| Book Review A Review of: Feed My Dear Dogs
by T.F. Rigelhof
"Jude always said a kid is supposed to get acclimatized to the great
world and society and so on, and just as soon as he can bash around on
his own two pins, but the feeling of dread and disquiet I experienced
on leaving home in my earliest days was justified for me again and
again on journeys out, beginning with the time Zachariah Levinthal
bashed me on the head for no clear-cut reason with the wooden mallet
he had borrowed from his mother's kitchen. It did not hurt much, as I
was wearing my Sherlock Holmes deerstalker hat with both ear flaps
tied up neatly in a bow on top, providing extra protection from
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Sad Truth About Happiness
by Michael Harris
Thirty-two-year-old Maggie Selgrin is given three months to live.
Being the good middle-child of her family, she feels the important
thing is not to make a fuss.
Happily, the magazine quiz that informed Maggie of her death-date also
presents a loop-hole, a backdoor she might use to dodge out of her
sentence-if she can only change her "Are You Happy" answer from a
lackadaisical "I don't know" to an unquestioning "Yes." If she can
convince herself that the lukewarm tapioca life she lives can be
termed "Happy", then Maggie gets to potter away another 60 years.
...
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|  | Rue du Regard
by Todd Swift
DC Books $14.95 Paperback
ISBN: 091968811X
|
Book Review A Review of: Rue du Regard
by Andrew Steinmetz
the church, Swift observes that "candles/Light the pale faced members
of the choir", and "stiff-necked listeners crouch forward/In low pews,
Anglican or just off-the-street". Swift captures Cripplegate
wonderfully. He remarks how Palestrina's medieval Matins Responsary
captures "the post-war mood". And then: "How venal, then, to notice
all the time-worn suits,/The dresses past their fashion. Decrepitude
cradles us". It is that last phrase-"Decrepitude cradles us."-that
makes Swift worth listening to.
...
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|  | Snow Water
by Michael Longley
Jonathan Cape $21.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0224072579
|
Book Review A Review of: Snow Water
by Michael Kinsella
the notes of music and sycamore leaves carried to all corners of the
battlefield (as in "Sycamore") or a harmonica playing, out in no man's
land, a music-hall favourite that "lasts until the end of time," (as
in "Harmonica") there is an awesome, tender and terrible symmetry to
Longley's exquisite observations, which are, in effect, similar to the
other stories he has told in catalogues. What we find in Snow Water is
an appreciation of nature which is not simply some sort of taxonomy,
but rather a ceremony that is meant to go on forever, trickling
through the lives and the lost lives of those in the poetry. Here is
...
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|  | Bonfires
by Chris Banks
Nightwood Editions $18.81 Paperback
ISBN: 0889711968
|
Book Review A Review of: Bonfires
by John Lofranco
ook often feels rushed. The poet wants to get his or her work out
there, and so sacrifices sober reflection for momentum and energy.
This doesn't appear to be the case with Chris Banks.
...
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|  | Gabriel's Wing
by Allan Cooper
Gaspereau Press $20.07 Paperback
ISBN: 1894031830
|
Book Review A Review of: GabrielÆs Wing
by John Lofranco
it is the isolated simplicity that seals the deal. We are made to feel
like we've heard this wisdom before, but, thankfully, we are not told
where. The transposition of heart and wheat is natural, and as a
reader, my heart sang along to the wheat's challenge. When the poet
has us whispering along with the wheat, that's the "something" we've
been looking for.
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Minstrel's Daughter
by M. Wayne Cunningham
has produced a spellbinding, lots-of-fun book with credible
characters, human and animal. It's great entertainment and a great
lead off for her new series. One might even say, "It's the cat's
meow!"
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Ayesha, My Queendom Come
by W.P. Kinsella
As a young man I remember thrilling to the phantasmagorical novels of
A. Merritt, like Ship of Ishtar, and the novel She by H. Rider
Haggard, the fantastical story of an immortal white Queen. Brinckman,
owes a huge debt to H. Rider Haggard, as he tells the tale of a modern
woman from Ottawa who, as a neglected and abused child discovers the
novel She, and interprets and adopts a passage from the novel, which
she takes to mean that it's alright to kill anyone who stands between
her and what she desires. At twelve she kills her drunken mother's
abusive boyfriend, and lets her mother take the rap and go to prison.
