Gerry Fostaty

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It took me back to familiar places in Toronto where I grew up, and it is clear the author knows the stage business, which is the backdrop to a very human story. I learned a lot about acting and actors, and learning is one of the things I look for in a book. The other is to be excited, even titillated. While STAGE BUSINESS is not quite thriller, not quite mystery, it certainly has elements of both, and the suspense is kept up throughout. The characters are believable and well-portrayed. A good read.… (més)

It’s the summer of 1974, twenty-five kilometres north of Quebec City, and eighteen-year-old Gerry Fostaty is on a cadet training assignment.

A cadet training assignment on a Canadian Forces base?

I know nothing of this world, beyond what I’ve gleaned from “Private Benjamin”, “An Officer and a Gentleman” and a high-school boyfriend who was in the reserves.

Mess hall, canteen, attaché, platoon, ammunition, barracks, puttees, inspection-ready, cadence, orienteering, drill, ordnance?

Even the basic vocabulary reminds me that I am in unfamiliar territory.

And despite the striking design — the black-and-white photographs, the reference to tragedy, the uniforms and the guns, the newspaper format complete with headline and article — I feel distanced from As You Were: The Tragedy at Valcartier even before I have begun to read.

Gerry Fostaty’s preface begins simply and powerfully, however, and I am immediately intrigued:

“Altogether, my life has been no more interesting than anyone else’s, but one extraordinary and horrible day has stayed with me for more than thirty years.”

This extraordinary day unfolded on Canadian Forces Base (CFB) Valcartier, and the details of the story are salient indeed, but the underlying idea — a trauma that has been endured but continues to haunt the survivor years later — this is a human story, and familiar territory in that sense.

(I was unexpectedly engaged and genuinely moved by the story; I have had trouble concentrating of late, but this narrative took hold and I read it in two sittings, in less than 24 hours, unwilling to put it aside.)

---This rest of this review can be accessed here on BuriedInPrint, if you're like to read more.… (més)

A very well-written account of a little-known incident involving the Royal Canadian Army Cadets in 1974. A live grenade somehow ended up in a box of dummy ammunition during a lecture on explosives safety, killing six cadets and injuring 54. Despite the severity of the incident, it did not receive a great deal of media attention, and even within the Canadian Forces and DND (the Canadian Department of National Defence) there was a tendency to push the whole thing under the rug. Yet the fact remains that the survivors were deeply traumatized and received no help dealing with the aftermath.

The book is well organized chronologically, starting in the present, then going back to the day of the explosion, which starts off with some routine matters to set the stage of life in a cadet camp, then the immediate aftermath, and eventually back to the present. Throughout, Fostaty draws on his own memories, using documentation he requested from DND to fill in the blanks. His writing style is conversational, able to tell a hilarious anecdote one chapter (involving a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II and the Paul McCartney song "Give Ireland Back to the Irish") then later on able to leave you breathless with shock and horror as he describes the chaos and carnage of the explosion. And you know that that's just the detail that made it to the page -- there's probably more that cannot be conveyed by mere words.

Overall this is a worthy read, recommended for those interested in the history of the Canadian Forces and/or the cadets.… (més)