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Book Reviews in April 1998 Issue

Book Review
Dim Glamour
by Hugh Graham
Edwin Alonzo Boyd, the famous Toronto bank robber of the late 1940s, was summarily expelled from the warmth of his mother's bed at the age of four. Until that year, 1918, his father had been serving in World War I.
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1867 How the Fathers Made a Deal
279 pages $29.99
ISBN: 0771060947
Book Review
Canada Made in Canada
by Michael Fitz-James
We all know that famous Robert Harris painting of the Fathers of Confederation meeting at Quebec to hammer a constitutional Canada into shape.
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Book Review
Biznes in the Wild East
by Olga Stein
It's a small world, so it came as no surprise that relations of mine had known Jennifer Gould, the author of Vodka, Tears, & Lenin's Angel, as an adolescent about eighteen years ago. They describe her as a super-precocious teen.
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Book Review
Really Really Dance to It
by Ray Robertson
At a club in Toronto a couple months back I had that rarest of experiences for a writer of literary fiction: someone who had bought my book recognized me and told me how much they enjoyed it.
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Misconceiving Canada The Struggle for National Unity
by Kenneth McRoberts,

416 pages $27.95 TP
ISBN: 0195412338
Reflection of a Siamese Twin Canada at the End of the Twentieth Century
546 pages $36.99
ISBN: 0670870994
Book Review
Let Us Prepare Mythologies
by H. D. Forbes
Looking back on our time, future historians may say that we stood unknowing on the brink of Canada's collapse. We were part of a larger pattern of disintegration of multi-ethnic federations at the end of the twentieth century.
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The soft signature
96 pages $12
ISBN: 1550223143
Book Review
Wading through Language
by Malca Litovitz
Lise Downe is a second-generation L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet. This means she writes in the heady atmosphere of Wittgenstein, Lacan, Derrida, Stein, and Joyce. She quotes a phrase from Finnegans Wake, "phoenix in our woodlessness."
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Hungarian Rhapsodies Essays on Ethnicity, Identity, & Culture
238 pages $49.95
ISBN: 0774806230
Book Review
Roots in Print
by Gerald Owen
"But the question that dogged me," says Richard Teleky, "since I have no particular flair for learning languages, was why bother now?" Why learn to read and speak Hungarian? Especially as an adult?
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Marshall McLuhan Escape into Understanding
465 pages $35
ISBN: 0773730451
Book Review
Hearthless Global Village
by Mark Wegierski
W. Terrence Gordon has tackled a huge subject. Indeed, this book is certainly an intellectual biography, a study as much of the ideas as of the life of the person. Dr. Gordon did a huge amount of research for this book.
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Map of Dreams
61 pages $12.95
ISBN: 1550650823
Book Review
Good Measure at Sea
by Carmine Starnino
James Dickey called it "the X-factor": the ingredient, impossible to schematize into a poem, whose ineffable presence transforms language from competent artfulness into the charged, listen-to-this-isn't-it-wonderful quality of good poetry.
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Time Capsule New & Selected Poems
255 pages $24.95
ISBN: 1896095259
Book Review
In the Dark Peninsula of Self
by Eric Ormsby
Sometimes, with unwitting prescience, a poet crystallizes his or her destiny into an almost mythic concision. This happens with rather chilling frequency in several of Pat Lowther's poems.
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The Indian Medicine Shows Two One-Act Plays
138 pages $14.95
ISBN: 1550960369
Plague of the Gorgeous & Other Tales
123 pages $14.95
ISBN: 1896239102
Book Review
Frontier & Camp
by Keith Garebian
Daniel David Moses' twin one-act plays, together entitled The Indian Medicine Shows, combine the dramatic and the comic to explore themes of desire, gender, belief, and "show biz" presentation in the closing years of the American frontier.
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Mr. Doyle & Dr. Bell A Victorian Mystery
213 pages $19.99
ISBN: 0670877557
Book Review
Justice in Distress
by Keith Oatley
Inside the cover of Mr. Doyle & Dr. Bell, by the Toronto crime-writer Howard Engel, is a quotation: "The detective is the modern knight errant. His quest, not a fair maiden in distress-not necessarily-but justice itself."
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Book Review
A Good Megaproject
by Clara Thomas
Thirty years after the publication of Norah Story's Oxford Companion to Canadian History and Literature (1967), the publication of the second edition of The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, edited by Eugene Benson and William Toye.
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Book Review
The Architectural Mystique
by Izzy Ferguson
Architects are not, as a whole, particularly nice people. Architects are not given to group hugs. Self-absorption tends to get in the way-or egotism, or immodesty, or any one of a number of protective colorations. A rough bunch of people.
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Canadian Who's Who 1997 Volume XXXII (with CD-ROM)
1360 pages $170
ISBN: 0802049966
Book Review
Well, Who is Who, Anyway?
by John Pepall
There is nothing nosy about wanting to know who people are. It is natural and proper to want to know where people come from, what they do, what family they have, even how old they are.
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The Demonic Comedy Some Detours in the Baghdad of Saddam Hussein
303 pages $29.95
ISBN: 0773730486
Book Review
In Iraq on Adrenaline
by Ted Whittaker
There are several other examples of the sort of narrative Paul William Roberts offers us in The Demonic Comedy. I'll mention just a few: Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, under-fire war reportage (Orwell at least got shot, a feat Roberts avoids).
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Small Mercies A Boy after War
205 pages $27.99
ISBN: 0670866180
Book Review
Found Innocence
by Keith Nickson
So here I am teaching a "non-credit" English course to special needs adults at George Brown College in Toronto. About twenty students usually show up, offering a wide range of abilities but with one feature in common.
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Book Review
Hockey Sextet
by Anne Steacy
One Boxing Day in an Ottawa blizzard my brother warmed up his car and we set off to see the maligned but surprising Senators play the superstars Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier and the other New York Rangers. During the hour it took to reach the Corel
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Interviews
Overcoming Fear of Flying - Eva Tihanyi speals with Helen Humphreys
by Eva Tihanyi
Helen Humphreys was born in London, England, in 1961 and emigrated with her parents to Canada when she was three. She has spent most of her life in the Toronto area but recently moved to Kingston, Ontario.
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Interviews
From Despair to Childhood - Branko Gorjup speaks with Andre Alexis
by Branko Gorjup
André Alexis is a fascinating young Canadian author, with an extraordinary range of literary knowledge and a thoroughly cosmopolitan sensibility. Born in Trinidad in 1957, he grew up in Ottawa.
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Interviews
Many Paths - Frieda Wishinsky speaks with Joan Bodger
by Frieda Wishinsky
Storyteller, Gestalt therapist, teacher, librarian, cryptographer, book reviewer, tour guide, and author: Joan Bodger's career gives new meaning to the word "multi-faceted". "When a door opens, go through it," is Bodger's philosophy.
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River Awakens
by S. Lundin,

