ro wrestling is inherently homoerotic. As a boy watching wrestling on TV, the sight of these muscle-bound, ...
By Malcolm Fraser
Non-Fiction
The hockey arena has fairly humble and perhaps predictable origins. Sheds erected over naturally occurring ice surfaces provided shelter and comfort for recreational skating and other amusements, eventually evolving into more robust (though largely nondescript) buildings. Initially it may seem difficult to get excited by the subject. But Howard Shubert’s book Architecture on Ice: A History of the Hockey Arena is beautifully illustrated with a carefully curated selection of paintings, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings
By Valerie Minnett
The desire to solve the mystery of the Franklin expedition’s loss has infected investigators like a virus. Potter himself has been seized by this infection, but he is still able to record the patient histories of those swept up in a contagion that has produced outbreaks for more than a century and a half.
By Douglas Hunter
Michael Harris’s Field Notes: Prose Pieces 1969–2012 begins with the story of an ill-fated trip to the Hamptons where
“a well-intentioned and fastidious cleaning-person” discarded ten years of his writing. Two books of poetry and over four hundred pages of prose by the Montreal writer, editor, and teacher were consigned “to the keening atten- tion of the seagulls circling above the local Long Island landfill.”
By Mike Spry
In the 1970s, Marguerite Andersen compiled one of the first feminist anthologies in Quebec, Mother Was Not a Person. Many books later, on the cusp of her ninth decade, she picked up her pen again to reconsider one mother in particular: herself.
By Elise Moser
From the very first page, Police Wife sensitizes readers to the horrors of domestic violence, highlighting the extra challenges faced by victims of officer-batterers, such as when 911 calls are answered by the aggressor’s colleagues.
By Kimberly Bourgeois
The fascinating story of how contemporary activists learn from each other and disseminate their knowledge is still being unravelled by acad- emia, as well as by social movements themselves. In Learning Activism: The Intellectual Life of Contemporary Social Movements, Aziz Choudry,an activist-turned-academic and professor in McGill’s Department of Integrated Studies in Education, pays homage to the intellectual work that is inherently produced and circulated when people get together to challenge oppressive systems.
By Patricia Boushel
Twenty-eight. That’s the number I can’t get out of my head. There are a lot of figures and statistics in Wade Rowland’s cir de cœur for the decline to near-terminal status of the once proud and nation-defining CBC, but for this reader the one that jumped off the page and put it all in perspective appears in a breakdown of the comparative per capita subsidy for public broadcasting among countries who have such things.
By Ian McGillis
The written histories of cities usually tell the big stories, hashing out biographies of visionary men building things and founding things and fighting one another for the spoils. In Beyond Brutal Passions, Mary Anne Poutanen delves into the details to create a portrait of Montreal’s early nineteenth-century prostitutes, scouring city archives for moments when the lives of these mostly forgotten women intersected with official public record.
By Emily Raine
Few figures are as stirring – and heroic – as a servant, walking a dangerous but noble path, abandoned by the very people who called him to it. We may not be capable of such idealism, but it reminds us of what faithfulness looks like. And the tragedies that usually accompany such missions show us true sacrifice and heroism.
By Matthew R. Anderson
The Last Bonobo is a brilliant book, exactly the kind of intellectually powerful, clear, and compassionate account that could – literally – help save the world.
By Elise Moser
How many people once played in a band, tried their hand at writing songs, and eventually let the whole music thing fall by the wayside – but have a nagging feeling that someday they’d like to take it up again? No doubt the number is too high to count, but Montreal writer Eric Siblin decided to take up a personal music revival in earnest, and to write about the experience. Studio Grace is an intimate, at times exhaustive account of Siblin’s journey in writing and recording an album.
By Malcolm Fraser