| Book Review A Review of: The Fortress of Solitude
by Andrew Steinmetz
Dylan Edbus, white, lives on Dean Street, in a mostly black and
Hispanic borough of Brooklyn called Boerum Hill. Not far off, are the
projects, Wyckoff Gardens and Gowanus Houses. Growing up, the
surrounding couple of blocks comprise Dylan's universe, and not a very
friendly environment it is. For all intents and purposes, this whitey
is on the moon.
It is the 1970s. Dylan's parents, Rachel, a half-wit hippie, and
Abraham, a reclusive maker of animated film, have moved the eccentric
household into one of the neighbourhood's brownstones. When advised by
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: HA! A Self-Murder Mystery
by Harold Hoefle
Hubert Aquin saw life as a Formula One course where a well-chosen
wall-not the checkered flag-was the goal. Gordon Sheppard, friend and
self-appointed biographer of the Quebecois writer, becomes in HA! the
post-race commentator on Aquin's wild ride, a forty-seven-year careen
that ends when, on 15 March 1977, he hoists his (dead) father's .12
gauge shotgun up and into his mouth, then pulls the trigger. Is a
crash a crash if it is willed, planned, and called by one's beloved "a
success"? Maybe, as Sheppard opines, it is a victory unlike any other.
Sheppard has crafted a book-called a novel by his publisher-as protean
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: A Round Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance
by Gordon Phinn
The ineluctable glamour of scandal seems to be why the brisk trade in
confessional memoir continues unabated. For some reason, which may one
day be unveiled by psychiatry, militant feminism, or aliens with a
kinder, gentler agenda, the female of the species is especially keen
on kissing and telling. Transgression, it would seem, remains ever so
tempting, the season of indulgence it generates quite irresistible,
while the lure of hard won redemption vies with public acclaim for the
big prize. While guys, when not boozily unemployed or dreaming of
fly-fishing, seem keener on the debilitating effects of war on the
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Sexual Life Of Catherine M. Catherine Millet
by Gordon Phinn
The ineluctable glamour of scandal seems to be why the brisk trade in
confessional memoir continues unabated. For some reason, which may one
day be unveiled by psychiatry, militant feminism, or aliens with a
kinder, gentler agenda, the female of the species is especially keen
on kissing and telling. Transgression, it would seem, remains ever so
tempting, the season of indulgence it generates quite irresistible,
while the lure of hard won redemption vies with public acclaim for the
big prize. While guys, when not boozily unemployed or dreaming of
fly-fishing, seem keener on the debilitating effects of war on the
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief
by Michael Carbert
As a reviewer, Wood is unique among his contemporaries. An impassioned
critic, his essays exhibit a fierce moral conviction about what
literature can and should do, along with a certain ruthlessness, a
talent for pinpointing serious flaws in the work of authors who
otherwise enjoy high regard, such as Thomas Pynchon or Toni Morrison.
In The Broken Estate, these good qualities are on display along with
Wood's theory regarding the problematic relationship between religion
and literature. To the various phenomena that helped to undermine
religion and usher in secular society (science, Darwin, Freud, etc.),
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Book Against God
by Michael Carbert
In the midst of reading The Broken Estate, one wonders why James Wood
wasn't content to just publish a collection of his excellent essays.
After all, his articles have attracted praise from people like Cynthia
Ozick and Harold Bloom and would seem capable of standing on their
own. But instead of simply gathering together some of his best pieces,
he saddles the book with a unifying theme, "The Broken Estate". Why? A
few years later we know the answer. It was actually a rehearsal of
sorts, a tune-up, for Wood's attempt to tackle essentially the same
theme in his debut novel, The Book Against God.
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource
by John Ayre
Considering how crucial water is to life, it's surprising how few
books on water exist even today for the non-specialist. One celebrated
study, Marc Reisner's The Cadillac Desert has gone through several
editions but the focus there is on the water management and
depredations in the American southwest. Marq de Villiers's Water which
first came out in 1999, had a much broader perspective. It carefully
reviewed some major problems the world over, both technical and
political, in the seemingly simple task of making clean water reliably
come out of taps. It was an impressively detailed and thought-out book
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Island of the Blessed
by Erling Friis-Baastad
In the Dakhleh Oasis, about 270 kilometres west of the Nile Valley,
scientists are attempting to survey, what author Harry Thurston calls
"an unbroken 400,000-year pageant of human endeavour." Excavations
have revealed a 20-by-80-kilometre warning sign. The predominant
crisis of the 21st century is going to be the water shortage. How we
survive it, or succumb to it, will depend on our ability to learn from
the lessons taught by a diminishing green patch in Egypt's Western
Desert.
