Reviews

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth

The evidence is in: Margaret Atwood simply sees more clearly than the rest of us. In her five-part 2008 Massey Lectures, the author applies her familiar cultural X-ray vision to dark material. Debt is usually ... Read More »

December 5, 2008 | Filed under: Politics & Current Affairs

Crabwise to the Hounds

By Jeramy Dodds

Despite my abiding conviction that a moratorium should be placed on poems about Glenn Gould (whose frequent appearance in Canadian poetry has made him into something of a verse cliché), I feel bound to admit ... Read More »

November 24, 2008 | Filed under: Poetry

★ Vlad: The Last Confession

By C.C. Humphreys

Somewhere between history and fiction lies truth. In Vlad: The Last Confession, author and actor C.C. Humphreys seeks to tell us one possible truth about Vlad Dracula, the historical figure who has inspired legends and ... Read More »

November 17, 2008 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Hope & Despair: My Struggle to Free My Husband, Maher Arar

By Monia Mazigh; Patricia Claxton and Fred A. Reed, trans.

On Sept. 26, 2002, Monia Mazigh’s life changed forever. Her husband, Maher Arar, had cut short his vacation with his family in Tunis to return to Ottawa for work, flying home via Zürich and New ... Read More »

November 10, 2008 | Filed under: Politics & Current Affairs

Dispersing the Fog: Inside the Secret World of Ottawa and the RCMP

By Paul Palango

Paul Palango has a lot of material to work with in his new book about the ineptitude, incompetence, and, in some cases, outright corruption of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Having drifted far from the ... Read More »

November 7, 2008 | Filed under: Politics & Current Affairs

Fear of Fighting

By Stacey May Fowles; Marlena Zuber, illus.

Fear of Fighting, Stacey May Fowles’ second novel, is as gut-wrenching as it is delightful. Fowles navigates the devastating terrain of a broken heart with grace, humour, and wit. The novel’s protagonist, a diffident Torontonian ... Read More »

November 7, 2008 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Hell or High Water: My Life In and Out of Politics

By Paul Martin

Considering the appeal of easy access to a pulpit, one of the biggest perks of political office, it is not surprising that firing off one last ideological salvo in the form of a memoir has ... Read More »

November 6, 2008 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

Outliers: The Story of Success

By Malcolm Gladwell

Outliers seems, initially, to be an inadvisable pairing of author and subject. Malcolm Gladwell, staff writer for that august cultural magazine, The New Yorker, and author of two exemplary pop-science bestsellers, The Tipping Point and ... Read More »

November 6, 2008 | Filed under: Science, Technology & Environment

Distantly Related to Freud

By Ann Charney

Ann Charney’s third novel begins in Montreal in 1952. Eight-year-old Ellen gazes through her bedroom window, awaiting the arrival of the refugees who will inhabit the empty rooms of her mother’s grandiose Mount Royal home. ... Read More »

November 4, 2008 | Filed under: Fiction: Novels

Atmospheric Disturbances

By Rivka Galchen

Toronto-born, New York-raised author Rivka Galchen’s first novel is a clever, stylish debut that wears its postmodern conventions on its sleeve. The narrator is Dr. Leo Liebenstein, a psychiatrist suffering from his own paranoid delusion. ... Read More »