87% of our exports go to the U.S., on whom we are still -- after all the flashy trade missions to Europe and Asia -- almost entirely dependent.

But While Canada Slept is not merely a gloomy jeremiad, and Cohen believes Canada has much to offer the world if it can move beyond the foreign policy of "hand-wringing, head-scratching and throat-clearing." This is a thoughtful, historically informative and alarming book that deserves its place on Canada's bestseller lists. While it's no day at the beach, the book's lessons are valuable and timely.

While Canada Slept: How We Lost Our Place in the World, McClelland and Stewart, by Andrew Cohen.

MISCELLANEOUS MEDLEY Three debut works that are all winners. They feature fiction from a compassionate teacher and a Kenyan immigrant, while a grizzled veteran journalist takes us behind the making of a groundbreaking documentary series.

"Summer reading" generally alludes to breezy tomes featuring conflicts that are easily resolved and good guys who always win the day. If that's the kind of book you're hoping to pack to the beach, As She Grows by Lesley Anne Cowan, BA'92, DipEd'93, definitely doesn't fit the bill.

If, on the other hand, you're willing to spend part of the summer reading a harrowing but compelling account of one young woman's desperate struggle to escape a fate of misery, Cowan's debut novel delivers the goods.

The book is a page-turner and you won't soon forget Snow, Cowan's clever, emotionally scarred protagonist. The 15-year-old Snow has been dealt a lousy life, to be sure. She lives in a grimy apartment with a drunken, half-crazy grandmother. Her mom is dead, her dad's identity is unknown and you just know her boyfriend isn't the kind of guy who is going to hang around when the going gets rough.

Snow is smart, tough and insightful and these qualities just might rescue her from a life of joyless poverty. But she is no angel. She frequently does stupid things, fuelled by bitterness and her own self-loathing. As she uncovers the unsettling facts of her mother's life, Snow's own fate begins to look frighteningly familiar.

What saves the book from overwhelming bleakness is Snow herself. You can't help but root for such a vibrant character and Cowan does a masterful job of showing us what the world looks like from this acerbic and suspicious teenager's point of view.

Cowan also does fine work giving readers a realistic and sombre glimpse of the social services network that exists to help troubled teens like Snow. Cowan herself is a teacher who specializes in dealing with at-risk youth, and the scenes set in group homes and in counsellors' offices feel strikingly authentic. She doesn't glamorize her profession -- far from it. Snow's putdowns of these services -- and some of the people who offer them -- are biting, but she also proves herself to be a difficult young woman to reach out to.

While she tackles grim terrain, Cowan's writing style can be quite lyrical. The book's first few sentences, in which a very young Snow journeys with her mother's ashes, comprise one of the most beguiling openings encountered in some time.

As She Grows is a confident and powerful first novel. Cowan is an author well worth watching.

As She Grows, Penguin Books, by Lesley Anne Cowan.