 Note from Editor Editor's Note
by Olga Stein
When it came to writing a note for this month's issue, I must admit to being initially at a complete loss, for although many of the books reviewed are of a historical cast, relating American and Canadian history, separate and shared, I couldn't find a review or reviews to single out for discussion. I was disinclined to merely list a fewùthe table of contents does that already.
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| Book Review Particularities of Place
by Peter O'Brien
That two such distinguished and poetic talents as photographer Geoffrey James and writer Rudy Wiebe have come together to produce a book is cause for celebration. That they use as their canvas the city of Lethbridge to examine the multifarious complexities of a specific "place" is an unexpected and inspiring delight.
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 | Cosmopolis
by Don DeLillo
Scribner
209 pages $39.5 cloth
ISBN: 0743244249
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Book Review Prousting the Prostate: A Day in the Life of Eric Parker
by Michael Greenstein
In the beginning of fiction was the picaresque novel: Don Quixote, the comic conquistador of La Mancha, ventures forth in search of Spain and self. Three centuries later, in the modernist hands of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce the voyage out would turn inward towards the discovery of the psyche and its languages.
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| Book Review A Car and its Driver
by Maurice Mierau
Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV) is a name with self-contradiction built in. Keith Bradsher has written an important history and analysis of the SUV phenomenon that should resonate well with an environmentally conscious readership. Anyone who thinks High and Mighty will have the same impact Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed did in 1965, though, is overly optimistic. A mere book is not likely to affect the SUV business because of the American economy's heavy reliance on SUV profits.
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| Book Review Mixing Loss with Grandeur and Beauty
by Noel Rieder
In All Manner of Misunderstandings (which was nominated for the Atlantic Poetry Prize in 2002 and recently short listed, alongside John Steffler's, Helix, for the Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards) Patrick Warner's subjectsùmemory, time, love, the frailty of life and nature's cycle of death and rebirthùare those we usually associate with poetry. What distinguishes Warner's book, and that of any good poet, is the way he approaches them.
Or, rather, the way he doesn't approach them.
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 | Kill-site
by Tim Lilburn
McClelland and Stewart
75 pages $16.99 paper
ISBN: 0771053215
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Book Review The World: Divine Text or Lilburnian Typo?
by Carmine Starnino
From the moment Gerald Manley Hopkins's spectre surfaced on the jacket of his 1986 debut, Names of God, Tim Lilburn has worked hard to chase him from his career. "I kind of got dinged by my first publisher who drew this comparison," he complained in an interview in 1988, "and I don't think it was helpful. I think that just comes from a very shallow reading of Hopkins, and of me.
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 | Parrot Fever
by Joe Rosenblatt. Illustrated by Michel Christensen
Exile Editions
59 pages $19.95 paper
ISBN: 1550965662
| | Le Perroquet FGcheux
by Joe Rosenblatt Translated by AndrTe Christensen and Jacques Flamand Illustrated by Michel Christensen
Les Editions de Vermillon
77 pages $14 paper
ISBN: 1894547527
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Book Review A Feathery Terrorist as Muse
by Anne Cimon
After nearly forty years of writing and publishing, internationally known Canadian writer Joe Rosenblatt knows something about the creative process. And in his latest book of poetry, Parrot Fever, and its bilingual edition, Le Perroquet FGcheux/Parrot Fever Rosenblatt generously shares with us the evolution of this fabulous work, this "surrealist fable.
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| Book Review Three Careers in Progress
by Richard Greene
The idea of poets having "careers" is a very strange one. A poet with seven volumes out, for example, is thought by the Canada Council to be in "mid-career". By that standard, a good many of the poets we most value (Eugenio Montale, Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Larkin, to name three) were less than novices.
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| Book Review Non-Fiction/Memoir
by Jo-Anne Mary Benson
It is always a pleasure to come across a book that informs the reader as much as it entertains. This happens to be the case with Michael Poole's Romancing Mary Jane. Poole's objective was to provide a candid glimpse of his entrepreneurial experience as a cannabis gardener. Readers will find this to be an entertaining adventure tale, which still manages to produce a balanced study of marijuana and its impact on society
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| Book Review Still Kicking Against the Pricks
by Keith Garebian
If hanging, drawing, and quartering were a punishment available to the most fervent Canadian nationalists, John Metcalf would probably be first on the executioner's list. Whether it is the assorted buffooneries of the school system and departments of education or the Canada Council and the major publishing houses, whether it is yesteryear's overrated literary lions or today's pop stars of CanLit, whether it is slavering celebrity journalists or pompous academic hacks, Metcalf makes all flinch.
