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Book Reviews in December 2004 Issue

All That Matters
by Wayson Choy

Doubleday Canada $35.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0385257597
Book Review
A Review of: All that Matters
by Nancy Wigston
Wayson Choy adds a strong new presence to his Chinese-Canadian mosaic with this novel, shortlisted for this year's Giller Prize. A journey that begins in "Old China" and continues throughout the depression and war years in Canada's "Gold Mountain", is narrated with clear-eyed honesty by Kiam-Kim, eldest or "First Son" in the immigrant Chen family. The three youngest Chen children were heard from in Choy's 1995 debut, The Jade Peony; once more Choy breathes a whole vanished world of family and political history into life. Born in China to a lovely mother, now dead, Kiam-Kim remembers ...
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Norman Bray, in the Performance of His Life
by Trevor Cole

McClelland & Stewart $34.99 Hardcover
ISBN: 077102262X
Book Review
A Review of: Norman Bray in the Performance of His Life
by T.F. Rigelhof
When did a book prize committee ever show more courage in its literary convictions than this year's Governor-General's English-language jury for fiction? First, Andr Alexis resigned on a point of honour and then Lynn Crosbie and Kathy Page, the remaining judges, selected two first novels-Colin McAdam's Some Great Thing and Trevor Cole's Norman Bray in the Performance of His Life-as well as David Bezmozgis's debut Natasha and Other Stories to go alongside the two slam dunks of the literary year, Alice Munro's Runaway and Miriam Toews's A Complicated Kindness. In doing this and then going the whole distance by giving ...
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Barry Lazar's Taste of Montreal
by Barry Lazar

V+¬hicule Press $13.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1550651757
Book Review
A Review of: Barry LazarÆs Taste of Montreal: Tracking Down the Foods of the World
by Brian Fawcett
Montrealer Barry Lazar's contribution really caught my eye. It's a countertop book, but at nearly 300 pages, it's a countertopper on steroids. The key item in it is an alphabetically-arranged meditation on the food resources to be found in Montreal, usually with directions about where to obtain the best, and frequently accompanied by entertaining factoids about the item under scrutiny. It's one of those books you get right away, and immediately wish your own city had something similar-unless you're a Montrealer, in which case you'll likely feel deeply grateful to have a walking encyclopaedia like Lazar ...
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Love and Sweet Food
by Austin Clarke

Thomas Allen Publishers $24.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0887621538
Book Review
A Review of: Love and Sweet Food: A Culinary Memoir
by Brian Fawcett
Austin Clarke's Love and Sweet Food is actually a reprint of a book Clarke published with Random House about five years ago under the title of Pigtails n Breadfruit. The subject is the food he ate and learned to cook while he was growing up in Barbados. It's a shame the book was underdistributed the first time around because it's a great read, and Clarke knows what he's talking about. It's as much a work of cultural analysis as it is a cookbook, although the recipes are all there, and they're not hard to follow despite Clarke's charming if occasionally annoying use of dialect. ...
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A Matter of Taste: Inspired Seasonal Menus with Wines and Spirits to Match
by Lucy Waverman, James Chatto

Harper Collins Canada $50 Hardcover
ISBN: 0002006723
Book Review
A Review of: A Matter of Taste: Inspired Seasonal Menus with Wines and Spirits to Match
by Brian Fawcett
Lucy Waverman and James Chatto have been at or near the top of the food chain in Ontario-or at least those parts of Ontario that are visible from the wealthy areas of downtown Toronto-for a long time now. They know what they're doing, they know what they're about, and what they're about is Rosedale Fusion cuisine. A Matter of Taste is, therefore, pretty much as advertised-a matter of taste. The book itself is a coffee-table whopper, beautifully produced and professionally executed-and not something you'd want to drop on your foot while you're cooking from it. The authors don't say this, but ...
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The Bar U And Canadian Ranching History
by Simon Evans

Univ of Calgary Pr $43.98 Paperback
ISBN: 155238134X
Book Review
A Review of: The Bar U: Canadian Ranching History
by Andrew Allentuck
Simon Evans, a retired professor of geography, has crafted a history of Alberta's huge Bar U ranch.The book also roams over the history of the Canadian west, agronomy, cattle branding, suburban sprawl, the late 19th century transatlantic meat trade, train robbing, horse stealing, and, no fooling, the Sundance Kid. This is not just another horse opera. With 57 pages of bibliography and footnotes, numerous maps, tables of horse counts and cattle prices, it's scholarship that has as much in common with Louis Lamour's cowboy tales as cryptography has with James Bond's derring-do ...
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Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire
by Roy Moxham

