 | All That Matters
by Wayson Choy
Doubleday Canada $35.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0385257597
|
Book Review A Review of: All that Matters
by Nancy Wigston
Wayson Choy adds a strong new presence to his Chinese-Canadian mosaic
with this novel, shortlisted for this year's Giller Prize. A journey
that begins in "Old China" and continues throughout the depression and
war years in Canada's "Gold Mountain", is narrated with clear-eyed
honesty by Kiam-Kim, eldest or "First Son" in the immigrant Chen
family. The three youngest Chen children were heard from in Choy's
1995 debut, The Jade Peony; once more Choy breathes a whole vanished
world of family and political history into life.
Born in China to a lovely mother, now dead, Kiam-Kim remembers
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Norman Bray in the Performance of His Life
by T.F. Rigelhof
When did a book prize committee ever show more courage in its literary
convictions than this year's Governor-General's English-language jury
for fiction? First, Andr Alexis resigned on a point of honour and then
Lynn Crosbie and Kathy Page, the remaining judges, selected two first
novels-Colin McAdam's Some Great Thing and Trevor Cole's Norman Bray
in the Performance of His Life-as well as David Bezmozgis's debut
Natasha and Other Stories to go alongside the two slam dunks of the
literary year, Alice Munro's Runaway and Miriam Toews's A Complicated
Kindness. In doing this and then going the whole distance by giving
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Barry LazarÆs Taste of Montreal: Tracking Down the Foods of the World
by Brian Fawcett
Montrealer Barry Lazar's contribution really caught my eye. It's a
countertop book, but at nearly 300 pages, it's a countertopper on
steroids. The key item in it is an alphabetically-arranged meditation
on the food resources to be found in Montreal, usually with directions
about where to obtain the best, and frequently accompanied by
entertaining factoids about the item under scrutiny. It's one of those
books you get right away, and immediately wish your own city had
something similar-unless you're a Montrealer, in which case you'll
likely feel deeply grateful to have a walking encyclopaedia like Lazar
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Love and Sweet Food: A Culinary Memoir
by Brian Fawcett
Austin Clarke's Love and Sweet Food is actually a reprint of a book
Clarke published with Random House about five years ago under the
title of Pigtails n Breadfruit. The subject is the food he ate and
learned to cook while he was growing up in Barbados. It's a shame the
book was underdistributed the first time around because it's a great
read, and Clarke knows what he's talking about. It's as much a work of
cultural analysis as it is a cookbook, although the recipes are all
there, and they're not hard to follow despite Clarke's charming if
occasionally annoying use of dialect.
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: A Matter of Taste: Inspired Seasonal Menus with Wines and Spirits to Match
by Brian Fawcett
Lucy Waverman and James Chatto have been at or near the top of the
food chain in Ontario-or at least those parts of Ontario that are
visible from the wealthy areas of downtown Toronto-for a long time
now. They know what they're doing, they know what they're about, and
what they're about is Rosedale Fusion cuisine. A Matter of Taste is,
therefore, pretty much as advertised-a matter of taste.
The book itself is a coffee-table whopper, beautifully produced and
professionally executed-and not something you'd want to drop on your
foot while you're cooking from it. The authors don't say this, but
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Bar U: Canadian Ranching History
by Andrew Allentuck
Simon Evans, a retired professor of geography, has crafted a history
of Alberta's huge Bar U ranch.The book also roams over the history of
the Canadian west, agronomy, cattle branding, suburban sprawl, the
late 19th century transatlantic meat trade, train robbing, horse
stealing, and, no fooling, the Sundance Kid.
