| Book Review Paradise On Hold
by Anne Denoon
CORDELIA STRUBE`S ALEX& Zee was short-listed forthe SmithBooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award. Although it did not win, itwas the choice of the redoubtable Joyce Marshall, a circumstance that compelledme, for one, to sit up and pay close attention. Now Strube`s second novel, Milton`s Elements, has arrived, hot on the heels of her first.
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| | Book Review On The Trail Of The Truth
by Merilyn Simonds
ONEPECULIARITY OF non-fiction lies in the perception of truth. Thoughostensibly based on objective fact, a book that tells a "true" storyis less believable, in some ways, than a novel. In the imagined world offiction, there is only one possible version of events - the author`s.With non-fiction, however, a reader never forgets that there are manyways to tell a story.
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| | Interviews The Spirit Of Place
by Allan Casey
For the photographer Courtney Milne, there is nothingmore spiritual than to experience beauty
OR MANY PHOTOGRAPHERS, achievement is measured inrolls of film; but for a select few, the hallmark of success is bestowed in theform of the lavish coffee-table book. With the publication of his fifthsuch book, Spirit of the Land. Sacred Places in Native North America (Viking),Courtney Milne has in a sense arrived.
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| | Essays But Seriously, Folks
by Ted Whittaker
THE PROBLEM IS, WHAT DOYOU leave out? Here`s a novel in part about Toronto, set in the near future -credible enough, if you posit no cataclysms. You`re on shakier ground when youintroduce characters modelled on those now alive and let them appear to be thesame age they are now. But the real difficulty rears up like a mama grizzlywith a threatened cub when, early on in the fable, the National Character isrevealed as one of the major engines driving the plot.
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| | Essays Up Front Barbara Carey The M-Force
USED TO THINK I WAS A WRITER. But that was before thelogic of the market economy became a kind of unified-field theoryapplying not only to the workings of leveraged buy-outs and your localmall, but even to non-commercial aspects of human society. (Perhaps inthe future some enterprising theoretician will prove that the m-force isalso behind the movement of the planets, but for now its influence is thoughtnot to extend to outer space.
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| | Essays Fetherling Raw Materials
OF THE GENERATION OF Canadian writers that moved fromcanter to gallop in the 1940s, none seemed then, or seems now, more truly,deeply, and diversely talented than A. M. Klein, author of The Rocking Chair and Other Poems and The Second Scroll, his famous novel. And none had a briefer runnor a sadder end.
For about 20 years in the life of Montreal and ofCanada, Klein enjoyed a delicately balanced combination of public life andprivate calling.
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| | Essays Race And Ethnicity Round-Up
by Gordon W. E. Nore
Why `us` and "them`must become `we`
THE LAST SEVEN OF MYMIDDLE AND SECONDARY SCHOOL YEARS WERE SPENT IN an all-boys Catholiccollegiate in Toronto. The school had a large Italian-Canadianpopulation, which 1 and many of my "Canadian" friends referred tosimply as "Italians.
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| | Essays Real Stories
by Pat Barclay
WITH ONE EXCEPTION, THESE seven new books for youngadults suggest that realism is definitely "in"; the exception is afantastical wild card so densely and archaically written it could well convertits readers to realism on the spot. FoolsErrant (Maxwell Macmillan, 214 pages, $14.95 cloth, $9.
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| | Essays Gardening Books
by Brian Fawcett
Budding Delights
Frombedding plants to naturalized gardens, this season`s guides for the greenlyinclined cover plenty of ground
THIS YEAR`S GRAB BAG OFNINE Canadian-made gardening titles contains Tsome highly useful books,several slightly strange ones (including an unexpected delight), and one bookthat is just short of remarkable.
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| | Essays Litcrit Round-Up
by Michael Darling
ReVpraising Values
Six recentcritical studies delve into our literary legacy
SPECULATING ON HIS OWNlegacy, Northrop Frye once described himself as "a kind of lumber room forlater generations," an image that, if qualified by the word"infinite," conveys some sense of the multiplicity of intellectualstructures for which Frye`s ideas could serve as buildine materials.
