 | Wakefield
by Andrei Codrescu
HarperCollins Canada / Cdn Adult Hc $34.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0002005794
|
Book Review A Review of: Wakefield
by Michael Harris
The best candidate we have for the real Doctor Faustus may be the
Johannes Faust who obtained his B.A. in divinity at Heidelberg shortly
after the 16th century wrenched into gear. Imprisoned for one of many
nasty deeds, Faust promised to remove the hair on the face of a
gullible chaplain without the aid of a razor. A salve of arsenic was
provided, removing both hair and flesh in one. Half a millennium
later, writers still eat that one up.
Not one to miss out on a good thing, Andrei Codrescu's latest novel,
Wakefield, joins the ranks of Faustian remakes. Wakefield purports to
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Zanzibar Chest
by Matt Sturrock
The critic James Wood has argued that some books are "so large, so
serious, so ambitious" that they "flush away criticism." Aidan
Hartley's memoir, The Zanzibar Chest, at 448 pages, is unquestionably
large, but no more so than the many legal thrillers, Jazz album
guides, or biographies of third-rate English gentry that are derided
unto death in the weekend book sections every season. Yes, it is
ambitious, but to a fault; the author's attempts to weave the
variegated strands of family history, African politics, and personal
experience into something whole are largely unsuccessful, while the
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Sun Through the Blinds: Montreal Haiku Today
by Steven Laird
Just Google "haiku" on the Web. You'll get a million and a half
entries from all over the world, all in Google's famous "0.14
seconds." That seems fitting for what is probably the world's shortest
and most recognized form of poetry. People write haiku in just about
every country, varying its simple three lines and tight metrics (in
English, traditionally about 17 syllables) only slightly from one
language to another. There have been at least two major worldwide
conferences, hosting poets from Russia, the Balkans, Europe, North
America, Australia, the Middle East, and of course Japan. Haiku's
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Early Mapping Of The Pacific: The Epic Story Of Seafarers, Adventurers, and Cartographers Who Mapped The EarthÆs Greatest Ocean
by Greg Gatenby
The worst part of this book is the title, for it is dry, almost
academically anemic. However the text inside is a terrific example of
historical writing. The prose is fully accessible and jargon-free, yet
plangent with research. The author manages that neat trick so rare
among historians: he conveys an authority based upon years, if not
decades, of study, while imparting a wealth of facts and stories in an
engaging, comprehensible manner. Where water and coastline are
concerned, the Pacific Ocean should mean almost as much to Canadians
as the Atlantic, but it is the latter which dominates our textbooks
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Lennon Legend: An Illustrated Life of John Lennon
by Greg Gatenby
Lennon Legend by James Henke demonstrates wonderful design. Indeed,
the complexity of the design is a principal facet of the book as a
whole. The text is a straightforward account of the biographical facts
of Lennon's life. Not being a Beatlemaniac, I cannot say whether
superior biographies exist. But there can be no better book
constructed in homage to John Lennon. The inner sleeve of this
slipcased hardback contains a pocket holding a CD of Lennon speaking
about his life and work. Nothing too exceptional about that. But that
is where the ordinary ends and the awesome begins. The next few pages
...
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|  | Old Toronto Houses
by Tom Cruickshank, John Visser
Firefly Books $59.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 1552977315
|
Book Review A Review of: Old Toronto Houses
by Greg Gatenby
To its disgrace, no other big city in Canada pays as little respect to
its history as Toronto. Where Montreal, for example, happily honours
its historical figures with street names, parks, and squares, Toronto,
in contrast, avoids naming streets after heroes, preferring the
addiction of naming its streets after yet more trees or after the
relatives of property developers. The politicians untroubled by this
amnesia clearly do not read books, for the city has been blessed with
many fine histories-and one of the best has just been published: Old
Toronto Houses. The text, by Tom Cruickshank, exudes the confidence
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Annex: The Story of a Toronto Neighbourhood
by Greg Gatenby
I once toyed with the idea of editing an anthology of work by authors
who had lived in a small area of Toronto known as "The Annex." After
cursory research I gave up the idea because I realized more authors
had lived in that tiny adjunct of the city than in any other
neighbourhood in Canada and an authoritative anthology would run to
several volumes. That life in the Annex has also been the subject of
scores (if not hundreds) of novels and stories would have further
complicated my editorial task. The wealth of that history is
fetchingly well mined in Jack Batten's The Annex: The Story of a
...
