| Book Review An East Coast Wealth
by Fraser Sutherland
Place names carry a lot of freight. They tell us something about what we did, who we are, even what we would like to be. They stake our claims on the land, exorcise historical ghosts, and erect hopeful signposts to the future. As the first point
Read more...
|
| Book Review From West to West
by Keith Nickson
It's been fourteen years since Guy Vanderhaeghe launched his writing career in a surprising fashion. He submitted an unsolicited manuscript of stories to Macmillan, which got the house a-buzzing. The publicity department was so drunk on discovery that
Read more...
|
| Book Review First Poets
by Robyn Sarah
In the mid-1970s one critic claimed in all seriousness that there were currently 187 "major poets" writing in English. One wonders how many there must be today? In the interim, university creative writing programs have continued to proliferate-hothouses
Read more...
|
| Book Review Bardic on Building
by John Ferguson
There was a time, much earlier in this century, when architecture wore short pants. It was an exuberant profession, energetic, hot-headed, even heroic. It was going to pave the way to the next millennium, a thoroughly modern millennium. But something
Read more...
|
| Book Review There's No Life Like It
by Ian Coutts
Armies exist to fight wars. That's a fairly straightforward statement, almost, you'd think, a self-evident one. Well, it's not, at least not according to the new book by David Bercuson, a history professor at the University of Calgary. He believes that
Read more...
|
| Book Review A Muse Goes Missing
by Douglas Marshall
Donald Jack's horse-faced hero, Bartholomew Bandy, entered literature in the opening lines of a 1962 novel called Three Cheers for Me. The time is July 1916. We find Second Lieut. Bandy, recently commissioned and bound for glory in the Great War,
Read more...
|
| Book Review Liberty or Citizenship
by Darcy Wudel
"Canada is a table filled with beer." "Canada is the loneliness of a long distance folk singer." These and other lines like them cover the front of this book. One might suspect that it is a sort of pop-culture treatment of Canada's identity question. It
Read more...
|
| Book Review The Inside-Out Wars
by John Ayre
It's a truism that the Second World War, the "good war", possessed none of the discomfiting ironies of the first Great War. While heroism led more effortlessly to the defeat of evil, this heroism was really more collective than individual. Beneath the
Read more...
|
| Book Review How to Hype Whales
by Peter Steven
A dinosaur of the seventies, a victim of its own success, or a model for environmental and opposition groups worldwide? Stephen Dale's new book offers strong proof that Greenpeace is all three.
Founded in Vancouver in 1971, Greenpeace quickly emerged
Read more...
|
| Book Review From the Heart of the Struggle
by William Mathie
Fifty years ago George Grant wrote to thank Sheila Allen, the woman who would soon become his wife, for sending him a copy she had made for him of a letter of Henry James. Grant had only recently discovered James. "Nothing that I have read in my life
Read more...
|
| Book Review But Somehow Does
by Maggie Helwig
"I play a twelve string and write songs that tell everything but the truth about love," says the narrator of "Johnny Fear & Debbie Dare", the first story in Christopher McPherson's first collection.
No story-writers and readers of fiction have to
Read more...
|
| Book Review Genie Set Loose
by Fraser Sutherland
As Mihailo Crnobrnja points out, the former Yugoslavia had seven neighbours, six republics, two autonomous provinces, five nations, four languages, two alphabets, and three religions. Crnobrnja should know, since he was the Yugoslav ambassador to the Euro
Read more...
|
| Book Review R&D without the Romance
by James Morton
There was a time, not so long ago, when technology was romantic and technologists were familiar figures in the pantheon of current celebrities. Before the Second World War, scientists like Einstein were as well-known as leading movie stars. As David Geler
Read more...
|
| Book Review Cement for a Nation
by Ian Allaby
The title Strong and Free rings with irony, though no doubt it means to promote hope. Franklyn Griffiths is talking about a Canada that is dependent, dispirited, and disintegrating. Snubbing the usual suspects (debt, free trade, the constitution), he
Read more...
|
| Book Review The Hells Angel of the Future
by Derek Lundy
Yves Lavigne sees himself as an embattled but undaunted crusader against evil. His mission is to expose outlaw motorcycle gangs-the Hells Angels in particular-as criminal scum of the earth.
In his first book, Hells Angels: Taking Care of Business (
Read more...
|
 | NAFTA in Transition
by Stephen J. Randall, Herman W. Konrad,
450 pages $29.95 TP
ISBN: 1895176638
|
Book Review After NAFTA, SNAFTA
by Alexander Craig
It's difficult to keep NAFTA out of the headlines. A truck plant closing in Quebec, medicare under threat from private U.S. companies in the West, farmers protesting in Ontario, unrest and uncertainty all over the country. Its economic, political,
Read more...
|
 | Too Many Suns
by Julie Lawson, Martin Springett,
32 pages $19.95 TC
ISBN: 077372897X
|
Interviews Essence of What's Going On - Frieda Wishinsky speaks with Martin Springett
by Frieda Wishinsky
"Ever since I was a kid, I loved to make things up," says Martin Springett. And in the five books he's illustrated, he has "made things up" in a bold and vibrant style very much his own.
