| Book Review A Review of: Photographic Atlas of the Body
by Olga Stein
The Photographic Atlas of the Body (Firefly, 288 pages) is marvelous
from the start-in fact from the start of its foreword, written by
Baroness Susan Greenfield. She begins with the following: "This book
truly spans the science/art divide. Indeed, it goes one better: it
shows how once can merge into the other. Science can actually be art,
and in turn, in the exquisite and ultimate mechanisms and function of
biology, there is an intrinsic beauty." Further down, she writes of
the section on the nervous system and the brain, "I hope that you will
be able to capture some of the excitement that I had when I was first
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Freshwater Aquarium Fish
by Olga Stein
If you were impressed with the magnificent parade of acquatic life
animated in the recently-released Fish Tales, you'll find this book
delightful. Mind you, the fish studied here are freshwater species,
but the variety, exoticism, and beauty of these creatures makes them
no less exciting than their Fish Tale counterparts. Best of all, with
this collection of 150 fish types, you're looking at the real
deal-live fish shot from multiple angles, with numerous images of each
type smartly arranged against a white backround, rendering all of
their unique, charming, and sometimes bizarre, attributes fully
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Last Chance To Eat: The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World
by Brian Fawcett
Gina Mallet has written a wonderfully crabby-and timely-memoir Last
Chance To Eat: The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World. Mallet was the
Toronto Star's much feared drama critic during the 1970s and the early
1980s, and has since had stints writing perceptive restaurant reviews
for the Globe and Mail. Her approach to restaurant reviewing
acknowledges that people actually drink wine and talk during meals.
From that I understood that she clearly loves and understands good
food. This book takes my regard for her into a higher dimension.
She has some firm ideas about what does and doesn't constitute good
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| | Book Review A Review of: Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida
by Richard Carter
About four centuries ago, a middle-aged poet was trekking along a
rough country road north of Tokyo. Relying on the hospitality of
strangers, and open to the weather's fitful moods, he delighted in
what he saw, smelled and heard: rainwater on leaves; frog splash in a
pond; mountains in the distance; cragged mossy temples. The
traveller-known as Basho (1644-1694)-was an acute observer whose poems
attract readers with their vivid precision and brevity. Here are two
examples:
"The morning glories
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Address Book
by Richard Carter
Nowhere is Heighton's taste for the sonorous smack of words more
obvious than in the final section of his The Address Book, called
"Fifteen approximations", which contains a marvellous array of
translations from such poets as Arthur Rimbaud, Rainer Maria Rilke,
Sappho and Horace. I have no way of properly judging these poems as
translations-my French is poor, and my German non-existent. But as
poems in their own right, many are stirring. Take stanzas 2-5 from
Heighton's translation of Arthur Rimbaud's "The Drunken Boat":
"I was unmoved, cared nothing for any crewmen,
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Burning Eaves
by Richard Carter
David Manicom benefits from a sensitive ear and an imaginative
intelligence. While, Like Heighton, Manicom has done some translating.
The Burning Eaves includes a powerful rendering of "The Convex Mirror"
by Yves Bonnefoy. Like Bonnefoy, Manicom can arrange images to develop
thoughts. Here are the first two stanzas of Manicom's translation of
Bonnefoy:
"Look at them, there at the crossroads,
Who seem to hesitate, who set out again.
The child runs before them: they have gathered
...
