In the beginning there was black, and good Christians have had it out for this troublesome colour ever since. At times synonymous with death and the devil, at others with fertility, paganism and power, black has suffered a dubious history on the colour wheel—occasionally even getting banished to the peculiar fringe of the “non-colour.” In Black: The History of a Color (Princeton University Press), Michel Pastoureau charts a European social history of the most symbolic and evocative colour on earth, inviting black back into its rightful place in the chromatic palette and interrogating the superstitions that Western civilization has erected around the colour of sleep, burial and dangerous night. But despite the campaigns waged against it, black has always had its dusky devotees. This book catalogues some of the most fanatical black-backers and uncompromising chromophobes who ever lived: from a pair of shadowy fashion-forward fifteenth-century dukes named “the Fearless” and “the Rash,” to Henry Ford, who to his dying day was puritanically opposed to producing automobiles in any colour but black. Drawing on archaeology, art history, religion and science, Pastoureau illustrates just how much subjective leeway informs our perceptions of colours and their shifting cultural meanings. He reveals that in Europe and the Middle East, the “opposite” of white was long considered to be red—early chessboards reflect this—and that during the Middle Ages, red and green were considered so alike as to be essentially interchangeable. One of the book’s more sweeping claims is that the relatively modern­ black-and-white­ media of print and photography have been so prominent in our culture that our tendency to think in these binary terms distinguishes us from civilizations past. For someone like me, who still has difficulty believing that the world didn’t actually used to be sepia-toned, as it is in early photographs, this little psychology lesson will strike a chord that resonates long after the book is read and put away.

Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide (Chicago Review Press) works as a channel to bring like-minded enthusiasts together. You can read between the lines to discern that the author, Glenn Kay, had an emotionally charged time spending red-eyed nights reviewing almost every zombie film in existence. He gives special credit to Night of the Living Dead (1968) for reviving ­zombie films in general, and midnight horror shows in particular, to this day. The author also credits the book The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) as “a much needed reminder of where the Zombie came from.” What he means is that the earliest zombie movies of the 1930s were historically accurate, at least in that they took place in Haiti and their principal characters were exploited on the coffee or sugar plantations. By the 1960s, the definition of zombie came to mean a more generic living-dead, sometimes flesh-eating, sometimes possessing other stomach-turning traits, but seldom viewed within a larger social context. I missed the film version of The Serpent and the Rainbow, but I did read the memoir by Wade Davis, who was disgusted by the way his book was portrayed onscreen and retreated to Borneo, mortified. I’m not sure what he expected, as Wes Craven was the film’s director. In all fairness, a non-fiction work like The Serpent and the Rainbow would be challenging to translate to screen, especially when sensationalism is the thing that sells. There’s no question that by the 1990s, zombie films were once again being given a more thought-provoking treatment. This renewed sensibility, in the words of Steve Newton, writing in the Georgia Straight, deserves credit “for bringing braininess to the zombie genre—as opposed to just brain eating.” Two films that did not make it to Kay’s checklist are Ubaldo Ragona’s Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price (1964) and Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls with Candace Hilligoss (1962). These two masterpieces must have influenced the author’s hero, George Romero. Both films include chilling scenes in which the undead pursue and surround the main character—Romero repeatedly paid homage to these in Night of the Living Dead. Less subjectively, I noted three factual errors on Kay’s part, which I’ll mention for other aficionados. First, in his mention of Robot Monster (1953), he says the monster’s getup is a gorilla suit and a robot head, but upon closer inspection, it’s a gorilla suit and a diver’s helmet, an observable distinction. Second, he says William Castle’s last film was Shanks (1974), but in fact Castle made one more film, Bug (1975). (That’s a shame, too, for Castle’s oeuvre may have been more impeccable had he stopped at Shanks.) Finally, he says Rabid was David Cronenberg’s second film, after Frissons, but Cronenberg completists out there will know that Rabid was actually his fourth film (Stereo and Crimes of the Future were the first two). Apart from these hypercritical points, Zombie Movies, with its contagious passion and extensive research, is entitled to top rating.

