| Note from Editor Note From The Editor
by Diana Kuprel
[The spirit of exclusiveness] is the most pernicious in an association of people: whenever exclusiveness arises, justice disappears, and where there is no justice, there cannot be morality; without morality, there are no morals. The spirit of exclusiveness is the main obstacle at every step of civilization.... It is still the greatest barrier to unity, to the unification of nations.
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|  | Whylah Falls: The Play
by George Elliott Clarke
Playwrights Canada
112 pages $14.95
ISBN: 0887545653
|  | The Baby Blues
by Drew Hayden T
Talonbooks
95 pages $13.95
ISBN: 0889224064
|  | The Tale Of Teeka
by Michel Marc Bou
Talonbooks
58 pages $12.95
ISBN: 0889224102
| |  | Glenn
by David
Coach House
112 pages $17.95
ISBN: 1552450589
|  | Beatrice Chancy
by George Elliott C
Polestar
160 pages $16.95
ISBN: 1896095941
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Book Review Settling The Score
by Cynthia Sugars
The essence of a concert recital is its ephemerality. It is fated to remain etched in the listener’s inner ear as an intangible memory, never to be precisely recalled. After all, no performance will ever be exactly the same as another. This was a phenomenon that obsessed Glenn Gould. How to make manifest the perfect moment—and how to preserve it for posterity
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| | Book Review The Immaculate War
by Christopher Merrill
No one knows who won the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. But certainly the myths that grew out of the Saint Vitus Day clash between Serbian and Ottoman forces continue to reshape the international order. When the armies of Serbian Prince Lazar and Sultan Murad met on the Field of Blackbirds, both sides suffered heavy losses, including Murad’s assassination and the beheading of Lazar.
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| | Book Review La Condition
by Bogdan Czaykowski
He was three and a drummer,
Kept going back in time,
Prickling tatoos on his skin
With the sticks of his drum.
Had a magic cap,
A fool’s motley for shame,
He could see like the blind,
He could talk like the mute.
When silence strikes
Half-normal states are born,
Leaping fishes glow,
Eyes pop out of smoke.
Aquariums shine like balloons
As the world rolls on,
But we are invisible
In the smoke of damp leaves.
In company like a monster
Lurks a human form.
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| | Book Review Digital Undoing Of Media Determinism
by François Lachance
Levinson is affable. He will trot out personal anecdotal hooks. He will relate his trepidation at meeting Marshall McLuhan. He will almost gush with recreated schoolboy delight at the approval he received. He will warmly mention the hospitality provided by McLuhan’s wife, Corrine. He will quote from his letter to Doubleday urging the publisher to consider McLuhan’s last book.
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| | Book Review Biography/Medicine
by Jeanette Bayduza
In Honour Due: The Story of Dr. Leonora Howard King (Canadian Medical Association, 236 pages, $24.95 paper, ISBN: 0920169333), Margaret Negodaeff-Tomsik chronicles the professional career of a pioneering woman whose life was shaped by dedication, perseverance, hard work—and a touch of luck.
Leonora Howard left her small farming community of Athens, Ontario, to study medicine at the University of Michigan because, in 1872, women were not yet admitted to medical school in Canada.
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| | Book Review Literary Loss Leaders, Or The Obsolescence Of Writers
by Joel Yanofsky
In his essay collection, The Gutenberg Elegies, critic Sven Birkets confesses to keeping a file called “the reading wars”. In it, he accumulates evidence all pointing to the same unsettling conclusion: books are becoming obsolete. In our electronic age, Birkets argues, “the old act of slowly reading a serious book” is losing ground—and fast.
Nowhere, it turns out, is the ground eroding faster than in the world of publishing, according to Michael Korda’s engaging and gossipy memoir, Another Life.
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| | Book Review A Teacher’S Life
by Douglas Fetherling
critic rather than a teacher, and felt uneasy in his long association with the University of British Columbia, Thomas has been that much rarer creature: a gifted teacher first and foremost. She’s published a number of books on CanLit, beginning with Canadian Novelists 1920-45 (1946). Others have included Love And Work Enough: The Life of Anna Jameson (1967) and several works wholly or largely devoted to Margaret Laurence and her writing
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| | Book Review Tobacco Wars
by Fred A. Reed
Books in Canada is to be congratulated for its decision to publish David Solway’s presentation of the enigmatic and elusive modern Greek poet, Andreas Karavis, in its October 1999 issue. For all too long, Greek poetry in particular and Greek letters in general have fallen into something of an eclipse on these shores.
