 Note from Editor Editor's Note
by Olga Stein
The Fall 2002 issue of Common Knowledge, ran an interview with Gianni Vattimo, author of The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture. The Italian philosopher eloquently expounds his notion of "weak thought", an intellectual commitment to 'weakening' what are commonly held to be objective truths, by exposing them as the products not of divinely ordained, 'metaphysical' precepts, but of violent historical developments.
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 | Unity (1918)
by Kevin Kerr
Talonbooks
128 pages $16.95 paper
ISBN: 0889224617
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Book Review Reign of Death and Gallows Humour
by Keith Garebian
Because it has won the 2002 Governor General's Award for Drama, Unity (1918) cannot be simply praised for its merits as a tapestry of the flu epidemic that strikes the small town of Unity, Saskatchewan, during the last year of World War I. By honoring it as the best published play of the season, the GG jurors have pushed it to the forefront of Canadian drama for critical assessment.
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| Book Review Deconstructing Christianity's Origins
by Daniel A. Smith
In this book, Burton Mack (former Professor of Early Christianity at Claremont School of Theology) sets out to apply what he calls a "social theory of religions" to the beginnings of the Christian movement and to the development of Christianity over the last two millennia. This is by no means a small undertaking.
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| Book Review Stepping out of Time
by Christopher Doda
The Collected Poems of Henri Coulette is one of those books designed to rescue a writer from obscurity or, at least, draw some attention to him before the shifting sands of literary taste bury him completely. Despite early potential, Coulette remains a minor figure in the vast panorama of American poetry.
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| Book Review Entering Through A Gate of Dew
by Robyn Sarah
I was twelve when I first came across Chinese poetry of the Tang Dynasty. I had arrived early for a piano lesson when the previous student was running overtime; our teacher, issuing me into the den that served as anteroom, ran a cursory eye over his bookshelf and placed in my unsuspecting hands a volume of Chinese poetry in translation, saying, "Here's something you can look at while you wait.
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| Book Review Award-Winning Graceful Collection
by K. Gordon Neufeld
The title story of Gloria Sawai's moving new collectionùwhich won the Governor General's Award for Fictionùopens with a mentally-challenged woman sitting in a chair overlooking a quarry, spelling simple words out loud to herself. Behind her, in a trailer lost on the Saskatchewan prairie, her partner, Eli, a brilliant musician and reformed drunk, stirs from sleep, roused by passages from Handel's Messiah which interlace his dreams.
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 | Creation
by Katherine Govier
Random House Canada
306 pages $34.95 cloth
ISBN: 0679311815
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Book Review The Goings and Shortcomings of Noble Men
by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
The story of a man abandoning his wife in order to pursue some perceived noble course of action is as old as Homer's Odyssey. What a bitter decision it must have been for Odysseus to make upon the birth of his son Telemachus. But there they were, the relentless Menaleus and Agamemnon, knocking at the castle door, demanding that the brand new daddy honour a commitment to protect fickle Helen's marriage to Menaleus
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| Book Review Scrawling Out of Death's Way
by Sam Ajzenstat
Socrates is supposed to have said that wisdom is learning how to die. Alistair Mackenzie whose attempt to size up his life makes up Neil Bissoondath's quietly but deeply moving new novel, Doing the Heart Good, wouldn't have much patience for that idea of wisdom.
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| Book Review Cogitations of a Serious Womanizer
by Sharon Abron Drache
A Man of His Time would have been a better title for the all-embracing Proustian romp that the novelist, Rick Salutin, delivers in The Womanizer. Similar to A Man of Little Faith, which incidentally won the 1988 Books in Canada First Novel Award, The Womanizer's main turf is ideas, with the added frisson of having been inspired by numerous women, "one night stands", and "repeaters", who enter and exit the protagonist's life.
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| Book Review A Cook Scours the World
by Leanne D'Antoni
Anthony Bourdain, the author of A Cook's Tour: In Search of the Perfect Meal, poses on the cover, lean and dangerous-looking in a camouflage tank-top with a tattoo around his bicep. This, his follow up to the much-acclaimed Kitchen Confidential, is less a cook's tour and more a cook's tour of duty; a sort of extreme sport of the culinary world.