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| | Essays Profile/Emile Ollivier
by Elaine Kalman Naves
Engaged in Exile
EmileOllivier`s world is a plural,polyphonic place where all characters are immigrants
N THE NEARLY FOURDECADES SINCE Fran~ois Duvalier came to power in Haiti in 1957, more than onemillion Haitians, an estimated 20 per cent of the country`s population, fled"this bare rock, this mountainous island with its flinty stones and itsalluvial deposits, this land of lingering death.
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| | Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Margaret Webb
TAKE DOUGLAS Coupland, put him in a fiction workshopwith David Adams Richards, and what you might get is a Michael Winter. That isto say the Newfoundland-based author of the 16 stories in Creaking in Their Skins (Quarry, 240 pages, $16.
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| | Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Anne Fleming
NORMA HARRS impressively serves up not eight, not 12,but 20 tales in Love Minus One &Other Stories (Hounslow, 170 pages,$16.99 paper), her first book of fiction since her 1980 novel, A Certain State of Mind Set variously in Toronto, Winnipeg, and Ireland, theyrun to the kind of stories friends exchange over coffee.
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| | Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Donna Nurse
JOSEF BODNER, the oddballprotagonist in the Vancouver writer Grant Buday`s most recent novel, harbours apassion for glass. In Under Glass(Oolichan, 142 pages, $10.95 paper) Josef spends much of his time hoarding everything from light bulbs to bottlesto his mother`s forbidden figurines. His fascination extends especially to theEater of Glass, a member of the gypsy caravan that, in 1913, still traversesthe Slovak village where Josef and his mother live.
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| | Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Roger Burford Mason
IT WOULD DEPENDON your point of view, but a lot ofpeople might say that there have been better times in this country`s history topublish a novel about how hard-done-by the Anglos are in Quebec.
In his pacey new novel, Calypso Warrior (Robert Davies, 224pages, $18.99 paper), Ken McGoogan combines those old stand-bys, sex andpolitics, with some caustic reflections on the anglophone-francophonedebate that will not sit well with pequistes.
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| | Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by George Kaufman
IT AS TEMPTINGTO say that they don`t make men like Gerald Clark any more. And,as sexist and old-fogeyish as that sounds in today`s world, it`s quitetrue. As Clark himself confirms in No Mud on the Back Seat: Memoirs of a Reporter (Robert Davies Publishing, 284 pages, $26.99 cloth), at onetime almost all the foreign correspondents were men, and cut from a verydifferent cloth from today`s CNN satellite heroes.
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| | Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Denyse O`Leary
AS CONTINUING economic malaise sinks even largecorporations, Walter Stewart`s latest book examines the growing issue ofconvenient bankruptcies. In Belly Up:The Spoils of Bankruptcy (McClelland& Stewart, 256 pages, $29.99 cloth), Stewart argues that kinder, gentlerpublic attitudes to insolvency in Canada and the United States, intended tohelp the unfortunate, may help the unscrupulous to other people`s money.
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| | Children's Books Children`S Books
by Rita Donovan
ONCE UPON A TIME, LONG LONG ago, a child didn`t read"children`s books." She snuck into the adjoining bedroom, or down tothe basement, and found among scroungeable artefacts a copy of The Rubaiyat of 0mar Khayyam, an old ElleryQueen`s Mystery Magazine, a dog-earedand dog-stained Classic comic book edition of The Ox-Bow Incident. Becausethis is what she found, this is what she read, and children`s lit was takencare of for another day.
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| | Children's Books Children`S Books
by Rita Donovan
Karleen Bradford`s Animal Heroes (Scholastic, 90 pages, $4.99 paper) is probably the most straightforward of the books Ireceived. This is the kind of book I ate up as a kid - simple true-lifestories of animals who wake you up when the burglar comes, push you off the road at the last minute, fight bears... fight bears? These are mostly cats and dogs, mind you, and the best part is...
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| | At Large At Large
by Michael Coren
POLITICAL LIVES
THERE ARE CURRENTLY TWO biographies of General Francobeing written and another, by Paul Preston, has just been published. They seemto be rather confused and I question their objectivity. My Uncle Lou was anEnglish member of the International Brigade and was a prisoner of theNationalists in Spain for over a year. I myself am half-Jewish and haveevery reason to hate fascism and all its works. But I do not believe thatFranco was a fascist.
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