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Book Reviews in January/February 2005 Issue

Cloud Atlas
by David Mitchell

Vintage Canada $24.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0676974945
Book Review
A Review of: Cloud Atlas
by Michael Greenstein
Annie Proulx's Accordion Crimes offers a portrait of the accordion as protagonist; David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas structures itself in the shape of an accordion with the first and last sections as bookends squeezing the intervening musical narratives. Relying less on traditional subplot than on more experimental multiple plots, Cloud Atlas covers large tracts of time and space between Mitchell's own islands of England (his birthplace) and Japan (where he has taught for several years). He continues in the vein of his earlier novels, Ghostwritten and Number9Dream, shape-shifting the genre under the ...
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The Line of Beauty
by Alan Hollinghurst

Bloomsbury USA $34.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 1582345082
Book Review
A Review of: The Line of Beauty
by Eric Miller
W.H. Auden concluded his 1941 poem "At the Grave of Henry James" with this stanza: All will be judged. Master of nuance and scruple, Pray for me and for all writers, living or dead: Because there are many whose works Are in better taste than their lives, because there is no end To the vanity of our calling, make intercession For the treason of all clerks. Like Auden, Nick Guest, the protagonist of Allan Hollinghurst's Man ...
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Rue du Regard
by Todd Swift

DC Books $14.95 Paperback
ISBN: 091968811X
Book Review
A Review of: Rue du Regard
by Andrew Steinmetz
Following Budavox (1999) and Caf Alibi (2002), Todd Swift's Rue du Regard completes the final part of a trilogy. Written while the poet stayed in Paris and London, Rue du Regard "has something to do with looking: in, out, back and ahead." The collection is named after a street opposite where Swift lived for two years "in the 6th, near le Nemrod caf, which is the best in Paris". Rue du Regard is tale of two cities. Paris is a place "made for, and from Cinema". It is "agelessly sad, sexual and sadistic". London is the Unreal City (all this, and more, you can learn from ...
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Snow Water
by Michael Longley

Jonathan Cape $21.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0224072579
Book Review
A Review of: Snow Water
by Michael Kinsella
Michael Longley has written some of the finest war poems in the English language. Born and brought up in Belfast, Longley, like many Irish poets, has felt a responsibility to respond to the violence in Ulster. "Wreaths" from The Echo Gate (1979) is a well-known sequence of harrowing poems that bring us into the homes and lives of those who have suffered. The intimacy and the pity of the sequence are in its details-the wife of a murdered civil servant who "took a hammer and chisel/ And removed the black keys from his piano"; the tangerines, dates, chestnuts sold by a greengrocer before he was shot dead in his ...
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Bonfires
by Chris Banks

Nightwood Editions $18.81 Paperback
ISBN: 0889711968
Book Review
A Review of: Bonfires
by John Lofranco
"In the direction of little towns," the opening poem of Chris Banks's debut collection Bonfires, gave me shivers. I admit to being nostalgic about the Eastern Ontario landscape he recreates in the book, but this bias, I think, also insulates me from any false praise. I am particularly sensitive to any attempt to call up Purdy's "country north of Belleville," and not for poetic reasons (Purdy I can take or leave), but because I spent my childhood and adolescent summers there. Banks piles image upon image, creating a landscape where "everything disassembles itself/into some new clarity." Cows become crows become ...
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Gabriel's Wing
by Allan Cooper

Gaspereau Press $20.07 Paperback
ISBN: 1894031830
Book Review
A Review of: GabrielÆs Wing
by John Lofranco
Allan Cooper opens his collection, Gabriel's Wing-yet another beautifully made book from Gaspereau Press-with a single poem that sets a rural and nostalgic tone. "The Driftwood Man" is an exemplar of concise simplicity. Eastern influences are apparent from the start: The potatoes grow in neat rows beside the brook. The earth breathes evenly. ...
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The Minstrel's Daughter
by Linda Smith

COTEAU BOOKS $9.95 Paperback
ISBN: 155050309X
Book Review
A Review of: The Minstrel's Daughter
by M. Wayne Cunningham
Seeing the world through somebody else's eyes takes on a whole new eye-popping meaning in Alberta author Linda Smith's delightfully exciting first novel in the Songs of Freya series, a follow-up to her earlier Freyan Trilogy. Young readers -even older ones for that matter-who enjoyed the adventures of Wind Shifter, Sea Change and The Turning Time will get a kick out of this new story that takes place forty years after the first trilogy. As a former children's librarian with a BLS from the University of Alberta and a credit in Writing for Children from Boston's Simmons ...
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The Warding of Willowmere (Willowmere Chronicles, Book 2)
by Alison Baird

