| Book Review Bound For The Beach
by Allison Sutherland
FOR THE RIGHT sort of child, the long months of summer freedom provide a chance to read, and read, and read. Up trees, sprawled on a beach, hidden in tall, uncut hay, or defiantly indoors on the most beautiful of summer days.
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| | Book Review Diminishing Returns
by Robin Skelton
The evils done by most of the season`s mysteries
aren`t likely to live after them
SPRING IS usually a time when crime flourishes, at least between the covers of books. Sadly, most of the season`s new crime novels reveal, if not a desire to downplay evil, at least a diminished interest in it. The most extreme instance of this is John Brady`s All Souls (HarperCollins, 219 pages, $24.95 cloth).
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| | Book Review Learning Experiences
by Heather Kirk
ACTUALLY I read eight novels. One broke all the rules: it was not written by a Canadian. The British-born American writer Susan Cooper, author of The Boggart (Maxwell Macmillan, 199 pages, $18.95 cloth), is a former Newbery Award winner (The Grey King, 1976). She has Toronto friends, which explains why her novel is set there. The Boggart is a frivolous and hilarious story of ancient magic in a contemporary, white, and unabashedly well-adjusted, middle class setting.
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| | Book Review A Sense Of Humus
by Brian Fawcett
Some budding
possibilities for those who
like to hoe, hoe, hoe
GARDENING is rapidly increasing both in popularity and range of applications, so one would expect to find gardening books proliferating almost as fast as fruit flies. Maybe I`m missing something, or Canada`s publishers are, because we received just eight new books for review, three of them from a single publisher. I can see three possible solutions to this mystery.
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| | Book Review All In The Family
by Laurel Boone
FOR PLEASANT, undemanding entertainment, S. L. Sparling`s The Homing Instinct is hard to beat. The characters are peculiar enough to remain interesting, yet familiar enough not to strain credulity. The plot, while no challenge to the reader`s little grey cells, is carefully concocted and neatly resolved. The setting is the book`s strongest feature: Bloody Point, Maine, a coastal estate somewhat declined from its former glory and isolated on a peninsula jutting into the fierce Atlantic.
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| | Book Review The Dance Of Reading
by Charlene Diehl-Jones
I AM INTRIGUED these days by the territory charted by the prose poem, and these four collections - Ann Diamond`s Terrorist Letters, Antonio D`Alfonso`s Panick Love, Nicole Brossard`s Green Night of Labyrinth Park, and Normand de Bellefeuille`s Categorics 1, 2 and 3 - offer several different takes on what`s possible in this form.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews
by George Kaufman
JOHNNY SCHNARR uses the word "lucky" in describing the many adventures of his colourful life, and he certainly did have more than his share of good fortune along the way. But it was more than luck that made Schnarr the kind of character who can keep us interested in his life story, related in Rumrunner, the Life and Times of Johnny Schnarr (Orca, 224 pages, $14.95 paper).
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| | Book Review The Russian Connection
by Douglas Fetherling
JAMES MAVOR`S two-volume autobiography, My Windows on the Street of the World, published in 1923, is one of the little mysteries of the second-hand book trade. Volume one is common as dirt but volume two is extremely difficult to find. If their relative scarcity were reversed, many more people would have heard of Mavor today and think of him as the brilliant figure (and fascinating memorist) that he was - rather than simply as the founder of the famous Canadian theatrical dynasty.
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| | Book Review True To Form
by Mickael Happy
KEITH MAILLARD`s seventh novel, Light in the Company of Women, is a historical romance set at the turn of the century, and is the first of a proposed series of novels about the fictional steel-mill town of Raysburg, West Virginia.
Romance enjoys the reputation of being the poor relation of "serious" literature because of its supposed tendency to page-turning prurience.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews
by Daniel Jones
IN HER FIRST collection of stories, Stalking the Gilded Boneyard (Gutter Press/Steel Rail Publishing, 145 pages, $12.95 paper), Christine Slater plays a dangerous game and loses. She takes characters from popular culture and attempts to give meaning to their superficial lives. At their best, these stories are affected and irritating; more often, they are tedious
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews
by Stan Fogel
MAKING A BOOK from a movie may be as gross a misconduct to some as an Atom Egoyan film script with the line, "He shoots, he scores." Nonetheless, two of Canada`s premier directors, Egoyan and David Cronenberg, seem as at home on the page as they do on the set. Cronenberg, in Cronenberg on Cronenberg (1992), chronicled his love of literature, most notably William Burroughs.
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| | Book Review Hard Questions
by Maggie Helwig
MARLENE NOURBESE PHILIP`s Frontiers is one of those books that is not likely to get an intelligent reading, with fashionable liberals rushing to endorse everything she says, and fashionable conservatives hastily denouncing her as "strident" or some such thing, and relatively few people actually reading the essays.
This is too bad, because Frontiers really is an intelligent - and not perfect - book, and one that deserves a thoughtful reading.