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|  | Harry's War
by D. Edward Bradley
Wexford College Press $18.81 Paperback
ISBN: 1929148224
|
Book Review A Review of: Harry's War
by M. Wayne Cunningham
To the accumulated tradition of British boarding school literature
initiated by Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays, and perfected by
James Hiltons's, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, add Kingston Ontario author, D.
Edward Bradley's, first-class, auto-biographical novel, Harry's War.
It's England of 1941 to 1945, and teenaged school boy, Harry Lockwood,
with his father soldiering in North Africa and his mother toiling in a
munitions factory, has two wars to survive. One is the overarching
Battle of Britain, which forces him to dodge explosions from the
dreaded German buzz bombs and ballistic missiles, V1 and V2 rockets.
...
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|  | Among the Brave
by Margaret Peterson Haddix
Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing $23.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0689857942
|
Book Review A Review of: Among the Brave
by M. Wayne Cunningham
Beat time,
Imagine a world with food so scarce the Population Police, led by the
despotic Aldous Krakenaur, are systematically scouring fake IDs and
annihilating all third-borns to limit families to two children. That's
the frightening world of Margaret Peterson Haddix's fifth volume in
her hugely successful Shadow Children series. Here 13-year-old Trey, a
Latin and French spouting kid with "cowardice" as his middle name
conspires with Mark Garner, the reckless, hell-raising brother of
Trey's friend Luke (a hero from an earlier volume), to solve a murder,
...
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|  | The hunger
by Marsha Skrypuch
Boardwalk Books $12.99 Paperback
ISBN: 1895681162
|
Book Review A Review of: The Hunger
by M.J. Fishbane
Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch's sequel to her 1999 novel, Nobody's Child,
continues the story of three orphaned children during the Adana
Massacre of 1909. Both of these books offer gripping stories. One can
read them separately, but in order to see these character's lives in
all their depth, I would recommend reading them both. That way the
reader can fill in plot gaps, and also see how Skrypuch plays with the
narrative.
In The Hunger, Paula's eating disorder is paralleled with the events
taking place during her Armenian grandmother's childhood. When Paula
...
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|  | Nobody's Child
by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch
Dundurn Press $12.99 Paperback
ISBN: 1550024426
|
Book Review A Review of: NobodyÆs Child
by M.J. Fishbane
Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch's sequel to her 1999 novel, Nobody's Child,
continues the story of three orphaned children during the Adana
Massacre of 1909. Both of these books offer gripping stories. One can
read them separately, but in order to see these character's lives in
all their depth, I would recommend reading them both. That way the
reader can fill in plot gaps, and also see how Skrypuch plays with the
narrative.
In The Hunger, Paula's eating disorder is paralleled with the events
taking place during her Armenian grandmother's childhood. When Paula
...
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|  | Peacekeepers
by Dianne Linden
Fitzhenry & Whiteside $8.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1550502719
|
Book Review A Review of: Peacekeepers
by M.J. Fishbane
In Dianne Linden's novel Peacekeepers Nellie Letita Hopkins's mother
is a peacekeeper on assignment in Bosnia. Nellie lives with her
bachelor Uncle Martin and her troubled younger brother Mike and goes
to a school that she affectionately calls, "JAWS." Linden parallels
Nellie's struggle for survive at school with her mother's experiences
in Bosnia. After being threatened by Bonnie, one of the school
bullies, for standing up to Bonnie's boyfriend, Nellie is afraid to go
to school. Nellie feels that her own personal safely is in jeopardy.
She gets help from her friend Sam and his older brother Ziad, who
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Cuckoo
by Sharon Abron Drache
A Jewish voice split simultaneously between three worlds, Europe,
Israel and North America, is the mish-mash that best describes Avner
Mandelman's nine stories in his second collection of short fiction, a
sequel to Talking to the Enemy, winner of the Jewish Book Award for
fiction. "Mish-mash" is also the title of the concluding story in
Cuckoo, and like the previous eight, it reveals a staggering number of
veiled complexities in both the religious and secular lives of Israeli
citizens.
