| Book Review The Moore-ish Church
by Michael Valdez Moses
In the liberal democratic West, the spirit of secularism has now loomed for more than two centuries. One must be impressed by the resoluteness of a writer whose work stands as a testament to the enduring importance and influence of the Catholic Church.
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| Book Review New Wine in Old Baggage
by Kenneth Sherman
George Woodcock said that Robin Skelton belongs to "the whole of the English poetic tradition". With the publication of this new book we can drop the qualifier, for here Skelton employs, not only English, but classical Greek, Indian, and Welsh poetic form
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| Book Review Hacking through to the Soul
by Charles Levin
"The soul of man is a far country, which cannot be approached or explored"- Heraclitus Ian Hacking is one of those rare philosophers whose mix of interests makes his work generally attractive, even beyond the academic circuit. At the University of
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| Book Review Poems a la carte
by Byron Ayanoglu
An anthology of poetry by a bouquet of authors is something akin to a pot-luck dinner party: you never know what the next arriving dish will be. When being served by several uncoordinated artistic psyches (be they culinary
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| Book Review Tuscan, Thai, Gothic, Canadian
by Ted Whittaker
The tides of every publishing season bring to the shore of our gastronomic desert island a raft of new Canadian cookbooks. Has culinary Canada finally come of age? My answer, based on present evidence, is a qualified no. The four works harvested here are
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| Book Review Unscientific Assuredness
by Judith Fitzgerald
Bruce Whiteman-a Montrealer and a quintessential connoisseur of art, music, sex, and literature-began his publishing career with The Sun at Your Thighs, The Moon at Your Lips (1978), a modest volume of exquisitely crafted monodic lyrics reminiscent of
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| Book Review Sabu and Taboo
by Cary Fagan
Ian Iqbal Rashid's debut collection of poems, Black Markets, White Boyfriends, was marked by the sympathetic personality of its author-an irony considering the confusions and paradoxes that Rashid (or rather his persona) seemed to feel about himself.
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| Book Review Perceptive Pub Crawl
by Howard Engel
Neighbours of mine disappear every year for a few weeks to go dancing in Ireland. With the dancing go large quantities of folk music and Guinness. Once they showed me pictures of their hostels in County Clare and mentioned the liveliest pubs in Galway.
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| Book Review A Carefree Fatalist & His Magus
by Andrew Faiz
Paul Quarrington is a carefree fellow; he is lighthearted and he doesn't take himself very seriously. Early on in Fishing With My Old Guy, he describes himself as someone who has "managed to cobble together an unlikely career, selling lies and fancy to
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| Book Review Grant on Grant
by H. D. Forbes
George Grant's thoughtful and unconventional writings about Canadian politics and education won him a wide following a generation ago. His most famous book, Lament for a Nation, is still assigned reading in some university courses, and it is even read by
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| Book Review Well-earned Nellies
by Michael Fitz-James
Ken Rockburn is well-known in and around Ottawa as a talented local broadcaster, whose two-hour Sunday evening radio program "Medium Rare" ran on CHEZ-FM from 1987 to 1993. The show was a rarity in providing, on a private radio station, magazine-style cov
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| Book Review The Bomb and Us
by James Morton
The mass circulation media in Canada recently expressed some surprise at a Canadian vote against a resolution in the UN disarmament committee. The resolution called for a phased program of nuclear disarmament leading to "eventual elimination of these weap
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| Book Review Ice Paternity
by Russell Field
When Ken Burns spent millions of dollars creating his nine-part PBS marathon, Baseball, a gauntlet was clearly thrown down. The American father-son myth had been institutionalized: fathers playing catch with their sons, teaching them to throw the curve
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| Book Review Borrowed Wire
by Ian Allaby
Most of us, given Ted Rogers's fortune, would vanish to a paradisical beach. But he lacks that freedom. His business is his life. He is, apparently, a prisoner of his own creation, Rogers Communications Inc. (RCI), which boasts $2 billion annual revenue,
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| Book Review A Cacophony, or a Dialogue?
by Leah Bradshaw
Jean Elshtain initially delivered Democracy on Trial as the 1993 Massey Lectures on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's Ideas series. She stands in good company in the tradition of the Massey Lectures and Ideas, one of the outstanding contributions of
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| Book Review Equal Time for Anger
by Paul Cantor
It is not easy to write a book on Plato's Republic that is both good and original. Over the centuries, the Republic has become one of the most commented upon of philosophic classics, and has attracted the interpretive efforts of some of the keenest of
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| Book Review Irrefutable Tschichold
by David Warren
Jan Tschichold has, since his death in 1974, acquired the stature of a typographer's typographer. Though a pioneer throughout his life, he has come to represent the best kind of entrenched conservatism: the unfailingly thoughtful good taste that may be us
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| Book Review Dances of Death in the Cupboard
by Gerald Owen
In a family I know, a saying of Eric Koch's has become a proverb: "I'd rather read about it in the New York Times"-meaning, roughly: "I don't want to see or even hear about this-or-that unpleasant thing. Let me experience it indirectly." But here he has
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| Book Review Justice to Service
by Jim Christy
Robert Service took more gold out of the Yukon than Jack London, but he didn't hit the Klondike until the Rush was a memory. Everybody who knows anything about the Scots bard-who was born in Lancashire-knows this, though generations of commentators have p
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| Book Review A Girl Not Overcivilized - Frieda Wishinsky speaks with Phoebe Gilman
Bright autumn light streamed into her small airy studio as the author and illustrator Phoebe Gilman spoke to me about her art, her books, and her experiences. It quickly became clear how intertwined are these three parts of her life, each strengthening,
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| Book Review Keep Calm with Weird People
by Louise Fabiani
In one of the finest stories in this collection, "The Death of Brûlé", Greg Hollingshead introduces his first-person narrator, a child whose mother is prone to angry outbursts. It is a passage that expertly leads into the story, and suggests the raison
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| Letters to Editor To the Editor
I am currently editing The Collected Letters of A. M. Klein, and am seeking his correspondences.