Penguin $18 Paperback
ISBN: 014301529X
Book Review
A Review of: The Warding of Willowmere
by M. Wayne Cunningham
"Why should a witch be phoning a nun?" That's one of the many questions Willowmere teenager, Claire Norton, must find an answer to as she tip-toes through a minefield of mind games between Wiccans, witches, warlocks, and daimons, good and bad, in Alison Baird's second volume in the Willowmere Chronicles. Claire's tight wire act is as suspenseful as any you'll find. For the Claire Norton you see really isn't Claire Norton, or at least not just Claire Norton. She's also a revenant, a reincarnation of a 17th century Scottish lass, Alice Ramsay, and before that of Flower-in-a-drought, a maiden in the ...
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Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane
by Suzanne Collins

Scholastic Us $22.99 Hardcover
ISBN: 0439650755
Book Review
A Review of: Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane, Book Two in the Underland Chronicles
by M. Wayne Cunningham
Eleven-year-old Gregor and his two-year-old sister, Boots, are down-to-earth kids, literally and figuratively. Twice now they've tumbled down tunnels beneath New York City, first from their apartment building basement, then from Central Park, into the Underland to pursue adventures, decipher prophecies and defeat evil doers in the guise of giant rats and ancient aquatic reptiles. And in their wake they've left reviewers gasping with praise and readers clamouring for more. In Suzanne Collins's second novel in the Underland Chronicles, it's ...
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Take the Stairs
by Karen Krossing

Second Story Press $9.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1896764762
Book Review
A Review of: Take The Stairs
by Tim McGrenere
Karen Krossing's first novel for teens begins with an interesting premise: thirteen stories told from the perspective of thirteen different teenagers who all live in the same run-down apartment building. Each character tells a story of personal adversity, and most end with some form of personal triumph. Petra escapes "the Building", as it is called by the tenants, and an abusive father. Tanya lets her leg hair grow and faces social humiliation at the pool to escape the repressive "beauty myth". Jennifer comes out of the closet. The stories intersect somewhat, with various characters re-appearing ...
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A Thief in the House of Memory
by Tim Wynne-Jones

Douglas & McIntyre $13.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0888995741
Book Review
A Review of: A Thief in the House of Memory
by Antony Di Nardo
All the ingredients for what may well be a gothic murder mystery are in place in this page-turner for young adults by two-time G-G winner, Tim Wynne-Jones: the body that is found in the abandoned, ancestral mansion; the persistent suspicions that a murder took place; and the surprising twists as the reader nears the end. Tim Wynne-Jones, however, eschews the murder mystery formula in order to achieve something entirely different, a novel of suspense that examines memory as a central theme in the shaping of experience. Declan Steeple is a bright16-year old whose memories of his absent ...
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After Sylvia
by Alan Cumyn

Douglas & McIntyre / Groundwood $18.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0888996128
Book Review
A Review of: After Sylvia
by Antony Di Nardo
Packaged as a sequel to the award-winning The Secret Life of Owen Skye, Alan Cumyn's new book for children, After Sylvia, is likewise a daily parade of mishaps, unfortunate events and those house-bound adventures of boyhood that befall Owen Skye. The crystal radio set catches fire, he masters the art of one-handed egg cracking by, well, breaking a lot of eggs, and with the help of his two brothers he accidentally crashes an old boat into the side of his father's station wagon. He's funny, but not because he wants to be; Owen has that sad clown aura about him. However, he can shake it off when he's after ...
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Jabberwocky
by Lewis Carroll, Stephane Jorisch

Kids Can Press $18.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 1553370791
Book Review
A Review of: Jabberwocky
by Olga Stein
"Jabberwocky", the mock-heroic' poem that is famously part of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, is rich in word-play and sound dynamics. The poem, which combines proper words with nonsense-type words, steers the reader towards a general grasp of the events described, but its full meaning is evasive. Carroll's word inventions serve to mock not just the heroics' of the young man, but also the gibberish-like admonitions of the father, rendering dubious all of his pronouncements, including those that pertain to the Jabberwock. Stphane Jorisch, whose illustrated Jabberwocky, has recently garnered ...
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Peg and the Yeti
by Kenneth Oppel, Barbara Reid