Born in Israel in 1947, Mandelman served in his native country's air
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Bone Woman: A Forensic AnthropologistÆs Search for Truth in Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo
by Todd Swift
American poet and critic Edgar Allan Poe wrote that no topic could be
more poetic than that which related death to a beautiful woman. Poe's
necrophiliac narrative strategies have since become somewhat
commonplace: the yellow police line is one both readers and television
viewers willingly cross often, and the number of "profilers" and
"forensic" experts, fictional and less-so, of whom we have grown fond
(from FBI agent Starling onwards), has swollen like a body left too
long in water. The trope has become a character, and that character
tends to be a determined woman interested in looking at dead people in
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Colin's Big Thing: A Sequence
by Brian Fawcett
The publication of Bruce Serafin's Colin's Big Thing is a major
intellectual and literary event for the West Coast. Or rather, it
ought to be, but the book likely won't get the A-list play it
deserves. As a reader, I've known about Serafin for almost a quarter
century now. Nearly everything he's written has been worth reading,
and I and lot of others have regretted his reluctance to write and
publish more.
A first book by Serafin was rumoured to be in the works 15 years ago,
and even then, people were saying "It's about time," and so the
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Fountain at the Center of the World
by Jeff Bursey
A roman thse is "a novel written in the realistic mode (that is, based
on an aesthetic of verisimilitude and representation), which signals
itself to the reader as primarily didactic in intent, seeking to
demonstrate the validity of a political, philosophical, or religious
doctrine," as Susan Rubin Suleiman explains in Authoritarian Fictions:
The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre. In the main, Robert
Newman's third novel fits this definition. The Fountain at the Center
of the World has generated favourable press in Canada, the United
Kingdom and the United States for its critical position on the
...
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|  | Original Minds
by Eleanor Wachtel
Harper Collins Canada $24.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0006394191
|
Book Review A Review of: Original Minds: Conversations with CBC RadioÆs Eleanor Wachtel
by Michael Greenstein
Eleanor Wachtel's voice on CBC Sunday afternoon's Writers & Company is
as familiar by now to the arts' scene as Barbara Frum's was in the
political arena. Original Minds is her third collection of
conversations, and Wachtel engages her guests and their listeners with
her thoughtful questions. Carol Shields's generous "Foreword" well
describes Wachtel's techniques of interviewing writers and thinkers
who grip us at every turn of the conversation. It would be interesting
to read a comparative study of National Public Radio, CBC, and BBC to
get a more comprehensive view of the arts in various countries.
...
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|  | Goldberg Variations
by Gabriel Josipovici
Independent Publishers Group $25.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1857545974
|
Book Review A Review of: Goldberg: Variations
by Jeff Bursey
It sounds like an ideal job for an author, to put a man to sleep by
reading to him, but Samuel Goldberg's task is made more difficult by
the stipulation that he can't read from works already written.
Instead, he is asked to come up with new material every night for his
employer, Tobias Westfield, a condescending pseudo-philosopher who is
unable to find rest. This is the conceit which begins the latest novel
from Gabriel Josipovici, who has had published fiction, plays,
criticism, essays and a memoir.
Novels about writers often read as an inside joke, and can be
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Chapel of Extreme Experience: A Short History of Stroboscopic Light and the Dream Machine
by Nancy Wigston
What a strange and delight-filled book is John Geiger's "short
history" of science, art and the brain. Plunging us back into a time
of idealistic and mind-expanding adventurers that included Aldous
Huxley, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg, Geiger's book
reminds us that that psychedelic' journeys were originally a serious
business, and only gradually widened-many would argue degenerated-into
a mass cultural phenomena.