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| | Book Review A Topical Nerve
by Gordon W. E. Nore
Marlene Webber is dedicated to the serious analysis of important social issues
MARLENE WEBBER has been talking a lot lately about her newest book, Food for Thought (Coach House, 1992). So have the media. Food for Thought is about the growing institutionalization of food banks in Canada, and suddenly, many of the media outlets that used to simply promote food drives are now asking the same questions Webber asked in the book, about the ethicality of using food banks to resolve hunger.
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| | Book Review Awakenings
by Birk Sproxton
IN The Secular Grail, Christopher Dewdney presents short essays, reflections, and fragments that set out to demonstrate and provoke an active reading of the world. Throughout his text, Dewdney opens up and reworks communication theory. What he seeks - and what we all must seek, he suggests - is an ongoing perceptual awakening, a constant shifting of the paradigms that govern perception.
Dewdney`s prose is clean and incisive, the essays punctuated with quotable aphorisms.
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| | Book Review Anne Goes Prime Time
by Michael Coren
AM SITTING at the starboard end of the back row of a 33-seat turboprop plane travelling from Halifax to Charlottetown. This is early April, snow and storm surround the flimsy aircraft, and I feel like a pioneer of the early days of aviation fighting his way across the Rockies to win a mail contract. Simply, I`m less than happy.
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| | Book Review Users Manuals
by I. M. Owen
ANYONE who writes a weekly column, not as a full-time job but as a spare-time activity, has my awed respect. I wrote nine columns a year in this magazine for two years and five months before falling into a stricken silence. Therefore I feel humble before Robertson Cochrane,
whose "Word Play" has appeared in the Globe and Mail every Saturday for almost two years.
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| | Book Review The Runner
by Libby Scheier
Everybody at the centre had their problems and they
weren`t keen on getting an earful
of someone else`s
She is the red-haired runner beat up by the cops. She runs along the Toronto lakeshore at four in the black August morning. When the cops stop her, she shouts at them and takes off. They give chase in their car, catch her, and pound her with their fists until they are tired.
She was always off the beaten track, but now she`s going over the edge.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews
by George Kaufman
BETWEEN the bleak economic news and the even bleaker political news, Canadians have been desperately casting about for some good laughs to take their minds off things for a while. One of the best ways to snag a few real chuckles is to pick up a copy of How To Be Not Too Bad (McClelland & Stewart, 248 pages, $24.99 cloth).
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| | Book Review A Place For Mavericks
by Alec Mcewen
CONNIVANCE. A Montreal political writer predicted in the Calgary Herald that the new Conservative leader would not enjoy the "same connivance with Quebec provincial parties" that Brian Mulroney had experienced. Perhaps that`s not a bad thing, because the verb connive comes from the Latin connivere, to wink or to close the eyes. Its two principal modem meanings are to pretend ignorance of or to encourage wrongdoing, and to cooperate secretly or conspire with others for some unlawful purpose.
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| | Book Review A Book Of The Dead
by Carole Giangrande
CONCERN with death abounds in this well titled novel: the need to come to terms with mortality, the grief and loss it entails, and the long shadow it casts over the dying of ecosystems, whole societies, and the earth itself. It is a book freighted with so many varieties of death and so much passive cogitating that turning the pages amounts to an act of defiance against both the Grim Reaper and Robert Fraser, the novel`s central character.
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| | Book Review Examined Lives
by Ted Whittaker
THE SUBTITLE Of Systems of Survival flags its author`s urgent intent, as does her lucid preface: Jane Jacobs would reform our working lives, whose ethics are too often disastrously confused.
Her literary device, the philosophical dialogue, is simple, its pedigree venerable. A retired publisher convokes a small group of his authors and friends to examine the current condition of honesty in working relationships
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| | Book Review Checks And Mates
by Mark Levene
THE OTTAWA writer Mark Frutkin has an extraordinary range. The editor of an arts magazine, he has also studied with Robert Duncan and Allen Ginsberg, and has published volumes of distinguished poetry, notably The Alchemy of Clouds ( 1985). But it is for his gifts as a novelist -Atmospheres Apollinaire (1988), which was short-listed for the Governor General`s Award, and Invading Tibet (199 1) - that Frutkin is most deservedly known.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews
by Roger Burford Mason
TO BE HUMAN is to be unavoidably sad, Richard Teleky`s new collection of short fiction, Goodnight Sweetheart and Other Stories (Cormorant, 157 pages, $12.95 paper), tells us. Sad, but also wonderful.
Here`s the family trying to cope with the grandmother`s Alzheimer`s disease, reluctantly, guiltily, committing her to a home.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews
by Allan Levine
WE LIVE at a time when nearly all the newspapers in Canada are owned by large and impersonal corporations such as Southam and Thomson, which routinely place financial considerations ahead of editorial quality. Until recently the Kingston Whig-Standard remained unaffected by this phenomenon. But much to the displeasure of many journalists and writers, including Douglas Fetherling, author of A Little Bit of Thunder: The Strange Inner Life of the Kingston Whig-Standard (Stoddart, 386 pages, $24
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| | Book Review Domestic Correspondence
by George Galt
Two new collections of letters show Canadian literature coming confidently of age
FEELING BLUE about the future of Canadian culture? Afraid some of our writers may be silenced by cuts in government funding to the arts? Don`t bet on it. John Sutherland`s letters from half a century ago demonstrate that literature can and will be produced in the face of mass indifference and apparently insurmountable material odds.