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|  | Splitting Off
by Triny Finlay
Nightwood $16.3 Paperback
ISBN: 0889711984
|
Book Review A Review of: Splitting Off
by Zach Wells
Sonnet L'Abb, in a recent review in the Globe and Mail, had this to
say about Triny Finlay's debut collection, Splitting Off: "To say
Finlay achieves a note-perfect CanLit voice is both praise and
admonishment: Her measured tone announces her craftsmanship, but
doesn't yet distinguish her among contemporaries." L'Abb gets it half
right. Poets who sound too much like their contemporaries effectively
consign their work to instant oblivion; competent craftsmanship
provides temporary surcease at best. If such poets merit praise, it is
the very faint praise of "fitting in." Significant poetry of any age
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Toronto Between The Wars: Life In The City 1919-1939
by Greg Gatenby
Charis Cotter sagely remarks in Toronto Between The Wars that most of
the buildings for which Toronto has been known for decades were built
between World Wars I and II: the Royal York Hotel, Maple Leaf Gardens,
the Bank of Commerce head office, Eaton's College Street, and Union
Station. These buildings are of only modest architectural interest.
Nevertheless they became symbols of the City because Toronto was so
profligate in destroying its masterpieces from the Victorian era it
had little better to offer. Those looking for plangent discussion of
what WWI and the Depression meant to Torontonians will have to look
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Framed: AmericaÆs Art Dealers To The Stars Tells All
by Greg Gatenby
>From friends who are professional painters and sculptors I have heard
horror stories over the decades about dealers who are years late in
paying, who don't lift a finger to promote or sell, yet demand a 50%
commission, and who make artists jump through hoops where no author of
similar stature would even lift a toe. But such gallery-meisters are
unpromising amateurs compared to Ted Volpe, a pathetic arriviste who,
even after a long time in jail for defrauding friends and other
investors in his New York and Los Angeles art galleries, finds it
impossible to fully acknowledge his own role in his downfall. His
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Rupert Hart-Davis: Man Of Letters
by Greg Gatenby
Although Rupert Hart-Davis died less than five years ago, already the
noted biographer Philip Ziegler has produced a wonderfully readable
account of the man and his career. Part of Ziegler's success is due to
his own felicitous, often witty writing. But the success is also due
to the fact that the career of Hart-Davis spanned most of the
twentieth century and so his personal history in many ways is a
history of British publishing for the same period. After a shaky start
at Heinemann, where he befriended H.G. Wells and J.B. Priestly among
other eminent authors, Hart-Davis became an editor at Jonathan Cape in
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Day I Swapped my Dad for Two Goldfish
by Olga Stein
Neil Gaiman's and Dave McKean's The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two
Goldfish has both a good story, for children 5 to 9 years of age, and
impressive illustrations. The text is inserted graphic-novel-style in
a font that resembles handwriting. Line-drawn illustrations are
superimposed on a background that often consists of colour washes on
newsprint or other textured surfaces. The result of this layering is
gorgeous, and the frequently created contrast between dark and light
colours gives some objects the appearance of being illuminated. Many
of the pages look a touch eery and dream-like. The line drawings
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: when I heard the learnÆd astronomer
by Olga Stein
When I Heard the learn'd astronomer contains text based on a poem by
Walt Whitman. There are only eleven lines, but each is meaningful and
elegant. A young boy is made to put on a jacket and tie before
attending, along with his parents, a lecture to be given at a
university. Inside the neo-classic building a gathering of people
awaits the lecture, and the boy, meanwhile, explores on his own,
looking at scientific miscellanea. Loren Long's illustrations are
haunting in their depiction of a child temporarily disconnected from
the world of adults. Long captures the boy's solitariness even in the
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Gonna Roll the Bones
by Olga Stein
Gonna Roll the Bones, a story based on text from a Hugo Award-winning
novella by Fritz Leiber, has been superbly rendered here with pencil
on vellum by David Wiesner. The story, a fantastical western,
obviously leaves out some important original material, but the reader
is given enough to guess that Joe Slattermill, the central character,
has some special gift when it comes to rolling bones' (or dice). Since
he lives in an old, run down cabin with his wife and mother, we can
surmise that he doesn't normally gamble for personal profit, but on
this occasion, restless and curious about The Boneyard, the new
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
by Olga Stein
Stephen King's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is a pop-up book. Why is
it being reviewed here? First, it has many panels with enough text to
fill a regular kids' book. Second, it's a marvel of design and
engineering-an amazing creation one might not want to let a child read
unsupervised for fear that clumsy little hands might cause damage.
