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Book Reviews in May 1995 Issue

Shooting the Hippo
by Linda McQuaig,

pages $8.99 MM
ISBN: 0140174753
Book Review
Menaced by Monetarism
by Brian Fawcett
According to McQuaig, from the 1930s through the mid-1980s Canadian government manipulated the money system to achieve a relative balance between employment growth and the need to maintain investor confidence by controlling inflation.
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Everything Arrives at the Light
by Lorna Crozier,

pages $14.99 PT
ISBN: 0771024797
Book Review
The Force of Illumination
by Mary Dalton
This new book is full of hard knowledge; the poems are suffused with an awareness of dissolution and death, and of the irretrievably lost past.
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Sonya & Jack A Novel
by David Homel,

81 pages $18 TP
ISBN: 0002243741
Book Review
Back in the USSR
by Keith Nickson
It's an ambitious and exotic tale of Jewish-American immigrant life with a twist- this time the immigrants return to the Soviet Union seduced by the romance of socialism.
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Closer to the Sun
by Garth Drabinsky,

pages $25 TC
ISBN: 0771056508
Book Review
Taking Off Again
by Laura Paquet
What motivates a mogul? What makes entrepreneurs risk everything -- reputation, career and, of course, money -- in the pursuit of dreams that often only they can see?
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North Spirit
by Paulette Jiles,

288 pages $27.95 TC
ISBN: 0385254997
Book Review
A Culture on the Brink
by Wayne Grady
North Spirit is a memoir of the 10 years Jiles spent in northern Ontario, helping people in Cree and Ojibway villages set up Native-language radio stations supplied to them by the CBC and, later, returning to some of those villages as a playwright.
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Fiery Spirits
by Ayanna Black,

206 pages $15 TP
ISBN: 0006475205
Book Review
Words for Survival
by Olive Senior
A mixed bag of fiction, poetry, and testimony, Fiery Spirits brings together the work of 20 authors born in Africa, the Caribbean, and Canada.
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Chopin People
by Nazneen Sheikh,

pages $12.95 TC
ISBN: 0921633890
The Middle Children
by Rayda Jacobs,

pages $13.95 TP
ISBN: 0929005597
Book Review
Evolutionary Etudes
by Linda Leith
Nazneen Sheikh is an impressively talented novelist. The sensuousness of her prose is wedded throughout to sharp observation and a dry sense of humour.
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Maximum Minimum Medium A Journey Through Canadian Prisons
by Julius Melnitzer,

382 pages $28.95 TC
ISBN: 1550135856
Book Review
Prison Pros and Cons
by Jeff Walker
Two basic elements of this memoir clash cacophonously: the surprising cosiness of Mel's time in the joint, and Mel's insufferable whining, which actually starts right after his arrest.
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Sleep on, Beloved
by Cecil Foster,

352 pages $31 TC
ISBN: 0345390156
Book Review
From Here to There
by Uma Parameswaran
The novel records many "documentary" details, some of them dated, such as the average salary and working conditions of a domestic. There is double victimization in that the employer holds the power of deportation over her head.
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Stations of the Left Hand
by Don Domanski,

Consortium Book Sales & Distribution
pages $11.95 PT
ISBN: 0889104611
Book Review
In the Deep Woods
by Sandra Nicholls
Domanski's rich, odd metaphors, synaesthetic special effects, and hypnotic language will have you listening for "the cricket's blue telegram / among the weeds" and pulling "dragon-thoughts out of empty air".
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Cool The Signs & Meanings of Adolescence
by Marcel Danesi,

168 pages $40 TC
ISBN: 0802004679
Big Hair A Journey into the Transformation of Self
by Grant McCracken,

218 pages $0 TP
ISBN: 0879516577
Book Review
Thin on Top
by Glenn Sumi
When academics write about popular culture, it's like Pavarotti singing country and western. Something, almost always, is missing.
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Interviews
Home and Away - Elaine Kalman Naves speaks with Jane Urquhart
by Elaine Naves
This interview has been fused together out of two separate conversations with Jane Urquhart, one by phone on February 7, 1995 and the other in person on March 2 in Ottawa, the day after her husband had received the Order of Canada.
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Letters to Editor
Letters to the Editor
For once Michael Coren is right on the button! I have never been a fan either of his neoconservative agenda or the look-ma-no-hands schoolboy humour he enlists in its service, but my interest was piqued by his "Who Stole Reviewing?"
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On Earth As It Is
by Steven Heighton,

240 pages $16.95 TP
ISBN: 0889841519
Prose/Poetry
On earth as it is - an excerpt
by Steven Heighton
Could be that death comes in part because the sealed-up grief gradually squeezes out and destroys every essential life-organ.
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Profiles
Back to the Heart
by David Homel
Steven Heighton was born in Toronto of a Greek mother and a father whom he affectionately calls "a righteous Scot," a Navy man who was both father and soldier, teacher and preacher.
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Grammar Girl
Grammar Girl - U and Non-U
by Rose Thorne
Words can look right or wrong; they are formed by accretion and adaptation; they are shapes that time has established, that centuries of use have polished.
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Up Front
Up Front - Greatest Hits
by Barbara Carey
We live in a culture where everything has to be the BEST -- or else, so the underlying message goes, why should you bother buying it? It's the freshest breath, the brightest shine, the strongest pain reliever....
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Opinion
Cut the Crap about 'Kiddy Litter'!
by Joan Clark
Everyone knows that what we call literature would not exist without the territorial imperative, that compulsion that drives some of us to stake out an area of the imagination and intellect and copyright it as ours. There is a down side to this.
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The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B. A Novel
by Sandra Gulland,

