| Book Review Brief Reviews-Poetry
by Erin Moure
JEAN-PAUL DAOUST`s Black Diva: Selected Poems 1982-1986 (Guernica, 46 pages, $8 paper) is a compact rainbow offering of earlier work of the 1990 Governor General`s Award-winning poet in an energetic translation by Daniel Sloate. As the fellow poet Andre Roy says in his introductory note (a poem in itself, capturing Daoust precisely), Jean-Paul Daoust "somersaults so he wont get dizzy;" he is "flammable ...his heart goes tilt.
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| | Book Review A Taste For Freedom
by Joan Thomas
IN The Man Who Painted Stalin, the Quebec feminist France Theoret writes the subtext of women`s lives. Her point of entry is the existential struggle of all human beings ("It is the faceless neuter of coming to terms with life alone;` she writes, in the odd syntax that characterizes this volume), and her concern is with the way in which the effort to live authentic individual lives is complicated and impeded by the fact of being female.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews-Non-Fiction4
by Daniel Jones
IN HIS BRIEF introduction to Hugh MacLennan`s Best (McClelland & Stewart, 362 pages, $27.95 cloth), the editor Douglas Gibson concerns himself less with the literary quality of MacLennan`s body of writing than with his "pioneering role in creating a literature that belonged to Canada." MacLennan used his novels as a means of elucidating social and moral issues; few critics have praised his style, which, for the most part, was didactic, heavyhanded, and often laboured.
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| | Book Review Overlapping Pickles Forbidden
by Diane Schoemperlen
IN Making Fast Food: From the Frying Pan into the Fryer, Ester Reiter, an assistant professor in the sociology department at Brock University, examines the impact of the fast-food invasion on the labour force and contemporary family life. Fast food, whether we eat it or not, has changed our lives forever. According to an Information Canada poll, 70 per cent of primary school students questioned as to the identity of Sir John A. Macdonald thought he had started a hamburger chain.
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| | Book Review But Can They Talk
by Gloria Hildebrandt
It isn`t just writing ability that makes some authors more promotable than others
WHERE I WORK I am surrounded by books. The three-foot-long window-sill behind me is jammed with unsolicited books and press packages. There is a foothigh stack of books beside the phone, because I have messages in to publicists about scheduling those authors for interviews
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| | Book Review In Three Dimensions
by Eileen Manion
IN THIS RELENTLESSLY postmodern text, Nicole Brossard takes two modernist classics, James Joyce`s Finnegans Wake and Djuna Barnes`s Nightwood, as her point of departure. But her central motif is light, not dark; and her controlling metaphor is the hologram, which she uses to develop a new way of seeing, in order to explore a new way of being for women, who, silenced by patriarchal culture, are confined within "the ordinary": "a circular bas-relief filled with unspeakable motifs.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews-Fiction2
by Donna Dunlop
APTLY TITLED and skilfully framed, the 10 stories of Patricia Stone`s Close Calls (Cormorant, 191 pages, $14.95 paper) are linked by an attentive and neatly quirky narrative voice. They are also connected by an emotional landscape in which silence is never really silent. Through a series of delicately rendered adventures and narrow escapes, girls and women experience the ambiguities of life, other people, and themselves.
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| | Book Review Perils Of Proofreading
by Alec Mcewen
CAN THE DEVELOPMENT of Canadian writers be trusted? In a one-page flyer announcing the two authors who would speak at its 1991 annual spring luncheon at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, the Writers` Development Trust managed to misspell Mexico, published, and Saint John, add a gratuitous article to David Adams Richards`s Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace, and end a sentence with two periods, one on each side of a quotation mark.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews-Non-Fiction5
by Desmond Morton
THE UNMAKING of Premier David Peterson in 1990 liberated Georgette Gagnon and Dan Rath from the Ontario payroll and left them leisure and a publisher`s advance to find out why their careers had been derailed. Their answer, delivered in Not Without Cause: David Peterson`s Fall from Grace, a Cautionary Tale for Voters and Politicians verywhere (HarperCollins, 408 pages, $22.95 cloth), is pretty much what everyone else had figured out a year ago.
