BOOK REVIEWS

Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society

Trying to determine a through line of broad historical periods is at best a fraught endeavour. But if there is a single driving idea of the 20th and 21st centuries, it might well be simply ... Read More »

October 5, 2020 | Filed under: Reviews, Science, Technology & Environment

★ Daniil and Vanya

By Marie-Hélène Larochelle; Michelle Winters (trans.)

Reading Marie-Hélène Larochelle’s debut novel is like watching a terrifying play. The sense of dread and horror is physically palpable, and the careful stagecraft of the writing – in Michelle Winters’s capable English translation – ... Read More »

October 1, 2020 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

The Virtues of Disillusionment

By Steven Heighton

The word “disillusion,” Steven Heighton posits, is something of an anomaly in the English language: a double-negative construction that yields not a positive synthesis but a negative. It’s a “paradox,” Heighton explains, using mathematical principles ... Read More »

October 1, 2020 | Filed under: Criticism & Essays, Reviews

★ Reaching Mithymna: Among the Volunteers and Refugees on Lesvos

By Steven Heighton

October 1, 2020 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography, Reviews

The Wall and the Wind

By Veselina Tomova

The Wall and the Wind is a story of resilience. It follows an imaginative girl whose dreams are blocked by the Berlin Wall. She lives east of the wall but wants to travel west so ... Read More »

October 1, 2020 | Filed under: Kids’ Books, Picture Books

★ The Company We Keep

By Frances Itani

If nothing else, Frances Itani’s latest novel shows the utter importance of community. Such a message is ironically timely, given the current need for physical distancing during a global pandemic. But Itani’s book is much ... Read More »

September 28, 2020 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels, Reviews

Restoring Democracy in an Age of Populists and Pestilence

By Jonathan Manthorpe

By now, everybody knows that Francis Fukuyama got it wrong. When he declared, in his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, that the fall of the U.S.S.R. and the Berlin Wall ... Read More »

September 28, 2020 | Filed under: Politics & Current Affairs, Reviews

Maurice and His Dictionary: A True Story

By Cary Fagan and Enzo Lord Mariano (ill.)

Maurice and His Dictionary is a distinguished non-fiction graphic novel from Toronto author Cary Fagan, based on his father’s experience during the Holocaust. In 1940 Brussels, following the Nazi invasion, 14-year-old Maurice and his family ... Read More »

September 28, 2020 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Kids’ Books

★ A History of My Brief Body

By Billy-Ray Belcourt

In his highly anticipated memoir, Billy-Ray Belcourt – the youngest winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize – proves yet again his astonishing linguistic precision and beauty. Reimagining the form and structure of a conventional memoir, ... Read More »

September 24, 2020 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography, Native Peoples, Reviews

My Day with Gong Gong

By Sennah Yee and Elaine Chen (ill.)

The adorable My Day with Gong Gong follows a little girl, May, who’s sullen about having to spend the day alone with her grandpa, or gong gong as she calls him in Cantonese. He doesn’t ... Read More »

September 24, 2020 | Filed under: Kids’ Books, Picture Books

Prev 78 798081 82....1083 1084 Next