| The Best of the Group of Seven by Joan Murray, pages $14.99 PT ISBN: 0771066740
| | People from Our Side A Life Story with Photographs & Oral Biography by Peter Pitseolak, Dorothy H. Eber, Ann Hanson, 168 pages $55 TC ISBN: 0773509968
| | Frame of Mind Viewpoints on Photography in Contemporary Canadian Art by Daina Augaitis, pages $40 TP ISBN: 0920159540
| | | Historic Fort York by Carl Benn, pages $29.95 TP ISBN: 0920474799
| | A Pictorial History of St. Paul's Anglican Church, Halifax, Nova Scotia by J. Philip McAleer, 160 pages $19.95 PF#TP ISBN: 0929112199
| | Marble Woman by Yuri Dojc, pages $29.95 TC ISBN: 189556526X
| | | Prairie Skies by Courtney Milne, C. Milne, Courtney Milne, 128 pages $34.95 TC ISBN: 1895618150
| Book Review Techniques of Imagination by Richard Perry The erotic meets the esoteric in the season's coffee-table titles. Read more...
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Book Review Widening the Investigation by Robin Skelton The best detective stories make community an integral part of criminality. Read more...
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Book Review Dark Days Always Pressing by Birk Sproxton Gordon Bowker's biography of Malcolm Lowry features a steadiness of purpose, a concern for truth as conventionally understood, and a quiet, understated style - virtues seemingly unknown to the fiery and mercurial Lowry. Read more...
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Book Review Turn Off, Tune Out by George Galt Most Canadians don't give a damn about the CBC. The real problem is that the English-language television network hasn't earned the loyalty and affection of enough viewers. Fewer and fewer taxpayers watch it. Read more...
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Book Review Complaint and Celebration by Marlene Cookshaw The poems are both complaint and celebration of the belief, expressed in the last tine of the closing poem, that "an hour's immortal even if a life isn't." Read more...
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Book Review Nobody's Pushover by Jack Batten You probably figure there isn't another tragic story from the big house, another wacko anecdote about a colourful con or a sadistic guard, another boring statistic about the failure of the penitentiary system, that you really want to hear again. Read more...
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Book Review The Inner Lives of Women by Carole Giangrande Scheier doesn't yet have the knack of developing characters, not with the depth required for a longer form of writing. Her creations could be fascinating people if she would remove their placards and just let them live. Read more...
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Book Review Divided We Stand by Christopher Moore United We Fall is the kind of book Brian Mulroney might write if he were to join a therapy group for failed prime ministers and try to work out all that bitterness. It's hardly an analysis of the Charlottetown accord. Read more...
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Book Review What Fresh Hells are These by Ted Whittaker If Canada becomes a Third World country, we may realize that all we got is rhythm, along with the secret thrill of knowing that we're richly ambiguous creatures inhabiting the exemplary, evolving "state without walls." Read more...
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Book Review Rhetorics of Persuasion by Lakshmi Gill It seems to me that these two books aim to modify the sensibility of a white reading public that, out of apathy, has somehow missed the dialectics - begun by Nietzsche and re-conceptualized by French Marxist sociology in the past 60 years. Read more...
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Book Review Polyvalent Phenomena by Maggie Helwig Even if you discount Bernard Arcand's defensive tone and the inevitable problems of translation, it remains a very odd book, a rambling intellectual study of pornography that suddenly pulls up into a most unexpected conclusion. Read more...
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Book Review Renewed Expectations by Kathryn Woodward No pinches of odd historical detail liven up these stories; they are not necessary. Nor are there any beautiful-plus-wildly-successful characters. Read more...
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Book Review Learning Curves by George Kaufman Criticizing our schools has become a growth industry, spawning numerous newspaper and magazine articles, TV special reports, and books. Read more...
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Book Review Anger and Hope by Phil Hall There are too many days when such optimism sounds just plain dumb, no matter how well it's expressed. So here are books to read on such days. You can't pay the rent? Voting seems ludicrous? Here are lives, voices, and tools, reminders of anger and hope. Read more...
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Book Review Game Misconduct by Brian Fawcett There is a great deal of uneasy talk these days among authors about how publishers' marketing departments are becoming the de facto editors within the industry, choosing not just which books are sellable, but also determining what the books will contain. Read more...
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Interviews Committed to Excellence by Elaine Kalman Louis Dudek is an apostle of high culture and hard work. Read more...
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Letters to Editor Letters to the Editor Children's book authors and illustrators are professionals. While the work they create may seem simple, these creators spend years working on books before they can be published. Read more...
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Prose/Poetry Flying Blind - excerpt by Robert Harlow No one should name a baby until they've lived with it long enough to find out who it is. A child comes with a personality, and part of bonding with it should be finding out what its name is. Read more...
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Profiles Its Own Amazing Order by Beverley Daurio My impression of Moure as sceptical about how information is presented in the media is supported by her own poetry and essays. Read more...
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First Novels First Novels - Leagues of Their Own by Gary Draper Much of the book's humour arises from the interplay between Doc and others, especially his sometime roommate Doug. Read more...