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Far From Home: Dr. GrenfellÆs Little Orphan
by W.P. Kinsella
Far From Home is the tale of a little girl named Clarissa who, in
1924, has been sent to live in a children's home in Newfoundland, far
from her family, because she suffers from polio. The main problem here
is that the author claims her book is based on a true story, and as
most of us know, true stories are usually boring beyond belief.
Clarissa's circumstances are neither original nor interesting. We are
bored with the routine business at the orphanage that fills two
hundred pages. I very nearly quit reading at fifty and again at one
hundred pages. Only in the final twenty pages, after Clarissa is
...
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| | White Man's Cotton
by Randy W Somerton
Jesperson Publishing $21.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1894377060
|
Book Review A Review of: White ManÆs Cotton
by W.P. Kinsella
For what it is, a bloody, crime-adventure story, it is not bad. The
telling is like a lout screaming at you. There is little literary
merit, and quite bit of the dialogue is like chunks of concrete
falling from the characters' mouths. However, the novel's saving grace
is that to my knowledge the concept is unique.
A group of wealthy black men unite to create a society called White
Mans Cotton, to take retribution for the appalling evils inflicted on
black people. They have a huge man known only as The Catcher, who
kidnaps selected individuals who have been exceptionally cruel toward
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The First World War: Volume I: To Arms
by Greg Gatenby
Alas, because most people today get their news and their mythologies
from TV and cinema, it is no surprise that most Canadians cannot talk
accurately about Canada and WWI for three full minutes-in large part
because next to none of our history is taught in schools, and because
our filmmakers in English-Canada have failed to make film-dramas about
some of the most seminal moments in our past. Where are the feature
films about Vimy or Passchendaele? Where are the TV dramas about the
Canadian General Arthur Currie (widely acknowledged as the finest
commander on either side of the Western Front) or about John McCrae,
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The First World War In Africa
by Greg Gatenby
Alas, because most people today get their news and their mythologies
from TV and cinema, it is no surprise that most Canadians cannot talk
accurately about Canada and WWI for three full minutes-in large part
because next to none of our history is taught in schools, and because
our filmmakers in English-Canada have failed to make film-dramas about
some of the most seminal moments in our past. Where are the feature
films about Vimy or Passchendaele? Where are the TV dramas about the
Canadian General Arthur Currie (widely acknowledged as the finest
commander on either side of the Western Front) or about John McCrae,
...
Read more...
| | Book Review A Review of: The Outbreak Of The First World War
by Greg Gatenby
Alas, because most people today get their news and their mythologies
from TV and cinema, it is no surprise that most Canadians cannot talk
accurately about Canada and WWI for three full minutes-in large part
because next to none of our history is taught in schools, and because
our filmmakers in English-Canada have failed to make film-dramas about
some of the most seminal moments in our past. Where are the feature
films about Vimy or Passchendaele? Where are the TV dramas about the
Canadian General Arthur Currie (widely acknowledged as the finest
commander on either side of the Western Front) or about John McCrae,
...
Read more...
| | Book Review A Review of: Financing The First World War
by Greg Gatenby
Alas, because most people today get their news and their mythologies
from TV and cinema, it is no surprise that most Canadians cannot talk
accurately about Canada and WWI for three full minutes-in large part
because next to none of our history is taught in schools, and because
our filmmakers in English-Canada have failed to make film-dramas about
some of the most seminal moments in our past. Where are the feature
films about Vimy or Passchendaele? Where are the TV dramas about the
Canadian General Arthur Currie (widely acknowledged as the finest
commander on either side of the Western Front) or about John McCrae,
...
Read more...
| | Book Review A Review of: 101 Top Historical Sites Of Cuba
by Greg Gatenby
A much more accessible history has just been published by Alan Twigg,
for some decades now the pre-eminent chronicler of literary British
Columbia, and increasingly of climes somewhat warmer. Five years ago
he issued Cuba: A Concise History For Travellers, a straightforward
account with a strong emphasis on the years of the Fidel junta, aimed,
I suppose, at the thousands of Canadians headed for the beaches of
Varadero. Now he has given us a richer book, 101 Top Historical Sites
Of Cuba-richer because it covers the entire island, including the
remotest spots, and manages to tell the history of the island through
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Virginia WoolfÆs Nose: Essays On Biography
by Greg Gatenby
Hermione Lee is globally regarded as one of the better literary
biographers in Britain, and so it was with relish that I dove into her
latest volume-not an account of an author's life, but a collection of
essays about the actual writing of biography. In lesser hands,
Virginia Woolf's Nose: Essays on Biography could have been just
another example of academic masturbation wherein the author moans
about how tough his job is and how terrible his life sleuthing after
the essentials of an author's history (with nary a mention of his
tenure, sabbaticals, or indexed pensions). But Lee is too smart and
...
