| Book Review Brief Reviews
by Martin Dowding
LATE IN the Second World War, between D Day, 1944, and VE-Day, 1945, almost 700 Canadian junior army officers volunteered to serve with the British Army in a scheme called Canloan. The Canadians, available due to the demobilization of some reserve units, went at the request of the British and served honourably in many famous regiments. More than 40 of them were awarded the Military Cross. Wilfred I. Smith`s Code Word Canloan (Dundurn, 346 pages, $29.
Read more...
| | Book Review Endowedwith Distinction
by Kathryn Woodward
IN ONE OF the stories in Robyn Sarah`s A Nice Gazebo, a cat, Hamlin, is nearlythe central character. We know her well, an ordinary unadorned calico. ButHamlin is more than just a soiler of kitty litter. She has presence: "She filled theplace with it," just as Sarah, a Montreal poet, fills her book withpresence, endowing her characters, even inanimate ones (the gazebo, a smokedmeat sandwich) with distinction. The result is a book of quiet dignity. We readit thankfully, as if being handed a gift.
Read more...
| | Book Review Brief Reviews
by Robin Britt
ANYONE INTERESTED in outrageously improbable true-crime opuses should enjoy Greg Weston`s The Stopwatch Gang (Macmillan, 361 pages, $27.
Read more...
| | Book Review Atlarge Astonishingus
by Michael Coren
AS SOMEONE who has woken up in the middleof the night in a hot - never cold -sweat contemplating how he will begin,structure, compose, and conclude yet another book review the following morning,I welcome the recent epistolary advice of Judy Stoffman, books editor of theToronto Star.
Read more...
| | Book Review Editor`S Choice
by Christopher Levenson
AS THE Canadian literary community, for all its geographical spread, is small and incestuous, I should start by stating my interest: about four years ago Vehicule turned down my own proposed new-and selected volume because, as Michael Harris explained, although he liked the poems, they were too much like his own. A well-known Canadian woman writer`s poetry manuscript was returned for the identical reason.
Read more...
| | Book Review Deep Thoughts, High Spirits
by Richard Perry
0F THE FOUR BOOKS considered here, the most scholarly is Ann Davis`s The Logic of Ecstasy: Canadian Mystical Painting 1920 1940 (University of Toronto Press, 216 pages, $60 cloth, $24.95 paper).
Read more...
| | Book Review Brief Reviews
by Allan Casey
AFTER PLOUGHING through Riel to Reform (Fifth House, 311 pages, $16.95 paper), a litany of bad blood between the hinterland West and the rest of Canada, even Western federalists are sure to be riled anew, and their Central Canadian counterparts humbled.
Read more...
| | Book Review Brief Reviews
by Allan Levine
FOR ABOUT 2,000 middle-class British immigrants the "Promised Land" in 1902 was a large section of territory located a few hundred miles northwest of Saskatoon. Barren and remote, it was hardly the utopia they had been led to believe awaited them. These novice pioneers had been lured from their relatively comfortable lives in England by Reverend Isaac Barr, a misguided but charismatic Anglican minister who dreamed of keeping "Canada for the British.
Read more...
| | Book Review Brief Reviews
by Roger Burford Mason
EVER SINCE I began reviewing books, I have wanted to be able to use the word "picaresque." The publication of Trevor Ferguson`s fourth novel, The True Life Adventures of Sparrow Drinkwater (HarperCollins, 404 pages, $24.95 cloth), now permits it.
Read more...
| | Book Review A Jungle Out There
by Jack Batten
CARSTEN STROUD has style. Big, handsome guy, resonant voice, lot of hair. He`s hung out with cops in Toronto and in New York City, and written books about the experience. Cops would welcome a guy like Stroud. Not some wimp journalist, not a whiny liberal. Stroud is a cop`s kind of guy. He`s right there.
Stroud`s writing has style too. It`s the style that originates with Hemingway, takes a jog to the right, filters through a certain type of crime novelist, the Ed McBain type.
Read more...
| | Book Review Asit Happened
by I. M. Owen
THE FIRST volume of John English`s life of L. B. Pearson, Shadow of Heaven, took him to the end ofhis 20 years in the diplomatic service, with his entry into Parliament and thecabinet in 1948.
Read more...
|  | Cold Blood IV
by Peter Sellers
Mosaic
242 pages $19.95 cloth
ISBN: 0889625131
|
Book Review Brief Reviews
by Anne Denoon
THE DUST-JACKET of Cold Blood IV (Mosaic, 242 pages, $19.95 cloth), edited by Peter Sellers, depicts a veritable pantheon of classic detection: Holmes, Marple, Poirot, Wimsey, Father Brown, and - the sole colonial - a Spade-Marlowe amalgam in the likeness of Humphrey Bogart. Apart from the presence of a trunk labelled "Toronto," I could deduce no plausible reason for these sleuths` appearance on the cover of a collection of recent mystery stories by Canadians.
Read more...
| | Book Review Brief Reviews
by Wayne Grady
The drudgery was no doubt real; the Thompsons taught classes of 120 students,most of them 16-year-olds who "exhibited, on occasion, a gaucherie well known in this age-group in other cultures." They lectured in English to people who had no reason on earth to think that Shelley was a great poet. And they were caught in an India that was itself 44 caught in the difficult transition from colonial to independent times [the Raj had ended in 1947] as well as from traditional to modem times.
