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. Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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." Read more...
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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? Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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." Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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). Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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 Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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 Read more...
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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 Read more...
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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 Read more...
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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, Read more...
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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. Read more...
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