Here at more than 700 archaeological sites, researchers are learning
...
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|  | Paul Martin
by John Gray
Key Porter Books $29.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 1552632172
|
Book Review A Review of: Paul Martin, The Power of Ambition
by Sharon Abron Drache
Veteran journalist John Gray, who has worked at The Globe and Mail for
more than 20 years, most recently as national correspondent, brought
his outstanding credentials to the task of writing an enigmatic
biography of Paul Martin, before Martin succeeded Jean Chrtien as
Canada's 21st Prime Minister.
Please keep in mind that The Power of Ambition, released on September
27, 2003, was completed when our current Prime Minister was still the
new leader of the Liberal party, and also that he is referred to
throughout Gray's book simply as Mr. Martin. For the purposes of this
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Player: The Life and Times of Dalton Camp
by Clara Thomas
When Peter Gzowski's Tuesday morning panel, Eric Kierans, Dalton Camp
and Stephen Lewis, finally went off the air in 1993, tens of thousands
of Canadians lost their weekly exposure to superb political commentary
enthusiastically argued and well spiced with wit. The "Three Wise
Men", as they had long since been known, were well matched in decades
of front-line experience; in Gzowski's genial orbit they shone
individually and together. Of the three, Camp was the one who had
never sat in Parliament, but he had been in the midst of every
election since 1949.
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Fights of Our Lives: Elections, Leadership, and the Making of Canada
by John Pepall
John Duffy's Fights of Our Lives are five general elections that he
claims have shaped Canada. They are actually eight elections as he
pairs the elections of 1925 and 1926, 1957 and 1958, and 1979 and
1980. The other two are the election of 1896 and the "Free Trade"
election of 1988. Only the last looks like an election that decided a
major issue. And perhaps it did not. Duffy reports that 40% of
Canadians told pollsters that John Turner would sign the Free Trade
Agreement if elected. They may have been right.
Reviewers have quibbled over Duffy's choice of elections. As he gives
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Think Big: Adventures in Life and Democracy
by John Pepall
Preston Manning's Think Big is a political memoir, the first half of
which covers familiar terrain in the history of the Reform Party and
Manning's personal history. The second half of the book is what is
new, and, to a degree, interesting. It covers the united alternative
initiative, the formation of the Canadian Alliance, the leadership
race that ended in Manning's defeat by Stockwell Day, the general
election of November 2000 and Stockwell Day's downfall.
Manning is not shy about presenting himself as a model politician
whose avowed Christianity threatens no policy commitments but stands
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: House Built of Rain
by Tim Bowling
Here's how Russell Thornton prefaces House Built of Rain, his powerful
new book of lyric and narrative poems:
Somehow I hear oarlocks and a rocking rowboat
striking the side of the house. Now it seems
the front door is being tried, the back door. Who is it
rowing around the house in this flood, wanting in?
And now I know it is rain - but it is too late;
a whole new rain has swept in through the rain,
and that rain is a solitary infant journeying
...
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|  | The Vicinity
by David O'Meara
Brick $15 Paperback
ISBN: 1894078306
|
Book Review A Review of: The Vicinity
by Tim Bowling
The Vicinity, David O'Meara's second collection, advances the
impressive aesthetic confidence and purpose exhibited in his fine
debut, Storm still (Carleton University Press, 1999). To be more
grandiose--which goes against the grain of O'Meara's even-tempered,
carefully wrought conversational style--this volume firmly establishes
him as one of the warmest and most inviting intellects in our poetry.