Carrol & Graf Publishers $19.5 Paperback
ISBN: 0786714565
Book Review
A Review of: Tea: Addiction, Exploitation and Empire
by Christopher Ondaatje
It all started when Catherine of Braganza, eventual wife of King Charles II, introduced tea to England. She arrived from Portugal on 13 May 1662 in Portsmouth, bringing with her the promise of a large dowry-500,000 in cash desperately needed to pay off his enormous debts. Actually she arrived with only half that amount and the marriage was very nearly called off. She also brought sugar and spices-to be sold when she arrived in England-and a single chest of tea. Catherine was a tea addict. In fact tea was already the common drink of the Chinese, and the British, it seems, were slow to discover ...
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Widener: Biography of a Library,
by Matthew Battles

Harvard University Press $40.32 Hardcover
ISBN: 0674016688
Book Review
A Review of: Widener: Biography of a Library
by Greg Gatenby
Any bibliophile will savour Widener: Biography of a Library by Matthew Battles. The Widener Library at Harvard (named by a loving and wealthy mother for a book-loving son who perished on the Titanic) is one of the world's greatest book repositories. Battles has penned a history of both an edifice and an idea, for while the recounting of its construction and expansion are of some passing interest-for example, John Singer Sargent painted murals for its entrance-the larger attraction is Battles's smooth delineation of how a library should buy, collect, and catalogue. Such seemingly mundane stuff is crucial, ...
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Noble Rot: A Bordeaux Wine Revolution
by William Echikson

Norton $37.5 Hardcover
ISBN: 0393051625
Book Review
A Review of: Noble Rot: A Bordeaux Wine Revolution
by Greg Gatenby
Just as there is a wine lake in Europe, there is a glut of wine books in English, full of glossy colour photos and obsequious text. They promise much but are ultimately thin, leaving little after-taste. But then comes a volume which is like Chateau Margaux 1945: deep, balanced, and superbly satisfying. For any oenophile in your life, Noble Rot: A Bordeaux Wine Revolution by William Echikson is the perfect gift, one of the finest wine books I've ever read. Despite the rise of New World wine dynasties, Bordeaux remains primus inter pares-its antiquity, its intimidating snobbery, and the ludicrous ...
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Posters of the Canadian Pacific
by Marc H. Choko, David L. Jones

Firefly Books $49.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 1552979172
Book Review
A Review of: Posters of The Canadian Pacific
by Greg Gatenby
History buffs and art lovers will relish Posters of the Canadian Pacific. Authors Marc Choko and David Jones give a brief and serviceable history of CP and its marketing via the coloured print. But the 300 posters themselves are the glory of the book, most reproduced in colour and many given an entire page in this oversized tome. It is exhilarating to see in these images from a century or so ago-the shameless pride in Canada as a new country full of splendour and beauty-and worth remembering that, for those millions abroad, who never came here, perceptions of our country were shaped by these ...
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A Modern Life: Art and Design in British Columbia 1945-60
by Thom & Elder Eds.

Arsenal Pulp Press $32.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1551521717
Book Review
A Review of: A Modern Life: Art and Design in British Columbia 1945-1960
by Michael Harris
A more learned but nonetheless accessible Canadian art book is A Modern Life: Art and Design In British Columbia 1945-1960. Canada, alas, is a country which too often regards excellence in design as something generated only by Italians. Yet in 1949 there were leaders in B.C. who created an exhibition which brought together artisans, crafts people and visual artists in an effort to show what was possible with native talent. This marriage of craft and art was-is-an extraordinary concept in Canada (even though William Morris had tried it almost a century before in the UK). Handsomely printed, this volume ...
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India the Definitive Images: 1858 to the Present
Viking $52.5 Hardcover
ISBN: 0670049654
Book Review
A Review of: India: The Definitive Images: 1858 to the Present
by Greg Gatenby
Khushwant Singh, one of India's most famous and internationally-acclaimed authors, began his writing career in Ottawa where he was a junior diplomat so out of favour with the ambassador that he was given nothing to do. Bored, he started to write stories and his earliest publications were in Canadian lit mags. Six decades later, as eminence grise, he has written a savvy Introduction for a beautiful book of photographs of his native land: India: The Definitive Images 1858 to the Present. Included in this visual anthology are the works of such globally-applauded stars as Henri ...
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Night Street Repairs
by A.F. Moritz