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| | Book Review The Embassy Returns
by Keith Nickson
THERE`S SOMETHING very innocent about Toronto`s resurrected coffee-house, the Bohemian Embassy. On a recent Thursday night, the owner, Don Cullen, sat near the door collecting admissions with a dog called Spirit lounging at his feet. Over at the refreshment counter, people bought juice, coffee, and perhaps some pastries before returning to the large back room where folk singers were warming up the 30-odd patrons. There`s no smoky haze, no smell of alcohol. There`s nothing dangerous here.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews-Fiction3
by Laurel Boone
THE GIRL WHO grows up in The Illumination of Alice Mallory (HarperCollins, 175 pages, $19.95 cloth), by Maureen Moore, lives in a rotting North Vancouver bungalow with her maniacal mother, her sad little half brother David, and Mr. Goldman, David`s father. At least, she lives there bodily; mentally, she lives in novels. Having drifted through grade nine in a haze of fiction, she left school in grade 10 and became a clerk at Woolworth`s. Now, captivated by D. H.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews-Fiction1
by Daniel Jones
THE PUBLICATION of Many-Mouthed Birds: Contemporary Writing by Chinese Canadians (Douglas & McIntyre, 184 pages, $24.95 cloth), edited by Bennett Lee and Jim Wong-Chu, is timely. Two recent novels by the Chinese-American writer Amy Tan have topped best-seller lists.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews-Non-Fiction1
by Joel Yanofsky
THE LESSON history keeps teaching us is that we never learn our lesson. Fear, ignorance, and prejudice inevitably get in the way. In the winter of 1885 an outbreak of smallpox in Montreal claimed more than 3,000 lives - 85 per cent of the victims were under the age of 10, 66 per cent were under the age of five. It was "the last epidemic of smallpox to devastate a city in the Western world" and it was completely preventable
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews-Non-Fiction3
by Ann Jansen
THE PICTURE of Canadian theatre that emerges from A Well-Bred Muse: Selected Theatre Writings 1978-1988 (Mosaic, 178 pages, $14.95 paper) is a melodramatic one, replete with heroes and villains. From opening shot to fina salvo, Keith Garebian tackles his subjects with what he describes as "varying degrees of ardour and loathing." The leading lights of the Stratford and Shaw festivals are on the side of the angels, with the director Robin Phillips at the Olympian apex of this gathering
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| | Book Review Me And My Gang
by Brian Fawcett
THIS MORNING while I was lounging around my new office in the Golden Griddle at Toronto`s Davisville and Yonge streets, I got to musing about a column the Toronto Star book columnist Philip Marchand wrote about my October Books in Canada review of Margaret Atwood`s Wilderness Tips. What I had to say about the book was, as they say, favourable. I thought the book was wise, intelligent, and decent, and I went on to say that those same attributes can now be applied to Atwood herself.
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| | Book Review A Life In Revolution
by Allan Casey
Ven Begamudre finds himself drawn into the orbit of India`s
cultural heritage in his search for fictional raw material
WEN VEN BEGAMUDRE was just a year old, his mother and father left India to study in America, leaving their son to the care of his grandmother on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. Several years later, fresh from graduate work, Begamudre`s mother - now a glamorous stranger from the West - came back for him.
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| | Book Review The Space Between Meanings
Two of Canada`s top literary critics go out to brunch and partake of many discourses
STAN FOGEL, a professor of English at St. Jerome`s College in Waterloo, Ontario, and Linda Hutcheon, a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Toronto, are both in the forefront of contemporary literary study in Canada.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews-Non-Fiction2
by A. Marie Pfohl
THE AUTHORS of Don`t Say No, Just Let Go (Pulp Press, 96 pages, $8.95 paper), collectively and pseudonymously known as Maria Von Couver, have written what purports to be a guide to living with teenagers; they have apparently survived the parenting of 11 challenging adolescents. The book provides a devastating parody of all those self-help books that repeat their one clever thought in as many pages as possible.
