Constant Internet access has, for many, displaced an indispensable part of our thinking. As soon as a fact is in dispute, out comes the smartphone, and – ta-dah! Yet we remember nothing. Even worse, our interest in intellectual questions seems to have flagged.
The author and her husband, and sometimes the kids and the in-laws, mostly went to Florida for a few weeks in wintertime. If that sounds thin, perhaps it is. But the “adventures” here are so fondly recalled, and related with such naturalness, that things are nicely thickened up and it’s hard not to cheer the little adventurers on.
The original power couple, Georges and Pauline Vanier partook in – or were close observers of – many of the great events of the early twentieth century. “I ask only to serve,” was their personal as well as public maxim.
There is something comical in journalist William Marsden’s description of the 2009 Copenhagen summit. In the opening chapters of Fools Rule, he unpacks the proceedings of the two-week conference and lays out an absurdist labyrinth of greed, mistrust, and simple bureaucratic idiocy.
This is the kind of book I would love to be excited about. Casselman’s prose is full of righteous anger, directed at the numberless tentacles of patriarchy that have limited women’s social, economic, sexual, and personal freedom.
Readable and highly detailed, Phoenix is a comprehensive portrait of a singular Canadian whose life, even away from the battlefield, was of a dramatic and tempestuous nature.
Crass Society is a brick of a book: 381 pages of text and 90 pages of notes, covering virtually every category of possession a rich person might covet: from gold and precious metals to jewels to fine art to antiquities to wine, ivory, exotic pets, even cigars. No indulgence of the privileged classes is safe from his scrutiny.
Ever since its inception, the car has been admired as the pinnacle of modern progress, as well as independence and adulthood. In the United States alone, there are 246 million registered cars with 210 million licensed drivers behind their wheels.
Linda Leith’s memoir, Writing in the Time of Nationalism, records her stellar career: she pioneered the teaching and researching of Anglo-Quebec writers, worked to establish QSPELL (Quebec Society for the Promotion of English-language Literature) – later the Quebec Writers’ Federation (QWF) – served as editor of Matrix magazine and various collections, wrote three novels and a number of academic papers, and undertook the organization of the cross-linguistic literary event Write pour écrire which ultimately led to her crowning achievement, the mammoth and much celebrated Blue Metropolis Festival.
Jewish mothers worry. This is a truth so universally acknowledged that it has not only become a cliché, it’s become a running gag. Even so, the joke behind the title of David Reich’s new autobiography – You Could Lose an Eye: My First 80 Years in Montreal – is not so much about his mother’s overbearing concern for Reich’s welfare, but how willing he has been to take her concerns to heart.
In her latest book, Mary Soderstrom – inspired first by the veritable world map of imported foods she saw at the Portuguese grocer’s as a child and then by a trip to Portugal decades later – sets her sights on the “little country with great ambitions.” Soderstrom’s story is a much-needed addition to the genre of historical non-fiction, in which Portugal remains largely unrepresented compared with its European neighbours.
When the AIDS epidemic in Africa exploded in the 1990s, global relief initiatives sought HIV-positive Africans to testify for their campaigns. Their recruitment, however, was frustrated by stigma. AIDS confessions often deeply upset social and familial hierarchies and many sufferers preferred to live in denial. The limited medical resources available at the time thus created a barter system in which victims who were more forthcoming banked on their stories for treatment, even as others were left to die.