House of Anansi Press $16.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0887847048
Book Review
A Review of: Night Street Repairs
by Carmine Starnino
Anyone who has spent time with the French symbolists-Stephane Mallarm, Paul Verlaine, Paul Valry-will be familiar with the deep theological swoon of their theorizing. They may have rejected Christian principles, but it's hard not to feel they were really religious poets who simply transferred their devotion to matters of style. Poetry, of course, has always had an affinity with religious belief, but what makes symbolism so interesting is that it marks, arguably, the first major example of literature's relationship with religion, turning from a shared curiosity about cosmic questions (life, death, suffering) to ...
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Your Secrets Sleep With Me
by Darren O'Donnell

Coach House Books $18.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1552451380
Book Review
A Review of: Your Secrets Sleep With Me
by W. P. Kinsella
Part of the opening paragraph goes this way: "So just for this moment there's nothing, nothing happening." That line sets the tone for this very odd novel set in Toronto, and peopled with totally unbelievable characters. Can you imagine an 11-year-old boy using the word anomalous in conversation? Another character "maintains that the world is an uneasy gathering of idiots and that suddenly something will blow and everything will be either okay or not okay." Nothing like being decisive. The oddest event is that the CN Tower collapses into Lake Ontario, but nothing comes of it. The most inexplicable thing is that ...
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Going to New Orleans
by Charles Tidler

Anvil Press $20 Paperback
ISBN: 1895636590
Book Review
A Review of: Going to New Orleans
by W. P. Kinsella
Having recently returned from New Orleans, I was anxious to read this book, and in the sense that it provides a thorough tour of New Orleans by day and night, I was not disappointed. One might say that this book does for New Orleans what Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil did for Savannah. This short novel begins in Victoria, BC, where horn player Lewis King lands a gig in New Orleans. He is accompanied by his sexually voracious and indiscriminately promiscuous girlfriend. The women in the novel are there for sexual purposes only and are not developed as characters. There is lots of hot and heavy sex, probably ...
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The Mysteries
by Robert McGill

McClelland & Stewart $32.99 Hardcover
ISBN: 0771055218
Book Review
A Review of: The Mysteries
by W. P. Kinsella
Here we have a first novel that will have the hated word promising' applied to almost every aspect of it. McGill, a real life Rhodes Scholar, has taken on a project that would be difficult or impossible for most veteran fiction writers. The story and aftermath of Alice Pederson's disappearance from a small Ontario town is told by twelve different narrators. It is often difficult for a first time novelist to hold to one voice, and twelve is just too many. Some of the voices are much stronger than others. When McGill writes from the point of view of a young man who has gone off to England to study, the ...
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Tarcadia
by Jonathan Campbell

Gaspereau Press $28.88 Paperback
ISBN: 1894031946
Book Review
A Review of: Tarcadia
by W. P. Kinsella
This novel is above all a portrait of an era, the 70s summer Nixon resigned, a time when community and family values were changing, and new social mores were being explored. The Chisholm family live in Sydney, Nova Scoria. Michael, who tells the story, is 14, the second of four children of a tough union organizer. His parents are especially permissive, almost neglectful. In the opening lines of the novel Michael informs us that his older brother Sid, dies in a boating accident in Sydney harbor. The story then works toward that event. I'm not sure the device is successful, for it takes away whatever suspense ...
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What's Remembered
by Arthur Motyer

Cormorant Books $22.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1896951686
Book Review
A Review of: What's Remembered
by W. P. Kinsella
What's Remembered is graced with a beautiful cover designed by Tannis Goddard. More a fictional memoir than a novel, the story opens with two gay men meeting at a gallery opening and gong out for a late supper. The older man tells the younger his life story, his childhood in a repressed home with a silent, brooding clergyman father, his falling in love with a man who does not return his affection while at Oxford. Peter, probably no pun intended, teaches at a second-rate Canadian university where he is seduced by a student and they have a wild, necessarily secret affair, until the student, Martin, graduates ...
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Angeline
by Karleen Bradford