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|  | The Wolf King
by Judd Palmer
Bayeaux Arts $16.3 Hardcover
ISBN: 1896209823
|
Book Review A Review of: The Wolf King
by Antony Di Nardo
The Wolf King is Number Three in Judd Palmer's "Preposterous Fables
for Unusual Children". In a note from the author we are told that if
you think to yourself, "How unusual it is to be me; how preposterous
life is!" then a fable such as this one might just be the antidote to
get you through that thought.
I'm not so sure. We usually expect fables to be accompanied by an
inherent moral or lesson and that, I would think, should help sort out
what makes life so preposterous. However, as we approach the
conclusion of The Wolf King, there are so many endings and different
...
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|  | Ellen Fremedon
by Joan Givner
Douglas & McIntyre / Groundwood $18.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0888995571
|
Book Review A Review of: Ellen Fremedon
by Antony Di Nardo
At one point in the novel, Ellen Fremedon's best friend, Jenny, says,
"well, people get tired of the same stories and the same happy
endingsthey like reading about something different." That captures how
I sometimes felt reading Joan Givner's story. Tired of the same. It's
about a precocious, well-mannered, well-educated 12-year old girl who
decides one summer to write a book. The book is about herself, her
family, including her younger twin brothers who remain nameless
throughout, and what happens that summer when a housing development
endangers the town's water supply. But, despite the clutch of typical
...
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|  | Peg and the Yeti
by Kenneth Oppel, Barbara Reid
Harper Collins Canada $19.99 Hardcover
ISBN: 0002005387
|
Book Review A Review of: The Boy From Earth
by M. Wayne Cunningham
Boys, girls, moms, dads, even grams and gramps will go gaga with the
giggles in following the topsy-turvy escapades of
thirteen-and-half-year-old earthling, Alan Dingwall, and his ET pal,
Norbert, the wisecracking mini-me Jupiterling. The two have been
hilariously cavorting about in three previous volumes by Cobourg,
Ontario author Richard Scrimger, ever since mighty-mite Norbert landed
his teeny-tiny spaceship in the nose hair of Alan's nostril. From his
nasal command post he has been barking orders at Alan, issuing edicts
to him and unabashedly telling people where to get off, much to Alan's
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The AlchemistÆs Daughter
by Olga Stein
Eileen Kernaghan, author of The Snow Queen and The Sarsen Witch, among
other books, and winner of numerous literary awards, believes in a
diet of language saturated with beautiful, image-rich, poetic
descriptions. Here is one gorgeous passage depicting her heroine,
Sidonie Quince's arrival at Hampton Court for an audience with Queen
Elizabeth.
"The brick walls of Hampton Court Palace, rising before them, were
deep crimson where the sunlight struck them, plum-coloured in shadow,
patterned with chequered lines of burnt-black. Sidonie craned her neck
...
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| | Nordkraft
by Jakob Ejersbo
McArthur & Co / Mcarthur (Tp,H $24.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1552784614
|
Book Review A Review of: Nordkraft
by Kevin Higgins
Nordkraft is the first novel by young Danish writer Jakob Ejersbo, who
already has a collection of short-stories, Superego, to his credit.
Nordkraft is translated into English by Don Bartlett. The glossy
back-cover is peppered with what, at first glance, looks like
over-the-top praise from various reviewers in Ejersbo's native land.
According to one, Nordkraft "is so gripping and strangely exhilarating
because it brings to light linguistic inventiveness and a
devil-may-care power to survive right down to the zero point of human
existence." According to another, the novel deserves "6 stars out of a
...
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|  | Radiant City
by Lauren B. Davis
Harper Collins Canada $32.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 000200576X
|
Book Review A Review of: The Radiant City
by Ingrid Ruthig
The shimmering surfaces of urban landscapes and the reality of their
gritty substrate seem to have left their mark on Montreal-born writer
Lauren B. Davis. Her well-received first novel, The Stubborn Season,
rooted itself in the thinly masked prejudices, madness, and turmoil of
Toronto during the Great Depression. Her second novel, The Radiant
City, finds purchase in Paris-a city that, to the bedazzled visitor,
radiates the light' mythologized in recent history. Yet for the
displaced survivors of the world's horrors who try to make a new life
there, it proves more danger zone than haven.
