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Book Reviews in September 1992 Issue

Summer Cottages
by John De Visser, Judy Ross,

158 pages $50 TC
ISBN: 0773725539
To Please the Caribou
by Dorothy K. Burnham,

28 pages $35 TP
ISBN: 0885439643
Canadian Sunset
by David McFadden,

pages $14.95 TP
ISBN: 0887531520
Harvest
128 pages $34.95
ISBN: 0920079954
Canadian Railway Scenes
by Adolf Hungry-Wolf,

86 pages $16.95 TP
ISBN: 0920698484
People in Struggle
by C. Gervais,

pages $24.95 PT
ISBN: 0921254377
The Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore An Illustrated History of Railway Stations in Canada
by Ron Brown,

200 pages $24.95 TP
ISBN: 1894073061
Canada with Love - Canada Avec Amour
by Lorraine Monk,

112 pages $29.95 TC
ISBN: 1895565006
Book Review
On the Right Track?
by Richard Perry
I have been assigned this small pile of picture-books at a time when the nation's unification seems more threatened than ever, when university students are graduating into a depression economy that holds no job offerings, when ...
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Chrome Suite
by Sandra Birdsell,

pages $18.99 TP
ISBN: 077101452X
Book Review
Channel Crossings
by Larry Scanlan
How can a child feel isolated when she has the company of 10 brothers and sisters? Yet that is precisely what Sandra Birdsell remembers feeling almost 50 years ago in Morris, Manitoba.
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Voyages at the Sea with Strangers
by Joan Skogan,

pages $21.95 TC
ISBN: 0002237466
Treasures of the Place
by Grady,

pages $7.99 TP
ISBN: 1550540149
Book Review
Landscapes with Figures
by Alex Newman
Wayne Grady has successfully selected stories that depict the landscape and its inhabitants not as enemies to be feared, and thus subdued, but as entities possessing spirit and intelligence.
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Last Magician
by Janette Turner Hospital Staff,

pages $5.98 MM
ISBN: 0771042248
Book Review
A World Disordered
by Carole Giangrande
Three cheers for Janette Turner Hospital, who's written a novel of wisdom that not only "speaks" to us, but also moulds itself to the shape of our experience. Her fictional world, like our real one, has lost its physical and psychic borders.
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JEWS & FRENCH QUEBECERS : TWO HUNDRED YEARS OF SHARED HISTOR
pages $24.95 TP
ISBN: 0889209987
Book Review
Richer than Richler
by Arnold Ages
This book is unique both in terms of its modest approach to the Quebec-Jewish relationship and the background of its authors. Jacques Langlais is a Catholic priest and a Quebec nationalist; David Rome is a Zionist and historian.
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Sheets of Glass
by Mark Henderson,

65 pages $9.95 TP
ISBN: 0864920954
Book Review
Nasty, Brutish, and Staged
by R Vaughan
Landscape being metaphor in our national agenda, the hapless denizens of our less forgiving climates should probably expect to become literary props, or at least Primal Forces.
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Becoming Bamboo Western & Eastern Explorations of the Meaning of Life
by Robert E. Carter, Ninian Smart,

248 pages $60 TC
ISBN: 0773508848
Book Review
Freedom to Be, or Not to Be
by William Christian
Precisely at the centre of the Western understanding of Christianity is the notion of soul as a moral core that establishes our identity. Since the Reformation this freedom of the soul in its relation to God has been the central fact of our experience.
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Voices
by Ayanna Black,

142 pages $16.95 TP
ISBN: 0006474136
The New Story Writers
by John Metcalf,

256 pages $18.95 TP
ISBN: 1550820389
Book Review
Quick-Fix Anthologies
by Ann Diamond
This anthology represents John Metcalf's personal take on what is newest and best. And given that Metcalf has laboured long and hard on behalf of Canadian writing, particularly the short story, this is not an unreasonable basis for a selection.
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Goddess Disclosing Monologues for Gaia
by Tom Marshall,

pages $12.95 PF
ISBN: 1550820397
Book Review
Vaulting Ambition
by Gary Draper
This is one of those fictions that fall somewhere between a loosely structured novel and a set of interlinked short stories.
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Voltaire's Bastards The Dictatorship of Reason in the West
by John R. Saul,

