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Book Reviews in February 1996 Issue

Book Review
The Moore-ish Church
by Michael Valdez Moses
In the liberal democratic West, the spirit of secularism has now loomed for more than two centuries. One must be impressed by the resoluteness of a writer whose work stands as a testament to the enduring importance and influence of the Catholic Church.
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The Edge of Time
153 pages $12.95
ISBN: 0921870345
Book Review
New Wine in Old Baggage
by Kenneth Sherman
George Woodcock said that Robin Skelton belongs to "the whole of the English poetic tradition". With the publication of this new book we can drop the qualifier, for here Skelton employs, not only English, but classical Greek, Indian, and Welsh poetic form
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Book Review
Hacking through to the Soul
by Charles Levin
"The soul of man is a far country, which cannot be approached or explored"- Heraclitus Ian Hacking is one of those rare philosophers whose mix of interests makes his work generally attractive, even beyond the academic circuit. At the University of
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bite to eat place an anthology of contemporary food poetry & poetic prose
187 pages $18.95
ISBN: 0964093316
Book Review
Poems a la carte
by Byron Ayanoglu
An anthology of poetry by a bouquet of authors is something akin to a pot-luck dinner party: you never know what the next arriving dish will be. When being served by several uncoordinated artistic psyches (be they culinary
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Northern Bounty A Celebration of Canadian Cuisine
by Jo M. Powers, Anita Stewart,

256 pages $19.95 TP
ISBN: 0394224310
The Young Thailand Cookbook
169 pages $19.95
ISBN: 0394224523
Umberto's Kitchen Tha Flavours of Tuscany
172 pages $35
ISBN: 1550544225
Some Acquired Tastes A Recipe Album
144 pages $18.95
ISBN: 1550544292
Book Review
Tuscan, Thai, Gothic, Canadian
by Ted Whittaker
The tides of every publishing season bring to the shore of our gastronomic desert island a raft of new Canadian cookbooks. Has culinary Canada finally come of age? My answer, based on present evidence, is a qualified no. The four works harvested here are
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Book Review
Unscientific Assuredness
by Judith Fitzgerald
Bruce Whiteman-a Montrealer and a quintessential connoisseur of art, music, sex, and literature-began his publishing career with The Sun at Your Thighs, The Moon at Your Lips (1978), a modest volume of exquisitely crafted monodic lyrics reminiscent of
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Book Review
Sabu and Taboo
by Cary Fagan
Ian Iqbal Rashid's debut collection of poems, Black Markets, White Boyfriends, was marked by the sympathetic personality of its author-an irony considering the confusions and paradoxes that Rashid (or rather his persona) seemed to feel about himself.
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Ireland,a Bicycle, & a Tin Whistle
175 pages $39.95
ISBN: 0773513442
Book Review
Perceptive Pub Crawl
by Howard Engel
Neighbours of mine disappear every year for a few weeks to go dancing in Ireland. With the dancing go large quantities of folk music and Guinness. Once they showed me pictures of their hostels in County Clare and mentioned the liveliest pubs in Galway.
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Fishing with My Old Guy
166 pages $24.95
ISBN: 1550541862
Book Review
A Carefree Fatalist & His Magus
by Andrew Faiz
Paul Quarrington is a carefree fellow; he is lighthearted and he doesn't take himself very seriously. Early on in Fishing With My Old Guy, he describes himself as someone who has "managed to cobble together an unlikely career, selling lies and fancy to
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George Grant in Conversation
196 pages $16.95
ISBN: 0887845533
Book Review
Grant on Grant
by H. D. Forbes
George Grant's thoughtful and unconventional writings about Canadian politics and education won him a wide following a generation ago. His most famous book, Lament for a Nation, is still assigned reading in some university courses, and it is even read by
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Medium Rare Jamming with Culture
232 pages $19.95
ISBN: 077375752X
Book Review
Well-earned Nellies
by Michael Fitz-James
Ken Rockburn is well-known in and around Ottawa as a talented local broadcaster, whose two-hour Sunday evening radio program "Medium Rare" ran on CHEZ-FM from 1987 to 1993. The show was a rarity in providing, on a private radio station, magazine-style cov
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Book Review
The Bomb and Us
by James Morton
The mass circulation media in Canada recently expressed some surprise at a Canadian vote against a resolution in the UN disarmament committee. The resolution called for a phased program of nuclear disarmament leading to "eventual elimination of these weap
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The Home Team Fathers, Sons, & Hockey
325 pages $29.99
ISBN: 0670858811
Book Review
Ice Paternity
by Russell Field
When Ken Burns spent millions of dollars creating his nine-part PBS marathon, Baseball, a gauntlet was clearly thrown down. The American father-son myth had been institutionalized: fathers playing catch with their sons, teaching them to throw the curve
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Ted Rogers An Executive Profile
214 pages $29.95
ISBN: 1896176089
Book Review
Borrowed Wire
by Ian Allaby
Most of us, given Ted Rogers's fortune, would vanish to a paradisical beach. But he lacks that freedom. His business is his life. He is, apparently, a prisoner of his own creation, Rogers Communications Inc. (RCI), which boasts $2 billion annual revenue,
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Book Review
A Cacophony, or a Dialogue?
by Leah Bradshaw
Jean Elshtain initially delivered Democracy on Trial as the 1993 Massey Lectures on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Ideas series. She stands in good company in the tradition of the Massey Lectures and Ideas, one of the outstanding contributions of
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The War Lover A Study of Plato's Republic
477 pages $65
ISBN: 0802005861
Book Review
Equal Time for Anger
by Paul Cantor
It is not easy to write a book on Plato's Republic that is both good and original. Over the centuries, the Republic has become one of the most commented upon of philosophic classics, and has attracted the interpretive efforts of some of the keenest of
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Treasury of Alphabets & Lettering A Handbook of Type & Lettering
by Jan Tschichold, Ben Rosen,

