| Book Review School Of Hard Knocks
by George Kaufman
A BOXING BOOK THAT will appeal even to those who don`t like the sport? A boxing writer who quotes Thackeray and Joyce Carol Oates, but writes like a hip mixture of Damon Runyon and Raymond Chandler?
Believe it, because you`re reading a review written by someone who thought lie didn`t like boxing, but found himself eagerly turning pages for the next largerthan-life anecdote and the next in an unending Parade of colourful characters.
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| | Book Review A Love That Persists
by Erin Moure
"TO BE AWAKE more lovely than dreams," Dionne Brand writes, and her new book of poetry is one of waking and attentiveness, to one`s own history, one`s pain as a woman, as an immigrant to the place of foreign habits, to one`s own sexuality.
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| | Book Review A Victim Of Satire
by Michael Coren
"WHY ME?" The cry of the victim of satire and parody everywhere. A call as distinctive as that of any winged creature, any beast of jungle or forest. It is uttered in wretched, plaintive tones, invariably to an apathetic audience. The response to the shriek has been chronicled by journalists around the world. A somewhat splenetic and self?satisfied "You're fair game," followed by a heavily inflected and triumphant "You can't really complain. Anyway, it's all publicity.
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| | Book Review Assaying The Essay
by Geoff Hancock
THE SECOND APPEARANCE of this annual anthology strives for a wholly balanced view of Canadian magazine culture. The intentions of the editor, Douglas Fetherling, are sound and his selections wide ranging, but various contradictory criteria are called upon; as a result, the book lacks a coherent central aesthetic. The aim of Best Canadian Essays 1990, to use Roland Barthes`s words, is to be interesting but not notable
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| | Book Review Hugh Maclennan, 1907-1990
by Paul Stuewe
WHEN HUGH MACLENNAN passed away on November 7 of this year, Canadian literature lost one of its most respected figures. The recipient of five Governor General's Awards and 18 honorary degrees, MacLennan created a body of work that sensitively reflected the shifting thoughts and sensibilities of a young nation's sometimes painful coming of age.
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|  | Breakup
by Braid,
pages CT
ISBN: 1550132563
|
Book Review How The West Was Stung
by Clive Cocking
WESTERNERS ARE ACCUSTOMED to being ignored, ridiculed, and exploited by central Canadians. It comes with the territory. Naturally we delight in taking our own shots, mostly jokes aimed at the perfidious East. But lately the humour has worn thin, barely concealing the lurking anger. These days we want to do more than just poke fun at the eastern buffoons ruining this country.
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| | Book Review Dignity Intact
by Marni Jackson
THIS IS THE SECOND book of a trilogy that began with Nights Below Station Street, a novel of spellbinding clarity and feeling that won the 1988 Governor General`s Award. Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace returns to the same turf, a mill town in northern New Brunswick, where everything anyone does has a ripple effect.
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| | Book Review Rebutal Critical Responsibilities
by Steve Mccaffery
'Serafin has produced ... a propagandist screed and demonstrated a lack
Of competence' in reading North of Intention
In "Colonial Mentalities" (November) Bruce Serafin focused upon Steve McCaffery's North of Intention as an example of the deficiencies of avant?garde literary criticism. Books in Canada invited McCaffery to reply to Serafin's article.
IT'S EVIDENT that Bruce Serafin does not wish to engage North of Intention on the solid level of its content.
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| | Book Review Poets' Corner Words On The Page
by Barbara Carey
Richard Lemm's affecting lyrics, Mari?Lou Rowley's imaginative spacing, and
Thelma Poirier's cumulative power display verse's various virtues
THE AUDIENCE for poetry may indeed be relatively small, as
Cary Fagan has lamented in these pages ("Aversion to Verse," October). But yearning for a poetry "spacious enough to embrace us all" is probably a mistake simply because all of "its" are so different.
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| | Book Review Treats For The Coffee-Table
by Richard Perry
MOST LARGE FORMAT, heavily illustrated books released for the holiday season in Canada focus upon the subjects of nature and art, and this year`s publications run true to form. One of the more valuable titles on the 1990 gift book list must certainly be David Burnett`s Masterpieces of Canadian Art from the National Gallery of Canada (Hurtig, 240 pages, $49.95 cloth). This is a substantial volume that should engage those who actually wish to read about art as well as peruse the pictures.
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| | Book Review Work In Progress
A Seat In The Garden
by Thomas King
'If you woke up one day and found a big Indian standing
in your cornfield ... what would you do?'
JOE HOVAUGH settled into the garden on his knees and began
pulling at the wet, slippery weeds that had sprung up between the
neat rows of beets. He trowelled his way around the zucchini and up
and down the lines of carrots, and he did not notice the big Indian at
all until he stopped at the tomatoes, sat back, and tried to remember
where he had set the ball of twine and the wooden stakes.