pages $24.95 PT
ISBN: 0340696370
First Novels
First Novels - The New Kid
by Eva Tihanyi
This River Awakens (Hodder & Stoughton, 359 pages, $19.95 paper), by Steve Lundin, is a powerful coming-of-age-story, sophisticated in style and content, beautifully written, and at times so startling in its intensity
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True Detective
by Byron Rempel,

pages $19.95 TP
ISBN: 096978046X
First Novels
First Novels - The New Kid
by Eva Tihanyi
On a lighter note, there's True Detective (Great Plains, 206 pages, $19.95 paper), by Byron Rempel, an off-beat detective novel in which the hero's sensibility is far more interesting than the case he sets out to solve. Roger Bushman, twenty-five a
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Misshapen
by Robert Budde,

216 pages $13.95 TP
ISBN: 1896300227
First Novels
First Novels - The New Kid
by Eva Tihanyi
Misshapen (NeWest, 187 pages, $13.95 paper), by Robert Budde, had its genesis as a creative writing dissertation at the University of Calgary, and there is a forced quality to the whole book, as if it had been cobbled together with great effort and
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Vancouver at the Dawn
by John Cherrington,

pages $18.95 PT
ISBN: 1550171577
First Novels
First Novels - The New Kid
by Eva Tihanyi
Vancouver at the Dawn (Harbour Publishing, 208 pages, 50 black and white photos, $18.95 paper) by the B.C. lawyer John Cherrington is much more a history book than a novel. Based on the published work, diaries, and family archives of Sara McLagan,
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Douglas Fetherling
Douglas Fetherling - Chinese Eatons
by Douglas Fetherling
When Cora Hind, the first important female journalist in Western Canada, applied for work on the Winnipeg Free Press in 1882, she was rebuffed because of her gender, even though she had recently qualified as a typewriter.
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