Harper Collins Canada $15.99 Paperback
ISBN: 0006393438
Book Review
A Review of: Angeline
by O.R. Melling
The title and theme immediately put me in mind of the Angelique books which my friends and I read avidly (and surreptitiously) in high school. Though not of the same racy nature, this works the same territory of historical fiction with an exotic setting, romantic tone, and compelling characters. You know it's a good story when you forsake the day's tasks and curl up on the sofa to read till you are finished. Both my teen reader and I fell under its spell. One is immediately drawn into the book and sympathetic to Angeline as she stands on the block in an Egyptian slave market, after ...
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Mosh Pit
by Kristyn Dunnion

RED DEER PRESS $12.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0889952922
Book Review
A Review of: Mosh Pit
by Olga Stein
Once I started reading this somewhat shockingly frank book dealing with modern-day adolescent life, I had misgivings about having handed a copy to a teen I know. However, the sixteen-year-old quickly assured me that there was nothing in it she hadn't encountered in other books and/or movies, and that she wasn't offended in the least by any of the content. This in itself surprised me. When did teen' lit become so explicit-not just about sex, but about lesbian sex, drug-taking and addiction, prostitution, and a host of other things I thought were still kept behind closed doors, at least when it came to juvenile ...
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The Tiger Claw
by Shauna Singh Baldwin

Knopf Canada $34.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0676976204
Book Review
A Review of: The Tiger Claw
by Steven W. Beattie
Novelists often seek to comment on the present by looking to the past. This is particularly true in Canada, where novels set in earlier eras seem to reproduce with the persistence of cultures in a Petri dish. Shauna Singh Baldwin's novel, The Tiger Claw, a nominee for the 2004 Giller Prize, is a fictionalized account of the life of Noor Inayat Khan, an Indian Muslim, who worked as a spy for the Allies' Special Operations Executive during World War II, and who was eventually captured and imprisoned by the Germans. (I'm not giving anything away here: the book opens with Noor confined to a prison cell in Pforzheim, ...
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Claire's Head
by Catherine Bush

McClelland & Stewart $32.99 Hardcover
ISBN: 0771017529
Book Review
A Review of: ClaireÆs Head
by Lisa Salem-Wiseman
Among Canada's emerging generation of novelists, Catherine Bush has established a reputation for honestly and intelligently conveying the reactions of young, modern, urban women to the fragmentation and disintegration of the structures on which they rely to give their lives meaning. Bush's first novel, Minus Time, traced the attempts of Helen Urie, whose mother is circling the earth in a space station and whose father is traveling the world saving people from disasters, to adjust to the lack of connection with her family members and the ensuing loss of meaning in a world in which appearances and spectacle ...
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Heir to the Glimmering World
by Cynthia Ozick

Houghton Mifflin $34.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0618470492
Book Review
A Review of: Heir to the Glimmering World
by Jana Prikryl
In Cynthia Ozick's latest novel, Heir to the Glimmering World, the narrator Rose Meadows endures Jane Eyre's childhood without getting to have any of Jane Eyre's fun. Maybe that's because Rose's predicament is meant to signify something about the 20th century rather than the 19th: Into her personal story barges the turmoil of Depression-era America, Nazi Germany, post-Revolutionary Russia, and Franco's Spain. It's always suspicious when such a large number of world events congeals in a single work of fiction (at the very least, it ties a bunch of one-ounce weights to the suspension of disbelief), but in ...
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The Plot Against America
by Philip Roth

Thomas Allen $36.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0618509283
Book Review
A Review of: The Plot Against America
by Michael Harris
The centre of the Earth, following World War Two, took up residence in a rent-controlled Manhattan apartment and has not deigned to budge since. Further, the American novel has become "the elaborate conscience of the American race," touts English critic Peter Ackroyd. So when Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Roth feeds a terror-infested populace a book titled The Plot Against America in the months leading up to a presidential election, more than an eyebrow is raised. The Plot is a dystopian fantasy. It's 1940 and America must decide between re-electing Roosevelt for a third term or foisting the upstart ...
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Damage Done by the Storm
by Jack Hodgins