Geiger skillfully takes us through the earliest days when science
began to probe light and the mind, beginning in 1823 with a Goethe
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Dark Threats & White Knights: The Somalia Affair, Peacekeeping, and the New Imperialism
by Eric Miller
Perhaps eighty soldiers heard Shidane Abukar Arone's screams on the
night of 16 March 1993-a night in the course of which the
sixteen-year-old Somalian died of torture inflicted at Belet Huen by
Canadian peacekeepers. This fact substantiates Sherene H. Razack's
claim, in her Dark Threats & White Knights, that violence, like
racism, was routine at the Canadian camp and that we commit an error
when we seek overmuch to individualize it in the persons of Master
Corporal Clayton Matchee and Private Kyle Brown, who bear the primary
responsibility for Arone's death. In effect, Razack's book implicates
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Vermeer in Bosnia
by Gordon Phinn
Readers will arrive at this book through one of three routes: Staunch
New Yorker supporters will be gratified that yet another of the
magazine's contributors now has a plump compendium of his wit, travels
and wisdom available for those long cool retroviews which the winter
months alone can afford. Serious Weschler wonks, those who long ago
collared his talent for their collections, relishing in such titles as
Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, Calamities of
Exile and that Pulitzer prize nominee Mr Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder,
can beam with pride as they place Vermeer In Bosnia beside their
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Cold Terror: How Canada Nurtures and Exports Terrorism Around the World
by Martin Loney
The attack on the World Trade centre was a transforming moment in
American politics, putting the issue of national security at the top
of the agenda. The failures of American intelligence and the
culpability of government agencies have been at the forefront of
debate and Congressional and Senate investigations. Canada has seen no
similar paradigm shift, though as Stewart Bell clearly demonstrates,
Canada is not only at risk of terrorist attack it is a major source of
terrorist organisation and financing. Canada has done so little to
confront terrorist groups that Bell pithily observes, "Its most
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror
by Martin Loney
Michael Ignatieff is one of the distressingly few progressive
intellectuals who have been prepared to take the threat of terror
seriously; too many have preferred to share with Canada's former Prime
Minister, Jean Chretien, the comforting fallacy that at root the
problem lies in poverty, its redress in "equity". Ignatieff has the
courage to recognize that what motivates terrorists is nihilism. Al
Qaeda does not want what we have, it wants to punish the West and
others who fail to share its myopic vision. The purpose of terrorism
"is to strike a blow that asserts the dignity of Muslim believers
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Shackled Continent
by Christopher Ondaatje
Anyone who wants to be reminded about the horrors of Africa, economic
or otherwise, will be interested to read this intelligent but light
treatise by Robert Guest, the Africa editor of The Economist. He has
spent three years traveling and writing about wars, famines and crazy
monetary policies in nearly all of Africa's sub-Saharan countries.
What Guest sets out to do in The Shackled Continent is to pose and
answer the riddle as to why Africa is the only continent to have grown
poorer over the past three decades and to diagnose the sickness that
continues to plague Africa's development. Why are so many of African
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda
by Brian Fawcett
John Keegan is the most gifted military historian-in any language-of
the last thirty years, and arguably, of the last century. The Face of
Battle (1976) which analyzed three seminal battles across Western
history beginning with Agincourt in 1431, following with Waterloo in
1815 and culminating with the Somme in 1916, altered the way war was
regarded by refusing to separate the strategic elements from the human
ones. Keegan has insisted, as his primary intellectual stance, that
war always has a human face, and his genius lies in his ability to
reveal it without obscuring it with statistics or sentimental pathos.
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Peloponnesian War
by David A. Welch
"The majority of the promises and expectations of the proponents of
the initial expedition had proven to be unfounded, while most of the
fears of the opponents had been justified. The Shi'ites and Sunnis had
not joined the Americans with enthusiasm and in great numbers,
al-Qaeda was now engaged, and the Ba'athists were resisting with
renewed morale. We might expect the American people to have felt
deceived by the optimists, and to have conceded the wisdom of the
doubters and recalled the expedition . . ."(Kagan, The Peloponnesian
War, p. 296.)
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: GodÆs Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible
by Clara Thomas
Adam Nicolson's story of the making of the King James Bible is a
resounding success. However, there is a certain generational element
to the reception of his work: if you are not a devotee of the majestic
rhythms and the seventeenth century language of this version of the
Bible, you are unlikely to be captivated by the complex story of its
making. If, on the contrary, you find every other translation to be a
pale shadow of this one and cling stubbornly to its archaisms, this
book will confirm satisfactorily your good taste and satisfy your
discerning eye and ear.
...
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|  | The Malady of Islam
by Abdelwahab Meddeb
HarperCollins Canada / Basic Books $37 Hardcover
ISBN: 0465044352
|
Book Review A Review of: The Malady of Islam
by by Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala
The thesis of this thoughtful book by Abdelwahab Meddeb, Professor of
Comparative Literature at the University of Paris X-Nanterre, and
editor of the journal Ddale, is immediately expressed in the first
pages of the opening chapter: "If fanaticism was the sickness in
Catholicism, if Nazism was the sickness in Germany, then surely
fundamentalism is the sickness in Islam." Therefore, "the spectacular
attacks of September 11, which struck the heart of the United States,
is a crime. A crime committed by Islamists." This is a useful book not
only for all those Westerners who have difficulty understanding why
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Still Life with Bombers
by David Solway
David Horovitz is the highly respected editor of The Jerusalem Report.