His voice, best described as urbane, worldly, perfectly at ease with
contemporary life even as it highlights its shallowness and very real
soul-destroying dangers, is a welcome antidote to the formless
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Mr And Mrs Scotland Are Dead, Poems 1980-1994
by Kevin Higgins
Since the mid-90s Kathleen Jamie's star has risen to such an extent
that she is now, with the possible exception of Don Paterson, the most
successful Scottish poet currently writing. Absolutely in tune with
the post-home rule Scottish zeitgeist, Jamie's poetry has won for
itself in Scotland a popularity comparable to that of Simon Armitage
in England and Billy Collins in the United States. A jacket-blurb from
the Scotsman goes so far as to say that: "Genius is no stranger to the
work of Kathleen Jamie." Of course it's always best to take such
over-effusive praise with a giant dollop of salt. However, the sheer
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Midgic
by Paul Vermeersch
Douglas Lochhead's Midgic is as long and slender as a ribbon of New
Brunswick coastal highway, and just as pretty. The book itself is
another exceptional example of the printer's art from Nova Scotia's
Gaspereau Press, an independent printing and publishing house with the
reputation of producing some of the finest-looking trade paperbacks in
the country today. The luxurious paper and delicate typography make a
fittingly lovely setting for Lochhead's quiet, meditative verse.
If the title seems a little arcane and strange at first, then you're
probably not from New Brunswick. Midgic is a small hamlet about 10km
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Wisdom & Metaphor
by Michael Greenstein
Kudos to Gaspereau for granting Jan Zwicky so much breathing space in
Wisdom & Metaphor, a blend of philosophy and literature that enacts
its own aesthetic on the printed page. A sequel to her Lyric
Philosophy (1992), this book uses a similar format: left-hand pages
offer Zwicky's own musings on art and philosophy, while the right side
comments on her thought through the numerous voices of other poets and
philosophers, with a particular focus on Wittgenstein. In another
light, she has compiled an anthology on the right side with her own
commentary opposite: her ambidextrous text fits both on the scholarly
...
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| | Ursa Major
by Robert Bringhurst
Gaspereau Pr $27.62 Hardcover
ISBN: 1894031660
|
Book Review A Review of: Ursa Major: A Polyphonic Masque for Speakers & Dancers
by Iain Higgins
"Tout, au monde," wrote Mallarm in "Quant au livre", "existe pour
aboutir un livre." Not so, implies Robert Bringhurst in Ursa Major: if
all worldly things exist to end in a book, then the book will be their
dead end. In any case, his poetic concerns have long been
anti-worldly, anti-bookish, anti-anthropocentric, and his
anti-Mallarman aim both more ambitious and more limited than that of
merely filling folded paper with everything "au monde." His aim
involves instead the fitting of a few storied bits of the cosmos into
a book in a way that blows its covers off-an oddly ironic goal for a
...
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|  | The Expedition
by Clayton Bailey
University Of Toronto Press $19.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1894283406
|
Book Review A Review of: The Expedition
by W.P. Kinsella
What a pleasure it is to encounter a novel that has everything going
for it. The language is in Technicolor, the characters leap from the
page, the story is layered, suspenseful, heartbreaking, and totally
engaging. The protagonist is Johanna Reid, a photographer in a dusty
western town in 1858 who, for a variety of reasons, has disguised
herself as a man.
An expedition is taking shape, led by a Captain Masse. Its purpose is
to survey and chart a route to the Pacific Ocean. When the
expedition's photographer fails to show up, Reid is hired. The men of
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Dreamlife of Bridges
by W.P. Kinsella
Disjointed' would be a one-word summary of this novel that introduces
a number of quirky, interesting characters, but never seems to know
what to do with them once they've been created. Set in Vancouver, Leo
and June are the main characters running on a primarily parallel
course that we expect to eventually intersect permanently, but that
expectation is never met. Leo is fortyish. The main burden he carries
is that his son died at 20. He creates his own misery. He is fired
from one job for general incompetence, loses another because he
refuses to take a turn working night shift like everyone else. He ends
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: A Measure of Undoing
by W.P. Kinsella
A Measure of Undoing comes awfully close to being a really great book.
It combines a beautiful portrait of present day Vietnam, a
heartbreaking love story, and suspenseful political intrigue. Seb is
an American doctor who has spent the last 20 years at the Can Tho
Children's Hospital fighting a losing battle, trying to save
children's lives with too little money and medicine. He blames his
countrymen, first for the use of chemicals (Agent Orange) during the
Vietnam war, and secondly for the long embargo against Vietnam which
left him without the medicines he desperately needed. Seb is not
...