McClelland & Stewart $32.99 Hardcover
ISBN: 0771041527
Book Review
A Review of: Damage Done by the Storm
by W. J. Keith
It is now almost thirty years since Jack Hodgins burst on to the Canadian literary scene like an unheralded comet. Spit Delaney's Island (1976), a book of accomplished short stories, introduced readers to the fascinating if slightly wacky world of Vancouver Island as seen from a dazzlingly original young writer's perspective, with its rich collection of varied, vulnerable, but endearingly human local characters. This was followed by two novels, The Invention of the World (1977) and The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne (1979), that brought into Canadian writing an element of imaginative fantasy (or ...
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All Times Have Been Modern
by Elisabeth Harvor

Penguin $35 Hardcover
ISBN: 0670044407
Book Review
A Review of: : All Times Have Been Modern
by Sarah Selecky
Moving breathlessly through more than thirty years of the Kay Olenski's life in relentless present tense, All Times Have Been Modern reveals the intimate details of Kay's life as though we are right there with her. At 13, Kay is hooked on reading the racy scenes she can find in the books in the family library-scenes that turn her "into a ticking little time-bomb reading a booksexually ticking" The books seduce her first, but when this "sexual ticking" mixes with flirtation with a boy who is staying with her family that summer, Kay creates a blueprint for arousal that stays with her through adulthood. Years ...
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Shake Hands with the Devil
by Romeo Dallaire

Random House Canada $39.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0679311718
Book Review
A Review of: Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda
by Gwen Nowak
Welcome to the theatre of war-to war as theatre. And all the world is its stage. Lieutenant-General Romo Dallaire didn't write Shake hands with the Devil for theatre or film but his award-winning book is eminently adaptable to either genre. Since we already know that as Canada's UN representative in theatre' Dallaire was unable to prevent the Rwandan genocide, we might expect SHWTD to be nihilist theatre. No transcendence. No redemption. Dark forces triumph. Curtain down. Not quite; at least not yet. ...
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Poached Egg On Toast
by Frances Itani

Harper Collins Canada $19.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0006393780
Book Review
A Review of: Poached Egg on Toast
by Angela Narth
It is said that to be truly an artist, one must learn to see the world through an artist's eye. In this collection of short stories, Frances Itani, an Ottawa-based writer who has published a previous book of short stories and a novel, as well as numerous articles and reviews, has managed to use her practiced artist's eye to peer into the very core of the human spirit. Poached Egg on Toast is a compilation of twenty of Itani's best short pieces, each one every bit as moving as her 2003 award-winning novel Deafening, which claimed both the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best ...
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Book Review
A Review of: Thirteen Steps Down
by Angela Narth
This novel should come with a warning label for all would-be mystery writers: "Performed by an expert: do not attempt this at home." Who, but Ruth Rendell, would be able to conceive of a murderous yet compelling main character such as Mix Cellini? Readers will be wishing him harsh and speedy retribution, while at the same time eagerly turning the pages to see what diabolical act he will think of next. Under her own name, Rendell has published over thirty murder mysteries and several short story collections. In addition, she has written another dozen mysteries under her nom de plume, Barbara Vine. In this, ...
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Gulag: Life and Death Inside the Soviet Concentration Camps
by Tomasz Kizny

Firefly Books $69.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 1552979644
Book Review
A Review of: Gulag: Life and Death inside the Soviet Concentration Camps
by Olga Stein
To write a brief review of this books strikes me as almost a sinful act, considering the scale of the human tragedy that is painstakingly documented in this collection of more than 500 photographs. Norman Davies contributes a moving, thoughtful introduction that attempts to explain why so much of this human catastrophe has gone unnoticed-the deaths of millions of people. The enduring communist sympathies of many European and North American intellectuals is one disconcerting reason. But principally what accounts for this lack of historical awareness is the fact that, while alive, Stalin devised means of ...
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The Opera Lover's Companion
by Charles Osborne

Yale University Press $54 Hardcover
ISBN: 0300104405
Book Review
A Review of: The Opera LoverÆs Companion
by Olga Stein
The connection between opera and literature is made well apparent in this must-have book for music and opera lovers, as well any individual interested in mythology, the Bible, history and literature of antiquity and the middle-ages. Opera and literature draw inspiration from the same sources, and, importantly, although opera is theatre performed through song, it's always based on a story, with a traditional narrative structure and compelling characters, combined to concoct great drama. Invariably, at the story's core is undeniable passion and life-and-death struggle. (Roland Barthes would likely have ...
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Yours, Al: The Collected Letters of Al Purdy
by Sam Solecki, Al Purdy