Nine-year-old Trisha becomes separated from her mother and older
brother while on a hike on the Appalachian Trail that runs between
Maine and New Hampshire. Lost in this vast, forested part of Maine,
Trisha decides to follow a stream on the principle that "water leads
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Edgar Allan PoeÆs Tales of Mystery and Madness
by Olga Stein
Edgar Allan's Poe's Tales of Mystery and Madness contains four of
Poe's stories: "The Black Cat", "The Masque of the Red Death",
"Hop-Frog", and "The Fall of the House of Asher". All four tales are
disturbing enough to furnish illustrator Gris Grimly with ample fodder
for his black pen. This book borrows a great deal from the dark
graphic novel, but while the drawings often seem better suited to
graphic books or magazines for adults, the overall design and use of
colour is artistically appealing, and the content is toned down just
enough (though I wouldn't give the book to a preteen). The book has
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Magic Off Main: The Art of Esther Warkov
by Olga Stein
Magic off Main arrived in my office late in December 03, too late to
be included in last year's gift books column. This was unfortunate
because the small book, with its tasteful but unassuming cover,
immediately revealed itself as a treasure. Esther Warkov's work is
completely unconventional, brilliant, disturbing, confounding, and at
all times fascinating. So striking is Warkov's art, I wondered why I
had never heard of her before. Fortunately, Magic Off Main does not
merely reproduce Warkov's paintings and three-dimensional art, the
book is an expertly written study of the artist's oeuvre, her personal
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: In the Place of Last Things
by Eric Miller
Michael Helm's In the Place of Last Things is a good novel. It not
only provokes thought, but it also sustains thought well beyond its
conclusion. I say this despite the fact that I have never thrown a
punch in all my adult life or picked a physical fight-violence is as
alien to me as it is familiar to Helm's protagonist, the 230-pound
Russ Littlebury. Helm gets the reader inside the mind of a man whose
strong intellect cannot suspend a reflex toward the exercise of force,
force at least temporarily conceived of as righteous. Littlebury
possesses brains, and has refined those brains in the academic study
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Man Who Hated Emily Brontd
by Steven W. Beattie
Anyone who has ever experienced the near-orgasmic gustatory sensations
on offer at Schwartz's delicatessen on Montreal's Boul. Saint-Laurent
will instantly recognize the essential truth of a statement that
author Ray Smith places in the mouth of one of his characters toward
the end of his latest novel, The Man Who Hated Emily Bront: "Smoked
meat has the mysterious quality that if it leaves the island of
Montreal it ceases to be smoked meat." Likewise, the "tasteless doughy
doughnut-shaped things" that masquerade as bagels outside the borders
of Montreal-and which are often marketed by disingenuous Toronto shop
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Collected Stories
by Clara Thomas
Carol Shields's Collected Stories was published, with the cooperation
of her family, one year after her death. "Segue", a chapter from the
novel she was working on when she died, is included along with the
complete collections, Various Miracles, The Orange Fish and Dressing
up for the Carnival. Her daughters Anne and Sara were actively engaged
in the book's preparation and made themselves available for
interviews. The finished work is a handsome collection, her family's
memorial to the writer whose remarkably diverse talents leave us a
shining legacy. New readers as well as long-devoted readers will be
...