450 pages $38.95 CT
ISBN: 0029277256
Book Review
Not So Common Sense
by Gerald Owen
John Ralston Saul likes Voltaire, dislikes his alleged bastards. He holds that Voltaire and other Enlighteners tried to use reason in the service of humanism, but that they were mistaken, and reason took over.
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Crossing the Line Canada & Free Trade with Mexico
by Jim Sinclair,

188 pages $15.95 TP
ISBN: 0921586043
Book Review
Laboriously Earnest
by Anthony Rudnicki
As far as the labour left in Canada is concerned, free trade is nothing less than a devilish plot by capitalist governments and cigar-chomping plutocrats to disenfranchise the working class.
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Unholy Alliances Terrorists, Extremists, Front Companies, & the Libyan Connection in Canada
by Warren Kinsella,

264 pages $26.95 TC
ISBN: 1895555248
Book Review
Evil Around the Corner
by Michael Coren
The most apposite and indicative comment on this profoundly important, tautly written, and absolutely necessary book is that certain people are attempting to discredit it and dismiss its findings.
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Legal Tender A Mystery
by Marion Foster,

237 pages $12.95 TP
ISBN: 092900535X
No Forwarding Address
by Bowers,

pages $24.95 TC
ISBN: 1550540076
Book Review
Murder, She Wrote
by Laurel Boone
One of the mysteries about mystery books is why certain authors and their protagonists become cult figures.
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The Dragonfly Fling
158 pages $12.95
ISBN: 0889104387
Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Let down Your Hair
by Jancis M. Andrews,

144 pages $12.95 TC
ISBN: 0921870132
Book Review
Convincing Characters
by Cyril Dabydeen
Unplotted, never fully formed, never illuminating character in "sudden" or postcard fiction (as in the Chekhovian manner), contemporary Canadian short stories are often wonderfully and amorphously postmodernist.
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Literary Images of Ontario
by W. J. Keith,

288 pages $45 TC
ISBN: 0802034705
An Independent Stance
by W. J. Keith,

320 pages $16.95 TP
ISBN: 0889841217
Book Review
The Critic Criticized
by Clint Burnham
My problem is that I don't think the position is really "independent," nor do I think that Keith shows why criticism should be that evaluative art.
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This Only Home
by Dennis Cooley,

pages $12.95 TP
ISBN: 0888011644
Book Review
Star-Gazing
by George Elliott Clarke
These 91 poems are essentially love lyrics - exaltations of the stars and astronomers and the poeticized ana of space sojourners. Indeed, Cooley accents humanity, not technology.
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Letters to Editor
Letters to Editor
I was amused, too, to read your criticism of our sex panel. You say I failed to provide any literary context (namely Hardy, Lawrence, etc.).
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Prose/Poetry
The Lemon Tree
by Patrick Roscoe
Mitch will finally discover that all gardens become mirage ... and he himself only black shadow upon the burning sand.
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Profiles
Profile - Close to the Truth
by Pat Barclay
John Grube, in his introduction to the New Canadian Library edition of 'The Double Hook' (1969), describes Sheila Watson as "a small, bird-like creature who lives on coffee and cigarettes."
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Opinion
Opinion - A Curious Neglect
by Stan Persky
How is it possible for one of the country's most important writers to publish a substantial volume of theoretical and polemical essays, only to find them virtually ignored or treated for the most part to reviews that are amateurish, and ignorant?
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Taugon on Red
by Sylvia Night,

Vantage Press, Incorporated
pages $15.95 TC
ISBN: 0533097029
The Lions
by Paul Sunga,

