Book Review Ghost Baskeball by Michael Greenstein Quietly prolific, Matt Cohen writes interesting, but occasionally flawed fiction. If his short stories lack the mastery of Alice Munro's or Mavis Gallant's, his novels fall short of Hemingway's or Updike's virtuoso performances (cited in Last Seen as last Read more...
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Book Review Psychoanlysis, Culture, & New Age by Charles Levin "I haven't been pussyfooting around for the last five chapters. I've been writing psychoanalytic critique."-M. D. Faber, New Age Thinking "With some minds, truth is, in effect, not so cruel a thing after all, seeing that, Read more...
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| Dobryd 170 pages $16.95 ISBN: 1550544381
| Book Review Opening the Barn Door by Mary Soderstorm Recently, during a time when I was much haunted by the faces of today's children of war, I re-read Ann Charney's novel Dobryd. Like those under-nourished living ghosts of Bosnia, Tadzhikistan, and Rwanda, she spent the first part of her life in peril. Read more...
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Book Review Cultiver son Arpent de Neige by Bert Archer The relationship of writing to the land on which it is written, and the pursuant questions relating to the existence and nature of national or regional literatures, are mostly the stuff of theory. Is there such a thing as an English literature? Read more...
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Book Review The Best Worst Hurricane Shelter by Kildare Dobbs The Manleys of Jamaica were leaders in the emergence of new nations in the Caribbean, Norman for a free federation of the British West Indies, his son Michael for a socialist Jamaica. Rachel Manley, a poet who lives in Canada, Read more...
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Book Review Functions Particularly Vital! by George Jonas After many agreeable books of fiction, Howard Engel (known as "Howie" to co-workers and friends) has written an agreeable book of non-fiction. The subject, as evident from the title, is the people who put other people to death. Read more...
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Book Review A Modern Bibliomancer by Tim Bowling Few people ever remark about a new book of poems, "It's a real page-turner, I couldn't put it down." No doubt this says a great deal about contemporary reading preferences. (Poetry is the poor sister of the written arts, Read more...
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Book Review Inside Outdoors by Eric Ormsby Charles Lillard writes with great exuberance about the forests and rivers and the inhabitants of the Northwest Coast, but despite its bluff, outdoorsy exterior, this is a recondite book. He writes for a select few. Read more...
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Book Review Tailor Provocateur by Hugh Graham Imagine that you are the United States. You have agreed to return the Panama Canal to Panama in 1999. But in the post-Cold-War world with a wide-open market, with hordes of oil tankers squeezing back and forth through the isthmus, you have come Read more...
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Book Review If He Were Him by I. M. Owen Clark Blaise was well-established as a short-story writer before he published a novel. Brevity suits him; and his new novel is actually a novella, consisting of a prologue, an epilogue, and eight brief stories, two of them narrated in the first person. Read more...
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Book Review Another Lament for the Pretence of Fiction by Judith Walker "Begin on a midsummer evening. Let them have everything that is pleasant." With these words the narrator of Margaret Drabble's latest novel sets up the characters that will be moved relentlessly around the chessboard plot. Some characters, Read more...
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Book Review An Exasperating Humanist by Michael Fitz-James Whatever one's position on "women's reproductive rights", no-one can deny Henry Morgentaler's monumental impact on Canadian law and medicine. His efforts to ensure that women have access to safe and legal abortions have been going on almost Read more...
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Book Review 3SC vs. WVS by Ian Coutts Canadians today are a cranky lot. We vote against the Charlottetown accord, we're rude to the prime minister on TV, in Toronto they ban smoking but everyone goes right on doing it. Have we really turned from being a nation of docile sheep into being Read more...
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Book Review Lucky to Get That Far by Harold Fiske In early 1994, the comedian John Candy died of a heart attack in his sleep in Durango, Mexico, while filming Wagons East, a movie everybody agrees was a turkey in the raw. It was no surprise that Candy kicked the bucket-he was a whale of a guy, Read more...
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Book Review Schools Beset on Left & Right by Dan Gardner After a six-month deluge of editorials and articles on education-are standards dropping? are the kids illiterate?-Globe & Mail readers were presented with the best evidence of the state of education in January. They may not have recognized it for what Read more...
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Book Review Undergrads: Beware, Don't Despair by Leon Craig "Learning is the comprehensive engagement in which we come to know ourselves and the world around us. It is a paradoxical activity: it is doing and submitting at the same time. And its achievements range from being merely aware, to what may be called Read more...
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Book Review Death of Life by Ellen Roseman Confederation Life was Canada's fourth largest insurance company, with $19-billion in assets, when it was seized by regulators in August 1994. While Mr. McQueen, a seasoned business journalist with the Financial Post, calls his tale a whodunnit, Read more...
