Archive for April, 2008

The pulchritudinous women chosen by Silvio Berlusconi to serve in his cabinet should surprise no one. The resurrected prime minister of Italy, back for his third time in office, is renowned for flirting, making rude gestures to policewomen and remarking on the number of girlfriends he’s had despite the fact he’s married. The four females picked for cabinet include a showgirl, an actress, another who is best known for her short skirts and a Miss Italy contestant.

In fact, Berlusconi’s style fits perfectly into the Italian way of life where women are admired far more for their beauty than their brains. (Unless, it is an Italian man’s love for his mother, which seems to know no bounds.) When we lived in Florence, I watched television to try and polish my language skills only to discover that Italian TV is mostly about beautiful women. There were two fashion channels with endless parades of runway models in bikinis and sheer clothing. Sunscreen ads showed topless women on a beach. Italy’s version of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” featured women in the front row wearing halter-tops and short shorts no matter the season.

Even the nightly sportscast was not exempt. Four men in suits and ties sat behind desks talking about the day’s events and tomorrow’s contests. In the middle of the foursome was a young woman perched on a high stool. Unlike her male confreres she had no modesty panel the better for the viewer to admire her legs rising to a skirt so short it barely covered her navel. She held a sheaf of papers, as if she was supposed to have a role, but was never called upon to comment. Every few seconds, while the men gabbed, the camera lovingly showed her shapely legs or her cleavage.

Berlusconi’s selections are not the first pretty parliamentarians. Porn star Ilona Staller, known as Cicciolina (Cuddles), was elected to parliament and served for five years. Nor is the national eye candy solely political. Pro golfer Sophie Sandolo sells a calendar with a provocative cover photo that shows her lying on her back, topless, with hips rampant. “Italy,” wrote author Tobias Jones in The Dark Heart of Italy, “is the land that feminism forgot.”

If I were to guess when the National Business Book Award went off the rails, I would pick 1999 when Ingeborg Boyens won for “Unnatural Harvest.” The topic was genetic engineering and the book was about science, not business. Since then, there have been many books nominated that should have won but have not. And there have been many other books that shouldn’t have been nominated but went on to win. Gord Pitts is a good example of an excellent author who has been nominated a record four times and should have won at least once but hasn’t.

(Conflict of interest declaration: I won in 1996 for “Who Killed Confederation Life?” and I’ve been shortlisted three times since. I don’t expect ever to win again, I don’t even want to. Others should collect the money and enjoy whatever publicity is generated.)

Last week, Andrea Mandel Campbell wrote an op-ed piece on this topic in the National Post. Beyond her whining because she wasn’t nominated for “Why Mexicans Don’t Drink Molson,” she made a valid point by asking why Don Tapscott’s “Wikinomics” wasn’t shortlisted (strangely, none of Don’s dozen best-selling business books has ever been shortlisted), where was Seymour Schulich’s “Get Smarter” and what about “The Opposable Mind” by Roger Martin. This year was Martin’s last chance now that he has replaced former Ontario Premier Bill Davis as chair of the award jury.

Sponsors PricewaterhouseCoopers and BMO Financial Group have certainly done their part by doubling the prize to $20,000 and putting on a pleasant lunch for several hundred in the book business every year.

But aside from who wins (always a contentious point no matter what the award), I think the real question is this: does the National Business Book Award sell books? I’d be happy to be proven wrong but I think the answer is no. As this year’s winner, William Marsden, author of “Stupid to the Last Drop” put it at the ceremony today, “My hope is that this award encourages business people to read.”

So far, there is no proof that such an epiphany has occurred. The third leg of the stool to go along with authors and prizes is marketing. The National Business Book Award badly needs a national retailer to thump the drums about the winner and finalists in the months following the lunch. It’s only good business.

Shortly after establishing this blog a year ago when Fantasy in Florence was first published, I realized that the question asked most often was: Where can I buy your book? As an author, this is always a frustration. You like to scream, “In a bookstore, what do you think?”

But I hold my tongue and make suggestions. As part of being helpful, I decided to put a link on this site to one of the online possibilities, so I checked out chapters.indigo.ca and discovered delivery took three-to-five weeks, far longer than it would take to read the book.

By contrast, Amazon.ca had immediate delivery. Price was about the same at both sites, more than one-third off, so it was a no brainer. Click on the link under the book and you’ll be taken to Amazon.ca for speediest delivery.

I just heard something recently that may explain why indigo.chapters.ca takes so much longer to deliver a book. The warehouse is in Nashville, Tennessee! So much for the firm’s pro-Canada posture. Most of my books are bought by people who live within 200 km of Toronto and I don’t imagine the numbers are too much different for other authors. The rationale behind forcing publishers, most of whom are located in Toronto, to ship books by truck across the Canada-U.S. border only to have them come back the same slow route for order fulfillment is beyond me.

Meanwhile, Amazon.ca remains your swiftest source.

If ever a frequent flyer program has been rendered useless, it has to be Aeroplan. As a member since 1984, the year of the plan’s inception, I used to be able to save points for three or four years and use them for two business class seats that required 60,000, and later 80,000, points per person. In that way, over the years we’ve flown business class on Air Canada to Los Angeles, London and Florence via Frankfurt.

Compared to traveling in steerage, going business class really was a reward for my loyalty to the carrier. With wider seats, better service, quality food and wines, it was the good life.

Air Canada has changed the system so that you can’t possibly choose to use your points in anything like the same luxurious way. I’ve accumulated 234,000 points and set out last month to book two business class seats to Florence this fall. Aeroplan’s online system allows you to select flights in various levels of availability as well as scout alternate destinations in other countries. All this is just so much window dressing. After noodling around for a few hours on several occasions, I discovered that the only business class seats to any European destination in the three-month period September through November will cost at least 460,000 points for two tickets.

Aeroplan claims that more seats are being added all the time but you can’t prove it by me. I’ve been back to the site half a dozen times and nothing has changed.

Frequent flyer programs no longer exist to reward customer loyalty, they continue only because they’ve become a major source of revenue for the airlines. Air Canada spun off Aeroplan into an income trust with an initial valuation of $2 billion earned from selling points to credit card operators, phone companies and hotel chains who, in turn, hand them out to their customers. Since cashing in has become more problematic, those collected points tend to remain unused.

Add the cost of personal items pilfered from our luggage in recent years, and customer loyalty has been twisted into lucre for the airlines and larceny by baggage-handlers.

Congratulations to Industry Minister Jim Prentice for scotching the MacDonald, Dettweiler and Associates (MDA) deal. If ever an American takeover cried out for such unprecedented action, this was it. As makers of Canadarm and Radarsat-2, the satellite that guards the Arctic, MDA should remain Canadian and now will.

The fact that this is the first time Canada has stopped such a grab riles me. We’ve been selling out this country since the nineteenth century when sawmills were the focus of foreign interest. Why exactly do we protect banks and cable companies and so little else?

Even bookstores are shielded. Chapters/Indigo now has two-thirds of the Canadian book market. Its tentacles reach deep into publishing houses who change cover designs on a buyer’s whim and need pre-approval on titles before the giant retailer will deign to stock particular books. In the case of some cultural industries, a little foreign competition would be welcome.

I’d like to think today’s announcement about MDA means that Minister Prentice will step in on other situations outside such designated industries but there’s so little Canadian content left to worry about that maybe all we can hope for is the right decision on an ad hoc basis.

The anniversary of Pope John-Paul II’s passing reminded me how we heard about his death in 2005. We’d been out to dinner that Saturday night and were walking home along the streets of Florence about 10 p.m. when, suddenly, church bells began to toll. Never before had we heard bells at that time of night but we knew immediately what the somber sound meant. Il Papa e morto. The pope is dead.

A crowd gathered on the steps of the Duomo. Some stood with heads bowed, others lifted their faces toward Heaven. For the most part, everyone was silent, lost in thought about the man, his death, and his life. Few words were exchanged but the one phrase that kept being repeated was santo subito, immediate sainthood, their hope for his speedy beatification.

A little more than two weeks later, I was writing at my desk when I realized that the bells of Giotto’s Campanile had been ringing for a minute or so. In itself, that was not an unusual event; they always pealed at 5:30 p.m. but wasn’t it a little later? I checked the time in the upper right-hand corner of my laptop screen: 6:12 p.m. There could only be one meaning to this joyous sound: Habemus Papam, We have a Pope. I turned on the TV and watched the smoke billowing from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel.

The celebratory bells outside our window marked the second time in a matter of days that such a sound had delivered the news, an unusual and medieval means of communication in this electronic age. The new pope, Benedict XVI, has sped up the process for John-Paul’s sainthood so it won’t take the usual five years, but there were those of us the night of his death who believed he should be given that status more quickly than the all-time record holder, St. Francis of Assisi, whose sainthood occurred in two years. Three years is long enough for St. John-Paul. Santo subito.