“Robinson-Smith’s account of the Tara-thon is lively, richly detailed and unvarnished… [The] imagination is caught by what Robinson-Smith reveals about the society itself, Bhutan’s history, the wary insularity of its mountain fastness, the harsh demands of life there, the delightfully appealing economic measure known as Gross National Happiness, and the effects, good and bad, of […]
“[Remembering Air India] is an important book. It explores, through a number of essays, poems and excerpts from the public record, a question that should haunt us all still: why has this terrible disaster been relegated to the very margins of public memory?… The focus of this book is not just on a failure of surveillance, […]
“[Heather O’Neill’s] father shared hard-earned wisdom culled from early years as a petty criminal through to his work as a kind of philosopher-janitor. Unfortunately, his enthusiasm for dispensing life advice was in direct opposition to its practical application. But it certainly makes for good reading…. [This] collection, like all of her work, is filled with […]
“A successful short story takes us to unfamiliar places, and the 16 stories in this collection certainly fill that bill. It’s a journey deep into Inuit life, with tales of Inuk of all shapes, genders and ages. The title story is at turns funny, violent and cunning: Jimmy tries to convince best friend Moses to […]
“Alberta for generations was famous for mountains, rodeos, Mormonism, football, Ukrainian culture, meatpacking and Social Credit. Say ‘Alberta’ today and any focus group replies, ‘oil’. That’s no accident, writes Prof. Geo Takach of Royal Roads University. From the 1947 oil strike at Leduc Number One, ‘resource extraction became heroic’. Alberta’s very identity was intertwined with oil […]
“In Little Wildheart, Micheline Maylor writes poems that chart the vagaries of love, its cycles of loss and renewal, followed by a realization about the joy and freedom in reinhabiting the self without outside commitment…. Maylor draws images from an elementary and animal world to reflect the psyche and its spiritual progress. Allusive and elusive, […]
“The book’s subtitle — Injustices and Activism — captures the two main themes it explores: thehorrible exploitation that many farm workers endure, and the efforts they and their supporters have made to organize for reforms. This book represents a compelling argument that those of us who depend on the life-supporting work done by Canadians and temporary […]
“Lisa Martin’s Believing is not the same as Being Saved cleaves even closer to the holy, keeping religious motifs so near her natural language that they slip in unnoticed until they start to pile up, as in the various uses of the sword ‘saved’ in the title poem. Martin’s best poems have a knack for […]
“The seven quirky stories in Gisèle Villeneuve’s new collection, Rising Abruptly,all have mountains at their heart…. The characters’ relationship with mountains evolves throughout the stories, creating an arc that models a romantic relationship: infatuation, the conflict between independence and commitment, and the acceptance of love coupled with death. Rising Abruptly is a literary ode to […]
“… Beach’s spare, poetic prose swept me away from the present world of mad dictators into a magical timeless realm like the sweet books of my childhood. I was transported and found myself rationing each page near the end, because I did not want to leave Beach’s fictional world. Highly recommended, even if you don’t like […]