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| | Book Review The Brothel’S Lewd Minstrel
by Maurice Elliott
Benita Eisler has written a very large and very heavy book on Lord Byron—perhaps the largest single volume ever.
Now, there is clearly a demand for biographies and memoirs. The political memoir, royal gossip, and celebrity chat all contribute to an apparently insatiable longing for what Ms. Eisler says (with some exaggeration, I hope) are the only consolations in this century: “sex and consumerism”.
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| | Book Review Grieving In Orpheus’ Shadow
by Keith Garebian
Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music is quite unlike anything else he’s written. It forgoes the sweeping social vision of his epical A Suitable Boy and the spirited satire of his verse-novel, The Golden Gate, preferring instead to immerse itself in matters of artistic sensibility. The novel, an impassioned, romantic tale of two unequally gifted musicians, strains after the shimmer of consciousness, collecting discrete sensory impressions and informing them with the narrator’s sensibility.
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| | Book Review 1999 Nobel Prize For Literature Günter Grass
by Thomas Salumets
On September 30, 1999, Günter Grass was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Nobel Foundation recognized him as a relentless critic of those who defend ideas at the expense of human beings and their environment. Above all, Grass was singled out for his role as the “great prober of the history of this century”.
The award did not come as a surprise.
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| | Book Review Gambling With Our Kids
by Nathan Greenfield
Parents with kids in school and others familiar with our school systems will likely find that reading Martin L. Gross’ The Conspiracy of Ignorance: The Failure of American Public Schools leads to hitherto unknown desires to play poker.
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| | Book Review From The Borderlands: View Of Blackbird’S Field
by Krzysztof Czyzewski
remember that we were born together
remember me
there
where others live
where we do not know one another
(Eqrem Basha)
Eqrem Basha is a poet for whom the parable of the apocalypse is being fulfilled right before his eyes. He’s known its words since childhood. From early on, he’s composed its poetic routes in verse. Now, he’s witnessing their incarnation.
The parable speaks of a land depopulated by cataclysm.
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| | Book Review Yet One More Mention Of The Dean
by Ray Robertson
The best writers speak across the ages. When Jonathan Swift writes to Alexander Pope that he loves individuals but hates humankind, I’m intrigued. When, in the same letter, he offers his own definition of a human being not as animal rationale, but, instead, merely as animal rationas capex (“an animal capable of reason”), he’s got me. Here’s a man after my own hopelessly misanthropic heart.
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| | Book Review Shade, Sybil, N’S Wife, Passim
by Dana Dragunoiu
Stacy Schiff has taken on a very difficult task: to write the story of a woman who deliberately sought to make her life impervious to the biographer’s gaze. Although Véra Nabokov (neé Slonim) recognized the need for a biography of her husband (and this in spite of her claim that he wished to exist solely in his literary work), she did not extend that necessity to herself
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| | Book Review Mccormack’S Ideal Sample Case
by Darren Werschler-Henry
The fellow beside me opened up his grip. Ten trays folded out, all of them empty.
“It’s the ideal sample case,” he said. “Comes in brown or black leather. You got your celluloid covers. You got your genuine aluminum trays, whatever size suits you. Guaranteed for twenty years.”
(Derek McCormack’s “The Bell-Ringer”)
Derek McCormack is the guttersnipe of Canadian Literature.
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| | Letters to Editor Letters To The Editor
by C.W. Hodgson
As a Cree Elder, I am grateful for A Story as Sharp as a Knife, by Robert Bringhurst, which was reviewed by Brian Brett in the October issue of Books in Canada. I read the book several months ago, and I consider it to be a gift to First Nation peoples across this land, as well as to those others who are interested in our languages and literatures, especially as, for the most part, the works written about us have been disheartening for me and others of First Nation ancestry.
