 Note from Editor Note from the Editor
by Olga Stein
The world convulsed violently in 1968 as students from Berkeley to Charles University took to the streets. That year, during the Olympic Games in Mexico City, 10,000 students gathered in a residential area called Tlatelolco to peacefully
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| | Book Review Three Poems - by Janusz Szuber
Crowing of Roosters. Crowing of roosters signals change in weather. Beneath bluish cloud the bluish pith of plums.
With ash-grey coating and sticky slit-There the sweet
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| | Book Review Hidden Border Crossings
by Norman Ravvin
A decade before the outbreak of the American Civil War, a Delaware-born woman named Mary Shadd published a rather unusual guide for prospective U.S. immigrants to Canada. At the same time that Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie
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| | Book Review Rebels, Yanks, and the rest
by Kenneth Stickney
How the teacher of undergraduate history groans when he comes to contemplate a course on Atlantic Canada in the American Civil War. The topic headings come naturally to mind: the Trent Affair, British-American diplomatic relations, Canadians in the U.S.
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| | Book Review Anti-Apartheid Epic
by Cranford Pratt
Contained between the covers of Robert Kinloch Massie's 1998 Lionel Gelber prizewinning volume, Loosing The Bonds: The United States and South Africa in the Apartheid Years, are two distinct and separable books. The first is a wide-ranging review
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|  | Man of Bone
by Alan Cumyn,
186 pages $17.95 PT
ISBN: 0864922299
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Book Review An Everyman's Inferno
by Roman Sabo
Once, I heard a man say that terrorism is the last defence against cynicism.
Once, I read a poem by a man held captive in Lebanon:
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| | Book Review A Certain Slant of Light
by Eric Ormsby
We measure the distances of stars by the years it takes for their light to reach us. At certain moments, we glimpse a light that died before our world was born, and we take pleasure in that acrid poignancy. Questions about the stars are questions about
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| | Book Review The Tap-tap of the Remington, the Tip-tip of the Boxer's Jab
by Austin Clarke
Portrait-painting is a difficult art, as Lord Butler, former Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, reminded us in his 1967 Romanes Lectures: "But the self-portrait, whether through the medium of a mirror or of a book, is even more so. [Samuel]
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| | Book Review Parcels from Overseas
by Clara Thomas
In his book about growing up in Barbados, Cecil Foster amply vindicates his brother's admonition, delivered as he left for Canada in 1979: "You will do well in Canada... All I ask is that you always remain humble and have humility, let us always remember
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| | Book Review This Heavy Craft
by Robin Healey
Rosa dei venti/Compass Rose is a generous selection of the poems of P.K. Page, with parallel Italian translations by Francesca Valente. Published in Italy, it is, presumably, intended to introduce Italian readers to the work of a distinguished, durable
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| | Book Review Shaowy Ruins of Colonial Architecture
by Scott McFarlane
Roy Miki's Broken Entries: Race, Subjectivity, Writing is a politically provocative collection of essays written by a prominent figure in the Japanese Canadian redress movement. Miki, who recently coordinated the controversial "Writing Thru `Race'
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| | Book Review Jane's Rapture
by Nikki Abraham
How and with what awareness do fiction writers transform the stuff of their everyday lives into art? Does knowing a writer's biography and sources enhance the work of art, diminish it or make no difference at all? As someone who has spent much of her ca
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| | Book Review Frontier Women, Wills of flint
by Janice Fiamengo
Reconstructing the lives of women in Canada's past has occupied researchers for at least the last three decades. Still a great deal of material-lodged in archives, homes, and memories-remains to be tapped. Such reconstruction takes different forms in
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| | Book Review Leaning on Wooden Crutches - Canada and the Human Security Agenda
by Robin Collins
Support for U.S. bombing runs into Sudan and Iraq notwithstanding, the human security agenda that has seized the imagination of Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs assumes that things have changed since the Cold War. "We started from the premise that
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| | Book Review Orient-bound
by Bruna Nota
The seventeen-car train trip that started in Helsinki and ended in Beijing has at least as many images as the thousands of kilometres travelled, and the innumerable experiences of the 234 women, twelve men, and train staff on the journey.
In Septe
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| | Book Review SIN Not Required
by Lorraine Johnson
There's little doubt that, sexually, we're a confused bunch. And when you add to the anxieties of libido the complications of commerce, as prostitution does, you're guaranteed to press explosive social buttons.