Harper Collins Canada $19.99 Hardcover
ISBN: 0002005387
Book Review
A Review of: Peg and the Yeti
by Olga Stein
Peg is the child of fisher-folk, and by eight years of age, an expert at fishing herself. A girl with ambition, who wants, "big, better, and best," she decides it's time to reach for new heights, and sets out to climb Mount Everest. Peg can do anything she puts her mind to, and before long, she is half-way up the mountain, undaunted by the precipices, chasms, and powerful winds. She finds a cave to spend the night. In the cave sleeps a giant, fierce Yeti who becomes furious when wakened by the plucky little girl. Pork scruncheons from Peg's food supply bag soon soften the bad-tempered Yeti, and he attaches ...
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Stella, Princess of the Sky
by Marie-Louise Gay

Douglas & McIntyre $15.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0888996012
Book Review
A Review of: Stella, Princess of the Sky
by Olga Stein
Stella, still a little girl herself, never loses patience with her younger brother Sam, even though he questions her relentlessly about the sun, moon, and everything he encounters around him. Stella, of Marie-Louise Gay's Stella, Princess of the Sky (also nominated for the 2004 Governor General's Award for Children's book illustration), is unfailingly imaginative in the answers she supplies. She's also clever at dispelling her brother's fears of wild animals and the dark, and at turning his imagination to more pleasant thoughts. While preparing to spend the night camping in their backyard, Stella ...
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Galveston
by Paul Quarrington

Random House Canada $34.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0679312366
Book Review
A Review of: Galveston
by Paul Keen
I was fortunate that my adolescence coincided with a particular string of Hollywood movies, all of them equally forgettable and, with the perverse logic that is adolescence, equally memorable. Towering Inferno, Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure. I was not quite the minimum recommended age, which is to say, I was the perfect age. I loved every minute of them. They worked because they followed a reliable formula. A small group of people thrown into extraordinary circumstances through sheer bad luck. Together they face the kind of pressure that inspires heroism or, more frequently, exposes the cracks ...
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Lighthousekeeping
by Jeanette Winterson

Knopf Canada $29.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0676976859
Book Review
A Review of: Lighthousekeeping
by Michael Harris
In her first novel since rounding off a seven-book cycle, Jeanette Winterson presents Lighthousekeeping-a slim volume on Love, Time, and plucky perseverance despite Orphan Annie-type troubles. Our Scottish heroine is named merely Silver ("I was born part precious metal part pirate"). The absence of a surname is appropriate as Silver lacks blood family and, being young, a past. Dad was a lusty sailor who dropped anchor for a night and was gone with the morning bird. Mom fell to her grisly death during an ill-conceived climbing expedition, which left poor Silver to be taken in by the kindly, blind lighthouse ...
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Vanishing Point
by David Markson

Shoemaker & Hoard $22.5 Paperback
ISBN: 1593760108
Book Review
A Review of: Vanishing Point
by Jeff Bursey
There is often truth in an author's belief that reviewers are hostile to invention. Dale Peck, with his jeremiads in Hatchet Jobs: Writings on Contemporary Fiction on the works of DeLillo, Pynchon, Faulkner, William Gaddis and Rick Moody, presents the spectacle of one angry man in a rope pull against Titans. The London Review of Books, proud to be heterodox when it comes to political and social issues, is staid in its opinions concerning fiction, while the Times Literary Supplement also disappoints. Middlebrow writers such as E. Annie Proulx, Louis de Bernires and Roddy Doyle are brand names reviewers respect, and the ...
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Refusal Shoes
by Tony Saint

Serpents Tail $16.16 Paperback
ISBN: 1852427736
Book Review
A Review of: Refusal Shoes
by Tim McGrenere
The 2003 movie, Love, Actually, opens with a series of sugar-sweet soft-glow images of London's Heathrow Airport-all huggy and kissy reunions at the baggage carousels and Hugh Grant, in a breathless voiceover saying "love, actually is all around' Well, in Tony Saint's first novel, Refusal Shoes-a searing and brutally funny portrait of corrupt immigration officers at Heathrow-love isn't anywhere to be found. In fact, love has been refused entry and cannot even claim asylum. Saint's book arrived with some controversy in England where it was ...
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Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books
by Aaron Lansky