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: A Perfect Night to Go to China
by Todd Swift
Ernest Hemingway spent some time in Toronto, before his legend took
hold. David Gilmour's sixth novel, A Perfect Night To Go To China,
returns him there. The terse, retro-prose recalls the story "A Clean,
Well-Lighted Place" ("Last week he tried to commit suicide," one
waiter said) with snappy dialogue and anachronistically pugilistic
behaviour from the tragic protagonist. This is a homage to Hemingway's
achingly beautiful, doomed classic, The Sun Also Rises (aka Fiesta),
by way of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy (that is, an urban mystery
that is really an ontological thriller); indeed, there is a fiesta at
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life
by Lyall Bush
"He is the novelist as the world would have the novelist be."
- Earl Shorris, The Life and Times of Mexico
In an early scene in Terra Nostra, Carlos Fuentes's big, culturally
ambitious novel from 1975, a young man named Pollo Phoibee pulls on a
sandwich board that advertises the caf where he works, and begins his
usual morning walk through Paris. But the morning has already started
strangely: straight out of the shower he had helped his elderly
landlady give birth. Now as he walks, he sees all around him young
girls, mature women, and grandmothers beginning to give birth in
...
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|  | So This Is Love
by Gilbert Reid
Key Porter Books $21.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1552636364
|
Book Review A Review of: So This Is Love: Lollipop and Other Stories
by John Oughton
So This Is Love is Gilbert Reid's first collection of short stories.
The assured quality of his prose suggests a longer track record in
publishing fiction, but evidently much of his craft has been polished
by work in other media, including film, television and radio (he won a
Gemini for writing the documentary Storming the Ridge).
In themes, and to some extent in level of interest, this is an oddly
split collection. About half of the stories-and generally the
strongest half-consider some of the horrific events that have become
almost mundane media fodder: genocide, civil war, child abuse, rape
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Learning to Swim
by John Oughton
Larry Lynch is a New Brunswick writer with one novel out. In this, his
first collection of short stories, where the protagonists are fairly
ordinary men, he alternates between short, almost sketchy tales and
longer ones which have the density-and sometimes the complexity-of
aspiring novels. There's another tension in the stories which keeps
them interesting. First collections often reveal a writer's literary
influences, and Lynch seems to have one foot solidly in the pool of
realism, and the other in the somewhat airier world of magic realism,
where almost anything can happen. He writes with an assured,
...
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|  | Shack
by Kenneth J. Harvey
The Mercury Press $17.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1551281074
|
Book Review A Review of: Shack: The Cutland Junction Stories
by Eric Miller
Harvey's Shack is set in and around the fictional Newfoundland town of
Cutland Junction. When I began "No Better a House", the first story of
Harvey's collection, Shack, I thought that his narrative seemed
old-fashioned, though not antiquated-as a handsaw, for example, isn't
rendered obsolete by a laser. I wasn't prepared for the depth of
feeling Harvey's world could induce. The predicament of Harvey's
protagonist, the aged Ace Winslow, initially rings too familiar. He is
to be moved from his condemned shack to a new government house. Yet
certain peculiarities redeem the tale of Ace's expropriation from
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: A Short Journey by Car
by Eric Miller
Liam Durcan's Short Journey by Car is a masculine book, in the
elementary sense that the book's protagonists are usually men. The
masculinities embodied in this collection of short stories are
appealingly off-kilter. Though for the most part the characters aren't
avant-garde in their predilections, the premises, whether ethical or
aesthetic, governing the way in which they are drawn palpably
liberate:; Durcan allows his formally inventive imagination to range
from Stalinist Russia to contemporary Windsor, Ontario. His preference
is to experiment and often surprise.
...
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|  | Most Wanted
by Vivette J. Kady
Porcupine's Quill $16.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0889842590
|
Book Review A Review of: Most Wanted
by Nancy Wigston
Vivette J. Kady grew up in South Africa, but there is nothing of that
far land in these thirteen tales. Instead, the unknown continent Kady
explores is the human psyche. These stories present a startling array
of characters who blaze their way across page after page, redefining
dysfunction as they go. What seems to bind together Kady's odd
assortment of children, adults, even the occasional dog, is the
unsteadiness of their grip.
