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Among the Lions: A Lamb in the Literary Jungle

by Harold Horwood

From its chuckle-inspiring title to its high-minded sermonizing on home-schooling and the value of literature, Among the Lions offers a glimpse into the harrumphing mind of one of Newfoundland’s most prolific writers.

In this, his second volume of memoirs, Harold Horwood drops names and notions on every page. Horwood began his book publishing career in 1966 and grew as a writer alongside the likes of Margaret Laurence and Farley Mowat. Amidst biographical sketches of Laurence, Mowat, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Alice Munro, and other writers of the time, Horwood also presents a short history of the beginnings of the Writers’ Union of Canada, of which he was a founding member.

In this, Among the Lions provides an excellent resource: a social history of a seminal time in Canadian letters. And though Horwood is often self-righteous, judgmental, and even snide about writers he dislikes – or writers whose work he admires but whose lifestyle or opinions he deplores – he provides enough rich detail of remembered conversations and excerpted letters to bring recent history to life.

Horwood’s writing is particularly vibrant on his passion for environmentally sound and socially responsible ways of living. When he can stop himself from being smug about the choices he’s made – a passive solar house he once lived in, the alternative school he helped organize, the hippie principles he embraced – his writing is lively and instructive. And when he can’t stop himself from being smug, Horwood offers plenty of unintentional humour: “I never wanted to lead a crusade. Much better to leave that to people like David Suzuki and Elizabeth May who do it very successfully, even though I can’t bear to listen to them myself.”

Taken with a giant grain of salt, Among the Lions is as fine and fun a history of the last 40 years on Canada’s literary scene as one is likely to find.

 

Reviewer: Stephanie Domet

Publisher: Killick Press/Creative Book Publishing

DETAILS

Price: $15.95

Page Count: 252 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 1-894299-25-4

Released: Oct.

Issue Date: 2000-10

Categories: Children and YA Non-fiction, Memoir & Biography

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