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Book Reviews in April 1990 Issue

Changing Heaven
by Jane Urquhart

Mcclelland & Stewart
258 pages $24.95
ISBN: 0771086571
Book Review
Stormy Weather
by Janice Keefer
At crucial moments in Jane Urquhart`s new novel, windows are wrenched open to let in the whirling blizzards and wild winds of Wuthering Heights LIKE HER FIRST NOVEL, The Whirlpool, Jane Urquhart`s latest work of fiction plunges us into a world of passions and marvels and intricate obsessions. Changing Heaven opens with a meditation on wind and weather, invoking those tempests of mind and heart without which we cannot achieve our full stature or understand our true nature as human beings.
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Radical Mandarin The Memoirs of Escott Reid
by Escott Reid,

432 pages TC
ISBN: 0802058116
Book Review
Warm Heart, Cool Head
by David Stafford
AS THE FIRST principal of Glendon College in Toronto in the late 1960s, Escott Reid would give an annual welcoming talk to new students. He would tell them that Glendon was not a professional school but a college devoted to liberal education.
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The Second Season of Jonas MacPherson
by Lesley Choyce,

160 pages TP
ISBN: 0920633676
Book Review
The Rhythms Of Nature
by Dayv James-French
AT THE AGE of 69, Jonas MacPherson sees himself in the exact middle of his life: his past stretches behind him into infinity, his future will last for eternity.
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Swimming Towards the Light
by Joan Clark,

pages TP
ISBN: 0771599757
Book Review
Getting Her Drift
by Anne Denoon
DESPITE THE FACT that every story in Suimming toward the Light could successfully stand alone, I finished reading the hook with the strong impression that it is AS Much a novel as a collection of short stories. All 13 pieces deal with the same set of characters, and although some are written in the third person, others in the first, all reflect the experience and sensibility of the books protagonist, Madge, whose life from childhood to middle age is told in more or less chronological order.
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Sunset Manor
by Richard Wright

Seal Books
180 pages
ISBN: 077042371X
Book Review
Mostly In Memory
by Kent Thompson
THERE IS A TERRIBLE democracy in death, as John Donne pointed out succinctly a long time ago; and a wild democracy in youth -- in the commonality of an untouched future; and a third democracy in old age when we are shuffled off to various camps and institutions to be attended to in our slipping years -- and this democracy is a terrible tyranny. No matter who you Were, you are now Old, and no matter what your tastes, your Age is now your only Fact, and you are therefore at the Mercy of the Many
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Eco Wars
by Day,

pages CT
ISBN: 1550131567
Book Review
Planet Abuse
by Lesley Choyce
THIS IS NOT a book to be taken lightly. David Day has amassed a sort of encyclopedia of all the malevolent, abusive, careless, and simply ignorant actions that we have undertaken against the planet and the living things thereon. It would he easy to he depressed by the conspiracy against lite that he documents so well. It is appalling, for example, to be reminded that the ivory trade was responsible for "trimming the herd of African elephants" from 10 million in 1870 to 1.3 million by 1980.
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She Tries Her Tongue Her Silence Softly Breaks
by M. Nourbese Philip,

L P C/InBook
100 pages TP
ISBN: 0921556039
Book Review
Insisting On The Questions
by Erin Moure
WITHOUT MEMORY CAN there be history?" Without speech? And without history can there he personal presence? If "words collect physical and emotional responses" then in what kind of pain or grief is the body without speech? Marlene Nourbese Philip reminds us that the enslaved African peoples in North America were made 11 "manageable" by the suppression of their own languages (shades of residential schools in this century and their damage to native and Inuit communities!).
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Book Review
A Questionnaire For Readers Of Books In Canada
Why We Need Your Help Since 1971, Books in Canada has provided a forum for review and discussion of Canadian books. Recently the magazine was purchased by Bedford House Publishing, which will assist our plans for expansion and development. To carry out this expansion, we need to generate more revenue from advertising and subscription sales. And to do that, we need to know more about you the reader, what your interests are, and some of your spending habits.
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Vineland
by Thomas Pynchon,

Little, Brown & Company
pages TC
ISBN: 0316724440
Book Review
Mytho-Delirium
by Douglas Glover
THOMAS PYNCHON IS a mysterious and reclusive cult figure in the United States, a kind of highbrow J. D. Salinger, a grey eminence of the American Post Mod movement, and one of the four horsemen of the New Writing of the `60s and `70s, along with John Barth, Robert Coover, and William Gass.
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Book Review
The Written Word Expert Opinion
by I. M. Owen
If it's 1990 this must be the '90s. But the new millennium won't begin until the year 2001 POLITICAL TERMINOLOGY: The other day a writer raised the question of administration: isn't it an Americanism, and therefore to he 'Shunned, to write of the Mulroney administration? Well, yes and no. The OED, whose section A?Ant was printed in January 1884, gives as the fifth meaning of administration "the executive part of the legislature; the ministry; now often loosely called the 'Government.
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Logan in Overtime
by Tom Quarrington,

224 pages TP
ISBN: 0385251521
Book Review
Puckish Humour
by Michael Barnholden
IF T14EY EVER get around to reading Paul Quarrington`s latest, hockey players will soon be joining other minorities in clamouring for publishing opportunities to correct negative images presented in white mainstream literature. We all know that hockey players can`t, won`t, or don`t read, so it is unlikely they`ll be joining the natives and feminists on the barricades. Still, the possibility is infinitely funnier than anything in this book.
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Book Review
Between Monica And Me
by Raymond Filip
I'm no philosopher, but I think we can all learn a lesson from Dumbo's story, and mine Monica Schnarre AT A TIME when fewer and fewer people are reading books, it's reassuring to know that more and more people are writing them. Even more reassuring is the fact that the majority of people writing books today are not specifically or primarily writers.
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Deadly Allies: Canada`S Secret War, 1937-1947
by John Bryden

Mcclelland & Stewart
314 pages $28.95
ISBN: 0771017243
Book Review
Glasnost At Home
by Lawrence Jackson
FOR HALF A CENTURY, our government has been deceiving us about Canada`s role in germ-warfare research. On our behalf, Canada has lied to the world on the same subject. In March, 1970, when our ambassador to the UN, George Ignatieff, told delegates to a disarmament conference that Canada "never has had and does not now possess any biological weapons," he probably believed it, but it was false. Canada was, in fact, a world leader in germ warfare research during the Second World War.
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Lies Of Silence
by Brian Moore

Lester & Orpen Dennys
208 pages $24.95
ISBN: 0886192757
Book Review
Safe Home
by Rupert Schieder
LIKE DAVID WALKER and Malcolm Lowry, Brian Moore is frequently discussed as a Canadian writer. While living in Canada from 1948 to 1959 he produced his first three novels, some of his best; the last, The Luck of Ginger Coffey, being set in Montreal. Although he has lived for the last three decades in the United States, he has maintained his Canadian citizenship. His "non-fiction novel," The Revolution Script (1971), examined the October Crisis.
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Towards a Just Society Governing Canada: 1968-1984
by Pierre Trudeau, Thomas Axworthy,

Viking Penguin
288 pages TP
ISBN: 0670830151
Book Review
Lost In The Translation
by I. M. Owen
It remains a puzzle why successive governments -- Trudeau, Clark, Mulroney -- have failed to get across the truth, that official bilingualism is the exact opposite of what its enemies say it is I`M NOSTALGIC for the Trudeau years. They were sometimes exhilarating, sometimes infuriating, never less than interesting. What a pity that this attempt by a group of Trudeau ministers and apparatchiks to survey and sum up those 16 years should turn out to be for the most part a deadly bore.
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The Woman On The Shore
by Al Purdy

Mcclelland & Stewart
113 pages $9.95
ISBN: 0771071271
Book Review
Image And Archetype
by Don Coles
SOMEWHERE FAR BENEATH all the shelves and libraries and booksellers` windows that shelter or display Al Purdys many volumes of poetry is one Ur-poem, which its Multifarious representatives up here on the earth`s surface ignore at their peril.
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The Dispossessed: Life And Death In Native Canada
by Geoffrey York

Lester & Orpen Dennys
283 pages $24.95
ISBN: 0886192501
The Guest Children The Story of the British Child Evacuees Sent to Canada During World War II
by Geoffrey Bilson,

pages TP
ISBN: 0920079423
Book Review
From Riches To Rags
by John Goddard
THE CREE PEOPLE of Chemawawin in northern Manitoba were making a prosperous living in 1963. Their economy was "thriving:` a provincial-government official reported. "There are no apparent community problems." A year later, the Chemawawin reserve was flooded by the Grand Rapids hydroelectric dam.
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Interviews
Esther Brandeau And Others, Irving Abella
IRVING ABELLA IS a professor of history at York University in Toronto, and the author or co?author of six books: Nationalism, Communism and Canadian Labour (University of Toronto Press, 1973); On Strike (Lorimer, 1974); The Canadian Worker in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 1977); The History of Canadian Labour 1902 to the Present (Canadian Historical Association, 1978); Twentieth?Century Canada (McGraw?Hill, 1984); and (with Harold Troper) None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews i
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Letters to Editor
Pen Pals
IT DOES SEEM astonishing that there could still be confusion over single and double digit numbers that have been in the public domain since before the PEN Congress. This can't be doing much for the reputation of writers as commentators on national and economic issues. As our teachers used to say, turn to pages 15 and 34 of the Congress program book. Now count. Result: 66 Canadian participants and moderators who were invited, who then accepted, who then participated. Now count again.
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First Novels
In The Valley Of The Shadow
SANDRA BIRDSELL'S The Missing Child, published by Lester and Orpen Dennys, is the winner of the W. H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award for 1989. Birdsell has published two collections of short stories: Night Travellers in 1982 and Ladies of the House in 1984 (both Turnstone Press). The image of rising flood water that is central to The Missing Child has occurred before in Birdsell's fiction (once in the opening story of her first collection) but never so powerfully as it does here
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