Reviews

★ Choosing His Coffin

“We are all lost,” a preacher shouts from a car radio at a son and mother in the title story of Choosing His Coffin, a collection of 20 of Austin Clarke’s best short stories. The ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

The Cure of Folly: A Psychiatrist’s Cautionary Tale

By Gordon Warme

With his book The Cure of Folly, University of Toronto psychiatry professor Gordon Warme attempts to recast the practice of psychiatry as “soul care,” an idea close to its roots, rather than a dubious science ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Science, Technology & Environment

Working Class Zero

By Rob Payne

One of the challenges facing the contemporary novelist is to capture the complexities and absurdities of modern life without boring the reader. Rob Payne manages to do this and make us laugh too. In Working ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Fire and Ice: The United States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values

By Michael Adams

An innocuous, unarmed United States with health care – this is what Canada is to many. However, according to Michael Adams’ second book, Fire and Ice (much less intriguingly titled than his first, Sex in ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Science, Technology & Environment

Hey Nostradamus!

By Douglas Coupland

Hey Nostradamus! is one of Douglas Coupland’s minor-key efforts. It doesn’t have the operatic heft of All Families Are Psychotic or the poppin’ fresh teen spirit of such earlier works as Microserfs. If anything, Coupland ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

When She Was Electric

By Andrea MacPherson

When She Was Electric, a first novel from Vancouver author Andrea MacPherson, suffers from a sense of familiarity, a reliance on structural clichés that damages, almost irrevocably, this otherwise interesting debut. MacPherson’s narrative treads perilously ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

★ Mental Hygiene: Essays on Writers and Writing

By Ray Robertson

Ray Robertson is a novelist (best known for his long goodbye to the 1960s, Moody Food), teacher at the University of Toronto, book reviewer, TV pundit, and, most importantly, a perceptive, light-on-his-feet heavyweight critic and ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays

Significant Things

By Helen McLean

Edward Cooper begins life in near-Dickensian circumstances, in a single room on Brunswick Avenue in Depression-era Toronto. Though he and his pretty, unmarried English mother have only each other and a meagre allowance from her ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Wild Cat

By Jacques Poulin, Sheila Fischman, trans.

Jacques Poulin is one of Quebec’s best and most-loved writers, winner of the Governer General’s Award for Les Grandes marées (Spring Tides) and the Prix France-Amerique for Le Vieux chagrin (Mr. Blue). Thoughtful and wryly ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Fiction: Novels

Crooked Smile: One Family’s Journey Toward Healing

By Lainie Cohen

In Crooked Smile, the lives of an upper-middle class Toronto family are shattered when the middle of three children is in a car accident while driving home from the cottage with a teen buddy in ... Read More »

November 25, 2003 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

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