Lettres à mes petits-enfants

by David Suzuki

David Suzuki coiffe ici son chapeau de grand-père et s’adresse à ses petits-enfants. Il les incite à imaginer quel sera leur avenir, à exprimer bien haut leurs idéaux et leurs convictions. Il explique l’importance de faire du sport, se désole de l’absence d’aînés ou de grands-parents dans la vie de nombreux enfants, et insiste sur l’importance d’avoir des héros.

Dans ce qui est sans doute le plus personnel de tous ses livres, David Suzuki raconte divers épisodes de sa vie hors du commun. Comment, par exemple, encore enfant, il faisait la récolte des pommes de terre et du céleri pour aider sa famille, et pourquoi il a toujours préféré la radio à la télévision. Il ouvre également une fenêtre sur son intimité de père et de grand-père, et écrit des lettres émouvantes à chacun de ses cinq petits-enfants, dont les deux qui appartiennent à la Première Nation haïda, leur rappelant l’importance de leur héritage autochtone.

Au fil de ses réflexions sur les grands enjeux de l’existence, riche d’une sagesse acquise au fil des décennies, Suzuki nous propose de vivre avec courage et conviction. Il nous donne également des pages fort émouvantes sur le vieillissement et la mort.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Canada, Biography, Memoir, Audiobook, Environment

304 pages

First published December 9, 2014

About the author

David Suzuki is a Canadian science broadcaster and environmental activist. A long time activist to reverse global climate change, Suzuki co-founded the David Suzuki Foundation in 1990, to work "to find ways for society to live in balance with the natural world that sustains us." The Foundation's priorities are: oceans and sustainable fishing, climate change and clean energy, sustainability, and David Suzuki's Nature Challenge. He also served as a director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association from 1982-1987.

Reviews

[Martha☀ · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars
David Suzuki is feeling his age and is desperate to pass his wisdom, his history and his reminiscences on to his eight (so far) grandchildren. Perhaps these letters are the best way to do so since no grandchild would actually sit through most of these preachy lectures. With some humour and a heavy dose of self-aggrandizement, Suzuki takes us through his parents' and grandparents' histories and his own path to stardom. Often, he is able to laugh at himself and the brash way he was in his younger days but often he comes across as old-fashioned, making sweeping judgments about modern technologies and social pastimes. ('Do this. Don't do that') There were parts which seemed too personal, making me feel like I was eavesdropping in on a private conversation.
The collection is a lovely sentiment but perhaps it did not need to be published for the general public and should have been left simply as letters to his grandchildren.

[Allison E · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked the idea of this book but the tone felt self-congratulatory too often for my liking. This book also showed Suzuki's age; while he is progressive in so many ways, some of the attitudes expressed in these letters felt remarkably 'old-fashioned.' Maybe the best example of this came in the way that he discussed his grandson Jonathan, who is disabled. Something about it just didn't sit right with me. All that aside, this book was an interesting way to learn more about Suzuki's family. It emphasized the importance of being connected to the land and to the community. All of Suzuki's usual messages are conveyed well here.

[Terra · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Suzuki is a national treasure

[Christina (Ensconced in Lit) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I award this book 3.5 stars.

Letters to my grandchildren by David Suzuki is exactly what the title suggests. Suzuki would like to leave a compiled set of letters on topics that he believes to be really important to the next generation, and in fact, pulls no punches on telling the reader in the Author's Note that he believes this book to be a "loose stream of ideas." I appreciated that Suzuki was very open about this concept so I knew exactly what I was getting into with this book.

There are many wonderful things about this book. Suzuki is undoubtedly a fascinating individual, and I loved the anecdotes and stories about his life that are sprinkled throughout the pages, and this was truly the strength of the book. The scenes of the Canadian incarceration during WWII were haunting, and the depictions of his life becoming one with the wilderness were mesmerizing. I found myself, however, wanting to stay within those stories, not within the other text, and I could tell I would like to read a memoir by Suzuki.

The problem with this book, and like I mentioned before at the beginning, is that it is essentially a set of lectures and ideas that Suzuki would like to leave his grandchildren. My parents and in particular my own father, is exactly at this stage of his life right now. He is finding it more and more important to leave his legacy and his viewpoints on the world to his children and grandchildren. These parts of the book make it harder for me to read as it is dry and in lecture format, and I receive much of that already in my life from someone I need to listen to more than Suzuki. Thus, while this will be very valuable for Suzuki's grandchildren, there may be a loss of the same importance because of the mode of communication to the greater public.

Overall, it's clear that Suzuki has led a good life, a fascinating life, and it's worth reading about-- I see he has an autobiography (or two), which makes a lot of sense. That said, this book was less about us, the readers, which makes it harder to read, and more about his grandchildren, which makes sense, as that was the purpose.

[Blaine · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you follow David Suzuki then you will probably like this book. If you are more of a critic then there really is not much here for you. I liked the personal and "folksy" tone of the book.He ponders and writes about family, career, crusades career and their inter-connecting relationships. It is not one of my favourite books by Suzuki but it was informative and gives you a bit more look at the man and how his view on life. Certainly worth a gander and it is relatively short which makes it a great afternoon read in the back yard

[Stephanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good collection of letters in varying lengths and topics made it easy to pick up and put down. Definitely some letters are better than others (the importance of fitness letter seemed kind of preachy), and there is a lot of repetition in how his internment at the Japanese internment camps during WWII shaped his life. Overall, an interesting read, but I didn't personally find it overly captivating.

[Fabien Provost · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent livre de David Suzuki, léger à lire. Lecture de chevet sur la vie de Suzuki et des enjeux sociaux auxquels il a fait face. Parle pas seulement d’environnement, mais de l’histoire et des enjeux sociétaux. À noter que l’auteur s’adresse à ses petits enfants ce qui rends l’œuvre plus intime, mais tout de même très pertinent pour tout les autres lecteurs qui souhaitent comprendre le monde à travers les lunettes de David Suzuki

[Sharon Coyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

My daughter got me this book for Christmas because she knew I followed David Suzuki and believed in the importance of the work he supports. The letters to his grandchildren provide a warm and human scale for Suzuki to gather, organize and pass on a lifetime of observing, thinking, learning and acting for change. Suzuki is a scientist with a holistic perspective, he factors in social, physical, psychological, political and economical aspects when he considers the important issues facing our planet and humans in particular. You may not learn new things, but you should walk away with a clearer idea of how everything is connected and where you can start as a individual and at a community level to work toward positive changes.

An added bonus is the fact than Suzuki spent a couple years of his childhood in my hometown of Leamington. He did his first year of high school at the same school I went to, so it was fun to hear about my town from his perspective!

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is amazing. It brought me back in time when I was a child and reminded me of what life was like before our society became so consumer oriented and disposal goods were the norm. It allows you to understand the internal conflict that most people face. The pressure to conform and be sucked into societal norms while at the same time trying to break free and connect with and find our place, role and purpose which inherently always leads to our intimate connection with Mother Earth.

[Virginianoor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful, personal book, so loving and angry and excited and passionate and proud. I'm total fangirl now.

[Woody · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yet another wise and inspiring book by David Suzuki.

[Bill Porter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inspirational

[Colette Connors · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish that I could be so eloquent in addressing the future issues that will have so much impact on my granddaughters.

[Donna]

David Suzuki singing his own praises. My opinion could be colored by my, as-of-late, suspicion of his understanding of Alberta's gas and oil.

[Cynthia · Rating 5 out of 5]

interesting audiobook but what he shared might have been upsetting for the supposed recipients of the letters. It was a wee bit too personal.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was glad to have been given this book. Perhaps the most important thing for me was to shake me out of parochialism. The author is a Canadian scientist-environmentalist and TV personality. There were a lot of personal stories here and those were fascinating and very very appropriate for anyone to read just now as Suzuki and his family suffered in WWII and beyond from institutional racism dressed up as national security. All of this and where he talks about the heritages of some of his grandchildren make the best part of the book, even where he is making prescriptions rather than story telling. Sometimes they were stories against himself and occasionally they hit a slightly Walton-esque, almost Sunday School note and occasionally it was tempting to pull various accounts apart because they couldn't both be quite as described.

I was glad that he talks about his achievements - that was particularly helpful for someone not familiar with any of his work. He doesn't explicitly caution against false modesty (which is odd because he cautions against plenty else) but shows it to be unnecessary.

I did feel there might be quite a bit between the lines that he is unaware of or deliberately avoids. There's that jokey bumper sticker that goes "If I'd known grandchildren were so much fun I'd've had them first" I suspect for Suzuki, as for some other grandparents, he pretty much *did* have them first, certainly those of the children of his first marriage. He implicitly makes clear the reason for the collapse of that marriage (ie he was never home because he valued his work more) but I felt uneasy it was left there, in a way which most things were not. The other instance was about his grandson's activism which he couldn't do because of his position as a TV presenter... again, left there when I thought he could have made a case that he would do more good for the cause by not being removed.

I thought it was sweet that he wrote for each grandchild in turn at the end... sweet yet dangerous. The grandchildren are of such different ages (it would have been helpful to know their ages at the time of writing) and what came across to me was a difference in the closeness he feels to each. That's probably natural (some are very young, others are adults for one thing - there's more to know with the latter) and he may see some more than others for reasons that are nothing of his making. But it is uncomfortable to observe, especially when it comes to Jonathan... there seems to be nothing to say to him that isn't about his disability and how hard his parents work for him. And then he does strange things like launching into a paragraph about contraception to his only granddaughter (he's happy to repeat himself where necessary but apparently his grandsons didn't need this and I really couldn't work out what he was getting at)

In a way, that was the charm of the book - that although you have to have died tragically young or be famous to get something like this published, it is the kind of thing that people want to do, to pass on life lessons at the end of your own, and what they are probably doomed actually to do, which is to cross a line from time to time and be embarrassing. A proper bompa.