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| | Book Review On Writing A Beset-Seller
by James Bacque
James Bacque`s book about the deadly conditions in U.S. and French prison camps for Germans after the Second World War, Other Losses, was a scandal and a best seller for the last year in Canada, Germany, France, and England. It is due out soon in the United States and six other countries.
BEING A WRITER is difficult because it requires ego while it enforces humility.
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| | Book Review The New Solitudes
by June Callwood
MRS. GOD Is one of the lost people who wanders downtown Toronto, indifferent to weather or the clarion call of appearances, and dreams aloud of another life. City Hall, you know.
As Toronto drifts consciencelessly into two social isolations, the gloriously, ostentatiously, very rich and the wretchedly poor, it would seem that the common denominator of their humanity is disappearing. The very poor have become invisible to the affluent: not to the eye, as Mrs
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| | Book Review The News For Now
by Michael Coren
FOREIGN CORRESPONDENTS are overly fond of telling us laypeople that in times of war, truth is the first casualty. Appealing, but fallacious. The first casualty in war is the humility of the foreign correspondent. The tight-lipped afterglow that so many of the breed cultivate is as risible as it is mis leading. This writer well remembers an internationally known journalist rehears ing his war-weary grimace in the mirror of a mobile washroom, two miles south of the Lebanese border.
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| | Book Review From Accord To Ambiguity
by Ramsay Cook
In the aftermath of Meech Lake, all deals are off
THE MEECH LAKE ACCORD was hatched in that peculiar Canadian incubator, the Premiers` Club, whose most striking characteristics, according to Andrew Cohen in A Deal Undone, are "the male bonding, the union of the jocks, the fidelity and the fraternity." Who will ever forget that scene late on Saturday, June 9, when, after nearly a week of arm-twisting, the premiers took turns congratulating each other on "standing tall
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| | Book Review Works Of Faith
by Mary Frances Coady
IN God`s Dominion, Ron Graham relates the story of Conrad Black`s conversion to Catholicism, as told to him by the financier himself. He and his mentor, Cardinal Carter of Toronto, discussed and argued their way doctrine by doctrine through the Creed until he finally decided to join the Catholic Church, at which point the two celebrated with champagne. "`So,` Black concludes, `I didn`t exactly go to them on my knees.
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| | Interviews View From The Edge
Helen Fogwill Porter's work is deeply rooted
in Newfoundland's stony soil
HELEN FOGWILL PORTER is the author of a memoir?history, Below the Bridge (Breakwater, 1980), and January, February, June or July (Breakwater, 1988), which was short?listed for the W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award and won the 1989 Canadian Library Association Young Adult Book Award. A collection of short stories, A Long and Lonely Ride, will be published by Breakwater early in 1991.
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| | Letters to Editor The Egocentric I
SINCE CHARLENE DIEHL?JONES exhorts Betsy Warland to a critique of essentialism as a hook on which to pin the review of her book, Proper Deafinitions (October), I am drawn to shout aloud that the contradictions of a wilfully absent, falsely and traditionally "objective" reviewer violently abstracting text from theory and voice from argument in order to impugn Warland's textual project are almost, but not quite, laughable.
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| | First Novels Mysterious Moments
by Gary Draper
I DON`T READ A LOT OF MYSTERIES, partly because they often leave me feeling let down. "Okay," I think when I`m done, 11 now I know who did it. Who cares?" When all that drives a novel is the solution to a puzzle, the novel seems a kind of cheat; after all, there is such a range of pleasures to he had from fiction that it`s a shame to restrict the reader to the enjoyment of a suspenseful plot.
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| | Field Notes Chercher L'Acadie
by Laurel Boone
In the Maritimes, French?language publishing is an adventurous as well as active
affair
Two hundred years ago, the Acadians didn't all allow themselves to be kicked out of the Maritimes, and then sonic of the toughest deportees came back. Today their descendants are a force to be reckoned with, not just in Politics, but in literary matters as well.
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| | Children's Books The Good And The Awesome
by Katherine Govier
AN ADULT APPROACHING to children's books with the aim of reviewing their merits must do so with humility. Ones judgement, while relevant, is not sufficient. On the other hand, the practice of having child readers themselves pronounce upon books isn't wholly satisfactory either. In my experience, children say that nearly every book is "good"; a very few, they say, are "awesome" To see how the others affect a child, I watch.
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| | Great Authors Damn The Tournedos!
by Pat Barclay
It's full speed ahead with these delectable
enticements to culinary indulgence
ONCE THERE WERE only two kinds of cookbook: the righteously health?conscious and those that damned the tournedos and charged calorifically ahead. Today, though, variations in the genre are increasing at the speed of a microwaved mushroom.
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