 | Changing Heaven
by Jane Urquhart
Mcclelland & Stewart
258 pages $24.95
ISBN: 0771086571
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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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| | 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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| | 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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| | 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
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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
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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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| | 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
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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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| | 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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| | 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
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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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| | 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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| | 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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| | 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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