[Katrina Sark · Rating 4 out of 5]

1 – In Search of Roots

p.26 – In 1853, U.S. commodore Matthew Perry and four heavily armed “black ships” steamed into Edo (Tokyo) Bay, demonstrating the advanced military technology of steamships and cannons and demanding access to Japanese harbours. The following year, a treaty was signed that ended Japan’s isolation from the rest of the world and prepared the way for the 1868 Meiji Restoration, under Emperor Meiji, a period that combined Western technological advances with traditional Eastern values. Iron smelters, shipyards, and spinning mills sprang up as Japan became industrialized and built up its military power. The samurai no longer had a position as a class in a nation on the way to Western-style industrial development.

The rapid change made by the Japanese after Perry shows that dramatic social and economic transformation is possible in a short time. In the 1930s Japan veered into militarism and ended up in a world war that it lost in 1945. But again, forced by military defeat and devastation of the country, Japan rose from that terrible time to become an economic giant within a few decades.
Today we are told that changing from fossil fuels to renewable energy will not only destroy the economy but also throw us back into the Dark Ages. I don’t believe it. If we can pull together as a society, as Japan has done, all kinds of changes are possible.

10 – Barriers to Change

p.235 – “Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it!” (W.H. Murray quoting Goethe)

p.239 – As Al Gore pointed out in his film An Inconvenient Truth, the Chinese character for “crisis” is made up of two parts: one meaning “danger” and the other, “opportunity.” This is a profound insight – that a moment of great threat becomes a chance to commit to a different path, to do things differently and avoid exacerbation or reputation of the dangerous situation. Einstein famously defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.”

A crisis provides the chance to get it right. In 2008, the world experienced an economic meltdown after big banks made easy loans to people who could not repay on the faulty assumption that property value would rise forever. When the property buyers defaulted and banks could no longer cover the money paid out, we had a fantastic opportunity to get things right by reining in the banks and their greedy CEOs. Instead, U.S. President George W. Bush, and the President Barack Obama, somehow found hundreds of billions of dollars to give to the banks simply to get them to back up and running again – a perfect example of that definition of insanity.
Meanwhile, proponents of renewable energy have to beg for crumbs. Think of what could be done if the trillions committed to bailing our banks were committed instead to moving us into a different path!

p.240 – Over and over again, when confronted with dangers from our current practices in energy, forestry, mining, and pharmaceuticals, and more, we fail to find different ways of approaching the problem. If the use of fossil fuels contributes to climate change, the fossil fuel industry should see its mandate as providing energy, not fossil fuels, and find new sources that do not create greenhouse gases; if clear-cut logging is destructive and unsustainable, the forest industry should look to an ecosystem-based way of harvesting trees and thereby maintaining the integrity of the forests while enabling logging to continue; and so on. But the mind of executives is usually set too strongly to countenance radical change, even when the health of the entire biosphere and your futures are at stake, as they are with climate change.

In 1973, during the Arab-Israeli war, OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries), a consortium of mostly Arab states, decided to put pressure on the West by decreasing the amount of oil sent to Western countries. Gas prices skyrocketed, and oil shortages led to long lineups at gas stations. There was real panic as industrialized countries realized how vulnerable they were in their dependence on oil from the Middle East.

In response to that crisis, Canada set up a committee under the eminent scientist Ursula Franklin to study how the country should respond to the threat posed by the OPEC. In 1977, Franklin completed her report, Canada as a Conserver Society, which recommended that we use our resources much more efficiently, conserve them by reducing waste, and move into renewable energy, such as wind, which would provide an opportunity for Canada to become a world leader in a new area. It was a prescient piece of work, and just think of what could have happened had we made a commitment to those goals! Canada could have been a world leader in an area that is exploding today. Instead, the report was accepted, put on the shelf, and soon forgotten. We reverted to the old ways as soon as the oil flowed again.

Denmark was equally alarmed by the OPEC embargo, but its response was to seek alternative energy sources, most notably, wind. Engineers had scoffed at the notion that windmills could contribute significant amounts of energy, pontificating that it was impossible to produce more than 2 percent of a country’s energy needs with wind. Like the “experts” who pronounced it impossible for machines to fly, those early engineers were expressing limits imposed by their own mind-set, not those set by nature. Denmark made a commitment to reduce dependence on oil and now aims to produce close to half of its electricity from wind.