This is not just another horse opera. With 57 pages of bibliography
and footnotes, numerous maps, tables of horse counts and cattle
prices, it's scholarship that has as much in common with Louis
Lamour's cowboy tales as cryptography has with James Bond's derring-do
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Tea: Addiction, Exploitation and Empire
by Christopher Ondaatje
It all started when Catherine of Braganza, eventual wife of King
Charles II, introduced tea to England. She arrived from Portugal on 13
May 1662 in Portsmouth, bringing with her the promise of a large
dowry-500,000 in cash desperately needed to pay off his enormous
debts. Actually she arrived with only half that amount and the
marriage was very nearly called off. She also brought sugar and
spices-to be sold when she arrived in England-and a single chest of
tea. Catherine was a tea addict. In fact tea was already the common
drink of the Chinese, and the British, it seems, were slow to discover
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Widener: Biography of a Library
by Greg Gatenby
Any bibliophile will savour Widener: Biography of a Library by Matthew
Battles. The Widener Library at Harvard (named by a loving and wealthy
mother for a book-loving son who perished on the Titanic) is one of
the world's greatest book repositories. Battles has penned a history
of both an edifice and an idea, for while the recounting of its
construction and expansion are of some passing interest-for example,
John Singer Sargent painted murals for its entrance-the larger
attraction is Battles's smooth delineation of how a library should
buy, collect, and catalogue. Such seemingly mundane stuff is crucial,
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Noble Rot: A Bordeaux Wine Revolution
by Greg Gatenby
Just as there is a wine lake in Europe, there is a glut of wine books
in English, full of glossy colour photos and obsequious text. They
promise much but are ultimately thin, leaving little after-taste. But
then comes a volume which is like Chateau Margaux 1945: deep,
balanced, and superbly satisfying. For any oenophile in your life,
Noble Rot: A Bordeaux Wine Revolution by William Echikson is the
perfect gift, one of the finest wine books I've ever read. Despite the
rise of New World wine dynasties, Bordeaux remains primus inter
pares-its antiquity, its intimidating snobbery, and the ludicrous
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Posters of The Canadian Pacific
by Greg Gatenby
History buffs and art lovers will relish Posters of the Canadian
Pacific. Authors Marc Choko and David Jones give a brief and
serviceable history of CP and its marketing via the coloured print.
But the 300 posters themselves are the glory of the book, most
reproduced in colour and many given an entire page in this oversized
tome. It is exhilarating to see in these images from a century or so
ago-the shameless pride in Canada as a new country full of splendour
and beauty-and worth remembering that, for those millions abroad, who
never came here, perceptions of our country were shaped by these
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: A Modern Life: Art and Design in British Columbia 1945-1960
by Michael Harris
A more learned but nonetheless accessible Canadian art book is A
Modern Life: Art and Design In British Columbia 1945-1960. Canada,
alas, is a country which too often regards excellence in design as
something generated only by Italians. Yet in 1949 there were leaders
in B.C. who created an exhibition which brought together artisans,
crafts people and visual artists in an effort to show what was
possible with native talent. This marriage of craft and art was-is-an
extraordinary concept in Canada (even though William Morris had tried
it almost a century before in the UK). Handsomely printed, this volume
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: India: The Definitive Images: 1858 to the Present
by Greg Gatenby
Khushwant Singh, one of India's most famous and
internationally-acclaimed authors, began his writing career in Ottawa
where he was a junior diplomat so out of favour with the ambassador
that he was given nothing to do. Bored, he started to write stories
and his earliest publications were in Canadian lit mags. Six decades
later, as eminence grise, he has written a savvy Introduction for a
beautiful book of photographs of his native land: India: The
Definitive Images 1858 to the Present. Included in this visual
anthology are the works of such globally-applauded stars as Henri
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Night Street Repairs
by Carmine Starnino
Anyone who has spent time with the French symbolists-Stephane Mallarm,
Paul Verlaine, Paul Valry-will be familiar with the deep theological
swoon of their theorizing. They may have rejected Christian
principles, but it's hard not to feel they were really religious poets
who simply transferred their devotion to matters of style. Poetry, of
course, has always had an affinity with religious belief, but what
makes symbolism so interesting is that it marks, arguably, the first
major example of literature's relationship with religion, turning from
a shared curiosity about cosmic questions (life, death, suffering) to
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Your Secrets Sleep With Me
by W. P. Kinsella
Part of the opening paragraph goes this way: "So just for this moment
there's nothing, nothing happening." That line sets the tone for this
very odd novel set in Toronto, and peopled with totally unbelievable
characters. Can you imagine an 11-year-old boy using the word
anomalous in conversation? Another character "maintains that the world
is an uneasy gathering of idiots and that suddenly something will blow
and everything will be either okay or not okay." Nothing like being
decisive. The oddest event is that the CN Tower collapses into Lake
Ontario, but nothing comes of it. The most inexplicable thing is that
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Going to New Orleans
by W. P. Kinsella
Having recently returned from New Orleans, I was anxious to read this
book, and in the sense that it provides a thorough tour of New Orleans
by day and night, I was not disappointed. One might say that this book
does for New Orleans what Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil did
for Savannah. This short novel begins in Victoria, BC, where horn
player Lewis King lands a gig in New Orleans. He is accompanied by his
sexually voracious and indiscriminately promiscuous girlfriend. The
women in the novel are there for sexual purposes only and are not
developed as characters. There is lots of hot and heavy sex, probably
...