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| Book Review An Indiana Jones Type Explores Ethiopia
by Christopher Ondaatje
As any intrepid traveller will tell you, it is the accident of discovery that propels the true adventurer, and the stimulation of achievement, that drives the explorer. Being there is important.
Tahir Shah is a most extraordinary writer. Born into a respected Afghan family and educated in England, Shah has taken us in his other books into the underbelly of India, the myth of Godwanaland and into the heartland jungles of Peru.
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 | Seven Journeys
by Doris Shadbolt
Douglas & McIntyre
142 pages $26.95 paper
ISBN: 1550549227
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Book Review Spiritual Journeys of Emily Carr
by Linda Morra
Doris Shadbolt is one among a number of illustrious Canadian art historians and critics, including Maria Tippett, Paula Blanchard, and Kate Braid, who have been fascinated by, written prolifically about, and championed the life and work of Emily Carr. The range of Shadbolt's output extends temporally and critically from her first book, The Art of Emily Carr (1979), which examines Carr's visual productions, to the editing of The Complete Writings of Emily Carr (1993).
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| Book Review Writer in the World
by T.F. Rigelhof
"I am exhausted. My work is complete," V.S. Naipaul told friends at his seventieth birthday party this past summer. There will be no new books, no more journeys. "I travel to discover other states of mind.
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 | Unended Quest
by Karl Popper
Routledge Classics
320 pages $23.21 paper
ISBN: 0415285909
|  | Karl Popper
by Routledge
Routledge Classics
431 pages $23.21 paper
ISBN: 0415285941
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Book Review Karl Popper Centenary
by Barry Allen
The nineteenth century French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857) invented a scientific philosophy he called "positivism." In Austria and Germany in the early twentieth century, a new positivism appeared, called logical positivism, associated with names like Ernst Mach, Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, and Otto Neurath. This obscure central European movement became unexpectedly decisive for philosophy written in English in the twentieth century, thanks to Adolph Hitler.
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| Book Review Outside the Petri Dish of the Poetic Imagination
by Andrew Steinmetz
Where the Words Come From: owes its existence to Tim Bowling who modestly asserts in the introduction that his role in the entire production "was a minor one." This is far from the truth. Bowling set out to mark the loss of Al Purdy in 2000 by first soliciting "A collection of interviews pairing younger and/or less well-known poets with some of our countries most celebrated practitioners of the art." The pairings cover a wide range, from Avison to Zwicky.
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| Book Review Get Tay Fuck Ootma Road: The Avant-Garde's Friendly Face
by Carmine Starnino
"Perhaps the ideal place to begin any discussion of the poetry of Christopher Dewdney is the point at which the reader turns away in bafflement and self-doubt."
û Alistair Highet, "Manifold Destiny: Metaphysics in the Poetry of Christopher Dewdney"
No, Mr. Highet, better we start with your sentence.
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| Book Review Callous Big Business vs. Ruthless Protest
by Lee Lamothe
Reading and re-reading Andrew Nikiforuk's award-winning Saboteurs is illuminating and frustratingùboth.
As an exposT of the dirty deeds of Big Oil and corporate ruthlessness in the oil patch it's an eye-opener, for we Easterners tend to think that the power produced when we flick a switch, light the gas fireplace, or activate the chainsaw, comes from some magical place where the marvels of engineering and technology produce energy without harm or pain to anyone.
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| Book Review Back to the Days of Ovid
by Timothy Kevin O'Keeffe
Since arriving in Canada as an exile in the wake of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Josef Skvorecky hasùin addition to his considerable contributions as publisher and teacherùfurnished readers with stories and novels posited in a variety of settings: from Nazi-occupied (The Bass Saxophone) to cold-war Communist countries (The Republic of Whores), to thinly disguised Canadian locales and institutions (Two Murders in my Double Life).
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 | Seek My Face
by John Updike
Knopf
276 pages $35 cloth
ISBN: 0375414908
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Book Review Updike Gets Good With Women
by Joel Yanofsky
This is a story with a happy ending. More than a decade ago, I interviewed Canadian supermodel Monica Schnarre. Although she was still a teenager at the time, she'd already been a celebrity for years. She was in Montreal to promote her memoir, which consisted mainly of fashion and makeup tips for girls who were just like her, though, let's face it, not nearly as leggy.