"As a kid, I was always looking at things. I learned to draw
Read more...
|
| Interviews Jane Eyre in a Cape Breton Attic - Eva Tihanyi speaks with Ann-Marie MacDonald
by Eva Tihanyi
Ann-Marie MacDonald was born in West Germany in 1958, spent her childhood summers in Cape Breton, and has lived in Toronto since 1980. She is a graduate of the National Theatre School of Canada and the author of the acclaimed play Goodnight Desdemona (G
Read more...
|
| Interviews There Really is Something Called Love - Judith Fitzgerald speaks with Stan Rogal
by Judith Fitzgerald
Stan Rogal walks the line, the fine line between the mundane and miraculous, love and story, heart and break. Other and self; self and other; either or both gone missing, stranded along the lines of least resistance in the name of What Passes for Love,
Read more...
|
| Letters to Editor To the Editor
In response to William D. Sinkins (Letters, Summer), I should point out that my April contribution, "A Primer of African-Canadian Literature", was neither a review nor a bibliography. It was a bibliographic essay. I
Read more...
|
| Essays Time at the Moll
Saturday afternoon, it was The Three Stooges, The Bowery Boys, Westerns with Randolph Scott. When I was old enough to get into movies at night, I saw most of what was playing, more Westerns, Biblical epics, musicals with Dan Dailey and Donald O'Connor. I
Read more...
|
| First Novels First Novels - Sardines of Poverty
by Eva Tihanyi
Striking a much lighter note is David Eddie's Chump Change (Random House, 272 pages, $19.95 paper). The hero is writer-wannabe David Henry, who, at thirty-four, returns to Toronto from New York, unsuccessful in his bid for literary fame and
Read more...
|
 | Other War
by Geoffrey Vitale,
pages $16.95 PT
ISBN: 0920953980
|
First Novels First Novels - Sardines of Poverty
by Eva Tihanyi
In his largely autobiographical The Other War (Cormorant Books, 281 pages, $16.95 paper), Geoffrey Vitale, a London-born professor and journalist, writes about the experiences of nine-year-old Jerry Mansfield. Jerry is one of many children
Read more...
|
| First Novels First Novels - Sardines of Poverty
by Eva Tihanyi
Nancy Richler's Throwaway Angels (Press Gang Publishers, 240 pages, $14.95 paper) is touted by the publisher as "a fast-paced mystery novel", but it is neither fast-paced nor sufficiently mysterious. In fact, the mystery, which is never
Read more...
|
| Crosstown
by Richard Scrimger,
269 pages $18.99 TP
ISBN: 1896332013
|
First Novels First Novels - Sardines of Poverty
by Eva Tihanyi
How can a happy, respected Toronto surgeon end up living out the last half of his life as a homeless derelict just blocks from the very hospital that had once held him in such high esteem? This is the question at the heart
Read more...
|
 | Ghost Train
by Paul Yee, Harvey Chan,
pages $15.95 TC
ISBN: 0888992572
|
Children's Books Children`s Books
by Jeffrey Canton
Ghost Train is a magnificent new picture-book written by Paul Yee with paintings by Harvey Chan. They work marvellously together; their 1992 collaboration, Roses Sing on New Snow, won them the prestigious Ruth Schwartz Children's Book Award.
Read more...
|
 | Rebellion
by Marianne Brandis,
288 pages $16.95 TP
ISBN: 0889841756
|
Children's Books Children`s Books
by Ruth Osler
The events in and around Toronto in the autumn of 1837 are seen through the experiences of a boy of fourteen years, recently arrived from England: not a partisan in this time of unrest but an observer.
He is Adam Wheeler, the son of poor agricultura
Read more...
|
| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Allison Sutherland
It's hard to believe this is a first novel. The writing is skilful and assured. Plot, character, and the sense of place are all well-realized. And it has that indefinable something that makes a reader feel by the second page that you are in for a sizeable
Read more...
|
| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Geoffrey Cook
Children's literature is often an easy and tempting target of ideological agendas: those innocent minds need our political, pedagogical, and ethical direction! Works created for such agendas are often condescending and lacking in aesthetic and imaginative
Read more...
|
| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Manny Drukier
After the War is a novel that tells of a fifteen-year-old Holocaust survivor's return to her empty home in Poland and her subsequent flight to Palestine via the underground railway.
Ruth's tragic but hopeful tale, told in the first person,
Read more...
|
| Children's Books Children`s Books
by Bruce Bartlett
This autumn brings us four novels from the Regina-based Coteau Books. All four are seemingly directed at readers about twelve years of age. They are a meagre crop. The exception is a pleasant surprise, one that all children's librarians should arrange to
Read more...
|
| At Large At Large - Responsible?
by Michael Coren
The publishing house McClelland & Stewart recently marked its ninetieth birthday and threw a large party to celebrate the event. There were several articles in the press about the anniversary, all rightly congratulating the editors a
Read more...
|
| Douglas Fetherling Douglas Fetherling - Low Wattage Limelight
by Douglas Fetherling
Milton Acorn looked like a derelict who had let himself go. He was said to bathe only once a year (though this was probably hyperbole based on how he smelled). Certainly he seemed to wear the exact same clothes day after day, year after
Read more...
|