256 pages $9.99 TP
ISBN: 0920501702
Amnesia
by Douglas Cooper,

240 pages $0 TC
ISBN: 1562827480
Stupid Crimes
by Dennis E. Bolen,

178 pages $10.95 TP
ISBN: 1895636019
First Novels
First Novels - Gritty Terrain
by Douglas Hill
DONNA O'SULLIVAN's In 1980 Sartre Died (Primary Press, 399 pages, unpriced) comes close to being totally unreadable. The book is printed with inadequate margins, and paragraphs run on for dozens, even scores, of pages. There are too many undeveloped, undifferentiated characters and unexplained point-of-view shifts; there is too much clumsy, turgid writing. What is a reader to do with "He loves me she thinks awkwardly," or "And Claire does have great feeling for Molly I know that I muse"? What mi
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First Novels
Last Words - Cultural Attachments
by Alec McEwen
In his 'Books in Canada' piece about the birth, death, and resurrection of a Toronto coffee-house, the Bohemian Embassy, Keith Nickson accredited John Robert Colombo as its "cultural attache'' during the early years.
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Field Notes
Field Notes - An Author in Search of Some Characters
by Eric Wright
I had been expecting this letter for a few years because there were eight of these books out there now, all of them containing the names of at least one of the boys I knew in Mitcham County School.
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Field Notes
Field Notes - Somewhere over the Transom
by Stephen Smith
Everybody has a novel in them, so the old saw says: but then so too does everybody have a pancreas. The question is, can the book be got out? More important, maybe, can it be published once it is out?
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Listening to the Candle A Poem on Impulse
by Peter D. Scott,

New Directions Publishing Corporation
240 pages $13.95 TP
ISBN: 0811212149
Tiny Courts in a World Without Scales
by David Bromige,

pages $9.95 TP
ISBN: 091962653X
Reflected Scenery from Where My Eyes Should Be
by Vic Elias,

88 pages $9.95 CT
ISBN: 0920259375
PulpLog
by Barry McKinnon,

64 pages $9.95 PT
ISBN: 0920576346
Acts of Light
by Mark Frutkin,

84 pages $10.95 TP
ISBN: 0920953700
Brief Reviews
Brief Reviews - Poetry
by Bruce Whiteman
This month's group of poetry collections is full of passionate intensity, sequestrated, almost ghettoized in the poor lonely objects that poetry books have become.
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The Landlady's Daughter
by Edward K. Burbridge,

L A & Chicago River Underground Press
210 pages $25 TP
ISBN: 0963126113
Brief Reviews
Brief Reviews - Fiction
by Laurel Boone
The plot is pure Cinderella. Just as middle-aged Elinor Richardson's life in Toronto comes unravelled, she inherits a Westmount apartment building from her cantankerous aunt.
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The Home We Leave Behind
by Helen Pereira,

160 pages $7.95 TP
ISBN: 189538706X
Brief Reviews
Brief Reviews - Fiction
by Roger Mason
These 12 stories follow the life of Annie MacDonald - energetic, quixotic, imaginative, and idiosyncratic - beginning with her childhood in rural British Columbia and an early (and failed ) marriage, and then ...
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The Child Hero in the Canadian Novel
by Theresia M. Quigley,

192 pages $17.95 TP
ISBN: 1550210696
Brief Reviews
Brief Reviews - Non-Fiction
by Karl Jirgens
Quigley's thematic analysis focuses on guilt, alienation, imprisonment, and prejudice, often in the context of Frye's notion of the "garrison mentality."
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Canada's First Nations A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times
by Olive P. Dickason,

University of Oklahoma Press
624 pages $45 TC
ISBN: 0806124385
Brief Reviews
Brief Reviews - Non-Fiction
by Douglas Glover
Dickason deploys a highly readable style in detailing everything from relatively flimsy speculations on prehistoric Cambodian culture influences on tribes in the Amazon jungle to the intricacies of treaty negotiations and contemporary land-claim cases.
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On the Hill
by Heather Robertson,