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| | Book Review To Save Themselves
by Bob Smith
SOCIAL-STUDIFS textbooks used to describe how all the buffalo were killed by mindless adventurers sitting on cowcatchers of trains that chugged to the frontier through the prairies` massive herds. They made students feel really bad - for the buffalo - and made them wonder about the kind of men who would do such a callous and shortsighted thing.
Textbooks now hint at other victims. The Blackfoot, Blood, Cree, and other aboriginal nations depended on the buffalo for their very existence.
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| | Book Review Personally Speaking
by Jim Christy
SINCE GEORGE GALT advises us that essays are personal, indeed "infused with the writer`s personality;" it behooves a reviewer to jettison any pretence of objectivity. I made some wonderful discoveries in The Thinking Heart, had my appreciation of other writers reaffirmed, was thoroughly bored by a couple of contributions, and astonished at the incompetency of the work of the two bestknown writers included.
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| | Book Review Stepping Out Of Time
by Laurel Boone
PAUL GRESCOE claims to have at least one more "Dan Rudnicki Mystery" up his sleeve; let us hope it`s better than the first. The plot of Flesh Wound (Douglas & McIntyre, 218 pages, $24.95 cloth) isn`t gripping enough for the book to work as a mystery, and the characterization and thematic material aren`t strong enough for it to work as literary fiction hung on a mystery plot.
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| | Book Review Batteries Included
by Barbara Carey
Ts THE SEASON of excess, both in making merry and in ostentatious gift-giving, at least if the lavishly decked halls of downtown department stores are any indication. Poetry is easily lost in the blur of all those alluring things. But think of it this way: books such as the poetry volumes under review here are relatively light on the parcel weigh scales (forget coffee-table tomes, their richer, more corpulent cousins) and simple to wrap.
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| | Book Review The Sacred And The Profound
by Elizabeth Anthony
Appealing illustrations and sensitive texts for the eye, the mind, and the heart
ALTHOUGH HE DEFINED art as "a spilling of the oil of love;" David Milne`s paintings could never be called unctuous. His oils almost audibly resist their ground, his lines even when languid are dry. Any use of opulent paint was restricted to his early New York years, when he exhibited his well-received work in the 1913 Armory Show.
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| | Book Review Always Share Things With Pumpkins
by Katherine Govier
Emily and Robin return to help sort out the truly delightful from the merely okay
ROBIN AND EMILY have been nagging me for weeks to write this review. "When was it supposed to be done?" "The 15th;" I say miserably. They look at the calendar by the table, all scratched over and bedoodled. "Today is the 29th!" They are truly scandalized. No point in my making excuses. They did their part - reading the books - a long time ago, and Emily, especially, is ready to give her opinion.
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| | Book Review A Batch Of Smart Cookies
by Pat Barclay
what`s new in cookbooks, from soup to nuts
FOR MY MONEY, you can have your murder mysteries, sci-fi sagas, and blockbuster "bodice rippers" (as some romance novels are known in the trade); when it comes to escapist reading, there`s nothing to compare with cookbooks. The vicarious eating they inspire is endlessly entertaining and fat free, and if you read them closely, you can enjoy vicarious cooking without messing up the kitchen with the real thing.
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| | Children's Books Onward And Upward
by Virginia Beaton
FOR SEVERAL years now, I`ve adopted the free-market attitude toward my daughter`s choice of books. My philosophy could best be described as "good books drive out bad": I figured that since we had laid down a solid reading foundation of Beatrix Potter, Noddy, and Mother Goose in early childhood, she had developed tastes that could only be satisfied by the best of children`s and young adult books.
I was only partly right.
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