Although the cover and title of Renovating Heaven by Andreas Schroeder (Oolichan Books) give the impression that the book is about the history of Mennonite barn raising in St. Jacobs, Ontario (and indeed the cover photo of men framing a barn-like structure is courtesy of the Mennonite Archives of Ontario in Waterloo), the book is actually a semi-autobiographical novel about Schroeder—sorry, about “Peter Niebuhr”—growing up as a Mennonite in Vancouver and the Fraser Valley. My family never plowed a field with a dilapidated ’36 Chevy, built a boat out of parts from the dump, milked cows at midnight, won an island in a contest or lost a parent in a car crash, but reading about the Niebuhr family’s experiences gave me the same comforting feeling that I get when I’m back home with my own—even though I read most of it while standing on public transit. The only thing that took me out of the story was the note on the book jacket that “In more forgiving times, these stories might have been described as largely autobio­graphical” but now the book is labelled a “novel” because of today’s non-fiction standards—I became preoccupied with trying to spot the fictionalized bits throughout. I hope the scene where Peter’s parents interrupt his first sexual experience and the girl jumps out the window to hide isn’t true, but it’s just so awkward that I think it must be.

Among the questions that inevitably follow a satisfying first day in Paris, according to the Revised Guide to that city included in Mavis Gallant’s new book, Going Ashore (McClelland & Stewart), are: “How can I get on the Anglo-American volleyball team?” and “When are the Ana­baptist Church sing­ alongs held?” The same book contains the full text of the Republic of France Toothbrush Tax Form, and the following wonderful passage from a literary memoir: “I decided to sell the inkpot to H.G. Wells. Many young writers were doing this.” Other excurses composed by Gallant in the 1980s and collected for the first time in Going Ashore include a note on General Achille Stifflet, who, having subjugated America, observed that “a little crenellation won’t hurt them now,” a remark that confused some of the women, who, “not knowing what crenellation was for, wore it in their hair.” A passage from Sieg­fried’s Memoirs provides the template for windy memoiristes of all times: “For a long time I used to go to bed early wondering if Siegfried von Handelskammern would ever complete his long-awaited memoirs of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where from June, 1940, when he made his first, much remarked appearance in Café Flore, until August, 1944, when he departed without having finished his glass of fine (patiently distilled from salvaged boot tops), he was the hub of an unparalleled intellectual revival.”

The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess by Andrei Codrescu (Princeton University Press) begins with a long essay on the life of the Dada art movement. Some of the language is a bit obscure, but Codrescu writes well enough that you want to keep reading. The real joy of the book comes in what follows the text: a 150-page glossary of terms related to Dada, such as (the) American woman (Peggy Guggen­heim), audiences and how Dadaists and communists viewed them, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Lenin and Tzara, and Zurich, the Swiss town where Dada was born. Zurich is also the historical anchor of the book: there, between 1915 and 1917, Lenin, the daddy of Communism, wrote political essays at the quiet library; and Tzara, the daddy of Dada, wrote poetry and hung around cafés with his artist friends. The glossary contains an entry on pseudo­nyms, the names adopted by writers, artists, revolutionaries, tyrants. Codrescu suggests that this privilege of adopting names, which has belonged to artists for so long, should be taken up by the readers of his book. Reading will become much more interesting, he proclaims, once you adopt a reading pseudonym and shed the intellectual baggage carried by your name. “A pseudonymous reader just might slip like a spy through the net and lose hermself in the words.” And who won this figurative chess match between Lenin and Tzara? The Soviet Union collapsed almost twenty years ago; Dada is present in fashion, in design, in music and art, in aesthetic trends—everywhere, all the time. The cover of The Posthuman Dada Guide is appealing in a (carefully) slapped together kind of way, and the size—4x8'' or 8x4''—lends emphasis to the “guide” aspect.

At the age of seventy-nine, Hans Eichner, a professor of German language and literature at the University of Toronto, published his first novel, Kahn & Engelmann, in German; it was hailed as a masterpiece in Europe. In April 2009, a masterful English trans­lation by Jean M. Snook appeared in Canada, published by Biblioasis, three days after the death of Hans Eichner at the age of eighty-seven. The publishers call the novel a “major work of Holocaust literature,” a fair enough evaluation. But readers in North America will find it first to be a novel of Europe in the twentieth century: the story will be familiar in bits and pieces to anyone having read or heard of Musil, Kafka, Kraus and other luminaries of Vienna before the Nazi storm. Eichner’s narrative implicates contemporary readers as none of the others can do today by remaining a family saga, complicated by family businesses, messy divorces, rivalries, disputes, suicides, success and failure, all of it compelling to anyone with a family. This saga, however, is driven not by “character” but by history, by the necessities of the “travelling life” thrust upon Jews over the centuries and of the growing spectre of the Nazi horror materializing finally with the explosion into Austria and then all of Europe. Members of the narrator’s family (like the author’s family) escape the Holocaust by several routes, to live as survivors always with an infected aftertaste of history in their mouths. Eichner’s narrative power is unsurpassed in any language. His sparse dialogue carries the story without effort: we move easily (and uneasily) from present (the last year of the twentieth century) to past, winding in and out of the decades. The mundane processes of life provide the sinews of epic. Eichner can quote Goethe, rhapsodize upon Beethoven and tell folksy tales of wandering rabbis. He is un­afraid of the ridiculous, the lowbrow, the sting in the tail. At the end he writes of the rabbi of Radsin: “When the corpses had been taken out, the rabbi still heard a sound in the car. He climbed in and looked: God was cowering in a corner of the car, crying. The rabbi refused to comfort him.”