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|  | Oblivion: Stories
by David Foster Wallace
Little Brown, USA $35.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0316919810
|
Book Review A Review of: Oblivion: Stories
by Lyall Bush
Modernism, the tradition David Foster Wallace belongs to with what
used to be called a vengeance, was supposed to have been wiped away
long ago by Postmodernism, with its shifting styles and its deadpan
assurances that surface is depth and skin is just another way of
saying soul. Samuel Beckett and Andy Warhol, and the last century's
presiding genius, Marcel Duchamp, were the gray eminences of the new
tradition. They shrugged away the Moderns' ghosthunter humanism, their
hungry hearts, their wager that well-arranged words could revive
cities (Ulysses), capture thought as it passed through the wobbly
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Birds Without Wings
by Michael Harris
When the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin sat down one wintry eve to
enumerate the properties of novelistic prose, he named polyphony as a
core element. The crush of a hundred voices, confounding each other,
supporting each other, filling in gaps and carving out fresh
mysteries-this is what we demand of a good, meaty novel. And Louis de
Bernires' latest offering, Birds Without Wings, fits the bill
handsomely. A hundred voices, at least.
Christian Greeks, Muslim Turks, Armenians and Jews make up the chorus,
happily coexisting under the Ottoman empire's millet system, wherein
...
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|  | Sointula
by Bill Gaston
Raincoast Books $34.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 1551927195
|
Book Review A Review of: Sointula
by Shannon Cowan
Bill Gaston is not afraid to take risks, and in his latest novel,
Sointula, his exploration into the sacred and profane heart of coastal
British Columbia is a quest of Quixotic proportions.
With such accolades as the Timothy Findley Award, a Giller Prize
nomination, and the Canadian Literary Award for Fiction under his
belt, not to mention twelve other books of prose, poetry, and drama,
Gaston deserves to have a wide readership by now. That he situates
himself outside the literary centre of Canada-first in New Brunswick
where he served as editor of The Fiddlehead, and now in pastoral
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Nine Planets
by Chris LaVigne
The world is a sham and Marty Devereaux knows it. Vice principal and
co-founder of a St. John's private school, Marty is an expert at
keeping up appearances, carefully crafting reality to suit the tastes
of his wealthy clientele. He is skilled at constructing pleasing
facades. Needing to create some semblance of tradition, Marty sets up
a phony trophy case filled with impossibly ancient awards for the
school's opening day. Marty's school, The Red Pines, is only the most
obviously fictional piece of a world Riche constructs by means of his
characters' dishonesty, their bold, unflinching willingness to
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Memory Artists
by Paul Keen
Memory, both as a promise and a curse, is one of the great mysteries
of our existence-a way of keeping faith with all we cherish, or where
we forget, the worst betrayal. Or, more darkly, it haunts us in the
endless return of unassimilable trauma. It is sometimes hard to know
the difference. Je me souviens, license plates remind us. Lest we
forget, we repeat like a mantra on Remembrance Day. Not just
particular memories but the idea of memory itself offers us some of
our most profound cultural coordinates. But memory can never be fully
adequate either. In the nineteenth century, Charles Babbage fantasized
...
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|  | Secret Smile
by Nicci French
Penguin Canada Hardcover $24 Paperback
ISBN: 0143014161
|
Book Review A Review of: Secret Smile
by Desmond McNally
Having thoroughly enjoyed this Nicci French's last novel, Land of the
Living, I expected more of the same high quality from Secret Smile.
The beginning of the narrative quickly establishes an undercurrent of
frenetic confusion tinged with dread, and yet the opening chapters
also seem to lack some of the tight organization one is used to from
French. The opening of Land of the Living explodes like a greyhound at
the start of a race. Secret Smile, on the other hand, appears to
meander initially, with several vignettes seemingly lacking much
purpose and direction. This state of affairs is short lived, however;
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Flourish: Murder in the Family
by Desmond McNally
Are you sitting comfortably? - Then I'll begin. . .
("Listen with Mother", BBC Radio, circa 1950's)
The above would serve as good advice to those preparing to read the
Flourish by Heather Spears. The author advises us in her introduction
that the events in her narrative are true and that all of the
characters lived, and are in addition, ancestors of Ms. Spears. This
renders the story to come more tantalizing for the reader.
