| Book Review Hard to Find a Good Family
by Rivanne Sandler
The characters in this book are people caught in a web of culture, unable to squirm out of this tightly-woven mesh, even when they dare to try. The entanglement is slightly less for those of them who live in Canada. But even in a new setting, cultural
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| Book Review Viewpoint Shift Rescue
by Bruce Taylor
I would not get into a car that had most of its wheels, nor would I eat a mushroom that was 80 percent free of deadly toxins. However, I often read, and even recommend, books that are just somewhat good. Alan Cumyn's Between Friends & the Sky is one of
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| Book Review A Gloss on the Dust
by Kildare Dobbs
Lorna Crozier, one of the most original poets alive, has written a narrative sequence inspired by the novel As for Me and My House, by the late Sinclair Ross. Mrs. Bentley, the enigmatic narrator of Ross's novel, was the first literary character Crozier
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| Book Review Many Small Rooms
by Roo Borson
There's a fine-and an arguable-line between the short form called prose poetry and the equally short form called postcard fiction. One might try to make a distinction by emphasis: an explicitly reflective quality, say, versus dramatic action, but in the
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| Book Review Apples with Salt
by Michael Greenstein
The striking cover of Janis Rapoport's fifth collection of poetry, After Paradise, features a composite, "Hallucination", by a British artist known as Hag. At the far right, an interior of fireplace, carpet, and chair yields to an external scene with
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| Book Review Sculptor Carving on His Mental Block
by Robin Roger
The title of Manny Drukier's Holocaust memoir refers to the indelible knot of memories that are lodged permanently in his survivor's soul, and which demand a kind of faithful attention that precludes full engagement in life. It is taken from Primo Levi:
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| Book Review Appreciation & the Traumatic Tone
by Norman Doidge
It is rare that anyone, in his or her mid-seventies, writes a first book, in a second or third language. Rarer still is that a first book proves to be of lasting worth. In the case of this book and this author, these two rarities are not unrelated.
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| Book Review Minimal Swerve
by Darren Wershler-Henry
"Now of course it is perfectly true that a more or less first rate work of art is beautiful but the trouble is that when that first rate work of art becomes a classic because it is accepted the only thing that is important from then on to the majority
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| Book Review Unflinching
by Tim Bowling
There are poets writing in this country who deserve to be better known. On the evidence of her latest collection, Jane Southwell Munro is one of them. Grief Notes & Animal Dreams is her third book, and first in nine years; Daughters appeared in
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| Book Review Doris vs. the Dinosaurus
by Barbara West
According to the photo on the dust-jacket of Rebel Daughter, Doris Anderson, now seventy-five, is a handsome woman with the look of a benign but slightly exasperated eagle. It is a fitting look for a revolutionary in winter. She who fought so many battles
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| Book Review Just in Time for Lean & Mean
by Henry Lackner
"The rich are getting richer and more powerful-the poor and the middle class are being flattened...not since the depression of the thirties have so many young families been at such risk for economic security.... By 1993 only half of Canadian breadwinners
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| Book Review At Rest in RV Motion
by Claire Gigantes
When David and Dorothy Counts told their anthropologist colleagues that they were proposing to do a study of people who live in Recreational Vehicles (RVs) as a retirement alternative, they ran occasionally into "lightly veiled (and sometimes explicit)
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| Book Review Mel, wha hae wi' Wallace bled...
by Nora Abercrombie
Today being Robbie Burns Day, my Scottish neighbour phoned to wish me the best of the day, and to ask if the celebration of Scotland's most famous poet did not elicit pride in my heritage. Well, I said, it saddens me that, while my ancestors fought and
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| Book Review Vitally Unnecessary
by Donna Orwin
An Unnecessary Man contains the most complete account in any language of the life and writings of Apollon Grigoriev. Wayne Dowler, a University of Toronto professor, does an excellent job of clarifying the often difficult and confusing prose of this Russi
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| Book Review Trying to Retrive Civic Virtue
by Thomas Pangle
This book, by one of America's leading political theorists, is a remarkable academic expression of the moral malaise that is ever more profoundly and precipitously seizing hold of modern liberal democracy. Sandel contends that behind the massive signs
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| Book Review Is There a Tory Canada?