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| | Book Review A Borderline Case
by David Homel
ONCE, IN AN ironic mood, my father said to me, "One day you`ll thank me for giving you an unhappy childhood; at least you`ll have something to write about." Well, Clark Blaise got the whole works: an unhappy childhood with all the trimmings, putting the rest of us amateur unhappy children to shame. Blaise revisits his childhood in I Had a Father, which is openly autobiographical
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| | Book Review Slow Reading, Please
by Royce Macgillivray
PRINT IS NOW used to manipulate us. Sheer volume of words has become a way of attracting attention, without any assumption that the words will actually be read. This is one of the standard techniques in direct-mail advertising. When we find an envelope in the mail stuffed with printed advertising material, no one expects that we will actually read it.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews
by Jinnean Barnard
READERS` expectations of the novels of Frederick Philip Grove probably fall significantly short of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven`s expectations of the man himself. Whereas readers seek literary pleasure, Baroness Elsa (who married Grove, whom she knew as Felix Paul Greve) sought, and found, orgasm. She was impressed by his 11 qualities of energy, determination and executive ability.
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| | Book Review Life At Second Hand
by Sharon Abron Drache
MATT COHEN`s The Bookseller is a surprise -a combination of send-up and sadness. The troubled protagonist, Paul Stevens, a clerk in Fenwick`s Used and Antiquarian Bookshop, gradually becomes reconciled to the difficulties and disappointments in his relation, ships with his brother, Henry, and with the great love of his life, Judith.
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| | Book Review Letters
Men`s Movement
MAYBE IT`S just me, but I think that Brian Fawcett`s treatment of Michael Kaufman in "Men`s Movement" (April) is considerably more of a personal assault than a book review. Fawcett decontextualizes Kaufman`s work and criticizes it chiefly through the construction of a weak analogy between what Kaufman is attempting to do and what advertisers are doing in the socalled "infomercial.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews
by Stan Fogel
STORMIN` NORMANS - Mailer and Schwarzkopf - more or less recently roamed deserts, infected by what Edward Said calls "Orientalism." Westerners, though, have been licking their Cheops, so to speak, for a long time. Too long perhaps for those who, like Said, would regard pyramid prose as one more colonial intrusion. Certainly Paul William Roberts, in River in the Desert: Modern Travels in Ancient Egypt (Random House, 394 pages, $28 cloth), loves the histories and vistas of his chosen terrain.
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| | Book Review Down On The Street
by Dan Bortolotti
SINCE PUBLISHING his first novel nearly 30 years ago, Austin Clarke has often dealt with the hardships of Blacks in the colonial West Indies and with the similar plight of Black immigrants in Toronto. Clarke`s latest collection, In This City, consists of eight short stories that read like pale reruns of his earlier work.
"Letter of the Law of Black" is a lengthy note from a Barbadian man to his son, who is studying in Canada.
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| | Book Review Sovereignty Sell Out
by Sheldon Gordon
LAWRENCE MARTIN has not exactly launched a fresh line of attack on Brian Mulroney`s prime ministry by accusing him of selling out Canada`s sovereignty to You-Know-Who. The professional nationalists Maude Barlow (A Parcel of Rogues) and Mel Hurtig (The Betrayal of Canada) have previously authored book-length polemics with that very message.
But give Martin some credit. Pledge of Allegiance shows more intellectual honesty in pursuit of that lachrymose theme.
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| | Book Review Interwoven Tales
by Gary Draper
CAROLINE WOODWARD`s The Alaska Highway Two-Step (Polestar/Raincoast, 130 pages, $14.95 paper) has a number of things going for it: that catchy title, the eccentric, earthy voice of the book`s narrator, Mercy Brown, and sturdy, serviceable prose throughout. The book is a braid of three narratives. The story that lies at the centre is Mercy`s journalistic tour of the Alaska Highway.
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| | Interviews The Impassioned Exile Of Barry Callaghan
by Roger Burford
if we fail to write the language of here, there will be no literature of this place
BARRY CALLAGHAN is the author of a collection of short fiction, The Black Queen Stories (Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1982); a novel, The Way the Angel Spreads Her Wings (Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1989); and several collections of poetry, including Stone Blind Love (Exile, 1988). He is also a translator, and the editor and publisher of Exile magazine, which is currently celebrating its 20th anniversary
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| | Prose/Poetry Inventional Attitudes
by Clint Burnham
THE MOST IMPORTANT event in 20th-century Canadian poetry was no doubt the shift in the early `60s from a naturalistic or social realist modernist poetry to a more formally engaged, experimental poetry. While there is a degree of continuity between the older modernist verse (here, Raymond Souster) and the latest attempt at revolt (here, Nancy Shaw), the poetic revolution ought to be a permanent one, as you`ll see from the appalling formal conservatism of some of the work under review here.
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