All I recall now of Schnarre's book is that it had more exclamation marks than pages. (I counted.
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| Book Review The Mohawk Princess
by Anne Cimon
As we learn in Flint & Feather, Charlotte Gray's erudite and enthusiastic biography of Canadian native poet E.Pauline Johnson, known also by her Mohawk name, Tekahionwake, her older sister, Evelyn, played a major role in how the poet is remembered. As Gray explains in her Afterword, "Evelyn burnt as many of her sister's papers as she could lay her hands on.
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| Book Review The New (Revisionist) CanLit Encyclopedia
by W. J. Keith
How can one review, both promptly and adequately, a double-columned book of well over 1300 pages? Obviously, one can't. All I can do under the circumstances is to institute a series of spot-checks concentrating for the most part on my own special interests and/or obsessions and then report on my findings. (This explains why, though the book is equally comprehensive on francophone writing, I have generally confined my attention to literature in English.
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| Book Review No Immunity:US Lit Celebrities Take a Hit
by Harold Hoefle
Reading B.R. Myers' A Readers' Manifesto, noticing his bows to some of the great modern German-language writerùBroch, Musil, CanettiùI kept thinking of a permanently bowed German: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. An eighteenth-century hunchback, mathematician, and aphorist, Lichtenberg once mused on the Myers of his day: "Whenever he composes a critical review, I have been told, he gets a tremendous erection.
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| Book Review Human Wreakage
by Rondi Adamson
IN The past decade the Second World War has become a favorite with moviegoers, many of them too young to have even a grandfather who was involved. Tom Brokaw's "Greatest Generation" series and Stephen Ambrose's numerous bestsellers are unprecedented in their across-the-board popularity.
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 | A Picnic on Ice
by Matthew Sweeney
Vehicule Press, Signal Editions
140 pages $16 paper
ISBN: 1550651633
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Book Review Affinities for the Strange and Subversive
by David O'Meara
Half a dozen years ago, Irish Poet, Matthew Sweeney, co-edited an anthology of poems called Emergency Kit; a kind of alt-poetry collection subtitled "Poems for Strange Times". It's an astounding and refreshing anthology, intended to bring together unconventional voices on the strangeness of our last century.
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 | Surrender
by Roy Miki
Mercury Press
131 pages $15.95 paper
ISBN: 1551280957
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Book Review Word-Pranks and Identity Politics
by Jack Illingworth
When Surrender was awarded the 2002 Governor General's Award for poetry in English, it received some fleeting, belated, and largely vapid media attention. Journalists (who had, at best, given the book a single glance before safely paraphrasing its press release) represented it as a sort of verse Obasan, a moving account of the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War.
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| Book Review A False Sense of Awe
by Maureen Lennon
In a recent interview, Gail Anderson-Dargatz explained that mystical experiences, as she understands them, manifest in "à a feeling of profound awe..." People who undergo them have a mysterious sense of 'understanding' settle over them, although they are unable to articulate what it is they have come to understand. Often, they assume that they have come to understand God.
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| Book Review Sex and Drive in the Victorian Era
by Raj Mehta
Michel Faber's first novel, a satire of sorts, Under the Skin, and his collection of rather crotchety short stories, Some Rain Must Fall, have attracted much flattery and even infatuation over the past few years. His writing has come to foil expectation and indeed faithful description, infused as it is with a kind of subjective strangeness and fullness of subtlety that swings between hyperactivity and quiescence.
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 | Quentins
by Maeve Binchy
McArthur & Company
345 pages $24.95 paper
ISBN: 1552783081
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Book Review A Gathering at Quentins
by Angela Narth
Summer rumours to the effect that Maeve Binchy was about to retire had her reading public very concerned. Catching everyone by happy surprise, the recent release of Quentins has been at least a temporary relief from the spectre of the end of this Dublin author's wonderful body of work.
It has been said that reading one of Binchy's stories is like coming home. Never was this sentiment more true. Quentins, a name already familiar to Binchy fans, is a novel about a restaurant.