He is a British national who emigrated to Israel in 1983 and immersed
himself passionately in every aspect of Israeli life and culture,
marrying and starting a family, building long-standing friendships
with Muslims as well as Jews, and devoting himself to a stern and
honest effort toward making sense of the Devil's Polymer which is the
Middle East. In the course of daily life as well as professional
practice, he has laboured to do justice to the competing claims of the
various sides in the conflict, travelling the length and breadth of
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: How Israel Lost: The Four Questionsh
by David Solway
Richard Ben Cramer is a secular Jews who earns his living as a
journalist with a pronounced interest in Middle East affairs. He is a
Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter and freelance writer for
various newspapers and magazines. He adopts the paradigm of the four
questions traditionally asked at the Passover seder-why do we eat only
unleavened bread on Pesach? why do we eat bitter herbs at the seder?
why do we dip our food twice tonight? why do we lean on a pillow
tonight?-as a template on which to organize the four chapters of his
book. Except he inflects the questions to read: why do we care about
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The American Empire and the Fourth World: The Bowl With One Spoon, Part One
by Fraser Bell
No two generations of historians see the past in quite the same way,
which is how it ought to be. Revisionism is inevitable and necessary
otherwise history would become atrophied and one-dimensional, like a
Byzantine fresco; it would cease to be a repository of ideas and
simply become the pastime of the antiquarian and the re-enactor
enthusiast. Unfortunately though there is a tendency among some of the
revisionists to distort the usual relationship between past and
present, so that their version of history smacks of pamphleteering or
advocacy journalism. This sort of history contains a number of
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Unnatural Law: Rethinking Canadian Environmental Law and Policy
by David Colterjohn
In May 2000, an outbreak of E. Coli bacteria contaminated the drinking
water in Walkerton, Ontario. Seven people died and thousands of others
were sickened in an incident that attracted intense national media
scrutiny. The ensuing wave of public outrage forced the Ontario
provincial government to introduce new legislation, the Safe Drinking
Water Act, which binds that province's municipalities to mandatory
water safety standards.
Far from being an anomaly, Walkerton's water safety problems are
shared by the residents of hundreds of other Canadian communities,
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: 20:21 Vision: Lessons for the Twenty-First Century
by Andrew Allentuck
Movie mogul Sam Goldwyn is supposed to have said, "never make
forecasts, especially about the future." In 20:21 Vision: Lessons for
the Twenty-First Century, Bill Emmott ignores that caution.
Editor-in-chief of the distinguished British weekly, The Economist, he
bravely takes up where gloomsters like Nostradamus and Thomas Malthus
left off. With elegant words and a great deal of data, Emmott assures
the ready that, though the road through the new century may be rough,
the ride will be better than it was during the last.
Emmott is on treacherous ground, for world events don't play out in
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: A Severe Elsewhere, Translated by Amela Simic
by Ken Babstock
The analogy has surely been used before: the experience of seeing a
reproduction of a painting is one thing; the composition, colour, and
some of the resonance is there. But to see up close the actual
brushstrokes that cumulatively account for a painting's visual force
is another order of aesthetic engagement altogether. Even while being
thankful for the gift of a poet from another language translated into
our own, one still reads through a collection like this lamenting
one's own limiting condition as a monoglot. How I wish I could read,
or at least soon hear (though critical faculties would be useless),
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Wanting the Day: Selected Poems
by Mark Callanan
To my great embarrassment, aside from the occasional poem in literary
journals, and possibly a collection along the way during my
undergraduate days, I have not truly read Brian Bartlett. As a result,
I approach Wanting the Day as if it were a keyhole to the door I've
never taken the time to open. In the author's note at the end of
Wanting the Day, Bartlett explains that the poems "are arranged to
reflect the sequence of their original collections," but re-ordered
within these selections from the originals, "giving the poems new
neighbours" (Camber is similarly shuffled). While new resonance can be
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Camber: Selected Poems 1983-2000
by Mark Callanan
To say that I am a great admirer of Don McKay's poetry would be a vast
understatement, though it was only a few short years ago that I
thumbed through a copy of Birding, or desire at a friend's house,
arriving randomly on page seventeen. There I found "How to Make a Fool
of Yourself in the Autumn Woods", and was immediately hooked, mostly
by the lines "let / your insides become / the most banal of
valentines."
I flipped again and this time came upon "Alias Rock Dove, Alias Holy
Ghost" (a poem also included in the first section of Camber):
...
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