Harbour Publishing $56.56 Hardcover
ISBN: 1550173324
Book Review
A Review of: Yours, Al
by Jeremy Lalonde
Shortly after the death of F.R. Scott, Scott's biographer, Sandra Djwa, wrote to Al Purdy and asked him to consider writing a couple of pages of prose about his relationship with Scott. In Purdy's response, spurious indignation-"You want pages from me? Is this ten volumes or one?"-quickly gives way to a very personal tribute. The final lines of Purdy's letter read like much of his poetry-they slip in and out of regular iambic meter and end with a measure of elegiac consolation: "Every day men die, but this man's life makes dying somehow seem unimportant: all that he was, except his body, still is and goes on ...
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The Afterlife
by Penelope Fitzgerald

HarperCollins Canada / Counterpoint $23.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1582433208
Book Review
A Review of: The Afterlife: Essays and Criticism
by Eric Miller
Among the pieces posthumously collected in The Afterlife is Penelope Fitzgerald's review of Peter Ackroyd's Blake. Fitzgerald remarks parenthetically of the poet's marriage, "(He had fallen in love with [Catherine] because she pitied him, which seems to surprise Mr. Ackroyd, but pity was the great eighteenth-century virtue that Blake most earnestly tells us to cherish.)" This observation is at once comic, profound, and touching-and all the more so for being couched in the sotto voce of a bracketed aside. Fitzgerald provides no quotation to substantiate her claim about the primacy of pity in the universe of ...
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The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Vol. V: 1935-1942
by L.M. Montgomery, Mary Henley Rubio

Oxford University Press $37.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0195421167
Book Review
A Review of: The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Volume V: 1935-1942
by Clara Thomas
Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterson, the editors of the five volumes of Montgomery's journals, deserve Medals of Valour, not only for the impeccable editing that we have come to expect of them, but also for their endurance in completing their task to its bitter end. Montgomery died shortly after her final entry on March 23, 1942. From 1937 to 1942 the entries covered by this fifth volume are a final litany of almost unrelieved misery, painful to read and surely painful for the editors to work on. From the first volume's publication, in 1985, we have been led to expect faultless editing, and, in the introductions ...
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Marian Engel a Life in Letters/Letters O
by Verduyn/Garay

University Of Toronto Press $40 Hardcover
ISBN: 0802036872
Book Review
A Review of: Marian Engel: Life in Letters
by George Fetherling
Through her novels and other fiction, Marian Engel communicated intensely and intimately with Canadian women of her own generation, the one that entered middle age in the 1970s when social and gender roles were changing so fast. She and her contemporaries seemed to be living in a different world than the one in which they had grown up. Surely this is one fact essential to any understanding of her work and career. But there are others too. I knew Engel quite well, socially and professionally, and I've naturally been interested to observe the piecemeal publication of what ...
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Mapping the Margins: The Family and Social Discipline in Canada, 1700 1975
by Nancy Christie

McGill-Queens University Press $80 Hardcover
ISBN: 0773526986
Book Review
A Review of: Strange Things Done: Murder in Yukon History
by James Roots
Which picture is conjured in your mind by the term, "Yukon society": the Hollywood-and-Robert-Service-induced romance of the hedonistic and frequently violent Gold Rush, or the German-and-Japanese-derived mystery of snowbound tranquility and jovial harmony? As Ken S. Coates and William R. Morrison point out in Strange Things Done: Murder in Yukon History, the reality can't be both. Either Yukon society is an anarchic one filled with crime and killings, or it's the living clich of Canada as the home of peace, order, and good government. ...
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The Politics of Anti-Semitism
Ak Press $17.5 Paperback
ISBN: 1902593774
Book Review
A Review of: The Politics of Anti-Semitism
by Nicholas Maes
The essays in The Politics of Anti-Semitism are assembled from Counterpunch, a newsletter/website that prides itself on "muckraking with a radical attitude." Some of the contributors are well-known figures of the radical left-Norman Finkelstein, Robert Fisk, Edward Said, Michael Neumann-and, as one might expect of a muckraking' enterprise, all without exception view Israel in the same condemnatory light. The first two essays in the volume set in place a central theme. Michael Neumann and Scott Handleman write at length on the nature of ...
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The Case for Israel
by Alan Dershowitz

