| Book Review Brief Reviews
by Bradd Burningham
IN Animal Rights & Human Values (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 334 pages, $34.95 cloth), Rod Preece and Lorna Chamberlain make an impressive attempt to present the history andphilosophy behind our contemporary treatment of animals, and to examine the keyissues - experimentation, the use of fur, hunting, farms and factory farming,pets, the use of animals for entertainment from all sides.
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| | Book Review Alltoo Frank
by Daniel Jones
IN 1984, the year after the publication of The Game, thefirst of histwo highly successful books on hockey, Ken Dryden was appointed youthcommissioner of Ontario."Very early in that job," Dryden writes, "I had come to realize thatthe people I was supposed to be acting for I didn`t know." He goes on:
These were people who go unnoticedbecause they aren`t very noticeable and who for the most part don`t want to benoticed....
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| | Book Review Whenwhitman Cometh
by Douglas Fetherling
In 1919, Canadian admirers of Walt Whitman took thecentenary of his birth as an event worth celebrating. At her summer place, BonEcho, on Mazinaw Lake in eastern Ontario, the pioneer feminist Flora MacDonald Denisonunveiled a tribute she`d had carved into granite near some Native pictographs."Old Walt," the legend ran. "Dedicated to the Democratic Idealsof Walt Whitman...
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| | Book Review Fromthe Heart
by Sandra Nicholls
LET`S TRAMP through Yeats`s "foul ragand bone shop ofthe heart" with two astonishing books of poetry: Riffs by Dennis Lee andLove As It Is byMarilyn Bowering. Riffs zooms through the "clobber and slop" of a wondrous, adulterouslove affair in 88 short poems. From the very first lines - "When I lurchedlike a turnout of want through the networks of plenty, / a me-shaped pang onthe lam" -Lee resurrects the music of Dylan Thomas, the wordplay of e.e.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews
by Daniel Jones
AT PRESENT, when Canadian films receive only three per centof all available screen time, "it is clear that in large part the problemsthat confront Canadian filmmakers are structural," Michael Posner writes in his introducftion to Canadian Dreams: The Making and Marketing of Independent Canadian Films (Douglas & McIntyre, 212 pages, $19.95 paper).
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| | Book Review Holmesin Our Native Land
by Michael Coren
A ONE-DAYconference on Sir LA ArthurConan Doyle and -L---`Uherlock Holmes at a Toronto library. More than a hundredpeople are here, all sanguine and well read partisans of literarycross-dressing. A bespectacled man in his thirties is wearing a red velvetsmoking-jacket, recounting an esoteric joke about Dr. Watson and laughingloudly with his friends. A plump middle-aged academic with thick whitesideburns balances a plate of cheese and ham in one hand, a glass of domesticwine in the other.
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| | Book Review Theright Words For It
by Eileen Manion
BOTH THESE recent Quebec novels have female protagonists, depend for their effectsmore on images than on plot or characterization, and leave the reader, at theend, with more questions than answers. Both were translated by Sheila Fischman.Beyond that, they have very little in common, except that they are bothdefinitely worth reading.
Lise Bissonnette is well known as a journalist, former editor,and current publisher of Le Devoir inMontreal.
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| | Book Review Black Where He Began
by Paul Stuewe
CONRAD BLACK is a great Canadian. Anyone foolish enough todoubt the truth of this assertion need only consult any page of A Life inProgress, whereinBlack offers an impressive range of evidence for the proposition that he is, asthe book`s dust jacket announces, "one of "- and the modesty of"one of` is characteristic - "the most compelling personalities ofour time."
The compulsion begins in the"Prologue.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews
by John Doyle
CYNTHIA WINE has been working as a hired gut for 20 years. Asa restaurant critic and food columnist she`s been part of a Curious Culturalrevolution - as we`ve become obsessed with the health and weight of our bodieswe`ve also become giddily infatuated with the foods we put in them Wine describes Eating for a Living: Notes from a Professional Diner (Viking, 306 pages, $24.99 cloth) as "dispatches from the front lines of the foodrevolution.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews
by Seekorum
THEJOURNEY PRIZE annually awards $10,000 tothe short story judged to be the best among those published in Canada`s smallliterary magazines during the previous year. The Journey Prize Anthology (McClelland& Stewart, 256 pages, $16.99 paper) brings together this year`s contendersfor the prize; it`s a diverse lot, but the following stories arerepresentative.
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| | Book Review Theimportance Of Listening
by Dennison Berwick
THE SUCCESS of his fourth book, Stolen Continents, hasconfirmed Ronald Wright as Canada`s pre-eminent travel writer. Home and Away isa collection of 18 travel pieces and memoirs tracing his life as a travellerover the past 20 years. Some have been previously published, in Destinations,Saturday Night, Granta, andelsewhere; others are rescued from the oblivion of the personal computer disk.
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| | Book Review Militaryexercises
by Eric Mccormack
THIS is adelightful and very funny novel. It`s actually an early Skvorecky, based on hisexperiences as a soldier in the Czech army during the post-war period. The bookappeared at first in samizdat form, and barely survived the Stalinist regime`sattempts to eradicate it (in the dedication, Skvorecky thanks friends whopreserved it "in times of peril"). The hero is, once again, DannySmiricky, whom readers will remember from The Cowards, The Engineerof HunianSouls, etc.
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| | Book Review Forcinga Dominion
by Margaret Sweatman
THIS is alyric novel, dominated by the storyteller`s voice and by her technique, butwide-ranging and skilfully written. And it`s a valuable document, apsychological and historical map of the north-western Prairies from frontier tosuburbs.
