| Book Review Father Image
by Sharon Tbesen
GERMAINE GREER's contribution to the old and worthy tradition of quest, literature is wildly original and personal. Daddy We Hardly Knew You is a remarkable story, fuelled by passions so elemental that we whose fathers and mothers are more or less known to us, can scarcely comprehend them.
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| | Book Review A Shelter For Daydreams.
by Larry Scanlan
HOME Is where the heart is. Home is hearth and family. Or, if you live in Toronto, home is a mortgage the size of a millstone, and its value as a piece of real estate the only topic of conversation. Not so for Witold Rybczynski, for whom home is still an idea and an ideal.
When Witold Rybczynski (the name is pronounced Veetold Rib?chin?ski, with the emphasis on the vee and the chin) wrote Home: A Short History of an Idea in 1986, he took critics by surprise and readers by storm
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| | Book Review Interesting Times
by I. M. Owen
LAST SPRING, running my eyes along the Mystery shelves of one of my local bookshops and failing to find anything new by any of the writers I regularly follow, I took a chance on a first novel I'd never heard of, A Stone of the Heart' (1988) by John Brady. Its quality was astonishing; so when, a few days after finishing it, I found a copy of Brady's second novel, Unholy Ground, in, the Books in Canada office, I naturally made off with it.
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| | Book Review Worlds Apart
by Beverley Daurio
IN ONE of Bharati Mukherjee's earlier novels, Wife, the central character is a young woman, a recent emigrant from India, who is squeezed between memories of the traditions of her home and life in America, until she loses control, lashes out, and murders her husband in their nice New York apartment. jasmine is an evolution of that character; Jyoti, Jane, Jase, or Jasmine, as she is variously called, is an escape artist, a transcender, and a survivor.
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| | Book Review Notes From The Inner Circle
by Brian Fawcett
In the absence of minority writers, the Women's Press
reasoned, WASP writers should cease to write about the
culturally and racially disadvantaged ? should cease,
apparently, even to imagine their condition
OVER THE past several years, both members of the Writers' Union of Canada (T.W.U.C.) and outsiders have criticized the union and the Canadian publishing industry for being male?dominated, and well, too WASP.
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| | Book Review Past And Present
by Dayv James-French
In Kenneth Radu's Distant Relations
the connections between what was and what is
are deftly brought together
KENNETH RADU limits the frame of Distant Relations (Oberon, 245 pages, $14.95 paper) to a single day in the life of Vera Dobrin, slowed by an erratic heart as she prepares for a family reunion. The pace is leisurely., As Vera rests, her memories connect the past to the present of a life where "there's just not enough time to understand everything you need to understand.
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| | Book Review A Better Class Of Euphemism
by I. M. Owen
"Melioratives' are those plesant?sounding terms for things that weren't really offensive in the first place
GREEKS, AND WHAT THEY HAD WORDS FOR: When I read something like he earned plenty of kudos for ... I suspect, but can't prove, that the writer imagines that kudos is a plural, and its second syllable rhymes with "hose." A headline in the Toronto Star a few months ago left no room for doubt: Kudos flow for Ontario welfare reforms.
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| | Book Review Mirror And World
by Isabel Huggan
A good journalist whips into town and grasps the
essence. A good fiction writer must get under the skin
of a place and its people, under her own skin
and into her soul as she dwells there
EARLIER this year while in France I had dinner with A French academic, an authority on both Canadian and African literature who teaches at the University of Nice.
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| | Book Review A Crystal City
by Don Nichol
THERE WERE at least two things that E. J. Pratt and James VI of Scotland had in common: both wrote on demonology (James a superstition?ridden book and Pratt an M.A. thesis) and both had to go to neighbouring countries to fulfil their callings. Neither returned to the land of his birth for any great length of time.
Like David Pitt's recent biography of Pratt, this new edition of his poetry ? E. J. Pratt Complete Poems comes in two hefty parts.
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| | Book Review Hopeful Travellers
by Peter Buitenhuis
Thirty-seven Canadian writers contributed
position papers` to The Second Macmillan
Anthology in response to such questions as:
Is the humanist tradition defunct? What is
postmodernism? Why do you write?
HOW TO GET to grips with this extraordinary smorgasbord - poetry, fiction, criticism, essays, autobiography, a symposium, questionnaire responses, a review? Sauve qui peut
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| | Book Review Me Victor You Jane
by Heather Robertson
THIS BOOK begins as a political thriller. Victor Galanti, a charismatic young United States congressman with presidential ambitions, has become embroiled in a kiddieporn scandal that threatens to destroy his career and his marriage. To ride out the storm, Galanti is despatched
to Newfoundland, his birthplace: he is the son of a Newfoundland woman and an American serviceman who deserted her before Victor was born While cooling his heels in St
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| | Book Review In Search Of Life.
by Merna Summers
WELL, WE ALL know what happened on the first six.