McClelland & Stewart/Tundra Books
pages $6.98 MM
ISBN: 0771075545
Brief Reviews
Brief Reviews - Non-Fiction
by George Clark
Maybe one reason why Canada is so hard to govern is that the 3,000 people who keep Parliament Hill running guzzle 50,000 cups of java and chomp 1,200 kilos of 'patates frites' every month.
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The Real Me Is Gonna Be a Shock A Year in the Life of a Front-Line Teacher
by Jill Solnicki,

256 pages $26.95 TC
ISBN: 1895555280
Brief Reviews
Brief Reviews - Non-Fiction
by George Kaufman
This book has a lot of worthwhile things to say to everyone in our society, especially those on both sides of the current debate over "de-streaming."
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North to Alaska! Fifty Years on the World's Most Remarkable Highway
by Ken Coates,

University of Alaska Press
304 pages $29.95 TC
ISBN: 0912006552
Brief Reviews
Brief Reviews - Non-Fiction
by Martin Dowding
Today, after many face-lifts, the Alaska Highway is a far cry from the frontier road it once was. Most of it is paved, and the romance of shattered windshields, punctured gas tanks, and a steady diet of mud and dust is all but gone.
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China Lake
by Anthony Hyde,

pages $0 MM
ISBN: 0345376951
Brief Reviews
Brief Reviews - Fiction
by Laurel Boone
By the end of the book, each thinks he knows everything, but neither knows as much as the reader, whom Hyde has made privy to the ruminations of both men.
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Scaring Myself Again Far-Flung Adventures of a TV Journalist
by Allen Abel,

249 pages $14.95 TP
ISBN: 0006379087
Brief Reviews
Brief Reviews - Fiction
by Michael Coren
Abel tells of his experiences in Germany and Iran, Brazil and Kuwait, Romania and China. And he tells of them with a humanity and an empathy for those he writes about that leave an indelible impression on our hearts and minds.
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To Scatter Stones
by M. T. Dohaney,

L P C/InBook
192 pages $10.95 TP
ISBN: 0921556233
Brief Reviews
Brief Reviews - Fiction
by Roger Mason
Dohaney knows her Newfoundland well, and this familiarity is the strongest and most attractive part of what is otherwise quite an obvious, sometimes creaking, but always determined narrative.
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Mrs. Mortifee's Mouse
by Linda Hendry,

pages $12.95 TC
ISBN: 0002237555
Projects for a Healthy Planet Simple Environmental Experiments for Kids
by Shar Levine, Allison Grafton,

96 pages $13.95 PT
ISBN: 0471554847
Mother Tree
by Ruth Whitehead, Charles Robinson,

Houghton Mifflin Company
pages $6.5 TC
ISBN: 0816430454
Fiona & the Prince of Wheels
by Sandy Watson,

Orca Book Publishers
128 pages $6.95 TP
ISBN: 092050177X
Dragon in the Rocks A Story Based on the Childhood of the Early Paleontologist, Mary Anning
by Marie Day, Marie Day,

32 pages $14.95 TC
ISBN: 0920775764
Soapstone Carving for Children
by B. D. Gosse,

pages $12.95 PT
ISBN: 0921254318
The Boy Who Wouldn't Speak
by Steve Berry, Deirdre Betteridge,

32 pages $14.95 LB
ISBN: 1550372319
Steven's Baseball Mitt A Book about Being Adopted
by Kathy Stinson, Robin B. Lewis,

Firefly Books, Limited
32 pages $14.95 LB
ISBN: 1550372335
A Toothy Tongue & One Long Foot Nature Activities for Kids
by Diane Swanson, Warren Clark, Carolyn Swanson,

92 pages $9.95 TP
ISBN: 1551100223
Children's Books
Children's Books - Encouraging Discoveries
by Janet Collins
Reading has always been my doorway to discovery, my avenue to adventure; with the turning of each page, a new delight is revealed. It's too bad that children often miss such simple pleasures in this age of video.
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Douglas Fetherling
In Memoriam - Adele Wiseman, 1928-1992
by Joyce Marshall
Some years ago I had a curious dream about my friend Adele Wiseman. We were walking single file along the balcony of a church when there was suddenly a gap in the flooring. Adele hopped over it nimbly.
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