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Book Reviews in March 1999 Issue

Note from Editor
Note from the Editor
by Olga Stein
The world convulsed violently in 1968 as students from Berkeley to Charles University took to the streets. That year, during the Olympic Games in Mexico City, 10,000 students gathered in a residential area called Tlatelolco to peacefully
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Book Review
Three Poems - by Janusz Szuber
Crowing of Roosters. Crowing of roosters signals change in weather. Beneath bluish cloud the bluish pith of plums. With ash-grey coating and sticky slit-There the sweet
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Plea for Emigration
by M. Shadd,

144 pages $16.5 PT
ISBN: 1551280531
Book Review
Hidden Border Crossings
by Norman Ravvin
A decade before the outbreak of the American Civil War, a Delaware-born woman named Mary Shadd published a rather unusual guide for prospective U.S. immigrants to Canada. At the same time that Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie
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In Armageddon's Shadow The Civil War & Canada's Maritime Provinces
by Greg Marquis,

384 pages $34.95 TC
ISBN: 0773517928
Book Review
Rebels, Yanks, and the rest
by Kenneth Stickney
How the teacher of undergraduate history groans when he comes to contemplate a course on Atlantic Canada in the American Civil War. The topic headings come naturally to mind: the Trent Affair, British-American diplomatic relations, Canadians in the U.S.
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Loosing the Bonds The United States & South Africa in the Apartheid Years
by Robert K. Massie,

832 pages $48.95 TC
ISBN: 0385261675
Book Review
Anti-Apartheid Epic
by Cranford Pratt
Contained between the covers of Robert Kinloch Massie's 1998 Lionel Gelber prizewinning volume, Loosing The Bonds: The United States and South Africa in the Apartheid Years, are two distinct and separable books. The first is a wide-ranging review
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Man of Bone
by Alan Cumyn,

186 pages $17.95 PT
ISBN: 0864922299
Book Review
An Everyman's Inferno
by Roman Sabo
Once, I heard a man say that terrorism is the last defence against cynicism. Once, I read a poem by a man held captive in Lebanon:
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Questions about the Stars
by R. Sarah,

112 pages $12.95 TP
ISBN: 0919626963
Book Review
A Certain Slant of Light
by Eric Ormsby
We measure the distances of stars by the years it takes for their light to reach us. At certain moments, we glimpse a light that died before our world was born, and we take pleasure in that acrid poignancy. Questions about the stars are questions about
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Barrel-House Kings A Memoir
by Barry Callaghan,

308 pages $29.95 TC
ISBN: 0316124060
Book Review
The Tap-tap of the Remington, the Tip-tip of the Boxer's Jab
by Austin Clarke
Portrait-painting is a difficult art, as Lord Butler, former Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, reminded us in his 1967 Romanes Lectures: "But the self-portrait, whether through the medium of a mirror or of a book, is even more so. [Samuel]
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Island Wings A Memoir
by Cecil Foster,

pages $27 TC
ISBN: 0002557363
Book Review
Parcels from Overseas
by Clara Thomas
In his book about growing up in Barbados, Cecil Foster amply vindicates his brother's admonition, delivered as he left for Canada in 1979: "You will do well in Canada... All I ask is that you always remain humble and have humility, let us always remember
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Compass Rose
214 pages $25
ISBN: 8880631799
Book Review
This Heavy Craft
by Robin Healey
Rosa dei venti/Compass Rose is a generous selection of the poems of P.K. Page, with parallel Italian translations by Francesca Valente. Published in Italy, it is, presumably, intended to introduce Italian readers to the work of a distinguished, durable
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Broken Entries
by R. Miki,

pages $19.95 PT
ISBN: 1551280590
Book Review
Shaowy Ruins of Colonial Architecture
by Scott McFarlane
Roy Miki's Broken Entries: Race, Subjectivity, Writing is a politically provocative collection of essays written by a prominent figure in the Japanese Canadian redress movement. Miki, who recently coordinated the controversial "Writing Thru `Race'
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Thirty-Four Ways of Looking at Jane Eyre
by Joan Givner,

256 pages $20 TP
ISBN: 0921586671
Book Review
Jane's Rapture
by Nikki Abraham
How and with what awareness do fiction writers transform the stuff of their everyday lives into art? Does knowing a writer's biography and sources enhance the work of art, diminish it or make no difference at all? As someone who has spent much of her ca
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Dear Editor & Friends Letters from Rural Women of the North-West, 1900-1920
by Norah L. Lewis,