God created, heaven and earth. Then on the seventh, he rested.
In her new novel, On the Eighth Day, Antonine Maillet takes him to task for rushing things, for botching the job. "This Creation of yours is too small," she scolds. 'Too short, too thin, too ? unfinished."
"You'd think he could have asked someone for help," she ?grumbles
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|  | Dance On The Earth
by Margaret Laurence
Mcclelland & Stewart
204 pages $26.95
ISBN: 0771047460
|
Book Review A Vivid Life
by Timothy Findley
THIS MEMOIR is a book about being a woman. It is also a book about being alive and about the giving of life; a book about being a mother - and having a mother.
Dance on the Earth is the last of Margaret Laurence`s books, which for some will lend a sadness to their reading of it, a sadness. that will not be justified and should be discouraged from the outset. That we have a book at all is reason to be anything but sad.
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| | Book Review More Fish In The Sea?
by Farley Mowat
'Take a good look about ye now, for 'tis all going
out afore long. This old island fed we people so long as
we took no more'n we had to have . . .
now 'tis all changed and gone abroad'
EARLY VOYAGERS to the northeastern approaches of America discovered two kinds of land. One was high and dry, and they called it the Main. The other lay submerged beneath 30 to 150 fathoms of green waters, and they called it the Banks.
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| | Book Review Time And Place.
by Christopher Moore
SMALL PLACES, minutely observed, frequently inspire the best in Canadian fiction. Nonfiction works of local history, on the other hand, most often offer boosterism, ancestorworship, and ill-digested factoids. Happily for readers who hope for better things from historical prose, the handful of books that look thoughtfully at quiet corners of the Canadian past has recently grown by one. Greenbank by W. H. Graham is a small wonder.
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| | Book Review An Overwhelming Stillness.
by Wayne Grady
SINCE Elizabethan times, when the "gold ore" brought back to England by Martin Frobisher as "tokens of possession" turned out to be nothing brut iron pyrite, the Arctic has been considered by people of European descent more as an impediment to the Orient than as a place in itself ? a passage, valued more for what it is not than for what it is.
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| | Book Review Intellectual Poetics
by Ken Norris
OVER A 30-year writing career, George Bowering has published almost 50 books of poetry, fiction, and criticism. Some say that's just too many, and certainly there is a hit?or?miss pattern to Bowering's work. For every wonderful book like Kerrisdale Elegies there's a not?so?wonderful one like Seventy?One Poems for People. His two latest books are Imaginary Hand and Errata; I score them as a hit and a half?hit.
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| | Book Review She Monsters.
by Anne Denoon
ALTHOUGH they are quite dissimilar in theme; style, and setting, these two novels do have a few things in common. They both explore the way their protagonists` childhood traumas reverberate in their adulthood Both reach their conclusion in the 1960s, both were written by women, and both display `the`, kind of uhabashed misogyny that perhaps only female writers can get away with nowadays.
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| | Book Review The Wit And The Wa
by Brian Fawcett
BASEBALL HAS always fascinated writers, and since the days of Ring Lardner, the sport has produced a wealth of fine writing. Unlike football, which is really one long steroid-induced mathematical orgasm, or hockey, which has replaced reading and writing with Don Cherry and picture books, baseball is a game of subtle textures, rituals, and allusive actions carried out at controlled velocities. People who like to give 110 per cent tend to be lousy ball-players and even worse fans.
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| | Interviews On The Edge Of Change, Gail Scott
GAIL SCOTT is a Montreal writer who grew up in a bilingual community in Eastern Ontario. For several years she worked as a journalist, writing on Quebec culture and politics for the Montreal Gazette and the Globe and Mail; she also helped establish Spirale, a French-language cultural magazine, and Tessera, a bilingual journal of feminist criticism and new writing.
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| | Letters to Editor Linguistic Structures
by Steven Heighton
BECAUSE I admire the courage and intelligence of Erin Moure's work, I was especially disappointed by her approach to David Manicom's letter of clarification (Books in Canada, April 1989, in reference to Moure's review of Poets 88 in the January?February issue). I was disappointed, and depressed, that an outstanding poet concerned with making language more honest and humane would resort, when fairly challenged, to such tawdry rhetorical tricks.
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