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| Book Review Mailer and Berton on Writing
by Joel Yanofsky
It always comes as something of a surprise to me that there are so many people who want to write and, failing that, want to read about what it takes to be a writer. This may have something to do with two complimentary misconceptions about the literary lifeùone that everyone has a book in them. The other that there is a secret lurking out there somewhere that will make it possible for them to get that obstinateù and, no doubt, best-sellingùmanuscript finished.
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| Book Review Defying Categories
by Raj Mehta
Thomas King is certainly known to Canadians for his work on the radio serial The Dead Dog Cafe Comedy Hourùno longer running sadly, though CBC still hosts an official webpage. His books include Medicine River, Truth and Bright Water, Green Grass, Running Water and the short story collection One Good Story, That One.
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 | Birth of a Bookworm
by Michel Tremblay Translated by Sheila Fischman
Talon
192 pages $18.95 paper
ISBN: 0889224765
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Book Review Young Reader Defies the Vatican Index
by Jack Illingworth
Birth of a Bookworm, Michel Tremblay's recently translated memoir of his childhood (which originally appeared in 1994 as Un ange cornu aux ailes de t(le), is a brief and charming account of the literary growth of an unusual Montreal boy.
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| Book Review Out of Penumbra, Suberb Canadian Histories
by R. B. Fleming
Penumbra Press is one of scores of small Canadian publishers that are turning out some of Canada's finest books. One of the press's most prolific authors is Munroe Scott. In 2001, Penumbra published Scott's novel, The Liberators, a raucous novel set in late 1830s, in post-Rebellion Upper Canada where anti-government activity continued on islands in the St. Lawrence, near Cornwall, even after William Lyon Mackenzie had fled the colony.
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| Book Review A Sense of (Canadian) Place
by W. J. Keith
"This book is what happens when one person becomes completely enamoured of the landscape in the city where he lives." A provocative sentence that not only makes up the complete "Introduction" to Falling into Place but is reproduced on both the front and back covers. Moreover, it is true.
The fact that the city in question is Hamilton, the steel-company-dominated city at the western end of Lake Ontario, may surpriseûeven amazeûsome readers.
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| Book Review Letters of Lost Words
by Allan Safarik
The union of the mighty Hudson's Bay Company (founded in 1670) with the North West Company in 1821 signaled a whole new chapter in the pursuit of company business with the establishment of new trade routes to accommodate the newly acquired posts on the Pacific Ocean. By 1850, the original focus of the beaver trade had been expanded to included a far wider mandate
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| Book Review Maligning the Messenger
by John Degen
The Bernardo/Homolka crimes and trials of the 1990s were as much about the excesses of the sensational press as they were about the failures of a particular police investigation and subsequent prosecution. In fact, with those two equally compelling tributaries to follow, one could be forgiven for forgetting the main stream of the story is one of cruelty, murder and the hideous moral twists to be found in humanity.
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| Book Review Writing Under the Influence
by Gordon Phinn
You might not know it, as you go about your daily business as an honest and upstanding citizen of the state, but indulging in and singing the praises of intoxicating plants, herbs and liquors has been one of mankind's favourite occupations. While it is only in the last twenty decades or so that our educated scribes have been furiously scribbling their schematics of bliss, the tribes down through the ages have rarely refrained from their holy frenzies.
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 | CafT Alibi
by Todd Swift
DC Books
74 pages $14.95 paper
ISBN: 0919688535
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Book Review Urbane Cosmopolitan Awaiting Apocalypse
by Kevin Higgins
At first glance this looks like a collection by yet another emerging North American poet labouring under the influence of some variant of New Formalism. There is even a poem titled "Seven Eights Are Fifty-Six" in which each of the seven stanzas is, you guessed it, exactly eight lines long. However, the collection's formality is deceptive. A closer reading reveals that Todd Swift's poetry is actually a place where several disparate trends in contemporary English language poetry intersect.
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| Book Review The Happy Life of Brian Moore
by George Fetherling
Brian Moore used to enjoy telling a story on himself. On a nostalgic visit to his native Ireland, he did what insecure authors sometimes do. He went into a bookshop pretending to be a routine customer and enquired if they had any fiction by the Belfast writer Brian Moore. The clerk said no, but tried to sell him some novels by the Canadian writer of the same name. Moore chuckled whenever he told the anecdote. At the time, however, he probably just sighed.
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| Book Review Historicals Converge on Eccentric Women
by Joan Givner
History and fiction have long been set up in opposition to one anotherùthe one being characterized by truthfulness and objectivity, the other by imagination and invention. Of the two oppositional terms, fiction has often been deemed the less rigourous genre, tainted by falsehood. Yet, as decades of post-structural theory have suggested, historical objectivity is a notoriously elusive entity, and the question of how history is produced, indeed the whole concept of "history," is a vexed on
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| Book Review A Question of Masculinity
by Steven W. Beattie
Contemporary masculinity is a complicated and treacherous subjectùcomplicated because it covers such a vast terrain; treacherous because the terrain is filled with landmines. The Iron John figure of Robert Bly's conceptionùthe hairy-chested Wild Man, the hard man who runs naked through the woods with a cabal of cohorts, and returns home to be ministered by the Wild Womanùis something of a throwback.
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 | The Body's Place
by Elise Turcotte Translated by Sheila Fischman
Cormorant Books
220 pages $22.95 paper
ISBN: 1896951465
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Book Review No Body's Place for Love
by Heather Birrell
The rape and murder of young girls preys on the public imagination like no other assault on collective ideals of decency and morality. And when such aberrations jump from the confines of our TV screens and explode in our neighbourhoods, as was the circumstance for Torontonians in the recent case of 10-year-old Holly Jones, we are forced to wrestle with their unfathomability in more immediate and disturbing ways
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 | Living History
by Hillary Rodham Clinton
Simon & Schuster
562 pages $44 cloth
ISBN: 0743222245
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Book Review Lady at the Top
by Joan Givner
Hillary Clinton's extraordinary career as First Lady, Senator, and as the first plausible female candidate for the presidency of the United States makes her autobiography worthy of serious analysis. Not everyone agrees with that proposition. Clearly, the book review editor who assigned the book to a columnist known for derisive one-liners did not, and the result is more wisecrack than insight: "At her best, she seems like Sarah Brown, the mission doll in 'Guys and Dolls'.
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| Book Review Back-Stabbing and Deceit among Scientists Unearthing a 1918 Mystery Killer
by Rob Thomas
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome is not the first illness of international significance thought to have arisen in the Guangdong province of China. In 1918-1919 the misnamed Spanish Influenza raged across the world in three great waves. It is estimated 20 to 40 million people were killed in one year. Modest estimates put the First World War death toll at 12 million.
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 | The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
by Leonard W. Labaree, Ralph L. Ketcham, Helen C. Boatfield, and Helene H. Fineman (eds), with a new Foreword by Edmund S. Morgan
Yale University Press
351 pages $16.5 paper
ISBN: 0300098588
|  | Benjamin Franklin
by Edmund S. Morgan
Yale University Press
400 pages $16 paper
ISBN: 0300101627
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Book Review Getting Acquainted With Ben Franklin
by Mark G. Spencer
Think of Benjamin Franklin. If the image that comes to mind is anything like mine, you'll be picturing Franklin as the renowned elderly man of the 1770s or 1780s. Perhaps you're envisioning Franklin at age 70ùthe internationally famous scientist, donning a beaver-pelt hat and spectacles.
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| Book Review Open-endedness in Slovenia
by W. J. Keith
John Metcalf is the son of an English Methodist minister who spent a lifetime preaching the Word; Metcalf himself, in a classic case of generational revolt, shed religious concerns early, yet clearly inherited from his father a passion for the now-secularized, lower-case word. This observation may smack of "amateur psychology," but it can serve, I think, as a viable and meaningful literary-critical myth (in the best sense of that much-abused term).
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| Book Review Those Big Fish ù Well Drawn from the Historical Well
by Clara Thomas
The three volumes of The CanadiansùVol I and II by Patrick Watson, III by Watson and Hugh Grahamùbegan as a series of television programmes for the History Channel, broadcast over four years beginning in 1998. Patrick Watson, whose long and groundbreaking association with CBC television is an important part of its history, was asked to take over from Shelley Saywell as Commissioning Editor of the series at the beginning of the second broadcast season.
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| Book Review Apocalypse in the Making
by Andy Brown
With SARS, West Nile Virus, and bioterrorism occupying the headlines, Richard Preston is certainly prescient in his trilogy of books on "dark biology". His book, The Hot Zone, about the Ebola virus, was made into the movie Outbreak. This latest work, The Demon in the Freezer, was published after the anthrax scare of October 2001, what the FBI labels "Amerithrax" and considers the first act of biological terror on US soil.
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| Book Review Birth of the Greenback
by Christopher Ondaatje
The dollar bill, in its present form, was first issued in 1957. Although called "paper money" it is in fact a curious mixture of linen and cotton with coloured silk fibres running through it. It is hailed as water resistant. On the front of the dollar bill, on the right hand side, is the seal of the United States Treasury with the scales of balance in the top segment, and the key to the U.S. Treasury in the bottom segment.
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| Book Review The Importance of Being Scottish
by Alexander Craig
There are three basic ways of trying to view other cultures, civilizations, and peoples: through travel, study, or reliance on stereotype. Some people choose to travel, but there's only so much time and money available. Reading and reflection, then, become the most common routes to other cultures. Herman's book gives you a lot to think about.
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| Letters to Editor Letters to the Editor
Dear Editor,
I have just read Jeffrey Canton's review of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and I have a few comments.
How can QUDDITCH be boring? It's a SPORT and quite an interesting one too. What would be boring is just the odd mention of the game here and there throughout the book. Readers would be highly disappointed if they weren't thrown into the action of at least one Quidditch game in each of Rowling's books.
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| Essays Hope for the Best
by Charles de Lint
I was in Toronto for the American Library Association's annual meeting the weekend that The Order of the Phoenix was released and decided to go to the Chapters around the corner from my hotel and take in their midnight launch party.
What struck me immediately was the happiness evident in the line-up as readers, young and old, waited for the magic hour of midnight. Store employees wandered about in fantasy-based costumesùas did many of the kids in the queue
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| Essays Is JK Rowling one of the greats of children's literature?
by O.R. Melling
Before giving Ms Rowling every writer's dream review - a convincing piece of well-reasoned praise - I must comment on the Potter phenomenon. Who could have imagined that in the 21st century children world-wide would be breathlessly awaiting not a toy, not a video game, not a movie, CD or DVD, but a book! Let her name be blessed. More amazing still, the book is not a glossy package of commercially-driven tripe but a whopping great tome of fine writing
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| Essays On Text and Hypertext, or Back to the Landau
by David Solway
Hypertext: a term invented by Theodore Nelson to indicate a non-linear writing mode in which users follow multiple links and associative paths through a constantly expanding online library of textual documents to which users themselves may contribute.
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| Essays Taste of a Good and Eccentric Sort
by Michael Darling
In a tribute to John Metcalf published several years ago in The New Quarterly, Leon Rooke admitted that he was particularly impressed by Metcalf's refusal to wear shoes without laces. "A gentleman," wrote Rooke, "does not wear such shoes." Tasteù"of a good and eccentric sort," to borrow Rooke's phraseùis what characterizes Metcalf's approach to life and literature
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| Up Front Amazon.ca/Books in Canada Bestsellers Lists
* Stats based on period from June 14 to August 20
Top 50 Bestselling Fiction
1 J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Raincoast, Hardcover)
2. John Steinbeck, East of Eden (Penguin, Paperback)
3. Yann Martel, Life of Pi (Vintage Canada, Paperback)
4. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter (Books 1-4 Boxed Set) (Raincoast, Hardcover)
5. Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (Doubleday, Hardcover)
6. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Raincoast , Paperback)
7.
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 | If Black Bird
by Michel Basilieres
Knopf Canada
310 pages $34.95
ISBN: 0676975275
|  | Mercy
by Alissa York
Random House
332 pages $32.95
ISBN: 0679311645
|  | Ten Thousand Lovers
by Edeet Ravel
Review Press
372 pages $24
ISBN: 0755303709
| | | Kalyna's Song
by Lisa Grekul
Coteau Books
240 pages $18.95
ISBN: 1550502255
|  | When She Was Electric
by Andrea MacPherson
Polestar
251 pages $21.95 paper
ISBN: 1551925966
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First Novels First Novels
by W.P. Kinsella
Mercy, by Alissa York, (Random House, $32.95, 332 pages, ISBN: 0679311645) is a strange, dark novel about terribly damaged people that has its own chilling charisma. There are two parts to the book and they come very close to being two separate novels. The first, which could be subtitled "Catholic Guilt", begins with a new priest, Father August, coming to the self-consciously named town of Mercy, Manitoba. The priest is a prissy, maladroit prig, the son of a town prostitute.
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Clara Thomas
Non-Fiction
Adrienne Clarkson writes the Foreword to this book; Marjorie Anderson, its chief editor, writes the Introduction and Carol Shields the Afterword. Its collection of "What We Aren't Told" confessionals has impeccable credentials and an overall enthusiasm and professionalism in its conception, planning, writing and publishing. Intrigued by the unexpected success of the original Dropped Threads, Shields and Anderson put out a general call from their website for more essays.