John Wiley & Sons Canada, Ltd. $32.99 Hardcover
ISBN: 047146502X
Book Review
A Review of: The Case for Israel
by Nicholas Maes
It is a peculiar feature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that its history allows for no consensus whatsoever. Perhaps Ben Gurion believed in the transfer' or forced deportation of Palestinians, but there is evidence to suggest he embraced the notion of a bi-cultural state. Perhaps Jews of the Yishuv acquired land from the natives in a legitimate fashion, although it is possible they occasionally hustled' them out of their ancestral possessions. Perhaps the massacre of Palestinians at Deir Yassin in 1948 was due to a breakdown in communications, except that it may have been an unspeakable act of ...
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Girl in the Goldfish Bowl
by Morris Panych

Talonbooks $16.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0889224811
Book Review
A Review of: Girl in the Goldfish Bowl
by Lia Marie Talia
Morris Panych's latest comedy won five 2003 Dora Mavor Moore Awards and recently received the Governor General's Award for Drama. Like his previous work, this play is a lyrical exploration of an imaginative individual's profound feelings of alienation in an inhospitable environment. In Girl in a Goldfish Bowl, the protagonist is a ten-year-old girl named Iris who is preoccupied with the events leading up to what she describes as "the last few days of her childhood." In recent productions of the play at the Arts Club and Tarragon theatres, Iris is played by an adult in child's clothing, ...
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Book Review
A Review of: GideonÆs Blues
by Lia Marie Talia
George Boyd's Gideon's Blues is an evocative, powerful, two-act tragedy about a family and community wrestling with racism and trying to overcome compromised circumstances. The play opens with Momma-Louise, the family matriarch and widowed mother of Gideon, singing the blues. Alone on stage, she speaks to her late husband Poppy, trying to understand why she has incurred the wrath of the Lawd Jesus and lost her only son. The rest of the play is an extended flashback that chronicles the last weeks of Gideon's life. As a university-educated black man with a bright, attractive wife and ...
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Mambo Italiano
by Steve Galluccio

Talon Books $16.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0889224943
Book Review
A Review of: Mambo Italiano
by Lia Marie Talia
Last Christmas I dragged my father, brother, and sister-in-law to see the film version of Mambo Italiano. I thought that as a first-generation Canadian, and the son of Italian immigrants, my father would enjoy the cultural context of the movie, and I thought the rest of us would enjoy its social critique. I said the movie was about an Italian family, but I didn't mention that it was about a young gay man finally admitting his sexual preference to his family. I was hoping my family might learn something about tolerance. Most plays, but few contemporary movies, share a teach and please' agenda; ...
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One Good Marriage
by Sean Reycraft

J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing Inc. $12.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0920486576
Book Review
A Review of: One Good Marriage
by Lia Marie Talia
Sean Reycraft is a Canadian playwright who examines the contours of contemporary marriage. One Good Marriage begins with tragedy and explores the fallout that this brings to a marriage, wrenching a couple out of the comfort of a stable union into a state of confusion and uncertainty. Through meeting these challenges, the writer suggests, a couple can create a stronger bond that defies conventional expectations. One Good Marriage is narrated by two characters, Stewart, a high-school librarian, and his wife, Steph, a high school English ...
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Liar
by Brian Drader

J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing Inc. $12.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0920486614
Book Review
A Review of: Liar
by Lia Marie Talia
Brian Drader is a Canadian playwright who examine the contours of contemporary marriage. Drader's Liar begins with tragedy and explores the fallout that this brings to a marriage, wrenching a couple out of the comfort of a stable union into a state of confusion and uncertainty. Through meeting these challenges, the writer suggests, couples can create a stronger bond that defies conventional expectations. Liar is a taut, traditionally-structured two-act play that employs multiple settings-a rooftop, bedroom, kitchen, and backyard-and ...
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Breakout
J. Gordon Shillingford Publishing Inc. $19.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0920486630
Book Review
A Review of: Breakout
by Lia Marie Talia
"These five young playwrights have courage in abundance; the courage to look at themselves, the courage to say what they think, and the courage to explore how they feel." In his introduction to this anthology of five up-and-coming Manitoban playwrights, Brian Drader, himself an accomplished and sensitive playwright, highlights the unflinching honesty with which these emerging prairie writers examine some of the dramatic tensions marking human lives. The plays, selected by Drader, include playwrights from Manitoba's Young Emerging Playwrights Program and other young writers from the province. ...
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