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George Fetherling Last Words - Flashes and Fizzles by Alec McEwen 'Ecotage', which came into use about 20 years ago, is a shortened combination of ecology and sabotage, both of which made their first appearance in the 19th century. Read more...
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Non-fiction by Ramabai Espinet The connectedness of Caribbean poetry to the merging of the sensual and the spiritual is explored with a poet's sense of language and a scholar's thoroughness. Read more...
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Non-fiction by Allan Casey At the turn of the century, a Canadian woman cast no vote, was excluded from the machinery of state and church government, and came by wealth only through husband and father. Read more...
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Non-fiction by Stanley Fogel Those of you with the sharpest of memories (intact, no doubt, because of an aversion to accelerated postmodem civilization and its discontents) will already know me. I am Books in Canada's designated Kroker reviewer. Read more...
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Brief Reviews Brief reviews - Non-fiction by Laurel Boone The lengthy introductions in 'Letters of Love and Duty' are poorly organized and dull, and in places they merely summarize the letters and annotations. Read more...
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Non-fiction by Roger Mason If other memoirs are half as engaging as this, we may end up with a reasonably balanced view of the period, not to mention a storehouse of scandalous anecdotes. Read more...
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Non-fiction by Donna Dunlop Throughout this spiral-bound book are constant and encouraging reminders to enjoy yourself as you begin to discover or develop your own voice, which is, Maloney emphasizes, as individual as your handwriting. Read more...
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Poetry by George Elliott Clarke Politicos aren't the only ones with X-like "messages" to deliver this fall. Canadian poets discuss neocoloniatism, racism, sexism, and pollution in several new collections. Read more...
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Fiction by Roger Mason Mitchell writes with a kind of avuncular jolliness that has its attraction and also goes some way towards leavening the deliberate pacing and uneasy diction of the novel. Read more...
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| Virtual Light by William Gibson, Bantam Books 336 pages $21.95 TC ISBN: 0553074997
| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Fiction by Daniel Jones Stripped of their futuristic hardware and software and of their dystopian settings, William Gibson's novels and stories are, for the most part, straightforward adventure tales of the sort that have long appealed to adolescent readers, particularly boys. Read more...
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Fiction by Kathleen Byrne The book recreates in gentle, almost lulling tones the deceptively placid summer of a 10-year-old boy, who watches the world go by from grandmother's front porch in the village of Petit-Goave. Read more...
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Fiction by Bradd Burningham In the face of mass starvation, how are we to take our own desires, concerns, and tribulations seriously? This is a question most have asked but few have answered, except by setting it aside. But what happens when the question won't go away? Read more...
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Fiction by Donna Dunlop An entertaining tale of two cutting teams engaged in a gently unscrupulous and comic competition, it is set in the Prairie town of Shelby, Alberta, a locale readers wilt recall from Mitchell's 1990 novel 'Roses Are Difficult Here'. Read more...
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Non-fiction by Allan Casey Wayman writes passionately about the writers who have helped him shape his own art of the gritty here and now. In the final essay titled "Sitting by the Grave of Literary Ambition," he distances himself spiritually from his own workaday world as a writer. Read more...
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews - Non-fiction by Allan Levine Behind most successful newspapers lurks a publisher or editor possessing an array of necessary attributes intelligence, ambition, a good business sense, and often a large ego -who shapes and guides the paper. Read more...
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| Alison's House by Maxine Trottier, Michael Martchenko, 32 pages $5.95 TP ISBN: 019540968X
| | Nature in the Home by David Suzuki, Kim Fernandes, Eugenie Fernandes, 32 pages $6.95 TP ISBN: 0773755861
| | The Trouble with Justin by Don Gillmor, Harvey Chan, pages $13.95 CT ISBN: 0888991770
| | | Last Leaf First Snowflake to Fall by Leo Yerxa, 32 pages $16.95 CT ISBN: 0888991835
| | TV Sal and the Game Show from Outer Space 34 pages $14.95 ISBN: 0889950938
| | Sasha & the Wiggly Tooth by Rhea Tregebov, Helene Desputeaux, 24 pages $5.95 TP ISBN: 0929005503
| | | Mother Holle by Charlotte Dorn, Peter Becker, pages $8.95 PF ISBN: 1550820435
| Children's Books Children's Books - Home Truths by Janet McNaughton Childhood is full of milestones - first smile, first steps, first word, first day of school. We reached a milestone in our house this summer, albeit one of the less celebrated ones. Read more...
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At Large At Large - Revised Versions by Michael Coren Mercenary authors grope around for subjects that will sell sufficient books to justify the distended advances paid by eager publishers. The writers then indulge in necrophilia, in a literary screwing of the dead. Read more...
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Douglas Fetherling Douglas Fetherling - Artistic References by Douglas Fetherling You can take some satisfaction in knowing that the compiler, writer, copy-editor, proofreader, designer, production manager, and chief financial officer is also the guy who wraps the parcels. Read more...
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