Starting with Susan McCaslin’s excerpt from her essay ‘The Problem with Perfect’ from her book Arousing the Spirit, this issue threatens to be something of a more summerish leisurely reading issue.
     Susan’s excellent book of poetry, Skydiving with Demeter, is also reviewed by Allan Brown in the centre pages. This pertinent volume of poetry, brilliant in both its concept and execution, was short listed for the BC book prize and is still in contention for the Alberta equivalent where it was published.   

    Starting with Susan McCaslin’s excerpt from her essay ‘The Problem with Perfect’ from her book Arousing the Spirit, this issue threatens to be something of a more summerish leisurely reading issue.
     Susan’s excellent book of poetry, Skydiving with Demeter, is also reviewed by Allan Brown in the centre pages. This pertinent volume of poetry, brilliant in both its concept and execution, was short listed for the BC book prize and is still in contention for the Alberta equivalent where it was published.   
     She adapts the Greek myth of Demeter and her daughter Persephone into the current mother-daughter context of contemporary culture. As the poet says in her foreword to the book: “What if Demeter, the timeless fertility goddess of the ancient Greek myth, slipped through a crack into the Twenty-first Century, shook off her ankle bracelets, corn tassels and garlands, and began a tour of our improbable culture?”
   This is a fine book of poetry by a writer whose spiritual essays, published by Woodlake Books of B.C., reveal a progressive faith spirituality in progress.
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   On another literary note, the fall list of Novalis publications includes Bishop Remi De Roo’s pastoral chronicles as a Father of the Second Vatican Council. He has been busily engaged in this memoir project during the past year as well as travelling to China at the invitation of the Chinese Catholic Church to speak in the seminaries on The Second Vatican Council.
     De Roo seems to be the only active Father of the 2,500 or more that participated at the Council between 1962-65. There are about a hundred still alive.
     This, the third book he has worked on with his close confrere retired Senator Douglas Roche of Edmonton, who is the project co-ordinator of these memoirs for Novalis.
   In this same vein the bishop spoke at Saint Andrew’s cathedral on Saturday, May 26 as part of the diocesan celebration of the 50th anniversary of Vatican II. As Bishop Gagnon said at the event, he presented a masterly summary of The Council, issuing challenges to the contemporary church on the process.
    Remi De Roo continues meeting with small groups of progressive Catholics and Christians and seekers of all stripes. He also spoke at weekend masses at Sacred Heart Parish on June 3, again on the abiding theme of the Council. An afternoon workshop was included in the program. On the day before he had lead the liturgy at St. Jean Baptiste Parish for the funeral mass of his former financial assistant Gerald Ricard. In March he had played the same role at Madelaine Ricard’s funeral, Gerald’s wife.
    At age 88 and counting, the bishop must be taking the right vitamin tonic to keep up his program and schedule. He continues to be a stimulating speaker and pertinent conversationalist, inspiring many with his persistence, clarity of vision and abiding sense of hope. 
                                   3.
    As for my own ‘special’ summer reading habits, I reached my 65th birthday April 29 and one of the surprise gifts was a book from Marven Sanders who has permanently relocated to the city due to health reasons.  Marven was one of the original crew that surrounded the idea of the newspaper in 1986. He built the original light table for layout purposes. Its still used by a graphic artist today.
   Marven knows my reading interests, or as my daughters typify them, obsessions. He presented me with Dr. Mary’s Monkey by Edward Haslem. The author had been interviewed on late night radio and Marven announced when I got his return to Victoria message “I’ve got a book for you, Pat.” I knew what that meant.
 When the movie JFK came out in the early 1990s, I became very focussed, not to say obsessed with the cast of characters that were revealed in the film about the more likely  causes of the death of the most famous U.S. President of the Twentieth Century, and the ‘crime of the century.’
    Editing the paper in those days was more labour intensive with physical paste-up, using that famous light table. As a result I would sit up long hours in the middle of the night in all night cafes near our offices, reading the sixty to eighty books that ultimately formed the bibliography to the movie.
   Twenty years later, Dr. Mary’s Monkey, published five years ago now, fits into that genre with its subtitle: “How the unsolved murder of a doctor, a secret laboratory in New Orleans and cancer causing monkey viruses are linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, the JFK assassination and emerging global epidemics.” It is a staggering book in its implications and fresh revelations about the Kennedy assassination.
   It is written by a Jesuit-educated resident of New Orleans whose father was a surgeon at Tulane University medical school and a colleague of Dr. Mary Sherman whose death, to this day, is on the books of the New Orleans police department as an unsolved homicide from June, 1964. Ed Haslem seems to solve it.
   The author was only a boy at the time of the death but his father’s upset reaction and circumspect comments plus the mysterious circumstances of the crime prompted him years later to start on the trail of its solution. If you know New Orleans from that era of the Jim Garrison investigation of the JFK assassination, not everything is as it seems. Not by a long shot.
   In short, Dr. Mary worked in a secret lab funded by the CIA to develop a serum to counter the cancer causing elements of the 1950s polio vaccine which was developed from monkey organs and was universally issued to counter the polio epidemic of the period.
   Dr. Sherman was not murdered in the conventional sense. What happened to her was much stranger.
   In the 1991 movie JFK, a strange character David Ferrie is a key player. He was twice asked to leave Catholic seminary after three year stints of training and study. Mary Sherman, a world class cancer pathologist, ended up working with David Ferrie who in the JFK movie claimed to be working on a cure for cancer, thus the white mice in cages throughout his apartment. Ferrie died mysteriously just as Garrison’s investigation was taking off.
     More significantly to the JFK killing, Ferrie was part of a team of a handlers that summer of 1963 for Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald, in CIA language was being ‘sheep dipped’ by the agency to fit the crime of Kennedy’s murder on November 22, 1963.
    This was New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s contention. Oswald was deliberately being publicly associated with what would later be evidence staged to frame him as ‘the patsy’ he claimed to be before being murdered himself by gangster and Ferrie associate, Jack Ruby. 
    Garrison is the hero of JFK and the only one to bring to trial someone charged with the assassination. Charged was Clay Shaw, a businessman and long term CIA operative who was part of the sheep-dipping strategy of Oswald. Haslem’s contention is that it was not the Kennedy assassination that made the federal government so nervous about Garrison’s investigation of Ferrie and Oswald and Shaw, but the possible discovery of the secret lab and its implications.
    The book is an easy read and very clear. It almost seems to write itself with the author simply following leads such as his father deep admiration of and inconsolable grief at the death of Dr. Sherman. When his father died prematurely, the author takes up the mantle. 
   The coincidences that follow and keep him sleuthing are intriguing. For example the author’s college girlfriend ends up renting the very apartment used by David Ferrie for his mice testing lab and conspiracy work.
    Ferrie, as reported in Jim Garrison’s different books, was actually trying to come up with a failsafe way of assassinating Fidel Castro, as sanctioned by the CIA which was collaborating with Mafioso gangsters at the time.
     Oswald’s family history included relatives who were employed by Carlos Marcello, the New Orleans Godfather, notorious for his connection to the JFK assassination.
   The significance of the book to me is that these mysteries only very slowly reveal themselves in their ‘solution.’ It is a very happy fact that more and more information is slowly being made known and revealing itself to analysis, such as Ed Haslem’s.
    I particularly like the part about his classroom discussions under the Jesuit teachers at the time of the crimes – discussions which contained prescient clarity and accuracy about the roots of the problem. The book is a testament to the slogan that the truth will out, but it does require hard work, long term diligence and faith in unlikely leads and outcomes.