Anyone with any information on such letters should please contact Dr. Harold Heft, Department
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| Essays Jassie
The Writers' Union of Canada holds an annual Short Prose Competition for Developing Writers to encourage emerging writers of fiction and non-fiction. This year's judges-Erna Paris, Olive Senior, and Rudy Wiebe-awarded the first-place prize of $2,500 to
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| Essays Authors Exist
The newly formed Association of Literary Scholars and Critics (ALSC) recently held its inaugural convention at the Radisson Hotel Metrodome on the University of Minnesota's Minneapolis campus. Founded in 1994 by Professors John Ellis (University of
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| Essays The Moor's Second Last Sigh
Salman Rushdie's new novel has risen like a Venus from the sea, a welcome sign of life from a writer who has been living under difficult circumstances. But to some, the book had a different resonance: a sense of déjà vu. It's called The Moor's Last Sigh?
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| Essays The Acts of Robertson Davies
The death of Robertson Davies on December 2nd caught the entire Canadian literary scene very much by surprise. Though he had entered his eighty-third year and though his wife Brenda travelled with him and kept a close watch over his health, he seemed to
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| Essays Take the More Tangled Route
I wrote an awful poem in 1974 that begins, "Introspection/ Reader of souls/ Destroyer of all sense". And on it drips about fortresses, penetration, virgin self-confidence, and filled vessels. Metaphors so mixed they're puréed. I was eighteen in the gothic
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| First Novels First Novels - Ninth Century Fox
by Eva Tihanyi
No beating around the bush on this one: When Fox is a Thousand (Press Gang, 256 pages, $16.95 paper) by the twenty-eight-year-old Larissa Lai is a remarkable debut. It is a magical book, rich with poetry and folklore, and elements of fairy-tale
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| First Novels First Novels - Ninth Century Fox
by Eva Tihanyi
Yan Li, in Daughters of the Red Land (Sister Vision, 320 pages, $10.95 paper), also weaves together three lives: that of Laolao, her daughter Qin, and Qin's daughter Peace, who now lives in Canada and narrates the story. Laolao is a product of pre-Mao
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 | Jade Peony
by Wayson Choy,
Saint Martin's Press, Incorporated
240 pages $12 TP
ISBN: 0312186924
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First Novels First Novels - Ninth Century Fox
by Eva Tihanyi
Wayson Choy's The Jade Peony (Douglas & McIntyre, 240 pages, $10.95 paper) is about growing up in Vancouver's early Chinatown. The book, which began as a much anthologized short story almost twenty years ago, is divided into three sections,
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| First Novels First Novels - Ninth Century Fox
by Eva Tihanyi
Steppe (Thistledown, 140 pages, $13.50) by John Weier takes its title from the German word for prairie. The narrator, looking back on his Ukrainian Mennonite ancestry from his own life on the Canadian prairies, is pleased to learn that he's "not
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| First Novels First Novels - Ninth Century Fox
by Eva Tihanyi
In The Lusty Man (The Porcupine's Quill, 176 pages, $16.95 paper), Terry Griggs is concerned with heritage of a very different kind. Her protagonist, the clumsy Innis C. George, who is on a journey to find out about the "lusty man", a stone phallus
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Virginia Beaton
In a colliery town, sirens from the mine can mean cave-ins, explosions, or, as in the Westray disaster, sudden death.
Sheldon Currie, author of The Glace Bay Miners' Museum (Breton Books, 138 pages, $12.95 paper) was born in
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by I. M. Owen
I don't normally buy a book I haven't seen, but in 1981 I made an exception on receiving in the mail a circular for Atlas of Canada, published by The Reader's Digest Association (Canada) Ltd. in conjunction with the Canadian Automobile Association.
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| At Large At Large
by Michael Coren
Aquite remarkable book has appeared from a quite remarkable publisher. The former is entitled Degenerate Moderns, by E. Michael Jones. The latter is Ignatius Press, a Roman Catholic house based in the United States and rapidly
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| Outlook Outlook - If Not Poets, Who?
by Brian Bartlett
When we open a book for the first time, we never know where our experiences with it and the author will end.
In 1972, while an undergraduate in Fredericton, I read in The Fiddlehead a few rivetingly clear, lithe poems by my
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