Read more...
| | Book Review Coyote Goes Slapstick
by Eric Mccormack
THOMAS KING is a writer of varied talents. His first novel, Medicine River (1990), was widely praised, and has since been made into a TV movie. His children`s book, A Coyote Columbus Story, was short-listed for last year`s Governor General`s Award. He`s a notable scholar - chair of Native American studies at the University of Minnesota. He also happens to be Cherokee through his father and lays claim to Greek-German connections through his mother.
Read more...
| | Book Review Brief Reviews
by John Doyle
VICTORIA BRANDEN has set herself a formidable task in Give Up the Ghost (Imp Press, 224 pages, $16.95 paper). It`s not that she wants to squelch all belief in ghosts, goblins, the paranormal, and all associated gimcrackery. Instead, she claims that apparently supernatural mysteries
can be explained away through simple scientific knowledge.
This isn`t an academic study, and Branden`s sources range from the Encyclopaedia Britannica to Carl Sagan to articles in Psychology Today.
Read more...
| | Book Review Brief Reviews
by Chris Scott
USUALLY it`s the angels that do the exterminating; in Gerald Godin`s The Exterminated Angel (Guernica, 128 pages, $12 paper), translated from the French by Judith Cowan, the angel is exterminated - by a car bomb. This
sardonic flashback to Montreal in the 1970s is populated by amiable grotesques such as Wolfred Milton, the tobacconist-turned drug-kingpin, "a hugely fat man so obese they would use him for testing the weigh scales for the big trucks before the thaw.
Read more...
| | Book Review Brief Reviews
by Allan Levine
No Two individuals have symbolized the opposing positions of the abortion debate more than Dr Henry Morgentaler and the former Manitoba NDP politician Joe Borowski. For the past 25 years, both men have devoted their lives and resources to the cause: Mortgentaler as a champion for women`s choice and Borowski as a defender of the unborn fetus.
In Morgentaler V. Borowski: Abortion, the Charter and the Courts (McClelland & Stewart, 371 pages, $22.
Read more...
| | Book Review Brief Reviews
by Chris Scott
THE "LINE" in David H. Elias`s Crossing the Line (Orca, 160 pages, $16.95 paper) is the US-Canada border. In the title story, two brothers, Steven and Bill, float down the creek "on the hastily built raft, pretending to be Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn." The line is indicated by a steel marker: "There were some numbers on it, and the words `Canada` on one side and `United States of America` on the other."
The stories deal with a family living in a southern Manitoba farming community.
Read more...
| | Book Review Brief Reviews
by Roger Burford Mason
THAT KENT NUSSEY studied writing with Raymond Carver is clearly evident from the homage the nine stories in In Christ There Is No East or West (Quarry, 208 pages, $14.95 paper) offer to the influence of Carver`s unblinkingly sombre view of humanity.
It is bleak territory to explore. Nussey`s people, like Carver`s, live small lives, 11 cribb`d, cabin`d and confin`d" by their economic, emotional, or spiritual poverty
Read more...
| | Book Review Brief Reviews
by Robin Britt
SOUVENIRS? T-shirts? Highlight videos? If they`re selling it, we Blue Jay fans are buying it, so you can`t blame the folks who thought up A Series for the World (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 144 pages, $33.95 cloth) for believing that we`d also spring for a coffee table opus about Toronto`s championship baseball sea
son. With W.
Read more...
| | Book Review Storm Warnings
by Douglas Fetherling
LEGAL AUTHORITIES in Upper Canada sat back and did nothing when in 1803 a white man called Cozens murdered a Native called Whistling Duck in the Lake Scugog area. But they quickly erupted with the full force of the law when an Ojibway Ogetonicut, a friend of the victim, followed Native tradition and retaliated, killing a white trader named John Sharp. The resulting case is important for several reasons.
Read more...
| | Book Review Afterthe Gold Rush
by Daniel Jones
IN 1966,at the age of 20, Neil Young drove a 1953 Pontiac hearse from Toronto to LosAngeles. Within several days, he had formed, with Stephen Stills, the BuffaloSpringfield, one of the seminal folk-rock bands of the`60s. John Einarson`sbiography, Neil Young: Don`t Be Denied, is the first in depth study of themusician`s Canadian years, and it is a fascinating - if occasionally depressing- story.
Born in Toronto in 1945, Young moved toWinnipeg with his mother when he was 14.
Read more...
| | Book Review Form And Frame
by George Elliott Clarke
ANTONIO MAZZA`s The Way I Remember It (Guernica, 64 pages, $10 paper) is only the Toronto poet`s second volume of his own work. Since his first book appeared in 1979, he has published three English translations of Italian poets. The Way I Remember It is also a translation of sorts: it originally appeared as a popular album of poetry, based on Calabrian-Canadian song, that Mazza recorded with his musician brother in 1988.
Read more...
| | Interviews Againstthe Grain
by Barbara Carey
Lorna Crozier`s poetry aims to prick holes inf alse comforts
LORNA CROZIER is the author ofeight books of poetry, including the McClelland& Stewart titles The GardenGoing On Without Us (1985), Angels of Flesh, Angels of Silence (1988), andInventing the Hawk (1992), her most recent collection, which won the GovernorGeneral`s Award for Poetry last year.
Read more...
| | Children's Books Story Sense
by Rhea Tregebov
CHILDREN`s picture-books offer many pleasures, from the poetic joys of language play to the delicate rendering - or madcap joie de vivre - of the illustrations. However, one element of a child`s enjoyment of a picturebook that seems to be too often overlooked is whether or not the story makes sense. A comprehensible narrative flow that the child can follow is, to a great degree, what makes the story satisfying.
Read more...
|
|