Workman Publishing Co $36.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 1565124294
Book Review
A Review of: Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books
by Michael Greenstein
Aaron Lansky quotes part of Isaac Bashevis Singer's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature: "The high honor bestowed upon me by the Swedish Academy is also a recognition of the Yiddish language, a language of exile a language which possesses no words for weapons, ammunition a language that was despised by both gentiles and emancipated Jews." Stockholm's high honor contrasts with the humble stature of Yiddish, a language that ironically has no word for Alfred Nobel's discovery of dynamite. Even non-emancipated Jews distinguish between the Hebrew loshn koydsh (the holy tongue) and Yiddish mame ...
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Apikoros Sleuth
by Robert Majzels

The Mercury Press $19.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1551281058
Book Review
A Review of: : Apikoros Sleuth
by Michael Greenstein
Robert Majzels's Apikoros Sleuth is the opposite side of the same coin as Outwitting History, if not a different coin altogether. Quebec translator, playwright, and novelist, Majzels has composed his most demanding work in his third novel, as he stretches the genre to its limits. An amalgam of murder mystery and Talmudic format, high and low brow, scatology and eschatology, Derrida, Jabs, Barthes, Kafka, Beckett, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Leonard Cohen, as well as other modernists and postmodernists, Apikoros Sleuth defies the reader's expectations, challenging the act of reading itself. Replete with ...
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The Red Queen
by Margaret Drabble

McClelland & Stewart $32.99 Hardcover
ISBN: 0771029063
Book Review
A Review of: The Red Queen
by Barbara Julian
Are characters in fiction more or less real than figures in history? Neither: both equally people the imagination of the living. Both live through their stories. Oedipus and Hamlet have had at least as much impact as, say, Frederick the Great or Catherine the Great or any other "great". Margaret Drabble suggests that the lives of both literary and historical figures manifest archetypal themes and therefore express a Universal Self. The Red Queen of Drabble's title-Lady Hyegyong, Crown Princess of 18th century Korea-is both a historical and literary figure, the latter ...
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Duet
by David Helwig

Porcupine's Quill $14.95 Paperback
ISBN: 0889842477
Book Review
A Review of: Duet
by Ingrid Ruthig
Carman, a recently widowed, retired cop with a restless streak and heart trouble, and Norma, a junk shop owner whose mouth is as unchecked as both her weight and her inventory, embody two lives winding down. And since misery loves company, these two cranky, abandoned strangers can't go solo for long, even though they've convinced themselves that solitude is what they want. When they do meet up, one expects (and gets) immediate dissonance. Yet, beneath all that noise, there's music, as David Helwig fashions the truest of voices with skill, unadorned honesty, and a clear-eyed understanding ...
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The Oxford Companion to Canadian History
by Gerald Ed. Hallowell

Oxford University Press Canada $79.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0195415590
Book Review
A Review of: The Oxford Companion To Canadian History
by Clara Thomas
The publication of Norah Story's Oxford Companion to Canadian History and Literature in 1967 was a great event, one of many in that Confederation Centennial year. Miss Story, after a career in the National Archives, had given up her position to work full-time on the project, instigated by I.M. Owen, Canadian manager of the Press and assisted by the enormous and enthusiastic labour of William Toye, its editor. We who were teaching Canadian Literature, a very few at that time, were delighted at its inclusion of Literature. In Toronto, at Glendon College of the newly founded York University, I was able to ...
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Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist
by John Brockman

Pantheon $33.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0375422919
Book Review
A Review of: Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist
by Barbara Julian
Curious Minds left me with the conviction that scientists are the most interesting people in the world, which is just the conviction its editor must have begun with. The 27 contributors whose backgrounds John Brockman asks about are not just scientists-they are also philosophers, activists, humourists, wunderkinds and prima donnas, and even if you are a humanities sort of person you will find their minds uncommonly curious in both senses of the word. The contributors were asked "what inspired them to choose their paths" in science. Some write about family, while others talk about their ...
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Secrets of the Soul: a Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis
by Eli Zaretsky

Knopf $45 Hardcover
ISBN: 0679446540
Book Review
A Review of: Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis
by Barbara Julian
"My mother had the idea that I was a little bit special," deadpanned Murray Gell-Mann about his wonder-child, PhD-at- age-21-background. Psychoanalysis would explain Gell-Mann's exceptional career in terms of his early childhood relations with authority figures in both his immediate family and the wider culture. In his exhaustive Secrets of the Soul, Eli Zaretsky analyzes the contributions of analysis to modern culture. It began with Freud's writings in the 1880s and '90s, but its roots go back further. Psychoanalytical thought grew out of earlier interest in ...
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The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can't Be Jammed
by Joseph Heath, Andrew Potter