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|  | Blue Becomes You
by Bettina Von Kampen
University Of Toronto Press $19.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1894283376
|
Book Review A Review of: Blue Becomes You
by W.P. Kinsella
There are echoes of Anne Tyler, Margaret Laurence , and of course
Arnold Bennett's Old Wives Tale, in this lovely character-driven novel
of small town Manitoba. Charlotte, at 62, is diagnosed with a heart
condition and decides to take early retirement from the bakery in
Norman, MB where she has worked all her adult life. As a teenager
Charlotte, a talented acoustic bass player, had high hopes of
traveling the world as a jazz musician. Just as she and her boyfriend
were about to take off her mother passed away suddenly, and her father
went into a state of shock from which he never recovered. Charlotte
...
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| | The First Stone
by Don Aker
Harper Collins Canada $15.99 Paperback
ISBN: 0006392857
|
Book Review A Review of: The First Stone
by Heather Birrell
The First Stone is a page-turner of a morality tale set in a
fictionalized Halifax. It follows Reef and Leeza, two very different
sixteen-year-olds, through their roles in a highway "accident", and
its attendant frustrations and despair. Reef's past catches up with
him when he angrily pitches a rock off an overpass and it shatters the
windshield of a motorist below. The motorist is, of course, the
innocent Leeza, and Reef's act winds up not only changing the two
teenagers' fates, but binding them in significant ways. Reef, thanks
to the decision of a compassionate judge, finds himself in a group
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Secret of Light
by Heather Birrell
This sequel to kc dyer's first YA novel Seeds of Time, follows
Darrell, her dog Delaney and her two friends Kate, the "computer
techie" and Brodie, "the fossil geek" as they embark on yet another
time travel adventure. The three adolescents are students at the Eagle
Glen School, an "alternative" (read magical) school located on
Canada's west coast, near Vancouver. In the first novel, Darrell was
drawn through magical glyphs on a nearby cave's walls into Medieval
Scotland. Secret of Light whisks the three friends off to Renaissance
Florence, and into the company of the renowned Leonardo da Vinci.
...
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|  | Airborn
by Kenneth Oppel
Harper Collins Canada $22.99 Hardcover
ISBN: 0002005379
|
Book Review A Review of: Airborn
by M. Wayne Cunningham
Go on Toronto-based author Kenneth Oppel's website,
www.kennethoppel.ca, and you'll find he has a fistful of awards and
prizes for his previous nineteen kid lit books. Open his new novel,
Airborn, and you'll soon discover why he continues to gain acclaim
from readers and critics alike for his imaginative stories, characters
and settings.
In the fictional 19th century world of Airborn, luxury airships ply
their trade in passengers and cargo hundreds of feet above the
Pacificus, veering away from uncharted skies and sailing over
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Bridge from Odessa
by Jerry White
Jorge Luis Borges is alive and well, and living in, well, in
Argentina. Sort of. That doesn't sound right at all, does it? Well,
that's because I'm having a hard time articulating the way in which a
Borgesian world-view is still part of contemporary literature, even
though it may seem that much of world culture has assimilated and
rendered indistinct his insights about the slipperiness of perception,
the meaning of odds and ends, and the possibilities of finding the
infinite in the imaginary.
That Borgesian tradition survives most clearly in two writers from
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Stevenson Under the Palm Trees
by Jerry White
Jorge Luis Borges is alive and well, and living in, well, in
Argentina. Sort of. That doesn't sound right at all, does it? Well,
that's because I'm having a hard time articulating the way in which a
Borgesian world-view is still part of contemporary literature, even
though it may seem that much of world culture has assimilated and
rendered indistinct his insights about the slipperiness of perception,
the meaning of odds and ends, and the possibilities of finding the
infinite in the imaginary.
That Borgesian tradition survives most clearly in two writers from
...