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 | Pot Planet
by Brian Preston
Grove Press
289 pages $24.95 paper
ISBN: 0802138977
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Book Review High-Minded Reporting
by John Ayre
A few years ago RollingStone magazine asked Vancouver journalist Brian Preston to write a feature on the burgeoning pot-growing business of British Columbia. It was logical territory for Preston. Known to smoke more than a toke or two, Preston had made a specialty of writing articles about quirky religious movements, New Age retreats and counter culture lifestyles for magazines like Details, Playboy and Vogue.
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 | Playing Through
by Curtis Gillespie
Doubleday Canada
321 pages $34.95 cloth
ISBN: 0385658818
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Book Review Playing The Scottish Field
by Gordon Phinn
Wedding ancient eastern philosophies to modern western sports and hobbies has become something of a cottage industry in the last fifty years. From Herrige's Zen And The Art Of Archery to the Tao of Pooh, the wisdom of the orient has been relentlessly shoehorned into the laisser faire dogmas of packaging and profit.
Perhaps a little too much fretting over the possibility of a timid CanLit remake of Michael Murphy's epochal Golf In The Kingdom (1972) made me approach Mr.
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| Book Review Looking for 'It' by the Seashore
by Tom Abray
For one year in the late 1990s Richard Taylor and his family traded the suburbs of Ottawa for the east coast of Australia. The events of that year form the narrative structure of House Inside the Waves. The book is marketed as a memoir but is more of an extended personal essay than a chronological history, for it touches on various subjects, such as, domestic life, surfing, literature, music, history, and the quest for what the author calls it.
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| Book Review The Virgin MaryùHistory or Fiction?
by Gwen Nowak
In A Virgin Conceived Mary Foskett invites us to join her on a journey into virgin territory. Given the 'virginal' destination it is appropriate that Foskett's chosen path is "a road not previously taken"; i.e., she claims to be the first Marian scholar to enter in to [to penetrate?] this virgin world and to fully explore it
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| Book Review A Critic in New York City
by Matt Sturrock
"You are holding a hunk of old journalism." Thus begins Anthony Lane's introduction to his book, Nobody's Perfect, a voluminous anthology of movie reviews, literary essays, and profiles written during the first decade of his tenure at The New Yorker
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| Book Review Poison Pens
by Shane Neilson
Why kill a book with kindness when one can play with venom? The bile, the brilliance: when dyspeptic pens slay dross and deficient wits, readers thrill at the panache. Reviewing is often a hack's artùa plodding description of character and plotùuntil the sword is taken up, and a book is disemboweled in public. Reading the binary thumbs-up vs.
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| Interviews Interview with Doris Shadbolt
by Linda Morra
Doris Shadbolt, author of The Art of Emily Carr (1979) and editor of The Complete Writings of Emily Carr (1993), was awarded the Order of Canada in 1976. Her most recent book, published by Douglas & McIntyre, is Seven Journeys, although her paperback copy of Bill Reid is scheduled to appear in May 2003. She was interviewed in the studio of her late husband, Jack Shadbolt.
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| Essays Don Bell's FoundE Bookes
As mentioned last month, we'd been planning for quite some time to write a column called Trout Fishing in Albania about a book which may, or may not, exist. It stems from a conversation I had with Montreal book dealer Michel Lanteigne around the time I had started this book scouting business.
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| Essays Languages Buzzing Around Us
by Tess Fragoulis
The Use and Abuse of Dialect and Foreign Tongues in English Novels
The business of the novel should never be about private revelations, games or jokes hidden in foreign words, or the erecting of self-serving obstacles made up of clumps of letters that the reader will trip on. Nor should it be about short-cuts, catch-words or phrases that take the place of the careful and slow weaving of details that creates convincing atmospheres and characters.