Every Francophile worth their sel de Guérande will enjoy The Discovery of France (Norton), Graham Robb’s fascinating examination of the processes by which the France of two centuries ago became the France of modern times. At the Revolution, much of provincial France was unknown and effectively inaccessible to the citizens and administrators of Paris. Those who ventured out of the major urban centres—Paris, Lyons, Marseilles, Bordeaux—and into the country’s interior had great difficulty understanding the local dialects; strangers were greeted with suspicion and sometimes with violence. Robb, a biographer and historian, makes excellent use of both primary and secondary sources, and knows how to balance the scholarly with the anecdotal (you can detect a novelist’s pleasure in his account of how, on “a summer’s day in the early 1740s . . . a young geometer on the Cassini expedition [to produce the first accurate map of France] was hacked to death by natives”). Robb is also an enthusiastic cyclist and claims that this book “is the result of fourteen thousand miles in the saddle and four years in the library.” In a lyrical passage near the beginning of the book, he extols the many virtues of the bicycle, including its ability to re-create, “as if by chance, much older journeys: transhumance trails, Gallo-Roman trade routes, pilgrim paths, river confluences that have disappeared in industrial wasteland, valleys and ridge roads that used to be busy with pedlars.”

One evening during a stay at the Hollyhock retreat centre on Cortes Island, B.C., while we waited for the dinner gong to ring, each guest was doing a little “show and tell” on the books that we’d been reading. I passed around my copy of Anik See’s Saudade (Coach House), a collection of ten essays on “The Possibilities of Place,” and before anyone had read a single word of it, the book was a hit for its cover design alone: French flaps, deep purple cover stock printed with silver ink, embossed title. A colophon points out that Saudade’s design is also the work of See, which makes sense once you learn that she has operated a small letterpress for many years, and that one of the book’s essays,  “Squeezing a Spiral into a Square Hole,” discusses the work of the master typographer Robert Bringhurst. Most of these essays are rooted in See’s travels—to Sri Lanka and Tbilisi, to Amsterdam (where she now lives) and the mountains of B.C.—but they are not travelogue; they express a persistent desire to get beneath the surface of a place. The title is a Portuguese word that describes “a feeling of longing for something that is now gone.” That longing is evident in the reading of Saudade, for in each of the book’s varied locales we sense See as a thoughtful, keen-eyed observer, but one who is always aware that there is so much more to see.

A first edition of Baedeker’s guide to Paris can be just as effective as a Flaubert novel in re-creating that long-vanished, premodern city. Tourism in the nineteenth century had not yet become the culture-distorting enterprise it is today; apart from a few well-travelled routes between the centres of culture, each trip abroad required extensive preparation and an iron constitution. Today we think of Edward Lear as a writer of nonsense verse, but in his day he was also considered an “artist of great promise,” a celebrated English landscape painter who lived in Rome for more than a decade. Edward Lear in Albania, edited by Bejtullah Destani and Robert Elsie  (I.B. Tauris), is Lear’s account of his travels through the Balkans beginning in 1848, the first stage of what was to be a ­fifteen-month exploration of the countries around the Mediterranean prior to his return home. In the introduction to the book, Lear offers this advice to any who might be considering a similar undertaking: “Previous to starting, a certain supply of cooking utensils, tin plates, knives and forks, a basin &c., must absolutely be purchased, the stronger and plainer the better; for you go into lands where pots and pans are unknown, and all culinary processes are to be performed in strange localities, innocent of artificial means.” In addition, “a good supply of capotes and plaids should not be neglected; two or three books; some rice, curry-powder, and cayenne; [and] a world of drawing materials if you be a hard sketcher.” Lear began his trip during an outbreak of cholera—which explains his insistence on “some quinine made into pills (rather leave all behind than this).” Poor Edward, to have missed out on all our modern travel conveniences: the fuel surcharge and the one-suitcase luggage allowance, the compact hair dryer and the GPS.