BOOK REVIEWS

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★ Thunder and Light

By Marie-Claire Blais,Nigel Spencer, trans.

Thunder and Light is the sequel to Marie-Claire Blais’ astonishing These Festive Nights (1997), a novel that won international praise – and a Governor General’s Award – in its original French version, Soifs. Another book ... Read More »

October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

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By Mark Macdonald

Vancouver author Mark Macdonald’s first novel, Flat, transformed the architecture of the apartment building into an effective and subtle symbol for, amongst other things, the essential strangeness of urban life. Desire, compartmentalized and isolated inside ... Read More »

October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

Waiting for Gertrude

By Bill Richardson

In Waiting for Gertrude, Vancouver writer, broadcaster, and notorious cat-fancier Bill Richardson envisions Paris’s famed Père-Lachaise Cemetery as inhabited by the souls of its notable occupants reincarnated into the bodies of feral cats. Chopin has ... Read More »

October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Quicksilver

By Nadine McInnis

The 14 stories in Nadine McInnis’s Quicksilver are linked by a spectrum of characters somehow experiencing revelations in the midst of suspended lives. Mercury, the rare metal also known as “quicksilver,” is a recurrent image, ... Read More »

October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Fiction: Short

Design in Canada: Fifty Years from Tea Kettles to Task Chairs

By Rachel Gotlieb and Cora Golden

Design in Canada is an ambitious project: a richly illustrated survey, in under 300 pages, of half a century of Canadian design. The high quality of the result is a testament to the authors’ comprehensive ... Read More »

October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Art, Music & Pop Culture

The Life: The Siren Song of Politics

By Steve Paikin

Journalist and television host Steve Paikin’s authorial debut, The Life, promises to shed light on the seductive call of Canadian politics, but underdelivers on this ambitious goal. Paikin uses the political lives of such Canadian ... Read More »

October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Politics & Current Affairs

Canada: A People’s History Volume Two

By Don Gillmor,Achille Michaud, and Pierre Turgeon

Some historians have complained bitterly that the grand sweep, the great events, of Canadian history are being forgotten or deliberately ignored. What a surprise it was then that millions of 21st-century Canadians sat in front ... Read More »

October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, History

Fishing for Brookies, Browns and Bows: The Old Guy’s Complete Guide to Catching Trout

By Gord Deval and Paul Quarrington

At casting demonstrations Gord Deval has been known to slice up a peeled banana at 40 feet with a well-aimed hook. This fact – and the prodigious amount of information in Fishing for Brookies, Browns ... Read More »

October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Sports, Health & Self-help

Frank: The Life and Politics of Frank Mckenna

By Philip Lee

Frank McKenna’s political importance cannot be denied. His first mandate as premier of New Brunswick was unanimous – his Liberals utterly defeated Richard Hatfield’s Tories in 1987 and sat unopposed in the legislature. While in ... Read More »

October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Memoir & Biography

Grounded in Eire: The Amazing Story of Two Pows in Ireland During World War Ii

By Ralph Keefer

Judging from what I saw in a recent visit, the Irish seem to have erased their country’s neutral stance in the Second World War from their memories. Everyone from President de Valera down to the ... Read More »

October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography