| Book Review Herring-Choker-Bluenoser
by Brian Bartlett
During Elizabeth Bishop's final years until her death in 1979, no other American poet likely received more intense praise from her fellow poets. Though she won several awards in her life and a hefty selection of essays about her appeared in 1983.
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| Book Review Be Polite to Bacteria
by Derek Lundy
Here's a prospect to make the blood run cold. The Ebola virus emerges out of its African rain-forest lair and begins one of its periodic depredations. Only this time it appears in a mutated form. It spreads itself through the air, like the flu.
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| Book Review The Odds on Doomsday
by Richard Lubbock
Simply by reading this sentence you have proved that you are a most exceptional human being. First, you are probably Canadian, which alone makes you a standout amongst the human race. Second, you certainly belong to the elite that reads Books in Canada.
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| Book Review No More Death of Princes
by James Morton
David Levy is one of the great contemporary comet hunters. The co-discoverer of Shoemaker-Levy 9, which collided with Jupiter with spectacular results in 1994, he has found nineteen comets.
I met him while he was hunting comets in London, Ontario.
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| Book Review Enlarged Blots, & a Surprising Dream
by Nathan Greenfield
More divides Towards Freedom from Facing Up to the American Dream than the forty-ninth parallel or the difference in their intended readership (the former for high school, the latter for university students).
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| Book Review Practice, Not Advice
by I. M. Owen
About twenty years ago, finding myself with little gainful employment beyond writing reviews for Books in Canada, I conceived the idea of writing a reference book on usage, a Fowler for our time and place.
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| Book Review Sense of Food Place
by Ted Whittaker
My wife and I eat out a lot, in restaurants good and grim. Living in Toronto, we have dinnered in scores of Italian rooms and have bellied up to the same menu and meal (or nearly), on evenings beyond count.
So where lies the thrill any more?
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| Book Review P.E.I Cow's Breakfast
by Deirdre Greene
T.K. Pratt's Dictionary of Prince Edward Island English, first published in 1988, now reprinted in paperback, is a work of some importance, which, despite flaws, makes a contribution to our sense of a distinctive regional strain in Canadian language.
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| Book Review Luck & Pathos
by Kildare Dobbs
The great age of photo-reportage began with the availability, after the First World War, of the Leica 35-millimetre single-lens reflex camera. Hitherto news photographers had relied on the Speed Graflex.
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| Book Review Tensing the Bow
by W. James Booth
To some in these waning years of the millennium, it must seem as if the debate over liberalism has run its course. What debate could there be? It has triumphed over its rivals, morally, economically, and politically.
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| Book Review From Central Caste-ing
by Martin Loney
An editor at Douglas & McIntyre asked Judy Rebick to write a book on new strategies for the Canadian Left. She is the former president of NAC (the National Action Committee on the Status of Women) and now a CBC personality.
Rebick demurred.
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| Book Review He's Bullish on the East Coast
by Michael Taube
There is a long-standing myth about the economy of the Atlantic provinces, which we can hear expressed in phrases like "Canada's Third World hideaway" and "our freeloading neighbours by the sea".
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| Book Review The Fish Turn
by J. Judd Owen
This slim volume is an important, and in many ways remarkable, document in the hotly contested battle for the soul of today's university. Its author, Stanley Fish, is professor of English and law at Duke University.
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| Book Review Prof. Smith is Read in Washington
by Jason Hanson
According to a White House press release, President Clinton wants to read this biography by a University of Toronto political scientist, Professor Jean Edward Smith (also the author of a forthcoming life of Mackenzie King).
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| Book Review Life after Crime
by Michael Greenstein
In Cary Fagan's first novel, The Animals' Waltz, the beer-guzzling, factory-working, ladder-climbing Sheila, as unlike any Jewish princess from Toronto's suburbs as one could imagine, travels beyond the length of Bathurst Street.
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| Book Review Delivering the Male
by John Oughton
Faced with many changes-the increasing evidence that the traditional, male-led nuclear family was often more dys- than functional, this is a work done by feminists to expand women's choices and rights and to achieve more equitable sharing of work.
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| Book Review Richler's Paradise Lost
by Scott Disher
".a growing body of first-rate writing about sports: one thinks immediately of Norman Mailer on the fights, Updike and Mark Harris-nevertheless.I can't help feeling guilty..
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| Book Review Exiles & Tourists
by Beatriz Zeller
"The poet is a little god," proclaimed Vicente Huidobro, the Chilean avant-garde poet. By this he meant that the poet must at every turn create the world: invent it from the confused matter that is life.
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| Book Review Ruthfulness
by D. G. Evans
It is always a mistake to read the promotional copy on the jacket of a newly published book. When the bumf and testimonial blurbs aren't frankly misleading, they create expectations of the book's contents that are unlikely to be met.
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| Interviews Learning to Write like a Child - Frieda Wishinsky speaks with Joe Kertes
by Frieda Wishinsky
"There are two kinds of writers," says Joe Kertes. "The Timothy Findley kind who can project themselves into another world and time and the Philip Roth type who write a broadened version of their own experience."
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| Interviews Golden Bough, Ont. - Eva Tihanyi Speaks with Tim Wynween
by Eva Tihanyi
Born and raised in Leamington, Ontario, Tim Wynveen, forty-five, has spent more than a decade as a copy editor and writer in Toronto. He has worked for Maclean's, Environics, as well as publishers of cookbooks, computer manuals, and genre fiction.
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| Letters to Editor To the Editor
Clarification on Unsung heroes I enjoyed reading Frieda Wishinsky's article on children's publishing entitled "Directing, Plus Midwifery", which was interesting, well rounded, and brought to the fore many of the unsung heroes of
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| Profiles Phyllis Grosskurth's Flawed Angel - an interview and profile
When Phyllis Grosskurth's biography Byron: The Flawed Angel came out first in Britain this February it got lavish attention. Being the first major one since Leslie Marchand's 1957 three-tome work, it was after all an event of literary importance.
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 | Homer in Flight
by Rabindranath Maharaj,
323 pages $18.95 TP
ISBN: 0864922205
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First Novels First Novels - 33-year-olds & Info-Endtime
by Eva Tihanyi
Homer in Flight (Goose Lane, 300 pages, $18.85 trade paper) by Rabindranath Maharaj is an intelligent, balanced, deeply felt book-recommended reading for anyone seriously interested in what it means to be an immigrant rather than
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| First Novels First Novels - 33-year-olds & Info-Endtime
by Eva Tihanyi
Mark Jarman's Salvage King, Ya! (Anvil Press, 284 pages, $16.95 paper) is exactly what its subtitle promises: A Herky-Jerky Picaresque. It is episodic and rambling, a loosely structured adventure told with realistic detail but from
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| First Novels First Novels - 33-year-olds & Info-Endtime
by Eva Tihanyi
An even more rambling but far more tedious novel is Norman Mascall's Year of the Ox (Galaxy, 462 pages, $23 trade paper). The basic plot revolves around Neville Maynard, who convinces the British government that it would be a mistake to cede
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| First Novels First Novels - 33-year-olds & Info-Endtime
by Eva Tihanyi
Speaking of genre confusion: Silence Descends, subtitled The End of the Information Age 2000-2500, (Arsenal Pulp Press, 96 pages, $11.95 paper), by George Case, can hardly be classified as a novel. As even the publisher admits,
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| Douglas Fetherling Douglas Fetherling - Two-Gun, One-Arm
by Douglas Fetherling
A decade ago the municipal government in Shanghai unveiled a monument to a Canadian physician who had died forty-some years earlier in a remote part of China while giving medical aid to the communists. No, not Norman Bethune.
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