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|  | Waiting for the Lady
by Christopher Moore
University Of Toronto Press $38.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0968716369
|
Book Review A Review of: Waiting for the Lady
by Stewart Cole
Sloan Walcott is an opportunist. One of the throngs of expatriate
Westerners to choose the balmy climate, cheap living, and exotic
promise of teeming Southeast Asia over the increasing expense and
alienation of life in America, Sloan is motivated mainly by sex,
money, and the prospect of intoxication. The first-person narrator of
Christopher G. Moore's fifteenth novel is a shameless philanderer who
keeps a Thai girlfriend with an allowance meted out by his Japanese
wife, and does drugs, drinks Tiger beer and smokes "fat ones" steadily
all day long. But all this doesn't mean much in Sloan's world. He has
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: What IÆm Trying to Say is Goodbye
by Cindy MacKenzie
The deliciously ironic humor that infuses Lois Simmie's children's
books, short story collections and her highly-acclaimed novel, They
Shouldn't Make You Promise That, is equally at play in her latest
novel, What I'm Trying to Say is Goodbye. But the humor is matched by
a solid groundedness that prompts fellow Saskatchewan writer, Sharon
Butala to describe the book as "the funniest serious novel ever
written in Saskatchewan." Simmie's humour is never superfluous, but
dry, and necessary, an easy and integral part of the narrative and a
symptom of life, in the way that sensitive, intelligent people are
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Die If You Must
by Christopher Ondaatje
"Die if you must, but never kill" are the words Colonel Rondon used in
Brazil to instruct his new Indian Protection Service, in 1910. It
became the Service's motto. John Hemming has used some of these words
for the title of his recent brilliant book Die If You Must which is
the third volume of his trilogy-a historical account of the Brazilian
Indians and their fate as Europeans began to invade and change their
world.
John Hemming, the former director of the Royal Geographical Society
from 1975 to 1996, has been engaged with Brazilian indigenous people
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Seek: Reports From the Edges of America and Beyond
by Kevin Chong
Since Denis Johnson's first work of nonfiction, Seek: Reports From the
Edges of America and Beyond appeared in the spring of 2001, these
pieces, set in current geopolitical zones of nightmare like Liberia
and Afghanistan, seem both topical and prescient, his personal
obsessions in line with the world's. With his laconic and
abyss-gawking voice, Johnson, poet and fiction writer, has
demonstrated a sympathy for restless lowlifes and reckless oddballs.
Be they the midwestern drifter of his seminal story collection Jesus'
Son or the bedraggled, mourning professor of his last novel, The Name
...
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|  | Drowning Man
by Dave Margoshes
NeWest Press $22.95 Paperback
ISBN: 189630057X
|
Book Review A Review of: Drowning Man
by William Robertson
Olivia: What's a drunken man like, fool?
Clown: Like a drowned man, a fool, and a madman:
one draught above heat makes him a fool, the
second mads him, and the third drowns him.
William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Olivia is talking about her uncle Toby Belch, a man who tries to make
the action of Twelfth Night revolve around keeping open his lifeline
of sack and spirits. In the old parlance, he's a reveller, but in our
contemporary terms he could easily pass for an alcoholic, and
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Houseboat Chronicles: Notes from a Life in Shield Country
by Andrew Lesk
A book that is more than deserving of the 2003 Writers' Trust Award
for Non-Fiction, Jake MacDonald's Houseboat Chronicles: Notes from a
Life in Shield Country is that rarity that is simply good literature.
It's not just that the author remarkably evokes a place rich in
symbolism-the great Canadian North-but that he does so literarily: his
memoir is note-perfect and, like the most enchanting of reads, it
exhilarates with its unsentimental evocations of both place and time.
MacDonald begins, where else, but with childhood, with a Grade 6
drawing assignment in art class. His imaginary landscapes, funny and
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Ten Thousand Lovers
by Toba Ajzenstat
Ten Thousand Lovers, set mainly in 1970s Israel, tells a love story,
but the central concern of the author is to examine Israeli society
and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lives of her
characters. Edeet Ravel was born in Israel but grew up in Canada. She
returned to Israel to do an undergraduate degree at the Hebrew
University. She has a PhD in Jewish Studies and she is a peace
activist.
Lily and Ami are the two central characters of Ten Thousand Lovers.
Lily, the narrator of the novel, has lived in England for many years.
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Human Parts
by Bill Gladstone
It is a time of unceasing bewilderment, sorrow and emergency in Israel
as nature turns unfathomably malignant, producing not one, not two,
but three national blights. First, a strange and unprecedented series
of cold fronts sweeps through the land, pummeling the populace with
mighty snowstorms, hailstorms, downpours and lightning flashes that
seem reminiscent of the ancient Biblical plagues. Second, a powerful
and often deadly viral contagion called the Saudi flu is in the air,
prompting widespread fear and suspicions of covert biological warfare.