166 pages $29.95 TP
ISBN: 0889202877
Mamie's Children Three Generations of Prairie Women
by Judy Schultz,

248 pages $16.95 TP
ISBN: 0889951675
By Snowshoe, Buckboard & Steamer Women of the Frontier
by Kathryn A. Bridge,

180 pages $19.95 TC
ISBN: 1550390864
Book Review
Frontier Women, Wills of flint
by Janice Fiamengo
Reconstructing the lives of women in Canada's past has occupied researchers for at least the last three decades. Still a great deal of material-lodged in archives, homes, and memories-remains to be tapped. Such reconstruction takes different forms in
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To Walk Without Fear The Global Movement to Ban Landmines
by Maxwell A. Cameron, Brian W. Tomlin, Robert Lawson,

416 pages $29.95 TP
ISBN: 0195414144
Knight Errant
by D. Lenarcic,

96 pages $17.95 PT
ISBN: 0772525196
Book Review
Leaning on Wooden Crutches - Canada and the Human Security Agenda
by Robin Collins
Support for U.S. bombing runs into Sudan and Iraq notwithstanding, the human security agenda that has seized the imagination of Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs assumes that things have changed since the Cold War. "We started from the premise that
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Peace Train to Beijing and Beyond
282 pages $19.95
ISBN: 1896836151
Book Review
Orient-bound
by Bruna Nota
The seventeen-car train trip that started in Helsinki and ended in Beijing has at least as many images as the thousands of kilometres travelled, and the innumerable experiences of the 234 women, twelve men, and train staff on the journey.

In Septe
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Making Work, Making Trouble Prostitution as a Social Problem
by Deborah R. Brock,

pages $45 TC
ISBN: 080200976X
Book Review
SIN Not Required
by Lorraine Johnson
There's little doubt that, sexually, we're a confused bunch. And when you add to the anxieties of libido the complications of commerce, as prostitution does, you're guaranteed to press explosive social buttons.

For decades, public debate on prosti
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Last Stop Paris
by Michael McLoughlin,

400 pages $0 TP
ISBN: 0140277129
Book Review
The French Connection
by Mike Gasher
A non-fiction murder mystery, Last Stop, Paris is a book written for insiders. And the credibility of this courageous but convoluted exposé rests ultimately upon the reaction of those insiders-journalists, historians, government officials in Quebec
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The Future of Aesthetics
by Francis Sparshott,

200 pages $35 CT
ISBN: 0802044263
Book Review
In Defence of Beauty
by Amy Mullin
Erudite and playful, opinionated and open-minded, Francis Sparshott's The Future of Aesthetics is a splendid and splendidly accessible investigation of the intertwining futures of aesthetics, philosophy, the university, and civilization. The text
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Light on the Water
by Keith McLaren,

pages $45 TC
ISBN: 1550546589
Book Review
Barques of Yore
by Phyllis Reeve
All is still in Victoria Harbour, circa 1900. A fleet of sailing vessels rests static on silvered glass. The Yacht Club's boathouse juts out, its details as magically distinct as an architect's model. This scene, so patently unreal, has been photographed
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Hockey Towns
by William T. Boyd,

256 pages $29.95 TC
ISBN: 038525783X
Shooting Stars Photographs from the Portnoy Collection at the Hockey Hall of Fame
by Andrew Podnieks,

176 pages $60 TC
ISBN: 0385258003
Scotty Bowman A Life in Hockey
by Douglas Hunter,

352 pages $0 CT
ISBN: 0670879908
Tough Calls NHL Referees & Linesman Tell Their Story
by Dick Irvin,

pages $29.99 TC
ISBN: 077104366X
Fury Inside the Life of Theoren Fleury
by Andrew Malcolm,

pages $19.99 TP
ISBN: 0771056567
Goalies Guardians of the Net
by Daniel Daignault, Denis Brodeur,

304 pages $60 TC
ISBN: 155013745X
Book Review
Stewards of the Ice
by Kevin Keeffe
A long time ago, before the National Hockey League resembled a fast-food chain with fledgling franchises in such hockey hot-beds as Tampa Bay or Nashville; before those playing the game for a living became instant millionaires by the time they reached the
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Free the Children
by Craig Kielburger, Kevin Major,

