I am amazed that you included John Muggeridge's apparent rant against "the red menace" in your March issue, and that you did so under the guise of a review of Bob Davis's thoughtful study on the course of Ontario history. At the very least, I would have hoped for a consideration of the important issues raised by Davis; issues that I assume are of concern to people from across the political spectrum. That discussion is still needed, and would have enhanced the stature of your publication. Instead, we were given this. Am I to conclude that you regard this as an adequate review of Bob Davis's book?

A final thought: I regard the implication found on the final sentence of Mr. Muggeridge's review to be offensive and insulting. It tells me a good deal about the reviewer, and nothing about the book in question.

Leonard Friesen

Department of History

Wilfrid Laurier University

Waterloo, Ont.

Chomsky

I am writing in response to the March '98 issue of Books in Canada, which contains a review of A Life in Dissent, a biography of Noam Chomsky.

I do not understand why Randy Allen Harris reviewed this book. He himself admits-in the review itself!-that his comments belong in the "Petty Embittered Foe Basket" because he and Chomsky argued over his linguistic theories. The review is based almost entirely, therefore, on personal grievances rather than critical appreciation: this fact is clear from the tone of the entire piece, even though the reviewer escorts us through the dim and, for most of us, uninteresting maze of 1950s academia and arguments over Cartesian linguistics.

The review ignores Chomsky's far more important international work in politics and social criticism. It is not a review of a book but a justification for the reviewer's own biased attitude toward a great man. Surely Chomsky is flawed, and surely the biography is flawed, too. But it is a flying leap to say Chomsky "lies, mangles the truth", and is "reckless in the distortion of the public record." My concern is not with Chomsky-he can defend himself-but with the quality of the book review itself. The review is petty, narrow-minded, ego-bolstering (the reviewer's ego, no one else's!)-it would be laughable if it weren't so embarrassing. The reviewer tells us a biographer cannot love his subject. And I'd like to tell the reviewer that a critic cannot jealously despise his.

Karen Connelly

Eresos, Lesvos, Greece

Don McKay

Richard Greene (March) admires one of the voices in Don McKay's Apparatus: the "high lyricism and rich expansiveness of language". But he's apoplectic that McKay won't stick with it; that he keeps lapsing into a "wiseacre mode", "failure of nerve", "embarrassing attempts to be fashionably subversive".

It's not a comfy thing that the world is multiple. And Professor Greene is free to prefer a simpler music, where the gravity and uplift stay undiluted. I just hope he isn't obliged to teach Shakespeare. Or Villon, or Donne, or Yeats. Or Bob Dylan.

But there are readers who can bear the sometimes painful polyphony of the world and the human heart, and treasure a poet who recreates it. For such readers, McKay is one of the most mature, quicksilver poets writing in English now. His wonderfully droll, eloquent, heartbreaking poems must be snickering at this tight-lipped pedantry.

Dennis Lee

Toronto

Richler's Mother II

I read Kathleen Tudor's letter to the editor re Mordecai Richler and his mother (February). I'm glad that someone finally had the courage to call a spade a spade.

Mordecai Richler is a most abrasive, insulting person. He gives me the creeps. He always looks sullen and I've never heard him say a kind word about anything-the Jews, the French Québécois. He opens his mouth and rages on about everything.

I read his mother's autobiography and that really touched me. I did not realize that he and his mother were not happy with each other before I read her book. In fact, I bought the book without realizing who she was.

I doubt that I would have bothered to read any of his books as a result of my negative feelings about him. However a friend gave me The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and I read it and liked it. I have since read his other books. He is a good writer but a most unpleasant person.

Eda Tarlo

Paquetteville, Quebec

IMF Copes

In his much-appreciated review of my book Who Elected the Bankers? (May), Matthew Davis addresses perceptive questions to scholars and citizens currently trying to come to grips with the multi-faceted challenge of globalization. Although he caricatures important parts of my analysis of the changing role of the International Monetary Fund, he captures the essence of my intended contribution to much larger and continuing debates. I am heartened that he finds that contribution "useful", given its theoretical context. I also think he is absolutely right to push research in this field beyond conventional limits.

Global economic integration has now reached a level where it does raise profound new questions about the ultimate loyalties of citizens and about the fragility of dominant political ideologies. This is a theme in my book, and I do indeed contend that institutions like the IMF can at most provide coping mechanisms. They cannot resolve the paradoxes that arise when sovereign states attempt to build a global economy, or when democratic governments seek narrowly-defined efficiency gains from corporate structures of ever-increasing scale and scope. Davis's anxiety for the human condition in such a context is widely, and quite rightly, shared.

As we pursue inquiries into the inadequacies of our contemporary political, economic, and social institutions, however, it is all too easy to forget the tragic historical circumstances that shaped many of them. Davis ignores the defining catastrophes of the past century when he bemoans the "gradual erosion of those things to which one feels primary devotion." The IMF and the pragmatic experiment it symbolizes exist in the shadow of World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. Many of the phenomena now associated with "globalization" reflect the intentions of multi-dimensional human beings traumatized by their experiences. The next generation faces the unintended consequences of that not-irreversible experiment, some of which are catalogued by Davis. But its own historic task is not rendered easier by collective amnesia or by nostalgia.

Louis W. Pauly

Director

Centre for International Studies

University of Toronto

Toronto