It's hard to know, in this rich landscape, where to dive in. Why not
start with the dog? His name is Duane, and he appears in the title
...
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|  | Ladykiller
by Charlotte Gill
Thomas Allen $24.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0887621775
|
Book Review A Review of: Ladykiller
by Barbara Julian
I have a fancy that characters in short stories really want to be in
novels. After all, the novel is a larger canvas and everyone wants a
big life, fictional people as well as real. I suppose this is another
way of saying that if characters and their stories are engaging the
reader wants to read on to the next chapter and the next-wants a whole
novel. If they are not engaging the story was a failure; either way it
is hard for a short story to be enough in itself, and it takes a real
master to give it a conclusive, satisfying totality.
It is not enough to peep through a window on characters engaged in a
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Making Light of Tragedy
by Barbara Julian
I have a fancy that characters in short stories really want to be in
novels. After all, the novel is a larger canvas and everyone wants a
big life, fictional people as well as real. I suppose this is another
way of saying that if characters and their stories are engaging the
reader wants to read on to the next chapter and the next-wants a whole
novel. If they are not engaging the story was a failure; either way it
is hard for a short story to be enough in itself, and it takes a real
master to give it a conclusive, satisfying totality.
It is not enough to peep through a window on characters engaged in a
...
Read more...
| | Book Review A Review of: RosaÆs District 6
by Antony Di Nardo
Thomas Hardy described the masses as "a throng of peoplecontaining a
certain minority who have sensitive souls; these, and the aspects of
these, being what is worth observing." In a work of fiction, these
sensitive souls are realized when the reader recognizes them as
breathing, thinking, feeling individuals. They ache and complain, love
and desire. They rejoice with friends and family or they don't. They
punish their children, gossip about neighbours, curse the weather, and
receive the news that breaks their hearts. This is the common currency
of the masses and of the sensitive ones among them, and-when a fiction
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Off Centre
by Paul Keen
"Taking a Line for a Walk," a short story in Caroline Shepard's
impressive new collection entitled Off Centre, takes its name from a
children's book called Harold and The Purple Crayon which is based on
an ingenious conceit. Harold is a child who uses his purple crayon to
sketch his surroundings. In fact, his drawings form the entirety of
the book's illustrations and, by implication, the whole of his world
against the blank space of each white page. As I can testify from
personal experience, children and adults love the book for the
strangely unremarkable way that Harold gets on living with the
...
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|  | Sightseeing
by Rattawut Lapcharoensap
Penguin $28 Hardcover
ISBN: 0670063894
|
Book Review A Review of: Sightseeing
by Antony Di Nardo
You approach a reading of Sightseeing, a collection of seven short
stories by the young American-Thai writer, Rattawut Lapcharoensap,
from two angles. At first, you're very much the voyeur, a peeping Tom,
not leering at the scenes before you, but luxuriating in their
lushness. It's hard not to gaze into Lapcharoensap's world, a
contemporary Thailand that he peoples with ordinary individuals in
extraordinary situations and lavishes with imagery that brings his
scenes to vibrant life. Then, you enter his world as the tourist, the
foreigner, a farang, and it makes you think, are we who we are because
...
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|  | Any Day But This
by Kristjana Gunnars
RED DEER PRESS $29.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0889953112
|
Book Review A Review of: Any Day but This
by g
This collection of stories by writer and teacher Kristjana Gunnars
illuminates the quandaries of a wide range of characters, many of whom
share in common a preoccupation with coming or going, leaving or
staying put. Place, naturally, plays a strong role in Gunnars' tales,
whether it's Edmonton, Saskatoon, B.C.'s Sunshine Coast, or more
exotic locales like Norway and Italy.
The title of her first story, "Directions in Which We Move", echoes
the thematic connections among these lyrical, honest portraits. Arne
Ibsen, a sociology professor at the University of Alberta, wakes one
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Almost Meeting and Other Stories
by Clara Thomas
This book represents a welcome renaissance of interest in one of our
most accomplished fiction writers, Henry Kreisel. All the works
collected here date from the mid-twentieth century on and the
collection is enhanced by sensitive editorial commentaries by E.D.
Blodgett of the University of Alberta.