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|  | The Mysteries
by Robert McGill
McClelland & Stewart $32.99 Hardcover
ISBN: 0771055218
|
Book Review A Review of: The Mysteries
by W. P. Kinsella
Here we have a first novel that will have the hated word promising'
applied to almost every aspect of it. McGill, a real life Rhodes
Scholar, has taken on a project that would be difficult or impossible
for most veteran fiction writers. The story and aftermath of Alice
Pederson's disappearance from a small Ontario town is told by twelve
different narrators. It is often difficult for a first time novelist
to hold to one voice, and twelve is just too many. Some of the voices
are much stronger than others. When McGill writes from the point of
view of a young man who has gone off to England to study, the
...
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|  | Tarcadia
by Jonathan Campbell
Gaspereau Press $28.88 Paperback
ISBN: 1894031946
|
Book Review A Review of: Tarcadia
by W. P. Kinsella
This novel is above all a portrait of an era, the 70s summer Nixon
resigned, a time when community and family values were changing, and
new social mores were being explored. The Chisholm family live in
Sydney, Nova Scoria. Michael, who tells the story, is 14, the second
of four children of a tough union organizer. His parents are
especially permissive, almost neglectful. In the opening lines of the
novel Michael informs us that his older brother Sid, dies in a boating
accident in Sydney harbor. The story then works toward that event. I'm
not sure the device is successful, for it takes away whatever suspense
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: What's Remembered
by W. P. Kinsella
What's Remembered is graced with a beautiful cover designed by Tannis
Goddard. More a fictional memoir than a novel, the story opens with
two gay men meeting at a gallery opening and gong out for a late
supper. The older man tells the younger his life story, his childhood
in a repressed home with a silent, brooding clergyman father, his
falling in love with a man who does not return his affection while at
Oxford. Peter, probably no pun intended, teaches at a second-rate
Canadian university where he is seduced by a student and they have a
wild, necessarily secret affair, until the student, Martin, graduates
...
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|  | Angeline
by Karleen Bradford
Harper Collins Canada $15.99 Paperback
ISBN: 0006393438
|
Book Review A Review of: Angeline
by O.R. Melling
The title and theme immediately put me in mind of the Angelique books
which my friends and I read avidly (and surreptitiously) in high
school. Though not of the same racy nature, this works the same
territory of historical fiction with an exotic setting, romantic tone,
and compelling characters. You know it's a good story when you forsake
the day's tasks and curl up on the sofa to read till you are finished.
Both my teen reader and I fell under its spell.
One is immediately drawn into the book and sympathetic to Angeline as
she stands on the block in an Egyptian slave market, after
...
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|  | Mosh Pit
by Kristyn Dunnion
RED DEER PRESS $12.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0889952922
|
Book Review A Review of: Mosh Pit
by Olga Stein
Once I started reading this somewhat shockingly frank book dealing
with modern-day adolescent life, I had misgivings about having handed
a copy to a teen I know. However, the sixteen-year-old quickly assured
me that there was nothing in it she hadn't encountered in other books
and/or movies, and that she wasn't offended in the least by any of the
content. This in itself surprised me. When did teen' lit become so
explicit-not just about sex, but about lesbian sex, drug-taking and
addiction, prostitution, and a host of other things I thought were
still kept behind closed doors, at least when it came to juvenile
...
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|  | The Tiger Claw
by Shauna Singh Baldwin
Knopf Canada $34.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0676976204
|
Book Review A Review of: The Tiger Claw
by Steven W. Beattie
Novelists often seek to comment on the present by looking to the past.
This is particularly true in Canada, where novels set in earlier eras
seem to reproduce with the persistence of cultures in a Petri dish.
Shauna Singh Baldwin's novel, The Tiger Claw, a nominee for the 2004
Giller Prize, is a fictionalized account of the life of Noor Inayat
Khan, an Indian Muslim, who worked as a spy for the Allies' Special
Operations Executive during World War II, and who was eventually
captured and imprisoned by the Germans. (I'm not giving anything away
here: the book opens with Noor confined to a prison cell in Pforzheim,
...
