2020 will be remembered as the year a sitting prime minister was censored for a trivial reading list.
Who would have thought that the “culture of cancellation” would reach the highest levels of government?
I wanted to offer you my reading list, in the form of recommendations for different public figures.
1 – By the way, by Woody Allen
This is by far the most wonderful biography I have read. Allen tells the story of his life, with verve, intelligence and self-mockery. More importantly, he is setting the record straight on the sexual assault allegations made against him. He recalls in detail the two independent inquiries which unequivocally concluded that his daughter Dylan had not been abused.
I recommend it to Karine Vanasse, who played a very small role in Midnight in Paris and who recently said on television that she would never agree to play with him today.
Woody Allen talks about actors who have said they regret starring in his films: “The fact that these actors never went into the details of the case didn’t stop them from speaking out in public with conviction.”
2 – Back to Birkenau, by Ginette Kolinka.
I had nightmares after reading the chilling story of this woman who was arrested by the Gestapo in March 1944 and then deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she rubbed shoulders with Simone Weil as a companion in poverty.
I recommend this book to lawyers who pleaded against Bill 21 by drawing an odious parallel between the possible abuses of this law on secularism and the Nuremberg laws which led to the final solution.
3 – Offended Generation: From the Culture Police to the Thought Police, by Caroline Fourest.
This brilliant essayist wrote the French counterpart to Mathieu Bock-Côté’s book, The Empire of Political Correctness.
She talks about the “plague of sensitivity” and the opportunists who “take advantage of compassion to open a permanent complaints office”. “A not insignificant part of the current collective hysteria is due to the skin, extremely cozy, of the new generations. And even more to the fact that they have been taught to complain in order to exist, ”she writes.
I recommend it to all right-thinking people in Quebec and to Katherine Fafard of the Association des libraires.
4 – Kukum, by Michel Jean
This novel does not only tell the story of the grandmother of my colleague Michel, but the slow dispossession of a whole people. He gives a new meaning to the word “denatured”: to tear away from Nature.
I recommend it to the staff at the Joliette Hospital.
5 – The anomaly, by Hervé Le Tellier.
While reading this book, winner of the 2020 Goncourt Prize, I came across this sentence: “When a Minister of Health cuts in the budget, let him remove a to scan, there a doctor, again an intensive care unit, he can imagine that he is shortening the lives of thousands of strangers quite a bit “.
And who do I recommend it to? To all the governments of recent years in Quebec, which have weakened our health system …