Plainsong follows the meandering trail ofa man`s life. The narrator, Paula, has inherited her grandfather Paddon`s fragmentary and barely legible journal,and feels compelled to fill in the blanks.
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| | Book Review Swingingimmigrants
by Keith Nickson
THE LATEST NOVEL in Hugh Hood`s "New Age" series, BeSure to Close Your Eyes, comes wrapped in a smart dust-jacket: stylish typography anda black-and-white image of a distraught woman all on a trendy matte finish. Thebook looks very modem, very late-20th-century.
The writing, unfortunately, shifts frompassages that are lyrical and realistic in a 19th-century kind of mode - andenjoyable for that - to those that are pedantic, jingoistic, and just plain awful.
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| | Book Review Authorsat Work
by John Doyle
WHEN HE was pestered with fatuous questions about how he wrote, William Faulknerwould often ramble on about building chicken coops. His answer was designed todemystify the daily routine of shaping narrative planks and nailing downcharacters, but it was interpreted as either wily or weirdly profound. Eveninveterate readers often refuse to believe that writing is a matter of learninga craft through hard, practical labour.
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| | Book Review You Can`T Take It With `U`
by Alec Mcewen
WRITERS OFCOLOUR. The Calgary Herald`sombudsman, in answer to a reader`s complaint about the newspaper`s American spellingcolor, favoured the dropped u on the grounds that it followed the newsservices` style, that it originated among printers
who thereby saved time in handtypesetting, and that the British form in Canada "was never quite soentrenched as some people think.
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| | Book Review Eastern Enlightenment
by Karen Connelly
THIS Is Tim Ward`s second book based on his experiences in Asia. Rest assured, youcan judge it by its cover, its design, and its paper, all of which arebeautiful. Ward`s first book, What the Buddha Never Taught, is an enlightening accountof time spent in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand. The unifying thread in TheGreatDragon`s Fleas is onceagain an exploration of the nature and tenets of Buddhism, but Ward does notsimply warm up and re-serve previous discoveries
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews
by David Homel
ONEOF THOSE rare bilingual/biculturalexperiments that produce not just goodwill, but good results as well, ParallelVoices/Voix paralleles (Quarry/XYZ editeur, 249 pages, $23.95 paper) is acollection of English-Canadian and quebecois writers of shortfiction, paired together, who read and translate each other. Sounds like aproject hatched in a barroom, right? Indeed, it was, as the editors Matt Cohenand Andre Carpentier happily admit in their introduction.
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| | Book Review Brief Reviews
by David Homel
ONTHE FIRST page of Suzanne Jacob`s A Beachin Maine (Guernica, 53 pages, $ 10 paper), translated by Susanna Finnell, anexceedingly handsome young man confides his problem to us: he is simply toohandsome. He feels desperately visible, and to relieve that anguish, he turnsto compulsive stealing. How does kleptomania work to lessen the pain of beingtoo beautiful? The author doesn`t tell us.
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| | Book Review Signsof The Tar Baby
by Mary Dalton
how did I meet him Isaw him and I touched him and we stuck together
Su Croll, "The Tar Baby"
PARADOX, ambivalence, ineluctable mystery: all figure in the collections reviewedhere. John Smith, in Strands the Length of the Wind (Ragweed, 96 pages, $9.95paper), meditates on what he describes as "the case of an anonymous planetand an anonymous intelligent species, for which the details of history wouldhave differed." His poems focus on flux, cycles, and shifting perceptions.
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| | Book Review Respecting Their Audience
by Heather Kirk
ELEANOR CAMERON put it succinctly in Green and Burning Tree: "Anymemorable children`s book will possess drama, vitality, possibly wit andburnout, and its own dignity - that is, a deep respect for the child`s quickand devastating perceptions." Hearteningly, such books - though few - areproduced by all manner of Canadian authors and publishers.
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| | Book Review Compliments Of The Season
by Lawrence Scanlan
There are some first-class titles available forlast-minute shoppers
THE 10GIFT BOOKS arrayed before me would break a young back ifcarried far: the scale would likely tip at 15 or 20 pounds. Were you to buy all10, the cash register would stop humming at $390.29: the bookseller`s smilewould not stop for days.
At first glance, the class of the bunchwould appear to be The World of William Notman: The Nineteenth Century Througha Master Lens (McClelland & Stewart, 227 pages, $100 cloth).
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| | Interviews Playingwith Convention
by Anne Denoon
Carol Shields is staking out the territorywhere fiction, biography, and autobiography intersect
CAROL SHIELDS, although bestknown as a novelist and short-story writer, is also a poet, critic, andplaywright.
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| | Children's Books Myths And Magics
by Diane Schoemperlen
SAVING THE BEST for last is not a that thedesign of each illustration`s bo notion that comes naturally to der wasinspired by an art or craft most children - certainly not to indigenous to thatarea. Crow and Fox is my eight-year-old son, Alexander, who everything achildren`s book should be: immediately plucked the best of the entertaining,educational, funny, inter bunch from this group of children`s active, andbeautiful. A few days after
books.
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| | Great Authors Heading For The Light
by Pat Barclay
Health-conscious Canadians are whipping up anappetite for
`Low Cholesterol Cheesecake` and `MockGuacamole`
JUST WHAT, may one ask, is going on? Because, of the 12 new cookbooks reviewed here,fully half are devoted to "light" or vegetarian cooking.
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