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| | Letters to Editor Letter To The Editor
by Brian Brett
How delightful to read C.W. Hodgson’s letter and learn she was as impressed by Robert Bringhurst’s A Story as Sharp as a Knife as I was.
Unfortunately, she is arguing at cross-purposes with the review. While it is an important and brilliant book, it has its flaws. One would be foolish to expect otherwise. The world is not white hats and black hats. Fine books, like fine people, often have more than a few faults and bad moments, which, sometimes, are even part of their charm.
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| | Letters to Editor Letters To The Editor
by David Solway
I appreciate Fred Reed’s response to my Karavis translations and commentaries in the October issue of BIC and take seriously his observations on certain aspects of the poet’s career and itinerary which I may not have fully accounted for. As Reed notes, Karavis is a mercurial and elusive figure whose biography will always remain to a large degree inaccessible.
Nevertheless, I must object to some of his contentions.
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|  | Facts
by Bruce Taylor,
72 pages TP
ISBN: 1550651048
|  | The Island In Winter
by Terence Young
Signal Editions
107 pages $12
ISBN: 1550651226
|  | The Green Alembic
by Louise Fabiani
Signal Editions
81 pages $12
ISBN: 1550651234
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Prose/Poetry Poetry As Good As Sin
by Richard Stevenson
Some poetic voices take a longer time to evolve than others. They steep or grow in character like a good wine or scotch. The elegiac mode, the self-deprecating wit, the quirky sense of humour, and the eye for detail you need to slip from anecdote to concise incandescent lyric aren’t attributes you find in younger poets’ work very often. But they are attributes Terrence Young exhibits in abundance
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| | First Novels The Butterflies Are The Book’S Grace
by Diana Brebner
When David Macfarlane’s family saga, The Danger Tree, was first published in 1991, I spent a small fortune on copies for family and friends, and returned several times to Ottawa’s memorable Food for Thought bookstore to replace my constantly disappearing personal copy. When his first novel, Giller-nominated Summer Gone (Knopf Canada, 266 pages, $32.95 cloth, ISBN: 0676971903), came to me this past August, I set all tasks aside and read the book in one sitting.
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| | Brief Reviews Memoirs
by Wayne D.
From The Story of Bobby O’Malley down to his recently published The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, Wayne Johnston has established himself as one of Newfoundland’s most gifted writers. His readers will now be eager for a glimpse of the factual underpinnings to his splendid inventions. In his Governor General nominated Baltimore’s Mansion: A Memoir (Knopf Canada, 272 pages, $32.95 cloth, ISBN: 0676971466), Johnston provides his readers with something more and with something less than this.
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|  | The Drawer Boy
by Michael Healey,
Theatre Communications Group, Incorporated
128 pages TP
ISBN: 0887545688
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Brief Reviews Drama
by Caroly
An Ontario farmhouse in 1972. Enter Miles, a young, enthusiastic actor from Toronto involved in a collective production about farm life. Then, two poker-faced farmers with whom Miles stays for dramatic insight. Although urban audiences might expect to yawn through a tale of two farmers, Michael Healey’s riveting play, The Drawer Boy (Playwrights Canada Press, 66 pages, $13.95 paper, ISBN: 0887545688), commands wide-eyed attention.
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| | Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Cece Scott
Ellen Stafford has travelled many miles in her life, but her longest journey was her evolution from a young, naive, manipulated, teenaged wife, into a confident, assertive woman fighting for the repressed and ultimately freeing herself along the way.
Always & After (Viking, 293 pages, $32 cloth, ISBN: 0670886203) illuminates significant moments in history: life in the roaring twenties and, more poigantly, a woman’s place in society in the downtrodden, dirty thirties.
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| | Brief Reviews Children’S Books
by Jeffrey Canton
WD Valgardson’s latest offering, The Divorced Kids Club, is a compelling collection of short stories for YA readers in the tradition of Tim Wynne-Jones’ Some of the Kinder Planets and Sarah Ellis’ Back of Beyond. Valgardson is still known best as the author of fiction for adults like The Girl with the Botticelli Face and Gentle Sinners.