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Jeremy Lott
Fiction
The pages of Ray Bradbury's new book crackle with lightning (!); pathos (!); bathos (!); bad puns (!); and dozens (!)ùnay, hundreds (!)ùof obscure '60s pop culture references! It underscores all of this with lots (!) and lots (!) of mild obscenity (!) and obsessive punctuation!! Really!!!!
If that intro annoys the reader as much as it does the reviewer (In college, I objected to one textbook on the grounds that it had too many exclamation marks.
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 | Ascension
by Steven Galloway
Knopf Canada
282 pages $34.95 cloth
ISBN: 0676974619
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Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Jeff Bursey
Fiction
Steven Galloway's second novel presents the misfortunes of the Magnificent Ursari Troupe, a Romany family of wire walkers. At the age of nine, Salvo, the main character, witnesses the murder of his parents when a non-Romany mob sets his home on fire. After escaping the village he ascends a church steeple and tears out his soul
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| Brief Reviews Brief Reviews
by Jeremy Lott
Fiction
The epigraph to this book serves fair notice that what follows will be not be easy sledding. G.M. Ford (yes, that is his real name) quotes British novelist G.K. Chesterton saying that while "children are innocent and love justice," most of us are "wicked and prefer mercy."
Hear, hear: A Blind Eye opens with true crime writer Frank Corso running from Texas rangers with an ominous subpoena.
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 | Hidden Buffalo
by Rudy Wiebe. Paintings by Michael Lonechild
Red Deer Press
32 pages $19.95 cloth
ISBN: 088995285X
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Children's Books Children's Books
by Olga Stein
Hidden Buffalo is Rudy Wiebe's wonderfully crafted tale of Sky Running, a young Cree boy of a time "long past but not forgotten." Sky is helping his tribe look for the much-needed prairie buffalo herds. He has stood all day on the higher ground overlooking Sounding Lake and the endless expanse of grassland to see whether he the animals could be spotted. It is the time of "Changing Leaves" and unlike previous autumns, the buffalo are nowhere to be seen.
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| Children's Books Children's Books
by Jeffrey Canton and Deborah Wandal
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenixùbeen there, done that. Or have we? The PR machine has quieted down since June 21st when Phoenix was released but we clearly haven't heard the last of Harry though the media furor has died down.
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 | My Home Bay
by Anne Laurel Carter. Illustrated by Alan and Lea Daniel
Red Deer Press
32 pages $19.95 cloth
ISBN: 0889952841
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Children's Books Children's Books
by Olga Stein
Gwyn, along with her parents and younger sister, Linden, have just moved from Vancouver to a new home in Nova Scotia on Mahone Bay. Gwyn is terribly upset about having been forced to abandon familiar surroundings and her Vancouver friends for what looks like an old house in the middle of nowhere.
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| Children's Books Children's Books
by Jeffrey Canton
This novel is the first in a highly popular British series, endorsed by the inestimable J.K. Rowling herself, which traces teenager Darren Shan's journey to the dark side. Darren and his best friend Steve go to see an after-midnight and totally ghoulish traveling circus, the Cirque Du Freak, which includes Sive and Seersa better known as the Twisting Twins, Rhamas Twobellies who is the world's fattest man, the very sinister Larten Crepsley and his performing tarantula, Madame Octa.
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 | Among the Barons
by Margaret Peterson Haddix
Simon and Schuster
192 pages $26.5 Cloth
ISBN: 0689839065
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Children's Books Children's Books
by Jeffrey Canton
Imagine a world devastated by such severe environmental disasters that a country's population has to be tightly controlled by the government to ensure that there is enough food for everyone. In this world families are allowed only two children.
Imagine that your family has violated that law and you are the third child. You have to be kept a closely guarded secret. No one can know of your existence. You can never go outside. You have to stay away from windows.
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 | Pure Dead Magic
by Debi Gliori
HarperCollins
182 pages $6.99 Trade Paperback
ISBN: 0440418496
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Children's Books Children's Books
by Jeffrey Canton
Readers who like the outrageous humour of Lemony Snicket and Harry Potter are in for a magical treat in the first of Debi Gliori's Pure Dead Magic books. Gliori leads us on a wild and wacky tour of the Titus and Pandora Strega-Borgia's family life. Dad has gone missingùhe has been kidnapped by his really nasty half-brother and full-time gangster who wants the Strega-Borgia fortune; meanwhile, Mom is caught up in her studiesùshe's taking courses in advanced witchcraft.
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