by Lloyd W. Robertson
What difference does a constitution make to a country? At the most obvious level, constitutions describe the institutions of government, their relationships to each other, and some safeguards to ensure that their operation is consistent with individual
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| Book Review Bloody Everyday
by John Doyle
We are already in the period of the post-Troubles fiction of Northern Ireland. Peace in Ulster is shaky and each month brings the threat of renewed violence by the IRA or by Loyalists. Still, the ceasefire holds and the various political parties and
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| Book Review Look Up
by Jack Chambers
Two Canadian publishers rushed into print with weighty general-purpose desk dictionaries in the fall, some three months ahead of their 1997 copyright dates. The Gage Canadian Dictionary (hereafter, "G") boasts 140,000 entries including 13,000 added to its
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| Book Review Person-to-Person Time Travel
by Maggie Helwig
From the cover illustration-Alex Colville's painting of a young woman peering out at us through binoculars-to the final sentence (".I think of it still, at moments like this, when it seems to be important to try to understand how I came to be transported
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| Book Review Descendant in the Ascendant
by Keith Garebian
The title of this book derives from a seventeenth-century masque by Ben Jonson: "For dancing is an exercise/ Not only shows the mover's wit,/ But maketh the beholder wise,/ As he hath power to rise to it." Jonson's lines, Neufeld explains, proclaim
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| Interviews Unredeemed Grace - Eva Tihanyi speaks with Dionne Brand
by Eva Tihanyi
Dionne Brand was born in Trinidad in 1953 and moved to Toronto in 1970. She is the author of six volumes of poetry, including the acclaimed No Language is Neutral (1990); Sans Souci & Other Stories; Bread Out of Stone (essays); and her first novel, In
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| Interviews Strength from Solitude - Frieda Wishinsky speaks with Monica Hughes
by Frieda Wishinsky
The stories of the prolific young adult writer Monica Hughes seem to flow from her pen. But each of her carefully crafted tales simmers in her mind for a long time before she puts it down on paper. "I keep an idea in my head and let it grow there,
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| Essays Freedom to Read Week 1
You can pick up cheap American horror novels for your kid at a fast food joint, books that offer about as much intellectual nourishment as a bag of chips. When they sell books at hamburger joints, or by mail-order through macaroni boxes, publishers
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| Essays Freedom to Read Week 2
While examining original diaries and photographs of the Romanovs for a juvenile biography of Princess Anastasia Nikolaevna, the author Hugh Brewster, of Madison Press, was amused to "discover" that the royal teenager smoked her father's cigarettes. (This
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| First Novels First Novels - Piracy, Apocalyipse
by Eva Tinahyi
Right from its opening line-"I pulled him from a sea of blood."-The Changeling, by Alison MacLeod (Macmillan General, 324 pages, £15.99 cloth), is dramatically charged. A changeling is, as one dictionary defines it, a child
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| First Novels First Novels - Piracy, Apocalyipse
by Eva Tihanyi
The Gathering of the Aspects, by Paul-Michel Ratté (Cormorant, 350 pages, $18.95 paper), is also a potent mix: part horror story, part philosophical exploration, but perhaps most notably an indictment of organized religion and its consequences
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| First Novels First Novels - Piracy, Apocalyipse
by Eva Tihanyi
The Lesser Blessed, by Richard Van Camp (Douglas & McIntyre, 144 pages, $18.95 paper), is the first-person account of Larry Sole, a member of the Dogrib Indian tribe, who, after being sexually abused by his father, kills him in his
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 | The Swing Tree
by Kristin Andrychuk,
184 pages $29.95 TC
ISBN: 0778010236
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First Novels First Novels - Piracy, Apocalyipse
by Eva Tihanyi
In The Swing Tree, by Kristin Andrychuk (Oberon, 160 pages, $31.95 cloth, $15.95 paper), Cath, forty-seven, a divorced mother of three teenagers, has moved her family back to take care of her ninety-year-old stepmother, Momma.
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| First Novels First Novels - Piracy, Apocalyipse
by Eva Tihanyi
Sunnybrook: A True Story with Lies, by Persimmon Blackridge (Press Gang, 96 pages, $23.95 cloth-with full-colour images throughout), is an unusual novel in that it started out as visual art. Blackridge, who lives in Vancouver and is described
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Ruth Osler
Two twelve-year-olds in modern Prince Edward Island go back to the time when it was Ile St Jean, settled by Acadians who were to supply food to the great fort of Louisbourg. Maggie is spending the summer with an elderly aunt because she has no immediate
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 | Pavlova's Gift
by Maxine Trottier, Victoria Berdichevsky,
32 pages $18.95 TC
ISBN: 0773729690
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Children's Books Children`s Books
by Rasa Mazeika
Great art must never be rejected because it conflicts with the world-view of the reader or reviewer. But what are we to make of pedestrian writing that clothes itself in the reflected glory of an historical person, while distorting history to teach
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 | Houses of China
by Bonnie Shemie, Bonnie Shemie,
24 pages $13.95 TC
ISBN: 0887763693
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Children's Books Children`s Books
by Julie Bergwerff
Bonnie Shemie's books appeal to the kind of imagination drawn to tree houses (trees optional) and snow forts (snow not so optional). Often, she advances the careers of young would-be architects by including step-by-step building instructions.
Her la
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Peter Bain
If this is a first science book, it shouldn't be the last. Although it is entertaining and reasonably accurate, it is only an encyclopedia in breadth, not depth. The authors' explanations, such as they are, are clear and straightforward. Yet when they say
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| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Allison Sutherland
The summer cottage experience is a defining one for many Canadians, a blend of solitude, outdoor privies, the sound of water under a boat's keel, the smell of the first raindrops on sunbaked rock, the feel of sandy bedding, and the taste of charred
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| At Large At Large - Corporal Wilde
by Michael Coren
A book entitled Queer Science was published recently by a prestigious American university house. Its subject was the use and abuse of science by the homosexual movement. On its cover was a picture of the Irish writer Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie
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| Douglas Fetherling Douglas Fetherling - Kensington Market Irregular
by Douglas Fetherling
Toronto has never been a place for erecting plaques on the former homes of the writers and artist who've lived there (much to the dismay of people like Greg Gatenby, the literary director of Harbourfront Centre, who is talking of taking up this very
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