The stage for this novel is Victorian Scotland, in particular, the
village of Kirkfieldbank near Lanark, where our central character,
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Garden of Beasts: A Novel of Berlin 1936
by Desmond McNally
Jeffery Deaver has chosen a time and place for his latest novel that
offers innumerable opportunities to immerse his readers in a setting
that history confirms was rife with Anti-Semitism, cruelty, hatred,
intrigue and the barbaric treatment of fellow human beings.
This novel of Berlin in 1936, the time of Hitler's Olympics, provides
the background for an unusual premise in Garden of Beasts, the literal
translation of Tiergarten. Deaver, a prolific and successful author of
many well-regarded novels, hits his stride quickly, introducing us to
his protagonist, a German American called Paul Schumann. An unlikely
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Find me Again
by Desmond McNally
Despite Find Me Again's cover notes I was unprepared for the
engrossing journey over two centuries on which I was to accompany the
author. This is Warsh's second novel, a sequel to the well regarded To
Die in Spring, and once again its central character is Dr. Rebecca
Temple.
Rebecca's husband has been dead eleven months, too short a time for
her to reconcile herself to this tragedy and the opening chapters are
suitably poignant and melancholy. Her relationship with Sarah, her
Mother-in-Law, is somehow stilted and mostly at arms length
...
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|  | Attraction
by James Manlow
MacAdam/Cage Publishing $30.2 Hardcover
ISBN: 1931561834
|
Book Review A Review of: Attraction
by Desmond McNally
As a student at school, my weakest subject was, and still is,
Mathematics. I did not take Advanced Physics and know next to nothing
about Quantum Mechanics. Imagine my discomfort when I discovered a
number of passages in Attraction dealing with these very subjects. I
hasten to add, however, that these mini-lectures did not diminish my
enjoyment of the novel. This is James Manlow's first foray into the
world of fiction, and a very creditable one it is.
Undergraduate Prentis ("Jack") Stone's bachelorhood is ambushed by an
attractive Anglo/French student named Anne-Marie who is attending the
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: After Surfing Ocean Beach
by Desmond McNally
Although a murder is of central importance in this offering by Mary
Soderstrom, After Surfing Ocean Beach is by no means a "mystery" or a
"whodunit".
The author has a sharp, efficient style, though not sparing in her
descriptive narrative. Nor does she diminish the import of what we the
readers are to discover. In fact by the end of the first chapter, we
are already presented with a body lying in a pool of blood and made
witnesses as Rick, acting defensively, stabs a man who comes to offer
him assistance.
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Hydra and the Bananas of Leonard Cohen: A search for serenity in the sun
by Todd Swift
Recently, the Guardian's Friday Review featured "Cohen at 70" on its
cover. His handsome face, peering out from under severely-cropped
greying hair, was at it again: appearing haunted and bemused
simultaneously. These periodic Cohen sightings so dear to the
international press (timed these days to coincide with album
releases-such as the new one Dear Heather) now have a tipping point:
the absurd moment when Rufus Wainwright is trotted out, to proclaim:
"I really believe he is the greatest living poet on earth."
Wainwright is a very talented musician, but he is not a very good
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Chronicles: Volume One
by Lyall Bush
I live in Seattle, and on November 3, I was reeling from an election
result that didn't surprise me yet managed to leave me stunned. In the
evening I finally put on some Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited, his
still strange and unsettling record from 1965 that is also one of the
towering pop artifacts of the 20th Century. Every time I listen to the
music I understand American life better. In every song the assured
24-year-old was reinventing popular music and also making a new world
out of trance-inducing quadruple rhymes and sliding, fragmentary story
shapes in which Gypsy Davey, Noah's great rainbow, Miss Lonely, chrome
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: War
by Matt Sturrock
What's left to say about war? The phenomenon has been amply addressed
by hexameter-spouting pre-literates, Confucian generals, shell-shocked
poets, writers' workshop jarheads, and untold numbers of eminently
qualified commentators in between. Amid all that rhapsodizing,
lamenting, codifying, strategizing, speculating, and eulogizing is the
uncomfortable truth that nobody has yet figured out how to put an end
to it. But, hey, didn't the threat of war reach its apogee in the late
twentieth century, when the cocked and loaded ICBMs of two competing
superpowers threatened to scorch or choke all human life from the
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: A Terrible Love of War
by Gwen Nowak
A Terrible Love of War is James Hillman's last testament. In four
charged chapters Hillman guides his reader on an excursion into the
dark underworld of the soul to shed light on what he claims has never
been seen before-the bunkers of the dark god of war, the dark god who
rules the world, the warring world, the everyday world where war is
now, has always been and, unless this ubiquitous force is
decommissioned, will always be.
