Frank: The Life and Politics of Frank Mckenna

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

Wondrous Strange: Glenn Gould, a Biography

By Kevin Bazzana

There are a number of enormous risks inherent in assessing the life of Glenn Gould. The heavy layers of hype and half-truth began to cover Gould around the time of his first public appearances as ... Read More »

October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

Mordecai & Me: An Appreciation of a Kind

By Joel Yanofsky

Sure, most men lead lives of quiet desperation, but fans of serious literature have honed quiet and desperate into a science. There’s no better reminder of this than the literary-stalker bio, that slightly creepy sub-genre ... Read More »

October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

Paul Martin: The Power of Ambition

By John Gray

The first thing that strikes you about John Gray’s biography of Paul Martin is just how well written it is. Open the book at random, read any paragraph, and be prepared to be amazed. For ... Read More »

October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

Breakfast with the Devil

By L. Wayne Carlson

Breakfast with the Devil is a ballad of conundrums. On one level it’s an unsentimental account of the career of the most-escaped prisoner in modern North American history, the story of a hardscrabble Canadian farm ... Read More »

October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

Waltzing the Tango: Confessions of an Out-of-step Boomer

By Gabrielle Bauer

One effect of the success of the Bridget Jones books, besides too many copy-cat efforts, is that author Helen Fielding raised the bar for portrayals of baffled, self-absorbed, youngish women. Bridget, lucky for her, had ... Read More »

October 30, 2003 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

Ha! A Self-murder Mystery

By Gordon Sheppard

In this era of harsh commercial imperatives for publishing, there isn’t much room left for big risky novels, those encyclopedic monster-pieces like Joyce’s Ulysses or Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, works that try to capture modern life ... Read More »

October 16, 2003 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

In My Own Name: A Memoir

By Maureen McTeer

This memoir is a bit of a slog. Not because Maureen McTeer hasn’t led an interesting life in politics and academia or met fascinating people in her privileged position as wife of a prime minister ... Read More »

October 16, 2003 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

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