| Book Review A Gift of Understanding
by Maureen Harris
On November 18th, 1992, the novelist Rudy Wiebe received a letter from Yvonne Johnson. Johnson identified herself as a prisoner in Kingston's Prison for Women (P4W) and a great-great-granddaughter of the legendary Cree leader Big Bear. She wrote because
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| | Book Review Engraving Stories
by Nikki Abraham
You know how a really great jazz musician can take an old tune and play with it-twist it, bend it, loop it back on itself, turn it upside down, appear to abandon it completely and then, with a sly flourish, return it to you fresh, new, still itself but
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| | Book Review In-Between Language
by Ted Whittaker
To read black Canadian literature is a heady adventure-the texts, and the writers' careers, in some instances their apparent tenure in this country, are so recent-and it's true, they themselves are so thin on the ground-that the works can still be looked
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| | Book Review It's Almost Time
by J Struthers
I wonder how many readers possess the intellectual instincts, the training, the willingness or time, or the peace of mind to read a novel-let alone a series of twelve interconnected novels-as an extended autobiographical meditation, as a long poem, as a
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| | Book Review Built-in Bends
by Marketa Goetz-Stankewisz
This is a brief but extraordinary memoir. It seems to move effortlessly between various levels-geographic, chronological, political, personal, literary. The reader feels as if afloat on a tossing vessel, touching land on different shores, awash with
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| | Book Review Barton's Funk
by Richard Vaughan
Twenty years and a half dozen acclaimed books into his career as one of Canada's most celebrated poets, John Barton has yet to become the fixed, or fixated, commodity we expect our poets to grow up to be. While there is a stuffed handbag's worth of
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| | Book Review The Only Real Estate
by Kenneth Sherman
John Oughton has had a sporadic career as a poet. His first book, Taking Tree Trains (1973), was followed eleven years later by Gearing of Love. This has been partly due to the fact that Oughton's interests are many. He is an accomplished
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| | Book Review Historicide
by Belinda Beaton
After thirty years as a professional historian, Jack Granatstein is well placed to comment on the way Canadian history is taught. This book warns that a frightening future awaits Canada if we continue down a path towards historical amnesia. Functional
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| | Book Review Surviving in the Third Person
by Sherie Posesorski
As many survivors of the Holocaust are compelled to do, Primo Levi kept retelling the story of his ten months in Auschwitz in his essays and memoirs. In his last book, The Drowned & the Saved, the explanation for why lies in the epigraph Levi has
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| | Book Review Happy Camper?
by Thomas Hurka
There are two attitudes to happiness. One is to wonder what it is and how it relates to other important concepts such as pleasure, duty, and the good life. The other is to try to get as much of it as possible as quickly as possible. The first is the
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| | Book Review HortiGulfure
by Brian Brett
The world of garden literature, real literature, has fallen on hard times. Lately, all one encounters are rows of pretty books with texts that could have been written by committees, books usually oriented towards a specific niche market.
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| | Book Review Global Warnings
by Ian Allaby
If you like polemic, and especially if you're bitter against "triumphalist" capitalism, you'll love Murray Dobbin's The Myth of the Good Corporate Citizen. Mr. Dobbin's book is a critique of globalization. It's fair to say he covers
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| | Book Review History Through Natural History
by Kildare Dobbs
From Lilliput Press in Ireland comes this big, beautiful volume on the history of natural history in Ireland. A collection of learned essays by various hands, it is in some sense an international collaboration, since the general editor, John Wilson Foster
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| | Book Review Texture of Troubles
by Waller Newell
The Warrior's Honour is a series of essays emerging from Michael Ignatieff's travels "through the landscapes of modern ethnic war" between 1993 and 1997, including Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Afghanistan. Readers who liked his previous
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| | Book Review A Cosmopolitan Quintet
by Gerald Owen
We live in an era of de-globalization. Print and broadcast media are reporting less than they used to about countries outside their own, not knowing what matters in the world at large-except for sporadic spurts of horror. There is no great conflict
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|  | Ingratitude
by Ying Chen, Carol Volk,
154 pages $18.95 TP
ISBN: 1550542672
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Book Review Sharper than a Serpent's Tooth
by Mary Soderstrom
Ying Chen is a small woman, who at first glance appears much younger than her thirty-seven years. As captured in Georges Dufaux's film for the National Film Board, Voyage Illusoire, she looks almost like a teenager when she's shown drifting down a
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| | Interviews A Sequel to Internment - Eva Tihanyi speaks with Kerri Sakamoto
