February 7, 2024 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography, Poetry, Reviews
Canadian literature is a multilingual territory, and I will admit that my first introduction to the work and life of French-Canadian poet Marie Uguay comes with the recent publication of her journals in translation. As ... Read More »
Smokie – “a big, strong, fast black Labrador retriever” – came into now-retired university professor Rod Michalko’s life in 1992. Michalko, legally blind since childhood, experienced a dramatic change in his vision later in life, ... Read More »
December 13, 2023 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography, Reviews, Social Sciences
Marina Sonkina In Ukrainian Portraits: Diaries from the Border, Marina Sonkina renders the impact of Russia’s attack on Ukraine in startling, intimate details: the toothless woman who spent her savings on a pair of dentures, ... Read More »
December 6, 2023 | Filed under: History, Memoir & Biography, Politics & Current Affairs, Reviews
Coming of age as a young woman at any time is both harrowing and darkly funny. Éloïse Marseille has captured the highs and lows of this life stage for readers who grew up in the ... Read More »
November 22, 2023 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography, Reviews
A good biography is like a dollhouse, the kind where you can swing open one side and see the rooms in a sort of cross-section. You can lean back and see how the thing works ... Read More »
November 14, 2023 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography, Reviews
What insights emerge when we linger by the ghost light? Whose stories impress us with their significance, and whose spirits speak to us? These are questions that Canadian actor and playwright R.H. Thomson extends to ... Read More »
November 8, 2023 | Filed under: History, Memoir & Biography, Reviews
The challenge of a memoir is to captivate the reader through a narrative form that matches function. Sleep is Now a Foreign Country: Encounters with the Uncanny is a shape-shifting account speckled with ghost marks ... Read More »
November 1, 2023 | Filed under: Health & Self-help, Memoir & Biography, Reviews
There’s something about Monia Mazigh’s Gendered Islamophobia that is reminiscent of texts such as The Communist Manifesto and Witches, Midwives, and Nurses. These works – short and to the point – were intended by their ... Read More »
November 1, 2023 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography, Politics & Current Affairs, Race & Ethnic Relations
In Cracking the Nazi Code, University of New Brunswick professor Jason Bell describes how Canadian Winthrop Bell (no relation) tried to warn the world about the rise of far-right extremism in Germany after the First ... Read More »
October 18, 2023 | Filed under: History, Memoir & Biography, Reviews
Every Canadian knows the analogy about living next door to the United States: “like sleeping with an elephant,” we are “affected by every twitch and grunt.” The analogy may be well-worn, but the challenge of ... Read More »
October 11, 2023 | Filed under: History, Memoir & Biography, Politics & Current Affairs, Reviews