Harper Collins Canada $29.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0002007908
Book Review
A Review of: The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture canÆt be Jammed
by Gordon Phinn
Finishing The Rebel Sell, possibly the most overwrought bit of cultural handwringing encountered this past decade, the perplexed reader looks about, in the stupefaction reserved for the suddenly contrite, for the raison d'etre, the joie de vivre, the lost tab of LSD, the memoirs of Timothy Leary, the original vinyl of Sergeant Pepper, the great poem your buddy wrote when he was really cooked, that lovely piece on Jimi Hendrix by Germaine Greer in The Mad Woman's Underclothes, Grace Slick singing "You, you are the crown of creation/and you've got no place to go," anything really, anything ...
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The Afterlife
by Penelope Fitzgerald

HarperCollins Canada / Counterpoint $23.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1582433208
Book Review
A Review of: The Battle of the St. Lawrence: The Second World War in Canada
by Fraser Bell
Of the Second World War, Winston Churchill famously remarked that, "the only thing that really frightened me was the U-boat peril." Churchill had every reason to be frightened, for during 1942 alone, 5.4 million tons of shipping were sunk; during the six years of the war, 2,259 merchant ships were sent to the bottom along with their crews and the food, oil, and munitions that Britain so desperately needed to keep on fighting. By the war's end, the Royal Canadian Navy provided half of the escort vessels which guarded the slow-moving convoys as they sailed across the Atlantic. ...
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Gielgud's Letters
by Richard (ed) Mangan

McArthur & Co / Orion Con Trad $50 Hardcover
ISBN: 0297829890
Book Review
A Review of: GielgudÆs Letters
by Clara Thomas
This collection, a total of almost 800 out of 1600 of Gielgud's letters, has been chosen and edited by Richard Mangan, the administrator of the famous Theatre Collection at Greenwich. Before Gielgud's death in 2000, Mangan had edited John Gielgud's Notes from the Gods. He was chosen by the executors of the estate to search out letters and to edit this volume. The result is a remarkable collection, arranged chronologically and with a minimum of editorial intervention. For an armchair theatre enthusiast, or for any theatre scholar, it is irreplaceable. ...
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The Lost Amazon
by Wade Davis

Douglas & McIntyre $45 Hardcover
ISBN: 1553650786
Book Review
A Review of: The Lost Amazon: The Photographic Journey of Richard Evans Schultes
by John Oughton
"Botanist" conjures an image of a meek, Mr. Magoo-like scholar inspecting flowers through a magnifying glass. But the specialization of "ethnobotany" (the study of plant use by indigenous peoples) obviously produces far more daring scientists, willing to endure physical danger, isolation and hallucinations to expand their own minds and human knowledge itself. Long-time Harvard professor Richard Evans Schultes, an "extreme" ethnobotanist if there ever was one, and his disciple Wade Davis (whose discovery of the drugs used to create zombies is detailed in The Serpent and the Rainbow), have undertaken ...
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Kingdom of Ten Thousand Things
by Gary Geddes

Harper Collins Canada $34.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0002001004
Book Review
A Review of: Kingdom of Ten Thousand Things: An Impossible Journey from Kabul to Chiapas
by Nancy Wigston
For thirty-odd years, BC poet, playwright, and author Gary Geddes had been fascinated by the tale of a Buddhist monk named Huishen, who had travelled from his native Afghanistan and, forty years later, ended his journey in China, where his amazing tales of strange new lands was recorded by Liang dynasty historians in the year 499AD. This much is certain. But Geddes wants to know whether it's possible that lands Huishen described could have been what is now the western coast of British Columbia or other parts of the Americas? Could Huishen have preached to the Haida and the Maya during his extraordinary voyage? ...
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Book Review
A Review of: The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool
by Asa Boxer
Douglas Adams once said something about the nature of the universe being such that it is impossible to figure out, and if someone were to stumble upon an understanding, the universe would change at that very instant. As a satirist, Adams is especially appropriate here, because at the centre of Marius Kociejowski's superb The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool-with its collection of ideas regarding irony, satire, simplicity, idiocy, and madness-stands the Fool. Kociejowski's story takes place in Damascus, Syria over a period of about five years, and focuses on three central characters and their interactions, ...
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Wilfred Thesiger
by Alexander Maitland