For decades, public debate on prosti
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| | Book Review The French Connection
by Mike Gasher
A non-fiction murder mystery, Last Stop, Paris is a book written for insiders. And the credibility of this courageous but convoluted exposé rests ultimately upon the reaction of those insiders-journalists, historians, government officials in Quebec
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| | Book Review In Defence of Beauty
by Amy Mullin
Erudite and playful, opinionated and open-minded, Francis Sparshott's The Future of Aesthetics is a splendid and splendidly accessible investigation of the intertwining futures of aesthetics, philosophy, the university, and civilization. The text
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| | Book Review Barques of Yore
by Phyllis Reeve
All is still in Victoria Harbour, circa 1900. A fleet of sailing vessels rests static on silvered glass. The Yacht Club's boathouse juts out, its details as magically distinct as an architect's model. This scene, so patently unreal, has been photographed
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| | Book Review Stewards of the Ice
by Kevin Keeffe
A long time ago, before the National Hockey League resembled a fast-food chain with fledgling franchises in such hockey hot-beds as Tampa Bay or Nashville; before those playing the game for a living became instant millionaires by the time they reached the
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|  | Free the Children
by Craig Kielburger, Kevin Major,
284 pages $29.99 TC
ISBN: 0771045921
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Books on Kids Books on Kids - Peer Defence
by Kim Mok
What's a thirteen-year-old doing when he takes on the heavy responsibility of eradicating an international problem? "Develop[ing] a social conscience"-that's how Craig Kielburger's book, Free the Children, answers this question as it chronicles the
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| | Interviews Playing Football in No-man's Land - Paul Keen speaks with Michael Longley
by Paul Keen
Born in Belfast in 1939, Michael Longley is a member of an exceptional generation of poets who came of age in Ireland during the violence of the 1960s. His poetry has been praised for its lyrical craftsmanship and its ability to convey
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| | Letters to Editor To the Editor
Jack Illingworth [in "A Duologue on the Notorious D.H.", Nov./Dec.1998] read our minds, that's exactly what No One Else is Lawrence! is about: an appreciation of Lawrence. I was much afeard reviewers would accuse Doug [Beardsley]
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| | First Novels First Novels - Slippery Moves
by Eva Tihanyi
El Dorado Shuffle (Cormorant, 323 pages, $19.95 paper) is Morgan Nyberg's first adult novel. (He won a Governor General's Award for his children's fiction, Galahad Schwartz and the Cockroach Army.) Basically, it is the story of Mac McKnight's
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|  | The Love of Women
by Jenifer McVaugh, Jenifer Mcvaugh,
250 pages $34.95 TC
ISBN: 0888871732
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First Novels First Novels - Slippery Moves
by Eva Tihanyi
The Love of Women (Borealis, 203 pages, no price given) by Jennifer McVaugh is a female picaresque, the light-hearted tale of Rosie Goshen, for whom life is simply "a matter of initiative". Rosie is raised in a convent and eventually married off
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|  | Moving Water
by Joan Skogan,
200 pages $16.95 TP
ISBN: 0888783868
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First Novels First Novels - Slippery Moves
by Eva Tihanyi
Joan Skogan's narrator in Moving Water (Beach Holme Publishing, 211 pages, $16.95 paper), also named Rose, is an artist, a woman of "restlessness and vagrancy" lured all her life by moving water: "[M]oving water meant that there might be more
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|  | Happy People
by William Landers,
pages $12.95 TC
ISBN: 0968362907
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First Novels First Novels - Slippery Moves
by Eva Tihanyi
The same, unfortunately, cannot be said about Happy People (Sinking Hill Publishing, 283 pages, $12.95 paper), a stereotypical high-school reunion story by William Landers. Bill, a software engineer, takes his new girlfriend (a knock-out strip
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| | First Novels First Novels - Slippery Moves
by Eva Tihanyi
William Gilkerson's Ultimate Voyage, subtitled A Book of Five Mariners (Shambhala, 314 pages, $35 cloth), is an allegorical adventure story with a magical twist. Gilkerson, who lives in Nova Scotia and is the author of ten non-fiction books
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| | First Novels First Novels - Slippery Moves
by Eva Tihanyi
Marc Milner, a history professor at the University of New Brunswick who has written non-fiction about the Canadian navy, also stays in familiar waters with Incident at North Point (Vanwell Publishing, 234 pages, $24.95 cloth). The novel is based
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| | Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Fiction
by Jennifer Duncan
Laurence, the title character of French-Canadian writer France Théoret's eleventh book (Mercury, 206 pages, $18.95 paper), skillfully translated by Gail Scott, is a thoughtful, determined young woman from a rural Quebec, Catholic family who resists