Third and perhaps most devastating, a gruesome procession of bus-stop
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Local Matters: A Defence of DooneyÆs CafT and Other Non-Globalized Places, People, and Ideas
by Eric Miller
In the English-speaking world, possibly the first sanguine assessment
of mall culture appeared in Joseph Addison's Spectator No. 69 of 1711.
This brief essay extols the peaceable cosmopolitanism of the Royal
Exchange, a prototypical shopping arcade:
"I have often been pleased to hear disputes adjusted between an
inhabitant of Japan and an alderman of London, or to see the subject
of the Great Mogul entering into a league with one of the Czar of
Muscovy. I am infinitely delighted in mixing with these several
ministers of commerce Sometimes I am jostled among a body of
...
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|  | Beachcomber
by Karen Robards
Thorndike Press $41.46 Hardcover
ISBN: 0786256540
|
Book Review A Review of: Lost in Mongolia
by Jason Brown
Colin Angus is one of those rare sorts who actually does those things
the rest of us MEC catalogue fetishists merely dream about. Only
thirty-one years old, the affably-mugged man from Vancouver has
already rafted the Amazon River, undertaken a five-year solo sailing
voyage around the globe, and, most recently, been the first to
navigate the entire course of the Yenisey River, the fifth longest in
the world. The travelogue of that latest adventure, Lost in Mongolia,
is a chronicle of the five months, between April and September of
2001, it took him to do it.
...
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|  | Captain Scott
by Ranulph Fiennes
McArthur & Co / Hodder Trade $39.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0340826975
|
Book Review A Review of: Captain Scott
by Christopher Ondaatje
Roland Huntford's book Scott and Amundsen was published in 1979-a year
before Ranulph Fiennes first reached the South Pole. It was there that
he heard about the recently published expos by Huntford that Captain
Robert Scott, the polar hero, was merely a British imperialist plot.
Now Fiennes, himself an extraordinarily accomplished explorer, and the
first man to reach both North and South Poles by surface travel, and
the first to cross the Antarctic continent unsupported, has produced
an anguishing biography of the much maligned Scott. It is a fine story
by a man uniquely qualified to write the account of Scott's epic and
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Bounty: The True Story of the Mutiny on The Bounty
by George Fetherling
Caroline Alexander's book Endurance became a surprise bestseller six
years ago and started a revival of interest in the Antarctic explorer
Sir Ernest Shackleton-one that grew to include books about the
leadership lessons that executives can supposedly gain by studying
him. In fact, the success of Endurance launched the publishing craze
for books about the age of exploration generally. Alexander herself
now returns to the field with The Bounty, a much more impressive work
that will have a different effect. No one is ever going to write a
book called Management Secrets of Captain Bligh.
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Sea of Glory: AmericaÆs Voyage of Discovery-The U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842
by George Fetherling
Caroline Alexander's book Endurance became a surprise bestseller six
years ago and started a revival of interest in the Antarctic explorer
Sir Ernest Shackleton-one that grew to include books about the
leadership lessons that executives can supposedly gain by studying
him. In fact, the success of Endurance launched the publishing craze
for books about the age of exploration generally. Alexander herself
now returns to the field with The Bounty, a much more impressive work
that will have a different effect. No one is ever going to write a
book called Management Secrets of Captain Bligh.
...
Read more...
| | Book Review A Review of: The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake, 1577-1580
by George Fetherling
The Secret Voyage of Sir Francis Drake 1577-1580 is by Samuel Bawlf, a
dedicated historiographic amateur and former Social Credit cabinet
minister in British Columbia, where the book has ridden the top of the
provincial bestseller list, an institution that is followed closely.
While suitably mysterious, Bawlf's title is self-limiting, for the
book is first of all a new biography. As such, however, it's scarcely
on the plane of one of the most important exploration books of the
past few years, Sir Francis Drake, The Queen's Pirate by Harry Kelsey
(whose most recent work, Sir John Hawkins, Queen Elizabeth's Slave
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Over the Edge of the World: MagellanÆs Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe
by George Fetherling
The first person to complete a circumnavigation was Ferdinand
Magellan(in Portuguese, Ferno de Magalhes). In fact he accomplished
the feat twice-or tried to. On the second voyage he was killed halfway
round by indigenous people in the Philippines (a foreshadowing of Cook
in Hawaii of course). The handful of companions who had survived to
that point completed the expedition without him. Their tale is an
important part of Laurence Bergreen's biography Over the Edge of the
World, a narrative with a strong bass line but one that also suffers
from a desire to be more sensational than it needs to be (for the
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: The Double Life of Doctor Lopez
by Nancy Wigston
If ever we wonder how things can get so tangled and scandalous in
public life today, we need only look back to Elizabethan England,
which set the gold standard for a civilisation's achievements-at both
ends of the scale. To wit: this investigative romp through a
Renaissance London exposed to its very bowels. In The Double Life of
Doctor Lopez, writer and researcher Dominic Green delivers some
zealously highbrow detective work for our delectation, presenting, as
per his subtitle, "Spies, Shakespeare and the Plot to Poison Elizabeth
I."