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|  | Claire's Head
by Catherine Bush
McClelland & Stewart $32.99 Hardcover
ISBN: 0771017529
|
Book Review A Review of: ClaireÆs Head
by Lisa Salem-Wiseman
Among Canada's emerging generation of novelists, Catherine Bush has
established a reputation for honestly and intelligently conveying the
reactions of young, modern, urban women to the fragmentation and
disintegration of the structures on which they rely to give their
lives meaning. Bush's first novel, Minus Time, traced the attempts of
Helen Urie, whose mother is circling the earth in a space station and
whose father is traveling the world saving people from disasters, to
adjust to the lack of connection with her family members and the
ensuing loss of meaning in a world in which appearances and spectacle
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Heir to the Glimmering World
by Jana Prikryl
In Cynthia Ozick's latest novel, Heir to the Glimmering World, the
narrator Rose Meadows endures Jane Eyre's childhood without getting to
have any of Jane Eyre's fun. Maybe that's because Rose's predicament
is meant to signify something about the 20th century rather than the
19th: Into her personal story barges the turmoil of Depression-era
America, Nazi Germany, post-Revolutionary Russia, and Franco's Spain.
It's always suspicious when such a large number of world events
congeals in a single work of fiction (at the very least, it ties a
bunch of one-ounce weights to the suspension of disbelief), but in
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Plot Against America
by Michael Harris
The centre of the Earth, following World War Two, took up residence in
a rent-controlled Manhattan apartment and has not deigned to budge
since. Further, the American novel has become "the elaborate
conscience of the American race," touts English critic Peter Ackroyd.
So when Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Roth feeds a terror-infested
populace a book titled The Plot Against America in the months leading
up to a presidential election, more than an eyebrow is raised.
The Plot is a dystopian fantasy. It's 1940 and America must decide
between re-electing Roosevelt for a third term or foisting the upstart
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Damage Done by the Storm
by W. J. Keith
It is now almost thirty years since Jack Hodgins burst on to the
Canadian literary scene like an unheralded comet. Spit Delaney's
Island (1976), a book of accomplished short stories, introduced
readers to the fascinating if slightly wacky world of Vancouver Island
as seen from a dazzlingly original young writer's perspective, with
its rich collection of varied, vulnerable, but endearingly human local
characters. This was followed by two novels, The Invention of the
World (1977) and The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne (1979), that
brought into Canadian writing an element of imaginative fantasy (or
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: : All Times Have Been Modern
by Sarah Selecky
Moving breathlessly through more than thirty years of the Kay
Olenski's life in relentless present tense, All Times Have Been Modern
reveals the intimate details of Kay's life as though we are right
there with her. At 13, Kay is hooked on reading the racy scenes she
can find in the books in the family library-scenes that turn her "into
a ticking little time-bomb reading a booksexually ticking" The books
seduce her first, but when this "sexual ticking" mixes with flirtation
with a boy who is staying with her family that summer, Kay creates a
blueprint for arousal that stays with her through adulthood. Years
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda
by Gwen Nowak
Welcome to the theatre of war-to war as theatre. And all the world is
its stage.
Lieutenant-General Romo Dallaire didn't write Shake hands with the
Devil for theatre or film but his award-winning book is eminently
adaptable to either genre. Since we already know that as Canada's UN
representative in theatre' Dallaire was unable to prevent the Rwandan
genocide, we might expect SHWTD to be nihilist theatre. No
transcendence. No redemption. Dark forces triumph. Curtain down.
Not quite; at least not yet.
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Poached Egg on Toast
by Angela Narth
It is said that to be truly an artist, one must learn to see the world
through an artist's eye. In this collection of short stories, Frances
Itani, an Ottawa-based writer who has published a previous book of
short stories and a novel, as well as numerous articles and reviews,
has managed to use her practiced artist's eye to peer into the very
core of the human spirit.
Poached Egg on Toast is a compilation of twenty of Itani's best short
pieces, each one every bit as moving as her 2003 award-winning novel
Deafening, which claimed both the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Thirteen Steps Down
by Angela Narth
This novel should come with a warning label for all would-be mystery
writers: "Performed by an expert: do not attempt this at home."
Who, but Ruth Rendell, would be able to conceive of a murderous yet
compelling main character such as Mix Cellini? Readers will be wishing
him harsh and speedy retribution, while at the same time eagerly
turning the pages to see what diabolical act he will think of next.