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| | Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Fiction
by Ted Whittaker
A clutch of short reviews could be written by exasperated specialists about the major topics touched upon in the sprawling, fitfully enlightening testament entitled Quantum Jump: A Survival Guide for the New Renaissance (Insomniac, 488 pages)
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|  | Limbo Road
by Ken Norris,
pages $15.95 TP
ISBN: 0889224013
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Poetry
by Rob McLennan
All that poet Ken Norris has ever needed is an editor. Knowing that publisher Karl Siegler has edited the manuscript of his newest collection, Limbo Road (Talonbooks, 160 pages, $14.95 paper), down from over 600 pages to its current 160, adds
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| | Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Theatre
by Diana Kuprel
For the past twenty years, Patrice Pavis, author of such (now) standard theoretical works as Languages of the Stage and Voix et images de la scène, has gained the respect of theatre students, practitioners, and critics for his fine, erudite
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| | Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Nature
by Myron Sloboda
Over the years, pictoral books on nature and parks have evolved in both style and substance. What was once a quiet, artful exploration of the wonders and vistas of nature, is now a somber and somewhat nervous portrayal of an ever diminishing number
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| | Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Nature
by Brian Brett
When I was thirteen years old, I was a desperate naturalist. I wanted to be a forest ranger or a watchman in a fire tower. I wanted to know everything about the forest-every spruce tree and weevil and salmonberry and grizzly bear. I tried to memorize
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| | Children's Books Children`s Books
by Julie Burtinshaw
"In my family, there's a story that gives me the shivers. Whenever my dad hears it, he says, that's life. It can turn on a dime." So writes the almost thirteen-year-old Jo for her school essay contest, and little does she know that she is about to
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|  | Bat Summer
by Sarah Withrow,
160 pages $8.95 TP
ISBN: 0888993528
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Children's Books Children`s Books
by Diana Brebner
Now that I've wrested my copy of Sarah Withrow's Bat Summer from my younger daughter, I can begin the difficult task of containing my enthusiasm for this book within the confines of a short review. Yes, this is a book with a "bat" theme, following
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| | Children's Books Children`s Books
by Marnie Parsons
Two years ago, I asked Dan Yashinsky to tell stories to my children's literature class. We were studying his wonderful collection, The Storyteller at Fault, and, since the book turns on the importance of stories as experiences of a moment, as oral
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| | Children's Books Children`s Books
by Sherie Posesorski
Canada, Ann Maria Weems was told, was so horribly cold in winter than when folks opened their mouths, their spit froze solid. But twelve-year-old Ann paid little mind because Canada was the "freedom land"-a place of liberty, safety, and sanctuary for
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| | Children's Books Children`s Books
by Erinn Banting
There is nothing like the first day of school to crank up a youngster's angst counter. And it is on a tremendously bumpy journey through the anxiety-ridden imagination of a little girl entering Grade One that Susan Musgrave whisks her readers off in
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| | The Wind in the Willows
by Kenneth Grahame, John Burningham, Peter Green, Ernest H. Shepard, Margaret Hodges, John Burningham, Ernest H. Shepard, Les Morrill, Roger Sale, Ernest H. Shepard, Laura Lydecker, Diane M. Ashachik, Laura Lydecker, Diane M. Ashachik, Don Daily, G. C. Barrett, Cliff Wright, Joan Collins, Justin Todd,
253 pages $22.95 LB
ISBN: 0884118770
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Children's Books Children`s Books
by Alicia Sloboda
"For every honest reader," wrote Kenneth Grahame, "there exist some half-dozen honest books, which he re-reads at regular intervals of six months or thereabouts. Whatever the demands on him, however alarming the arrears that gibber and grin in menacing
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| | Great Authors Great Authors of Our Time - Elena Poniatowska
Novelist, essayist, and journalist Elena Poniatowska is one of Mexico's leading and most influential literary figures. She was born in Paris in 1933, and since 1942, has lived in her mother's native Mexico, where the family moved after
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| | Great Authors Walking in the Minefield - Maria Elena de Valdes speaks with Elena Poniatowska
This past Fall, the world remembered the tragedy of Tlatelolco of thirty years ago when the Mexican government massacred hundreds of students who were taking advantage of media presence for the upcoming Olympic Games to protest government
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