HarperCollins Canada / UK Non-Fict Hc $74.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0002572249
Book Review
A Review of: Wilfred Thesiger: A Life in Pictures
by Christopher Ondaatje
Some day soon someone will write the definitive biography of Sir Wilfred Thesiger, without doubt the twentieth century's greatest traveller and explorer-but also a complicated man and an anachronism. Hopefully this will be done by Alexander Maitland, Thesiger's friend and authorised biographer. But this book is not that biography. Instead Alexander Maitland has produced a pictorial volume celebrating Thesiger's achievements and introducing nearly two hundred of his unique photographs, some of them not published before. It is a pleasing retrospective with an outstanding introduction by the author. ...
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Cassell's Tales of Endurance
by Fergus Fleming

McArthur & Co / Orion Con Trad $39.95 Hardcover
ISBN: 0304357472
Book Review
A Review of: Tales of Endurance
by Christopher Ondaatje
There have already been two good anthologies on exploration in the last two years: Travels, Explorations and Empires 1770 - 1835 (Four volumes) edited by Tim Fulford and Peter Kitson; and The Faber Book of Exploration edited by Benedict Allen. Both these books offer sensitive and thought-provoking discussions on the writings of the world's greatest explorers, as well as providing us with a wide selection of the explorers' own writings. Now, however, Fergus Fleming, the author of the best-selling Barrow's Boys, has produced another anthology, Tales of Endurance, writing it himself and covering over 40 stories of ...
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Mirabel
by Pierre Nepveu

V+¬hicule Press $15.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1550651919
Book Review
A Review of: Mirabel
by David Solway
A bargain, Mirabell? With us as prize? James Merrill, The Changing Light at Sandover They're not only incredibly faithful, they're true poems in their own right. A.B. Yehoshua, The Liberated Bride >From time to time the Governor General's Award juries get it right. Not often, mind you, but every once in a while a jury manages to come up with an appropriate choice to salvage the institutional life of an organization known more for endemic cronyism than enlightened ...
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Unsettled
by Zachariah Wells

Insomniac Press $11.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1894663764
Book Review
A Review of: Unsettled
by Graham Good
Poetic debuts need to clear a space in an already crowded field. When a new voice is raised, it needs to be distinctive to gain a hearing. Voice is not merely a metaphor: poets increasingly have to take their work onstage at live readings and develop some kind of vocal persona. The Homeric epics were oral performances long before they were written down. Now, poems often exist in both dimensions of reading: aloud, and on the page. But even in print, poetry still "voices" itself: poets invoke the muse, provoke with satire, evoke scenes and experiences. The voice ...
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Postscript
by Geoffrey Cook

V+¬hicule Press $14.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1550651900
Book Review
A Review of: Postscript
by Graham Good
Poetic debuts need to clear a space in an already crowded field. When a new voice is raised, it needs to be distinctive to gain a hearing. Voice is not merely a metaphor: poets increasingly have to take their work onstage at live readings and develop some kind of vocal persona. The Homeric epics were oral performances long before they were written down. Now, poems often exist in both dimensions of reading: aloud, and on the page. But even in print, poetry still "voices" itself: poets invoke the muse, provoke with satire, evoke scenes and experiences. The voice ...
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Monks' Fruit
by A. J. Levin

Junction $15.04 Paperback
ISBN: 0889712026
Book Review
A Review of: MonksÆ Fruit
by Andrew Steinmetz
Monks' Fruit is A. J. Levin's first collection, and what strikes the reader before anything else-before sense can be made of the poems, before a personality emerges from them-is the poetry's linguistic compression. The grammar is intentionally strained and words are packed together to generate a syntax impatient with the normal order of things. Meaning is hard to come by on a first reading. The poems are not obscure, though they are often opaque. A perfect example is the opening of "Henry Moore": Still after sharing a one-sheeted tight bed months ...
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Fruitfly Geographic
by Stephen Brockwell

ECW Press $16.95 Paperback
ISBN: 1550226479
Book Review
A Review of: Fruitfly Geographic
by Andrew Steinmetz
The poems in Fruitfly Geographic, Stephen Brockwell's third book, are generally hard and clear, clean and spare: pure things made by an imagist. The poem "Dart" is a good place to begin. The clarity and attention to rhythm and careful use of enjambment will fascinate, and reward, the close reader. Here, in the first 13 lines, Brockwell's aim is true: I've spent half my life learning to play darts in the dark. To find ...
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