240 pages $0 TC
ISBN: 0853316201
The Form of the Book Essays on the Morality of Good Design
by Jan Tschichold,

180 pages $24.95 PT
ISBN: 0881791164
Finer Points in the Spacing & Arrangement of Type
by Geoffrey Dowding,

96 pages $19.95 PT
ISBN: 0881791199
Book Review
Irrefutable Tschichold
by David Warren
Jan Tschichold has, since his death in 1974, acquired the stature of a typographer's typographer. Though a pioneer throughout his life, he has come to represent the best kind of entrenched conservatism: the unfailingly thoughtful good taste that may be us
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Hilmar & Odette Two Stories from the Nazi Era
228 pages $25
ISBN: 0771045573
Book Review
Dances of Death in the Cupboard
by Gerald Owen
In a family I know, a saying of Eric Koch's has become a proverb: "I'd rather read about it in the New York Times"-meaning, roughly: "I don't want to see or even hear about this-or-that unpleasant thing. Let me experience it indirectly." But here he has
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Vagabond of Verse Robert Service -- A Bigraphy
416 pages $39.95
ISBN: 1851587047
Book Review
Justice to Service
by Jim Christy
Robert Service took more gold out of the Yukon than Jack London, but he didn't hit the Klondike until the Rush was a memory. Everybody who knows anything about the Scots bard-who was born in Lancashire-knows this, though generations of commentators have p
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The Gypsy Pricess Fried Wishinsky profiles Phoebe Gilman
32 pages $15.99
ISBN: 0590244418
Book Review
A Girl Not Overcivilized - Frieda Wishinsky speaks with Phoebe Gilman
Bright autumn light streamed into her small airy studio as the author and illustrator Phoebe Gilman spoke to me about her art, her books, and her experiences. It quickly became clear how intertwined are these three parts of her life, each strengthening,
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The Roaring Girl
196 pages $22.95
ISBN: 189589753X
Book Review
Keep Calm with Weird People
by Louise Fabiani
In one of the finest stories in this collection, "The Death of Brûlé", Greg Hollingshead introduces his first-person narrator, a child whose mother is prone to angry outbursts. It is a passage that expertly leads into the story, and suggests the raison
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Letters to Editor
To the Editor
I am currently editing The Collected Letters of A. M. Klein, and am seeking his correspondences. Anyone with any information on such letters should please contact Dr. Harold Heft, Department
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The Jesuit Mystique
304 pages $29.95
ISBN: 0771573294
Essays
Jassie
The Writers' Union of Canada holds an annual Short Prose Competition for Developing Writers to encourage emerging writers of fiction and non-fiction. This year's judges-Erna Paris, Olive Senior, and Rudy Wiebe-awarded the first-place prize of $2,500 to
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The Jesuit Mystique
304 pages $29.95
ISBN: 0771573294
Essays
Authors Exist
The newly formed Association of Literary Scholars and Critics (ALSC) recently held its inaugural convention at the Radisson Hotel Metrodome on the University of Minnesota's Minneapolis campus. Founded in 1994 by Professors John Ellis (University of
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Essays
The Moor's Second Last Sigh
Salman Rushdie's new novel has risen like a Venus from the sea, a welcome sign of life from a writer who has been living under difficult circumstances. But to some, the book had a different resonance: a sense of déjà vu. It's called The Moor's Last Sigh?
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Essays
The Acts of Robertson Davies
The death of Robertson Davies on December 2nd caught the entire Canadian literary scene very much by surprise. Though he had entered his eighty-third year and though his wife Brenda travelled with him and kept a close watch over his health, he seemed to
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Essays
Take the More Tangled Route
I wrote an awful poem in 1974 that begins, "Introspection/ Reader of souls/ Destroyer of all sense". And on it drips about fortresses, penetration, virgin self-confidence, and filled vessels. Metaphors so mixed they're puréed. I was eighteen in the gothic
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When Fox Is a Thousand
by Larissa Lai,

