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. Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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? Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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". Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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?" Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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.... Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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." Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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. Read more...
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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. Read more...
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