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Marianne in Chains: In Search of the German Occupation of France 1940-45
by Rosemary Sullivan
Almost six decades have passed since the end of World War II, and yet
we haven't begun to exhaust our obsession with it. Contemporary
novelists, from Michael Ondaatje to Ian McEwan, have felt the need to
take on the period and every season brings new war films. The latest
is Norman Jewison's The Statement, about a devout Catholic complicit
in genocide in occupied France. How do we explain this obsession?
Robert Gildea would say that it takes a long time before all the
truths are out. The Second World War was supposed to have been the war
of good against evil. Now, that orthodox version is cracking. What
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: ShivaÆs Really Scary Gifts
by Peter O'Brien
If Coach House Press did not exist, it would be necessary for
Canadians to invent it. And then the hard part would follow: nurturing
it through the years and the many vagaries of publishing, funding,
ceaseless technological change and what can best be described as the
constant process of redefining beauty.
Since its founding by Stan Bevington in 1965, the press has been a
small company that thinks like a big company. It keeps itself
financially viable, it adapts quickly to changing technology, it
updates its aesthetic mandate as required and it doggedly goes about
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Jim
by Peter O'Brien
If Coach House Press did not exist, it would be necessary for
Canadians to invent it. And then the hard part would follow: nurturing
it through the years and the many vagaries of publishing, funding,
ceaseless technological change and what can best be described as the
constant process of redefining beauty.
Since its founding by Stan Bevington in 1965, the press has been a
small company that thinks like a big company. It keeps itself
financially viable, it adapts quickly to changing technology, it
updates its aesthetic mandate as required and it doggedly goes about
...
Read more...
|  | The Perilous Trade
by Roy MacSkimming
McClelland & Stewart $39.99 Hardcover
ISBN: 0771054939
|
Book Review A Review of: The Perilous Trade: Publishing CanadaÆs Writers
by Clara Thomas
Roy MacSkimming's The Perilous Trade is a comprehensive guide to
Canadian publishing from 1946 to 2003. The book has been in process
for five years, but most important, MacSkimming has been involved in
both writing and publishing in Canada since 1964 when he began to work
in Clarke Irwin's warehouse. He is uniquely qualified to trace our
publishing history. In the late 60s and 70s Canada's burgeoning
cultural nationalism made anything seem possible and quite often,
against all odds, it was. There is a strong undercurrent of optimism
in his work, a holdover from those days: what happened once can happen
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Sex, Time and Power: How WomenÆs Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution
by Gwen Nowak
How often have feminists decried the myth of Zeus birthing his
daughter, Athena, from his head as overt unapologetic male womb envy?
After all, Zeus ate Athena's mother whole in his attempt to control
the fruit of her womb! Now along comes Leonard Shlain birthing
Athena's prehistoric sister, Gyna sapiens, out of his fertile
imagination, in psychobiological terms, his right brain, in
plainspeak-his head. But unlike the less evolved Zeus, Shlain's motive
is curiosity not control, a curiosity that becomes compassion for
Gyna's Unknown Mother and for Gyna herself. In Sex Time and Power,
...
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| | Book Review A Review of: Risking It All
by Gordon Phinn
The ineluctable glamour of scandal seems to be why the brisk trade in
confessional memoir continues unabated. For some reason, which may one
day be unveiled by psychiatry, militant feminism, or aliens with a
kinder, gentler agenda, the female of the species is especially keen
on kissing and telling. Transgression, it would seem, remains ever so
tempting, the season of indulgence it generates quite irresistible,
while the lure of hard won redemption vies with public acclaim for the
big prize. While guys, when not boozily unemployed or dreaming of
fly-fishing, seem keener on the debilitating effects of war on the
...
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