Over and over, we are told that solutions to problems are “impossible,” usually on the basis of economic cost, but seldom because of real scientific or engineering barriers, and almost always because the blocks are in our minds.

p.243 – But other things are not fixed and can be changed.

p.257 – My generation and the boomers who followed have partied as if there is no tomorrow. We didn’t see that we were leaving you a world depleted of diversity and opportunity and heavy with impending ecological crises.

[JennieWithTheBooks☮️(◕‿◕✿) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely a personal book loaded with thought provoking nostalgia.
Suzuki has had a lifetime of experiences, that's for sure.
So many personal stories and reflections for his children and especially grandchildren to savour well into the future.
Honest love but not overly sentimental.
He has had a fascinating life. I have always been a huge fan of his as I was growing up and even though the book dragged on a bit at times, I'd still recommend it.
Much of what he writes is familiar to many 'Canadians' over, say, the age of 35 but regardless of your age, Suzuki wrote this book for a whole new era of people to understand. I loved how he talked about his own grandparents who could not speak a word of English and he could not speak Japanese, so they remained foreign to him, and here he is leaving a legendary legacy to his grandchildren and their children and so on. SUPER AWESOME!! We should all be so wise as to document and record our experiences(although they'd pale in comparison to his) for our future generations.
He didn't come across to me as the know-it-all celebrity scientist(but he did pretty much bring up every single thing that he's famous for) because of his somewhat humorous ways of recapping his stories. He was more like my favorite story-telling granddad-or maybe the one you wished you had.
I liked his book. I'd give it 3½ stars.

[Pat · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, this was a noble idea for Suzuki to express his thoughts, beliefs and values to pass on to the next generation...but it missed the mark for me. I found only the pieces about his famiy's history, immigration to Canada, internment during WWII etc. engaging and compelling enough to capture my interest. My mind wandered during much of the rest of it which was dry, repetitive and preachy (even though his prefaces it by saying to his grandchildren that he doesn't want to come off sounding like he's preaching). There were letters to each grandchild at the end which should have been left personal and not published. It felt like Suzuki was capitalizing on his fame and name to publish merely another book. The last chapter was the best with talking about personal things we can all reasonably do and strive for (like get out more in nature).

[Connie D · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a lovely set of letters/essays that David Suzuki, a scientist/geneticist/environmentalist/human, wrote to his grandchildren. It's a little less personal that I expected and might prefer, but is certainly meaningful. He discusses racism, tolerance, working hard, choosing a career, feminism, First Nations' issues, activism, loving nature, science, fossil fuels, extinction, death, and family. One major concern he has is how his generation has left the world in an ecological mess; he makes suggestions for his grandchildren.

[Etienne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Plus personnel, ce livre en deux parties résume d'abord la penséeet les valeurs, sous la forme d'une certaine biographie, de l'auteur et dans la seconde, s'adresse personnellement à chacun de ses petis-enfants. Personnel oui, mais un peu répétitif et le côté très privé du livre fait que pour des fans de l'auteur et de son oeuvre sans être des membres de sa famille proche, on se retrouve dans une discussion qui ne nous concerne peu. Je n'ai pas détesté, mais certains livres résument mieux la vie, la pensée et le travail de ce grand homme.

[Pankaj · Rating 4 out of 5]

Insightful reading. I found it a fascinating medium for sharing familial and personal history to inform and educate the next generation and the public at large.

It started off as a very entertaining read but slowed down in parts. A good read on the whole and one that inspired me to start a blog of my own for my grandchildren ... some day they might read it, if and when they are able to.

[Simon Bager · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe I’m just too European, but this seemed to me to mainly be an overly sentimental old mans somewhat weird letters to his family, which felt a bit strange to be part of. If you’ve followed the environmental movement for just a few years, there’s not much new under the sun in this book, and Suzuki seems to be a bit out of touch with some issues. Honestly a bit disappointed..

[Roberta · Rating 3 out of 5]

I expected to find this inspiring and I loved the idea of writing down a life for those who will follow. Although I wasn't precisely disappointed, I did fine the book less engaging than I hoped. I also found some parts of it preachy and, at times, repetitive. I did like being able to pick it up, read a letter then put it away for a while.

[Shannon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thought-provoking. Makes you really aware of the kind of future our children will have if we don't make more of an effort to collectively change our habits.

[Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this book. It made me think which is always a sign of a good book.

[Gillian Trommeshauser · Rating 2 out of 5]

I almost felt intrusive reading letters that were written for his grandchildren. Unfortunatley it just reinforced my hatred for the human race.

[Carmen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Started but didn't finish - felt like it was written for a much younger person who knows absolutely nothing about anything. Fairly patronizing. Don't have time for that kind of thing!

[Wendy Capron · Rating 4 out of 5]

He is such a sweet man!

[Carmen Grantham · Rating 3 out of 5]

Large focus on how to treat the environment well, plus some insights into David's upbringing and life as a parent and grandparent.