Hence the title of chapter one: "War is Normal". But admittedly war is
not an acceptable normal given its horror, the pathologies of
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Spice Trade
by Christopher Ondaatje
Columbus found America; Magellan circumnavigated the globe, and Vasco
da Gama sailed around Africa to India. These three adventurers were
indeed the standard bearers of the age of discovery, driven, in fact,
not so much by the will to discover as by the all-consuming hunger for
spice. It is difficult to imagine that anything more could be written
about spices than in this exemplary book, The Spice Trade, by Jack
Turner. It is a tour de force and gives a very full account of the
early spice race, including the exploits of the 15th and 16th century
explorers.
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Lumiere Light: Recipes from the Tasting Bar
by Brian Fawcett
This book originates in my old stamping ground of Vancouver. From Food
Network star Rob Feenie and his sous chef Marnie Coldham, the recipes
in the book are based on the fare from their Lumiere Light tasting bar
in Vancouver. The virtues of this one are that the recipes are
excellent, the cuisine light, high/serious and culturally fused. These
are the same virtues to be found, generally, in Feenie's television
cuisine and the two Vancouver restaurants. Unfortunately, the book
suffers from the same faults I've found in his television cuisine:
most of his recipes require a professional kitchen and pantry with a
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Great ChefÆs Cook at Barbara-JoÆs
by Brian Fawcett
Great Chef's Cook at Barbara-Jo's issues from Barbara-Jo McIntosh's
Vancouver cookbook store, which features a fully equipped kitchen in
which, I gather, a horde of celebrity chefs line up to cook a meal and
socialize with Vancouver's foodies. The book is heavy on
cross-testimonials: Vickie Gabereau introduces the book, McIntosh
praises each celebrity with a private anecdote, and many of the
celebrities themselves provide testimonials to McIntosh. Along with
the celebrity caricatures by the talented Bernie Lyon, there's barely
room for the recipes, which thankfully are pretty clear and quite
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Salut! The Quebec Microbrewery Beer Cookbook
by Brian Fawcett
Raymond Beauchemin's Salut! The Quebec Microbrewery Beer Cookbook is a
much less elegant but rather more informative cross-promotional
volume. The recipes require you to know more about Quebec's
microbreweries than most of us outside of Quebec will, but for someone
like me who thought that cooking with beer either meant chili or
getting drunk around the barbecue, it was a pleasant surprise to
discover how many culinary uses beer can have. The book also provides
a thumbnail sketch of Quebec's brewing history and offers a
cross-reference section that allows you to substitute non-Quebec
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Smoothies Bible
by Brian Fawcett
The Smoothies Bible by culinary herbalist and home economist Pat
Crocker is a wonderful book for those who want to be trendy and are
obsessed with their digestive tracts. Most of the fruit smoothies-and
there are literally hundreds of recipes for them- seemed drinkable
enough, but I just can't talk myself into making , say, a broccoli
smoothie, or some of the more radical herbal concoctions for my
breakfast even if they promise to make my colon glow in the dark. But
if you're into blenders and food processors, or have lost your dental
equipment, this may be your kind of book. Those who think that food is
...
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