288 pages $28 TC
ISBN: 000224392X
Outage A Journey Into Electric City
by B. W. Powe,

308 pages $19.95 TP
ISBN: 0394221249
Wigger
by Lawrence Braithwaite,

pages $10.95 PT
ISBN: 1551520206
No Angel Came
by John B. Boyle,

176 pages $15.95 TP
ISBN: 1895286026
I Am Come into My Garden A Love Story
by Allan Wargon,

224 pages $24.95 TC
ISBN: 1895897203
First Novels
First Novels - Sense and Sensibilities
by Eva Tihanyi
The painter's eye is everywhere, celebrating the physical world, "the pink bricks of Niagara, flesh of salmon, of watermelon, ripened peaches, the pink cheeks of young soldiers, young rebels, pushed into the earth."
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If We Are Women
by Joanna M. Glass,

104 pages $5.25 TP
ISBN: 0822215608
Flowers & No More Medea
by Deborah Porter,

124 pages $11.95 PT
ISBN: 0887545262
Serpent Kills Play
by Jim Millan,

116 pages $11.95 PT
ISBN: 0887545289
Hope Slide/Little Sister
by Joan MacLeod,

pages $14.95 TP
ISBN: 0889104638
Shared Anxiety Selected Plays
by George F. Walker,

527 pages $29.95 TP
ISBN: 0889104727
Whale Riding Weather
by Bryden MacDonald,

128 pages $14.95 TP
ISBN: 088922353X
Odd Fish A Play by Pamela Boyd
by Pamela Boyd,

96 pages $9.95 PT
ISBN: 0889951241
Brief Reviews
Brief Reviews - Theatre
by David Prosser
Maybe I'm suffering from a surfeit of surrealism, or maybe it's just that the idea of printing stage directions as if they were free verse strikes me as deeply pretentious.
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The Time of the Kingfishers
by David Watmough,

pages $14.95 TP
ISBN: 1551520087
Brief Reviews
Brief Reviews - Fiction
by Glenn Sumi
Lacking a firm plot and controlling narrator (someone who could bridge these events together in an artful way), the book feels less like a novel than a memoir penned by a pedantic, prattling uncle.
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Formosa Straits
by Anthony Hyde,

241 pages $0 TC
ISBN: 0679440399
Brief Reviews
Brief Reviews - Fiction
by Roger Mason
Formosa Straits rattles along, and if you don't mind formula writing and wooden dialogue, not to mention some pretty two-dimensional characterization, it might make a passable holiday read.
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Flatbush Odyssey
by Allen Abel,

352 pages $29.99 TC
ISBN: 0771007035
Brief Reviews
Brief Reviews - Non-Fiction
by David Homel
True to his trade as a journalist, Abel gives us a wider, historical view of his home ground.
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H in the Heart
by B. P. Nichol,

pages $19.99 PT
ISBN: 077106814X
Some Impossible Heaven of the Senses Last Poems of Tom Marshall
by Tom Marshall,

104 pages $23.95 TC
ISBN: 0887509657
The Colours of Heroines
by Lydia Kwa,

80 pages $11.95 TP
ISBN: 0889611998
The Words I Know
by Cathy Stonehouse,

pages $12.95 TP
ISBN: 0889740372
James I Wanted to Ask You
by Michael Holmes,

110 pages $12 TP
ISBN: 1550222236
Two Women in a Birth
by Daphne Marlatt, Betsy Warland,

170 pages $15 TP
ISBN: 1550710036
Brief Reviews
Brief Reviews - Poetry
by Colin Morton
Tom Marshall is most himself in "Fugue for Lonnie" -- the bemused lover, unable to assert himself too forcefully, constrained by a natural reticence, speaking quietly yet with deep conviction.
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The Golden Disk
by Bell Kilby,

32 pages $18.95 TC
ISBN: 0385254415
Songs Are Thoughts Poems of the Inuit
by Maryclare Foa, Neil Philip,

24 pages $19.95 TC
ISBN: 038525458X
Fearless Jake
by Margaret Haffner, Mark Thurman,

24 pages $5.99 MM
ISBN: 0590124242
Grandfather Drum
by Ferguson Plain,

32 pages $9.95 TC
ISBN: 0921827415
Freedom Child of the Sea
by Richardo Keens-Douglas, Julia Gukova,

24 pages $5.95 TP
ISBN: 1550373722
The Watcher
by Brenda Silsbe, Alice Priestley,

24 pages $4.95 TP
ISBN: 1550373846
Ladybug Garden
by Celia Godkin,

48 pages $18.95 TC
ISBN: 1550410830
The Sugaring-Off Party
by Jonathan London, Gilles Pelletier,

32 pages $16.95 CT
ISBN: 1895555841
Children's Books
Children's Books - Good Intentions
by Rhea Tregebov
For publishers and authors, it is hard to resist the temptation to make children's books didactic. For teachers and parents, it is hard to resist the opportunity for edification -- if not moralizing -- that children's books offer.
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At Large
At Large
by Michael Coren
Every day we see the edges of the intellectual and political envelope reduced and curtailed- if we are not careful there won't even be any room left for the address.
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Douglas Fetherling
Russell in Canada
by Douglas Fetherling
One of the most prolific and facile writers of his time, Russell also possessed invisible antennae that permitted him to pick up signals from any publication in the English-speaking world that seemed to be emitting a hint of liberalism.
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