Kreisel was a native of Vienna. After the Kreisel family fled the Nazi
annexation of Austria, Henry was arrested in England as an enemy alien
and dispatched to Canada, where he spent his late teenage years in an
internment camp in New Brunswick. He was one of a very few camp
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Thanks for Listening: Stories and Short Fictions
by Clara Thomas
This book represents a welcome renaissance of interest in one of our
most accomplished fiction writers, Ernest Buckler. All the works
collected here date from the mid-twentieth century on and the
collection is enhanced by sensitive editorial commentaries by Marta
Dvorak of the Sorbonne Nouvelle, France..
Buckler was a born and bred Maritimer. By far the most part of his
life was spent on his farm in the Annapolis valley of rural Nova
Scotia, close to the little town of Bridgetown. It was hardscrabble
farming land, made more difficult by the constant demands of his
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: LetÆs Not Let a Little Thing Like the End of the World Come Between Us
by Paul Butler
This short story collection from Thistledown Press explores an
underworld of misfits: arsonists, strip club bouncers-people who
function outside ordinary social norms, and are emotionally insulated
from the pitifulness of their own lives. There is an oddly Canadian
texture here, a kind of understatement in which tragedy is filtered
through the lens of wry humour.
An apocalyptic flavour runs through James Marshall's Let's Not Let a
Little Thing Like the End of the World Come Between Us. In the first
story, The Last Thing You Want To Look At In A Strip Club, a bouncer
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Translating Women
by Paul Butler
This short story collection from Thistledown Press explores an
underworld of misfits: arsonists, strip club bouncers-people who
function outside ordinary social norms, and are emotionally insulated
from the pitifulness of their own lives. There is an oddly Canadian
texture here, a kind of understatement in which tragedy is filtered
through the lens of wry humour.
The men and women in Translating Women rarely confront their problems
head-on. In "The Only Sign of Fire", husband Lester climbs up a maple
tree positioned across from his home and calmly settles in to watch as
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Cities of Weather
by Michael Greenstein
Although the past tense is stronger in Montreal than elsewhere in
Canada, the youthful magazine, Maisonneuve, makes a clear case for the
future of English creative writing in Quebec. A 28-year-old associate
editor at Maisonneuve, Matthew Fox has just published his first
collection of short stories, many of which involve the coming of age
of a sensitive gay protagonist from Fiona, Ontario (in the vicinity of
Alice Munro country) who moves to Montreal to engage in artistic
activities.
The first story, however, masks the homosexuality of the others in
...
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|  | My Husband
by Dacia Maraini, Vera F. Golini
Wilfrid Laurier Univ Pr $22.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0889204322
|
Book Review A Review of: My Husband
by Michelle Ariss
"To get back at his wife for taking sides against him in a family
dispute involving money, a man in Italy refused to have sex with her
for seven years."
The Record (Sherbrooke, Qubec) April 4, 2005
If you were in Italy as a tourist in the 60s and are reluctant to
relinquish romantic memories of your time there, then I suggest that
you avoid My Husband, the recent translation of a collection of short
stories by Dacia Maraini, one of Italy's most renowned novelists,
poets and playwrights. If, however, you are fascinated by the place
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Inventing Tom Thomson: From Biographical Fictions to Fictional Autobiographies and Reproductions
by Cynthia Sugars
Canadian poet Earle Birney is famous for having said that Canadians
are haunted by a "lack of ghosts." I wonder. This line has provoked no
end of speculation, and is certainly meant to be understood
metaphorically. And yet, there is something very resonant about the
idea of a haunting that both is and is not one. Admittedly, this was
Birney's way of nudging his 1960s contemporaries out of their cultural
and intellectual somnambulance. It also points to the notorious
Canadian identity crisis which persists in dogging cultural debate in
Canada today. Notwithstanding the fact that Canada has proven to be
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Ed Delahanty in the Emerald Age of Baseball
by James Roots
Baseball has been a constant mirror of racial shifts in American
society. It has faithfully reflected the country's racial history and
the change in status of various ethnic groups: from the segregation of
black ballplayers into the Negro Leagues, to their torturous
integration after World War Two; from the black players' post-Vietnam
dominance of the game, to the rise of Hispanic players in the 1990s.
The latest contribution to this branch of US social history, Jerrold
Casway's Ed Delahanty in the Emerald Age of Baseball, strives to
provide a prequel by taking the ethno-cultural time-machine back to
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Fruitfly Geographic
by Andrew Steinmetz
calls. Heat
cracks the glass in his hand.
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