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|  | Balloon
by Tim Wynne-Jones
Key Porter
344 pages $24.95
ISBN: 155263096X
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Brief Reviews Fiction
by Eva Tihanyi
No word-mincing. If you read Tim Wynveen’s novel, Angel Falls (1997), and were wondering if someone who hadn’t published so much as a short story prior to that acclaimed, prizewinning, first book could create another equally successful work of fiction, the answer is an unequivocal “Yes.” Although Balloon (Key Porter, 344 pages, $24.
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|  | Daughter
by Ishbel M
Kids Can
216 pages $16.95
ISBN: 1550745352
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Children's Books Children’S Books
by Katherine Matthe
Sylvie Marchione is fourteen years old and facing the typical stresses of adolescence: piano exams, schoolwork, a growing need to discover her place in the world. She must also cope with the increasingly embarassing and even threatening behaviour of her mother who, until recently, had been a meticulous teacher, housekeeper, and concerned parent
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| | Children's Books Children’S Books
by Marnie Parsons
As a child, I loved historical fiction. I read most of the work of British writer Rosemary Sutcliff, and I devoured novels like Rifles for Waite and Johnny Tremaine. What I don’t recall, however, is reading Canadian historical fiction. A failure of memory or of my reach on library shelves? While I didn’t doubt our history was rich and intense, nor did I stumble across children’s writers who put that into language.
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|  | Bud, Not Buddy
by Christopher Paul
Doubleday Canada
272 pages $24.95
ISBN: 0385323069
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Children's Books Children’S Books
by Sherie Posesorski
Christopher Paul Curtis’ first YA novel, The Watsons Go To Birmingham—1963, was acclaimed for the appealing voice of its ten-year-old narrator; for its vibrantly authentic portrait of black, middle-class life in Flint, Michigan (where Curtis, now living in Windsor, was born); and for its convincing shifts between the comic and the near tragic in the story of the Watsons’ family life and their trip to Birmingham in the summer of 1963, when racist opposition to the civil rights movement culminated
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|  | The Run of the Dragon
by Iain Lawrence,
Bantam Doubleday Dell Books for Young Readers
pages TC
ISBN: 0385326637
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Children's Books Children’S Books
by Jeffrey Canton
While Pottermania is taking the globe by storm, Canadian kids have a reason of their own to celebrate. Iain Lawrence, whose first book, The Wreckers, was greeted with critical acclaim last year, has just published The Smugglers. This sequel, which, if possible, is even more exciting than its predecessor, is sure to cement Lawrence’s reputation for literary excellence.
The Wreckers introduced readers to fourteen-year-old John Spencer.
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|  | Share The Sky
by Ting-Xing Ye
Annick Press
32 pages $17.95
ISBN: 1550375784
|  | My Four Lions
by Bernice Gold
Annick Press
24 pages $17.95
ISBN: 1550376020
|  | Bye-Bye Pie
by Sharon Jenninngs,
pages TC
ISBN: 1550414054
| |  | Tall In The Saddle
by Anne Carter
Orca Book
32 pages $17.95
ISBN: 1551431548
|  | Me And Mr. Mah
by Andrea Spalding
Orca Book
32 pages $17.95
ISBN: 1551431688
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Children's Books Children’S Books
by Mary Anne Cree
Families come in all shapes and sizes. This new crop of picture books shows children in a variety of family settings, dealing—sometimes practically, other times imaginatively—with the ups and downs of daily life.
In Bye-Bye Pie, when Joey and Alfie’s grandmother tells them she is going to Greenland for a year, the boys kick into high gear, planning a party and making going-away gifts. Joey draws a self-portrait, makes a hand print, and presses flowers.
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| | Children's Books Children’S Books
by Theo Heras
This fall features a fine crop of humourous stories for the picture book crowd that includes new titles by Jean Little and Andrea Wayne von Konigslow, as well as books by relatively new names like Gary Barwin, Rose Cowles, and Stephane Jorisch.
The imagination of the prolific Jean Little has run rampant, fracturing “I know an old lady who swallowed a fly” shamelessly with I Know An Old Laddie. Her catchy refrain—“‘You’ll die,’ said I. ‘Not me,’ said he.
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