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 | A Tourist's Guide to Glengarry
by Ian McGillis
Porcupine's Quill
185 pages $19.95 paper
ISBN: 0889842469
|  | Some Girls Do
by Teresa McWhirter
Polestar
148 pages $21.95 paper
ISBN: 1551924595
|  | Stay
by Aislinn Hunter
Polestar
269 pages $21.95 paper
ISBN: 1551925680
| |  | Tiger Dreams
by Almeda Glenn Miller
Polestar
363 pages $21.95 paper
ISBN: 1551925729
|  | How the Blessed Live
by Susannah M. Smith
Coach House Books
168 pages $18.95 paper
ISBN: 1552451003
|  | An Expectation of Home
by Larry Lynch
Gasperau Press
301 pages $21.95 paper
ISBN: 189403161X
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First Novels First Novels by W.P Kinsella
by W. P. Kinsella
How the Blessed Live by Susannah M. Smith (Coach House Books, $18.95, 168 pages, ISBN: 1552451003). With beautiful language and the lyrical voice of a poet Smith carries off this retelling of the Isis/Osiris myth. What makes the novel work is that the reader does not need to know the myth to enjoy the story. When the twins Lucy and Levi are born their mother, Wren, dies. They are raised by their grief-stricken father in an idyllic setting on an island on Lake Ontario.
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| Brief Reviews Theatre by Keith Garebian
by Keith Garebian
In the Wings by Nicky Guadagni
From the novel by Carole Corbeil
Directed by Layne Coleman
Theatre Passe Muraille, Nov. 8-Dec 8, 2002
Layne Coleman's production was a homage to his late wife, the brilliant arts critic Carole Corbeil, whose second and final novel is, among other things, a homage itself. It is the story of Allan O'Reilly, a brilliant young actor who is about to play Hamlet, and Alice Riverton, an actress who falls in love with him
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| Children's Books Children's Books
by Jeffrey Canton
The year 2002 was another fabulous year in the world of children's books but Books in Canada wanted to offer readers a best of the best list to make sure that readers started off 2003 on the right foot. Asking our children's book reviewers what their top picks were proved that almost every reader reads with their own very particular point of view. It's a fascinating look at the hits of the past year and a great way to kick off the New Year.
Theo Heras, Children's Specialist at Lillian H.
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 | The Corner Garden
by Lesley Krueger
Penguin Canada
336 pages $24 Trade Paperback
ISBN: 0143012738
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Children's Books Children's Books
by Karen Krossing
Lesley Krueger has chosen a diary form in writing The Corner Garden. Compelling secrets are revealed in the notebooks of teenager Jessie Barfoot, adult Martha van Tellingen, and the teenage Martha, or Maaike, as she was known. These characters use their diaries the way they were meant to be usedùas a way to understand their worlds and to express painful secrets.
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| Children's Books Children's Books
by Jeffrey Canton
Katherine Paterson weaves wonder into her fiction. She's able to cast a line from her imagination out to young readers, drawing them into the midst of worlds totally unlike any other they've ever encountered.
Eleven-year-old Angel Morgan isn't sure how she's going to cope with what's happening in her world.
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| Children's Books Children's Books
by Trudee Romanek
Did you know that Asian sailors may have visited Canada before western explorers arrived? Or that "dumbledore" (aside from being the name of the headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the Harry Potter books) is the Newfoundlander nickname for bumblebee? Christopher Moore's new compendium of all that is Canada is a wealth of fascinating information.
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| Children's Books Children's Books
by Jeffrey Canton
With every novel, Martha Brooks pushes the boundaries of Young Adult fiction a little bit harder, a little bit further. She does it ever so quietlyùperhaps hoping that we'll get so embroiled in the lives of her characters that we won't notice what's different about her approach this time or where it is that she's taking us.
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| Children's Books Children's Books
by Olga Stein
Nan Gregory, author of the best-selling How Smudge Came, gives us a delightful picture book yet again. Little Amber has just started kindergarten. She enjoys classroom activitiesùpainting a mural, quiet reading timeùas well as outdoors onesùriding on a swing, and playing with her friends in the snow. What she doesn't like is waiting in the office after everyone else has gone home because her father is late picking her up. One such afternoon, Amber imagines a way of teaching her dad a lesson.
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 | Hoot
by Carl Hiaasen
Knopf
304 pages $23.95 cloth
ISBN: 0375821813
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Children's Books Children's Books
by Jeffrey Canton
Hoot, Carl Hiaasen's first book for younger readers is part mystery, part slapstick comedy and is a totally satisfying and truly environmentally friendly novel. On one level, it's a story about Roy Eberhardt, the new kid in this otherwise sleepy little Florida town who has caught the eye of the local bully and has to find a way of dealing with this dilemma as well as make his own place in his new community.
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