284 pages $29.99 TC
ISBN: 0771045921
Books on Kids
Books on Kids - Peer Defence
by Kim Mok
What's a thirteen-year-old doing when he takes on the heavy responsibility of eradicating an international problem? "Develop[ing] a social conscience"-that's how Craig Kielburger's book, Free the Children, answers this question as it chronicles the
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Interviews
Playing Football in No-man's Land - Paul Keen speaks with Michael Longley
by Paul Keen
Born in Belfast in 1939, Michael Longley is a member of an exceptional generation of poets who came of age in Ireland during the violence of the 1960s. His poetry has been praised for its lyrical craftsmanship and its ability to convey
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Letters to Editor
To the Editor
Jack Illingworth [in "A Duologue on the Notorious D.H.", Nov./Dec.1998] read our minds, that's exactly what No One Else is Lawrence! is about: an appreciation of Lawrence. I was much afeard reviewers would accuse Doug [Beardsley]
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El Dorado Shuffle
by Morgan Nyberg,

331 pages $19.95 PT
ISBN: 1896951066
First Novels
First Novels - Slippery Moves
by Eva Tihanyi
El Dorado Shuffle (Cormorant, 323 pages, $19.95 paper) is Morgan Nyberg's first adult novel. (He won a Governor General's Award for his children's fiction, Galahad Schwartz and the Cockroach Army.) Basically, it is the story of Mac McKnight's
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The Love of Women
by Jenifer McVaugh, Jenifer Mcvaugh,

250 pages $34.95 TC
ISBN: 0888871732
First Novels
First Novels - Slippery Moves
by Eva Tihanyi
The Love of Women (Borealis, 203 pages, no price given) by Jennifer McVaugh is a female picaresque, the light-hearted tale of Rosie Goshen, for whom life is simply "a matter of initiative". Rosie is raised in a convent and eventually married off
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Moving Water
by Joan Skogan,

200 pages $16.95 TP
ISBN: 0888783868
First Novels
First Novels - Slippery Moves
by Eva Tihanyi
Joan Skogan's narrator in Moving Water (Beach Holme Publishing, 211 pages, $16.95 paper), also named Rose, is an artist, a woman of "restlessness and vagrancy" lured all her life by moving water: "[M]oving water meant that there might be more
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Happy People
by William Landers,

pages $12.95 TC
ISBN: 0968362907
First Novels
First Novels - Slippery Moves
by Eva Tihanyi
The same, unfortunately, cannot be said about Happy People (Sinking Hill Publishing, 283 pages, $12.95 paper), a stereotypical high-school reunion story by William Landers. Bill, a software engineer, takes his new girlfriend (a knock-out strip
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Ultimate Voyage A Book of Five Mariners
by William Gilkerson,

336 pages $35 TC
ISBN: 1570623643
First Novels
First Novels - Slippery Moves
by Eva Tihanyi
William Gilkerson's Ultimate Voyage, subtitled A Book of Five Mariners (Shambhala, 314 pages, $35 cloth), is an allegorical adventure story with a magical twist. Gilkerson, who lives in Nova Scotia and is the author of ten non-fiction books
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Incident at North Point
by Marc Milner,

pages $24.95 TC
ISBN: 155125011X
First Novels
First Novels - Slippery Moves
by Eva Tihanyi
Marc Milner, a history professor at the University of New Brunswick who has written non-fiction about the Canadian navy, also stays in familiar waters with Incident at North Point (Vanwell Publishing, 234 pages, $24.95 cloth). The novel is based
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Laurence Roman
by France Theoret,

313 pages $0 TC
ISBN: 2894190999
Brief Reviews
Brief Reviews - Fiction
by Jennifer Duncan
Laurence, the title character of French-Canadian writer France Théoret's eleventh book (Mercury, 206 pages, $18.95 paper), skillfully translated by Gail Scott, is a thoughtful, determined young woman from a rural Quebec, Catholic family who resists
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Quantum Jump A Survival Guide for the Next Renaissance
by W. R. Clement,

528 pages $24.99 TP
ISBN: 1895837456
Brief Reviews
Brief Reviews - Fiction
by Ted Whittaker
A clutch of short reviews could be written by exasperated specialists about the major topics touched upon in the sprawling, fitfully enlightening testament entitled Quantum Jump: A Survival Guide for the New Renaissance (Insomniac, 488 pages)
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Limbo Road
by Ken Norris,

pages $15.95 TP
ISBN: 0889224013
Brief Reviews
Brief Reviews - Poetry
by Rob McLennan
All that poet Ken Norris has ever needed is an editor. Knowing that publisher Karl Siegler has edited the manuscript of his newest collection, Limbo Road (Talonbooks, 160 pages, $14.95 paper), down from over 600 pages to its current 160, adds
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Dictionary of the Theatre (Dictionnaire du Theatre) Terms, Concepts, & Analysis
by Patrice Pavis, Christine Shantz, Marvin Carlson,