by Eva Tihanyi
Kerri Sakamoto, who is thirty-nine, was born and raised in Toronto, to which she returned in 1996 after a seven-year stay in New York City. She holds a Master's degree in creative writing from New York University and has written
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| | Letters to Editor To the Editor
I take exception to Alison Sutherland's condescending and whining comments concerning Sheila Dalton's book Catalogue. First of all, Dalton is a poet in her own right with many poems having appeared in Canadian literary magazines over the past ten years
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| | Essays Dogs of Several Species
by Annette Goldsmith
The dog is a familiar figure in Canadian letters. As Leon Rooke demonstrates in Shakespeare's Dog, a pet's perspective on the world can be quite revealing. In children's books, the Canadian literary dog functions as observer, companion,
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| | First Novels First Novels - Slippery Memory
by Eva Tihanyi
The Wise & Foolish Virgins (Knopf Canada, 426 pages, $29.95 cloth), by the award-winning playwright Don Hannah, is a story of intersection (perhaps "collision" would be a better word) set in a small New Brunswick town called
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|  | Childhood
by Andre Alexis,
276 pages $19.99 TP
ISBN: 0771006659
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First Novels First Novels - Slippery Memory
by Eva Tihanyi
An even more auspicious debut novel is Childhood (McClelland & Stewart, 270 pages, $19.99 paper), by André Alexis. This is a quiet, contemplative novel, reminiscent of a long reverie. The narrator, Thomas MacMillan, now thirty, reflects upon
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| | First Novels First Novels - Slippery Memory
by Eva Tihanyi
Fifteen-year-old Tracey Berkowitz, the narrator of Maureen Medved's The Tracey Fragments (House of Anansi, 156 pages, $18.95 paper), is struggling in the stressful throes of adolescence. Unlike Thomas, she isn't looking back on her childhood;
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|  | Guilty
by Sky Gilbert,
192 pages $18.99 PT
ISBN: 1895837294
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First Novels First Novels - Slippery Memory
by Eva Tihanyi
Yet another playwright joining the first novelist ranks is Toronto's Sky Gilbert with Guilty (Insomniac Press, 155 pages, $18.99 paper). Gilbert, co-founder of the Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, has, like Medved, written a dramatic monologue
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|  | Peripheries
by Helene Littmann,
272 pages $18.95 TP
ISBN: 1896951082
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First Novels First Novels - Slippery Memory
by Eva Tihanyi
Peripheries (Cormorant Books, 265 pages, $18.95 paper), by Helene Littmann, is actually three novellas linked by certain commonalities of theme and setting. All three take place in Vancouver and feature female protagonists, ranging in age from
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|  | Janey's Girl
by Gayle Friesen,
224 pages $14.95 TC
ISBN: 1550744615
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Children's Books Children`s Books
by Allison Sutherland
First-time authors of children's and teenagers' books have a heartbreaking time ahead of them. They are in competition not only with the new books of the season, but with Charlotte's Web, Treasure Island, Kevin Major's Hold Fast,
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|  | Stephen Fair
by Tim Wynne-Jones,
192 pages $9.95 TP
ISBN: 0888992955
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Children's Books Children`s Books
by Jeffrey Canton
A new book by Tim Wynne-Jones is always something to celebrate and Stephen Fair is no exception. It's a compellingly readable novel that sensitively explores contemporary family life and the ties that bind us to one another. Fifteen-year-old
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| | Children's Books Children`s Books
by Jeanette Clark
Who says Canadian history is stuffy? In this large-format book, our PMs only look like stuffed shirts. Perhaps it's the illustrator's courtroom experience. He has focused, with interesting results, on the sartorial side of our leaders' lives.
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| | Children's Books Children`s Books
by Judi McCallum
Having loving feelings or a "crush" on someone is nearly universal among young children, so it is not unusual that two new titles dealing with the phenomenon appeared this past spring.
What is of note, however, is that the authors of both these bo
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| | Children's Books Children`s Books
by Margo Beggs
The mark of a good picture-book is that you want to read it aloud. You want to find a child and say, "Would you like me to read you a story?" You look forward to laughing over the illustrations and hearing a child say, "Read it again." That's how I felt
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| | Children's Books Children`s Books
by Julie Glazer
Kit Pearson's This Land, an outstanding new anthology of stories by Canadian children's authors linked thematically through landscape, exceeds expectations. As a young child I hated anthologies. Often the source was unnamed and impossible to find
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| | Douglas Fetherling Douglas Fetherling - Visual Writers
by Douglas Fetherling
That there was a recent exhibition of works-on-paper by Victor Hugo, at the Drawing Center in New York, is surprising but not astounding, for the great nineteenth-century French poet and novelist is remembered as an all-round genius. As Jean Cocteau,
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