Under her own name, Rendell has published over thirty murder mysteries
and several short story collections. In addition, she has written
another dozen mysteries under her nom de plume, Barbara Vine. In this,
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Gulag: Life and Death inside the Soviet Concentration Camps
by Olga Stein
To write a brief review of this books strikes me as almost a sinful
act, considering the scale of the human tragedy that is painstakingly
documented in this collection of more than 500 photographs. Norman
Davies contributes a moving, thoughtful introduction that attempts to
explain why so much of this human catastrophe has gone unnoticed-the
deaths of millions of people. The enduring communist sympathies of
many European and North American intellectuals is one disconcerting
reason. But principally what accounts for this lack of historical
awareness is the fact that, while alive, Stalin devised means of
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Opera LoverÆs Companion
by Olga Stein
The connection between opera and literature is made well apparent in
this must-have book for music and opera lovers, as well any individual
interested in mythology, the Bible, history and literature of
antiquity and the middle-ages. Opera and literature draw inspiration
from the same sources, and, importantly, although opera is theatre
performed through song, it's always based on a story, with a
traditional narrative structure and compelling characters, combined to
concoct great drama. Invariably, at the story's core is undeniable
passion and life-and-death struggle. (Roland Barthes would likely have
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Yours, Al
by Jeremy Lalonde
Shortly after the death of F.R. Scott, Scott's biographer, Sandra
Djwa, wrote to Al Purdy and asked him to consider writing a couple of
pages of prose about his relationship with Scott. In Purdy's response,
spurious indignation-"You want pages from me? Is this ten volumes or
one?"-quickly gives way to a very personal tribute. The final lines of
Purdy's letter read like much of his poetry-they slip in and out of
regular iambic meter and end with a measure of elegiac consolation:
"Every day men die, but this man's life makes dying somehow seem
unimportant: all that he was, except his body, still is and goes on
...
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|  | The Afterlife
by Penelope Fitzgerald
HarperCollins Canada / Counterpoint $23.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1582433208
|
Book Review A Review of: The Afterlife: Essays and Criticism
by Eric Miller
Among the pieces posthumously collected in The Afterlife is Penelope
Fitzgerald's review of Peter Ackroyd's Blake. Fitzgerald remarks
parenthetically of the poet's marriage, "(He had fallen in love with
[Catherine] because she pitied him, which seems to surprise Mr.
Ackroyd, but pity was the great eighteenth-century virtue that Blake
most earnestly tells us to cherish.)" This observation is at once
comic, profound, and touching-and all the more so for being couched in
the sotto voce of a bracketed aside. Fitzgerald provides no quotation
to substantiate her claim about the primacy of pity in the universe of
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Volume V: 1935-1942
by Clara Thomas
Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterson, the editors of the five volumes of
Montgomery's journals, deserve Medals of Valour, not only for the
impeccable editing that we have come to expect of them, but also for
their endurance in completing their task to its bitter end. Montgomery
died shortly after her final entry on March 23, 1942. From 1937 to
1942 the entries covered by this fifth volume are a final litany of
almost unrelieved misery, painful to read and surely painful for the
editors to work on. From the first volume's publication, in 1985, we
have been led to expect faultless editing, and, in the introductions
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Marian Engel: Life in Letters
by George Fetherling
Through her novels and other fiction, Marian Engel communicated
intensely and intimately with Canadian women of her own generation,
the one that entered middle age in the 1970s when social and gender
roles were changing so fast. She and her contemporaries seemed to be
living in a different world than the one in which they had grown up.
Surely this is one fact essential to any understanding of her work and
career. But there are others too.
I knew Engel quite well, socially and professionally, and I've
naturally been interested to observe the piecemeal publication of what
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Strange Things Done: Murder in Yukon History
by James Roots
Which picture is conjured in your mind by the term, "Yukon society":
the Hollywood-and-Robert-Service-induced romance of the hedonistic and
frequently violent Gold Rush, or the German-and-Japanese-derived
mystery of snowbound tranquility and jovial harmony?
As Ken S. Coates and William R. Morrison point out in Strange Things
Done: Murder in Yukon History, the reality can't be both. Either Yukon
society is an anarchic one filled with crime and killings, or it's the
living clich of Canada as the home of peace, order, and good
government.
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Politics of Anti-Semitism
by Nicholas Maes
The essays in The Politics of Anti-Semitism are assembled from
Counterpunch, a newsletter/website that prides itself on "muckraking
with a radical attitude." Some of the contributors are well-known
figures of the radical left-Norman Finkelstein, Robert Fisk, Edward
Said, Michael Neumann-and, as one might expect of a muckraking'
enterprise, all without exception view Israel in the same condemnatory
light.
The first two essays in the volume set in place a central theme.
Michael Neumann and Scott Handleman write at length on the nature of
...