pages $16.95 TP
ISBN: 0889740410
First Novels
First Novels - Ninth Century Fox
by Eva Tihanyi
No beating around the bush on this one: When Fox is a Thousand (Press Gang, 256 pages, $16.95 paper) by the twenty-eight-year-old Larissa Lai is a remarkable debut. It is a magical book, rich with poetry and folklore, and elements of fairy-tale
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Daughters of the Red Land
by Mordecai Yan Li,

350 pages $18.95 TP
ISBN: 0920813178
First Novels
First Novels - Ninth Century Fox
by Eva Tihanyi
Yan Li, in Daughters of the Red Land (Sister Vision, 320 pages, $10.95 paper), also weaves together three lives: that of Laolao, her daughter Qin, and Qin's daughter Peace, who now lives in Canada and narrates the story. Laolao is a product of pre-Mao
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Jade Peony
by Wayson Choy,

Saint Martin's Press, Incorporated
240 pages $12 TP
ISBN: 0312186924
First Novels
First Novels - Ninth Century Fox
by Eva Tihanyi
Wayson Choy's The Jade Peony (Douglas & McIntyre, 240 pages, $10.95 paper) is about growing up in Vancouver's early Chinatown. The book, which began as a much anthologized short story almost twenty years ago, is divided into three sections,
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Steppe A Novel
by John Weier,

pages $13.5 TP
ISBN: 1895449391
First Novels
First Novels - Ninth Century Fox
by Eva Tihanyi
Steppe (Thistledown, 140 pages, $13.50) by John Weier takes its title from the German word for prairie. The narrator, looking back on his Ukrainian Mennonite ancestry from his own life on the Canadian prairies, is pleased to learn that he's "not
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The Lusty Man
by Terry Griggs,

pages $16.95 PT
ISBN: 0889841594
First Novels
First Novels - Ninth Century Fox
by Eva Tihanyi
In The Lusty Man (The Porcupine's Quill, 176 pages, $16.95 paper), Terry Griggs is concerned with heritage of a very different kind. Her protagonist, the clumsy Innis C. George, who is on a journey to find out about the "lusty man", a stone phallus
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The Glace Bay Miners' Museum The Novel
by Sheldon Currie, Antoine Saito,

144 pages $12.95 PT
ISBN: 1895415055
Brief Reviews
Brief Reviews
by Virginia Beaton
In a colliery town, sirens from the mine can mean cave-ins, explosions, or, as in the Westray disaster, sudden death. Sheldon Currie, author of The Glace Bay Miners' Museum (Breton Books, 138 pages, $12.95 paper) was born in
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Reader's Digest Atlas of the World
by Reader's Digest Editors,

240 pages $49.95 TC
ISBN: 0895772647
Brief Reviews
Brief Reviews
by I. M. Owen
I don't normally buy a book I haven't seen, but in 1981 I made an exception on receiving in the mail a circular for Atlas of Canada, published by The Reader's Digest Association (Canada) Ltd. in conjunction with the Canadian Automobile Association.
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At Large
At Large
by Michael Coren
Aquite remarkable book has appeared from a quite remarkable publisher. The former is entitled Degenerate Moderns, by E. Michael Jones. The latter is Ignatius Press, a Roman Catholic house based in the United States and rapidly
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Outlook
Outlook - If Not Poets, Who?
by Brian Bartlett
When we open a book for the first time, we never know where our experiences with it and the author will end. In 1972, while an undergraduate in Fredericton, I read in The Fiddlehead a few rivetingly clear, lithe poems by my
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