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Book Review Only the Language Laughs by Ted Whittaker Near the end of a 1966 essay reprinted in this reader ("Harrison College and Me"), Austin Clarke admits that, for him, his youthful achievements could not validly be collectively recognizable. "I understand now.why I did compete in individual sports. Read more...
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Interviews Say It in Elephant - Kim Echlin interviewed by Eva Tihanyi by Eva Tihanyi Kim Echlin was born in 1955 in Burlington, Ontario, but currently lives in Toronto. She has studied French at the Sorbonne, completed a doctoral thesis on Ojibway story-telling, travelled extensively through the Marshall Islands, China, France, Read more...
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| Cameron & Me by Dorothy J. Harris, Marilyn Mets, 32 pages $16.95 TC ISBN: 0773730044
| Interviews Story Intact - Frieda Wishinsky speaks with Joan Harris & Marilyn Mets by Frieda Wishinsky It's a magical process. A writer has an idea. She develops it into a story. A publisher likes the story and finds an illustrator. The illustrator reads the story and translates the words into visual images. Each person in the process brings her own Read more...
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Letters to Editor To the Editor Not Exactly a Beast In my review of Alice Munro's Selected Stories (December), I describe a character in the story "Vandals" as a "destructive beast". Professor Gerald Noonan (of Wilfrid Laurier University) has brought Read more...
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First Novels First Novels - The Cure for Mad Cow? by Eva Tihanyi Knopf Canada kicks off its 1997 "New Face of Fiction" campaign with A Scientific Romance (312 pages, $29.95 cloth), by Ronald Wright, among whose previous works are five acclaimed travel books. The title is a Victorian term for speculative Read more...
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First Novels First Novels - The Cure for Mad Cow? by Eva Tihanyi In The Illuminated Manuscript (Mercury Press, 384 pages, $24.95 paper), Ruth Moffatt travels in the opposite direction: into the past, but with some very interesting twists along the way. The most striking feature of this novel is its form. Read more...
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First Novels First Novels - The Cure for Mad Cow? by Eva Tihanyi Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for My Darling Dead Ones (Knopf Canada, 196 pages, $26.95 cloth), by Erika de Vasconcelos. This, too, is a multi-generational novel about women and their relationships, primarily to one another. Read more...
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First Novels First Novels - The Cure for Mad Cow? by Eva Tihanyi Keel Kissing Bottom (Random House, 252 pages, $27.95 cloth), by Elizabeth de Freitas, is a quirky, surreal, selfconscious work, redeemed only by the author's talent with language. First, the preposterous story line: Mary Seeburth, Read more...
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Children's Books Children`s Books by Jeffrey Canton Good historical fiction re-creates for the reader a real sense of a particular time and place. It's often a question of striking just the right tone rather than blitzing the reader with an overwhelming litany of historical facts and details.
And Read more...
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Children's Books Children`s Books by Don Aker "Ruth is my wife. She likes sugar in her coffee but not in tea. Shave every day." These simple instructions recorded in a file marked "Disease" capture succinctly the tragedy of Alzheimer's, the disorder that afflicts Ernie Mather in Mary Woodbury's novel Read more...
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Children's Books Children`s Books by Welwyn Katz My favourite picture-book of all time is Simon & the Wind. The writing in it awes me. In that little book, Tibo manages to define, for me at least, one of the most important aspects of the human condition. In 270 words, more or less, he does what Read more...
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Children's Books Children`s Books by Gillian Chan From personal experience, I know what a major upheaval immigrating to a new country can be: exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. It's hard to imagine what children must feel when faced with this, especially when they do not always understand all Read more...
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Children's Books Children`s Books by Allison Sutherland Ask any adult what comic books they used to read as a child, and you get a slightly sheepish smile of remembered, mildly illicit pleasure. Uncle Scrooge McDuck. Archie Veronica. Superboy. And of course a Classic Comic or two. A Tale of Two Cities... Read more...
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Children's Books Children`s Books by Diana Halfpenny When the first novels published by Les éditions la courte échelle are translated into English, they are put out by Formac Publishing Company Ltd. Coupled with the vast quantities of these books available, this name suggests formulaic writing, stereotype Read more...
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At Large At Large - White Mischief by Michael Coren Perhaps the most successful and laudable international political campaign since the Second World War was the one launched by the free world to end apartheid in South Africa. A combination of economic boycotts, physical isolation, Read more...
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Douglas Fetherling Douglas Fetherling - Byron: Manic Celeb by Douglas Fetherling Almost a century and a quarter after his death by fever (at Missolonghi in Greece, while symbolically helping the local insurgents fight the Turks), Lord Byron remains a figure of controversy and disgust. The fact that a new biography, Read more...
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First Novel Award Student Writing Awards 1996-1997 The winners of the Books in Canada Student Writing Awards are as follows: 1st place university/college undergraduate level: "Clever" by Rachel Li Wai Suen (York University); 2nd place university/college undergraduate level: Read more...
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