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|  | The Case for Israel
by Alan Dershowitz
John Wiley & Sons Canada, Ltd. $32.99 Hardcover
ISBN: 047146502X
|
Book Review A Review of: The Case for Israel
by Nicholas Maes
It is a peculiar feature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that its
history allows for no consensus whatsoever. Perhaps Ben Gurion
believed in the transfer' or forced deportation of Palestinians, but
there is evidence to suggest he embraced the notion of a bi-cultural
state. Perhaps Jews of the Yishuv acquired land from the natives in a
legitimate fashion, although it is possible they occasionally hustled'
them out of their ancestral possessions. Perhaps the massacre of
Palestinians at Deir Yassin in 1948 was due to a breakdown in
communications, except that it may have been an unspeakable act of
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Girl in the Goldfish Bowl
by Lia Marie Talia
Morris Panych's latest comedy won five 2003 Dora Mavor Moore Awards
and recently received the Governor General's Award for Drama. Like his
previous work, this play is a lyrical exploration of an imaginative
individual's profound feelings of alienation in an inhospitable
environment. In Girl in a Goldfish Bowl, the protagonist is a
ten-year-old girl named Iris who is preoccupied with the events
leading up to what she describes as "the last few days of her
childhood." In recent productions of the play at the Arts Club and
Tarragon theatres, Iris is played by an adult in child's clothing,
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: GideonÆs Blues
by Lia Marie Talia
George Boyd's Gideon's Blues is an evocative, powerful, two-act
tragedy about a family and community wrestling with racism and trying
to overcome compromised circumstances. The play opens with
Momma-Louise, the family matriarch and widowed mother of Gideon,
singing the blues. Alone on stage, she speaks to her late husband
Poppy, trying to understand why she has incurred the wrath of the Lawd
Jesus and lost her only son. The rest of the play is an extended
flashback that chronicles the last weeks of Gideon's life.
As a university-educated black man with a bright, attractive wife and
...
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|  | Mambo Italiano
by Steve Galluccio
Talon Books $16.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0889224943
|
Book Review A Review of: Mambo Italiano
by Lia Marie Talia
Last Christmas I dragged my father, brother, and sister-in-law to see
the film version of Mambo Italiano. I thought that as a
first-generation Canadian, and the son of Italian immigrants, my
father would enjoy the cultural context of the movie, and I thought
the rest of us would enjoy its social critique. I said the movie was
about an Italian family, but I didn't mention that it was about a
young gay man finally admitting his sexual preference to his family. I
was hoping my family might learn something about tolerance. Most
plays, but few contemporary movies, share a teach and please' agenda;
...
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|  | One Good Marriage
by Sean Reycraft
J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing Inc. $12.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0920486576
|
Book Review A Review of: One Good Marriage
by Lia Marie Talia
Sean Reycraft is a Canadian playwright who examines the contours of
contemporary marriage. One Good Marriage begins with tragedy and
explores the fallout that this brings to a marriage, wrenching a
couple out of the comfort of a stable union into a state of confusion
and uncertainty. Through meeting these challenges, the writer
suggests, a couple can create a stronger bond that defies conventional
expectations.
One Good Marriage is narrated by two characters, Stewart, a
high-school librarian, and his wife, Steph, a high school English
...
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| | Liar
by Brian Drader
J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing Inc. $12.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0920486614
|
Book Review A Review of: Liar
by Lia Marie Talia
Brian Drader is a Canadian playwright who examine the contours of
contemporary marriage. Drader's Liar begins with tragedy and explores
the fallout that this brings to a marriage, wrenching a couple out of
the comfort of a stable union into a state of confusion and
uncertainty. Through meeting these challenges, the writer suggests,
couples can create a stronger bond that defies conventional
expectations.
Liar is a taut, traditionally-structured two-act play that employs
multiple settings-a rooftop, bedroom, kitchen, and backyard-and
...
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|  | Breakout
J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing Inc. $19.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0920486630
|
Book Review A Review of: Breakout
by Lia Marie Talia
"These five young playwrights have courage in abundance; the courage
to look at themselves, the courage to say what they think, and the
courage to explore how they feel." In his introduction to this
anthology of five up-and-coming Manitoban playwrights, Brian Drader,
himself an accomplished and sensitive playwright, highlights the
unflinching honesty with which these emerging prairie writers examine
some of the dramatic tensions marking human lives. The plays, selected
by Drader, include playwrights from Manitoba's Young Emerging
Playwrights Program and other young writers from the province.
...
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