When author and activist June Callwood was asked to provide some words of wisdom for aspiring writers, she responded, “Read, read, read. Forgive your parents.” Blind Spot, by Laurence Miall, is the story of a man who cannot follow the last part of that advice.
The epigraph to Jon Paul Fiorentino’s I’m Not Scared of You or Anything is a quotation from comedian Andy Kaufman: “I never told a joke in my life.” It’s a code of conduct Kaufman undoubtedly followed. He was a prankster and a trickster – audiences sometimes wouldn’t know whether he was performing or not. His characters were strange and childlike, uncomfortable, completely open … and funny.
Chez L’arabe, the debut short story collection of National Post columnist Mireille Silcoff, establishes its homegrown credentials early on. Not two pages in, readers will encounter Mount Royal, chemin de la Côte-des-Neiges, potholes, and the narrator’s assumption that “all Montreal Arabs [are] Lebanese,” a throwaway line designed to set up a not-so-surprising revelation about the national origin of two minor characters.
Winter expands her focus well beyond gender identity to study other triggers of alienation, including ageing, homelessness, and poverty. Stunning beauty intertwines tough emotional truths, while sucker-punch endings leave you reeling. Meanwhile, an oddly alluring hue of loneliness tinges the collection and leaks into her non-fiction title.
For all its advice on effective time-management and organizational skills, The Organized Mind also makes room for serendipity. The more information we have easy access to, the more important it becomes not only to filter out what we don’t need to know, but also to figure out what we want to know. According to Levitin, “the twenty-first century’s information problem is one of selection.”
Speaking Out on Human Rights is a powerful response to the right-wing backlash against human rights commissions and tribunals. In this readable book, lawyer and McGill University lecturer Pearl Eliadis details the positive contributions these commissions have made to the advancement of human rights and points the way forward to strengthening these important institutions.
British explorers who ventured into the Arctic were a stubborn sort. Though many of them possessed the unrelenting tenacity and unstoppable work ethic memorialized in song, it was the nearly universal refusal to change their ways that truly defined European seekers of the Northwest Passage.
Susan Pinker’s The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter integrates research about human community and social interaction in a perceptive and timely study. But in Pinker’s impulse to serve readers straightforward prescriptions for this troublesome human condition in which we flail about, she occasionally neglects to balance her thesis with more subtle insights into our minds and bodies.
Brave New Canada argues that our country’s foreign policy requires decisive change. The book’s authors, Derek H. Burney and Fen Osler Hampson, urge us to stop lamenting the bygone age of Pearsonian diplomacy. Instead of “looking at the world from a rear-view mirror,” we are advised to survey the fast-changing political landscape and seek pragmatic policies that advance Canadian interests.