672 pages $39.95 PT
ISBN: 0802081630
Brief Reviews
Brief Reviews - Theatre
by Diana Kuprel
For the past twenty years, Patrice Pavis, author of such (now) standard theoretical works as Languages of the Stage and Voix et images de la scène, has gained the respect of theatre students, practitioners, and critics for his fine, erudite
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National Parks of Canada
by Kevin McNamee, J. A. Kraulis,

224 pages $29.95 TP
ISBN: 1550139851
Brief Reviews
Brief Reviews - Nature
by Myron Sloboda
Over the years, pictoral books on nature and parks have evolved in both style and substance. What was once a quiet, artful exploration of the wonders and vistas of nature, is now a somber and somewhat nervous portrayal of an ever diminishing number
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Hungry Hollow The Story of a Natural Place
by A. K. Dewdney,

Springer-Verlag New York, Incorporated
200 pages $23 TC
ISBN: 0387984151
Brief Reviews
Brief Reviews - Nature
by Brian Brett
When I was thirteen years old, I was a desperate naturalist. I wanted to be a forest ranger or a watchman in a fire tower. I wanted to know everything about the forest-every spruce tree and weevil and salmonberry and grizzly bear. I tried to memorize
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Turns on a Dime
by Julie Lawson,

pages $8.95 PT
ISBN: 0773759425
Children's Books
Children`s Books
by Julie Burtinshaw
"In my family, there's a story that gives me the shivers. Whenever my dad hears it, he says, that's life. It can turn on a dime." So writes the almost thirteen-year-old Jo for her school essay contest, and little does she know that she is about to
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Bat Summer
by Sarah Withrow,

160 pages $8.95 TP
ISBN: 0888993528
Children's Books
Children`s Books
by Diana Brebner
Now that I've wrested my copy of Sarah Withrow's Bat Summer from my younger daughter, I can begin the difficult task of containing my enthusiasm for this book within the confines of a short review. Yes, this is a book with a "bat" theme, following
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At the Edge A Book of Risky Stories
by Dan Yashinsky,

224 pages $14.95 TP
ISBN: 0921556748
Children's Books
Children`s Books
by Marnie Parsons
Two years ago, I asked Dan Yashinsky to tell stories to my children's literature class. We were studying his wonderful collection, The Storyteller at Fault, and, since the book turns on the importance of stories as experiences of a moment, as oral
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Stealing Freedom
by Elisa Carbone,

pages $17 TC
ISBN: 0679893075
Children's Books
Children`s Books
by Sherie Posesorski
Canada, Ann Maria Weems was told, was so horribly cold in winter than when folks opened their mouths, their spit froze solid. But twelve-year-old Ann paid little mind because Canada was the "freedom land"-a place of liberty, safety, and sanctuary for
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Dreams Are More Real Than Bathtubs
by Susan Musgrave, Marie-Louise Gay,

32 pages $17.95 TC
ISBN: 1551431076
Children's Books
Children`s Books
by Erinn Banting
There is nothing like the first day of school to crank up a youngster's angst counter. And it is on a tremendously bumpy journey through the anxiety-ridden imagination of a little girl entering Grade One that Susan Musgrave whisks her readers off in
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The Wind in the Willows
by Kenneth Grahame, John Burningham, Peter Green, Ernest H. Shepard, Margaret Hodges, John Burningham, Ernest H. Shepard, Les Morrill, Roger Sale, Ernest H. Shepard, Laura Lydecker, Diane M. Ashachik, Laura Lydecker, Diane M. Ashachik, Don Daily, G. C. Barrett, Cliff Wright, Joan Collins, Justin Todd,

253 pages $22.95 LB
ISBN: 0884118770
Children's Books
Children`s Books
by Alicia Sloboda
"For every honest reader," wrote Kenneth Grahame, "there exist some half-dozen honest books, which he re-reads at regular intervals of six months or thereabouts. Whatever the demands on him, however alarming the arrears that gibber and grin in menacing
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Great Authors
Great Authors of Our Time - Elena Poniatowska
Novelist, essayist, and journalist Elena Poniatowska is one of Mexico's leading and most influential literary figures. She was born in Paris in 1933, and since 1942, has lived in her mother's native Mexico, where the family moved after
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Great Authors
Walking in the Minefield - Maria Elena de Valdes speaks with Elena Poniatowska
This past Fall, the world remembered the tragedy of Tlatelolco of thirty years ago when the Mexican government massacred hundreds of students who were taking advantage of media presence for the upcoming Olympic Games to protest government
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