January 30, 2004 | Filed under: Science, Technology & Environment
Like hard, everlasting roses, there are hundreds of shades of red diamonds alone, from “water” pink to vivid red. As Matthew Hart’s Diamond: A Journey to the Heart of an Obsession skillfully recounts, gemstone diamonds ... Read More »
Janice Stein is a highly regarded political scientist at the University of Toronto who specializes in international conflict and security issues. Why, then, has she written the 2001 Massey Lectures on “the cult of efficiency,” ... Read More »
January 29, 2004 | Filed under: Science, Technology & Environment
In The Greek Myths, Robert Graves explained that ambrosia, worshipped in pre-Classical Greece for its ability to produce “hallucinations, senseless rioting, prophetic sight and erotic energy,” was actually hallucinogenic mushrooms. Another branch of metaphysics that ... Read More »
January 29, 2004 | Filed under: Science, Technology & Environment
Nothing is rotten in the state of Canada if you believe Searching for Certainty, the joint work of The Globe & Mail’s longtime Ottawa correspondent Edward Greenspon and veteran pollster Darrell Bricker. Canadians don’t mind ... Read More »
January 29, 2004 | Filed under: Science, Technology & Environment
As a youth, Steve Mann fantasized about repairing televisions and radios. The world of the senses, of physical touch, of non-technological interaction – the so-called real experiences of stars at night, rosy sunsets, or leaves ... Read More »
January 29, 2004 | Filed under: Science, Technology & Environment
In Charles Wilkins’ odyssey to the mountains, rainforests, and seacoasts of our country, two questions dominate: What is the nature of the Canadian attachment to our land and water; and what constitutes a life justifiably ... Read More »
January 27, 2004 | Filed under: Science, Technology & Environment
One Thousand Beards, Allan Peterkin’s “cultural history of facial hair,” aspires to be a quirky yet authoritative overview of the historical and social roles of facial hair. Peterkin, a Toronto psychotherapist and author, has amassed ... Read More »
January 26, 2004 | Filed under: Science, Technology & Environment
The essays collected by Michael Aleksiuk and Thomas Nelson in Landscapes of the Heart till the fertile ground plowed by Henry David Thoreau in Walden, focusing on writers’ personal relationships with the natural world. Missing ... Read More »
January 26, 2004 | Filed under: Science, Technology & Environment
The environmental movement has endured a reputation for negativity since its inception. To simply acknowledge the science behind environmentalism is to embrace this negativity – most of the things that so-called developed human society does ... Read More »
January 26, 2004 | Filed under: Science, Technology & Environment
The open prairies tend to be ignored or considered fleetingly by many urbanites, a blur from a car heading elsewhere. But in the last decade titles like Don Gayton’s The Wheatgrass Mechanism, Sharon Butala’s The ... Read More »
January 22, 2004 | Filed under: Science, Technology & Environment