INTERNATIONAL FICTION
Never Let Me Go
By Kazuo Ishiguro
Knopf Canada, 287 pages, $34.95
The latest novel by the author of Remains of the Day and The Unconsoled is an experiment in timing, suspense and ambiguity. Never Let Me Go begins as if it were going to be an account of a glorious childhood at a privileged estate/school called Hailsham. But Ishiguro has decided surprises in store, to reveal any more of which would be unfair, though it would not spoil one’s pleasure in the author’s spare, lovely prose and his ability to take the moral temperature of a time and place. -- André Alexis
The Accidental
By Ali Smith
Hamish Hamilton, 320 pages, $30
The clever and dysfunctional Smart family is on holiday in Norfolk, which sets into motion Ali Smith’s novel, which was short-listed for this year’s Man Booker Prize. As expected, Smith’s tale is formally inventive (sonnets, Q & As, Internet sites etc.), but it’s Smith’s exploration of how something broken (i.e., the Smarts) gets put back together again that makes this book so good, so wise and so human. Nothing accidental about that.
-- Caroline Adderson
Oh Pure and Radiant Heart
By Lydia Millet
Soft Skull, 489 pages, $33.95
The premise of Lydia Millet’s fifth novel is this: On March 1, 2003, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard, all instrumental in the development of the A-bomb, are resurrected in the post-9/11 United States and set out to undo what they had done. Millet is a mordant satirist, and Oh Pure and Radiant Heart is not just savage and funny, it’s elegiac as well. Like Robert A. Heinlein’s 1961 science-fiction classic, Stranger in a Strange Land -- also about a returnee who became a messianic cult object -- it both inveighs against religion in the United States and suggests that humanity is doomed. -- Chris Scott
Until I Find You
By John Irving
Knopf Canada, 824 pages, $39.95
Decidedly mixed reviews greeted this huge novel by the author of many huge novels, but The Globe and Mail’sreviewer thought John Irving’s Until I Find You to be “perhaps his finest book. The novel stands on its own as powerfully intimate, epic storytelling, but serves also as a summation and a re-evaluation of Irving’s canon.” It’s a saga of the Garp-like young Jack, his mother Alice, his search to make sense of past and present -- and sex, sex, sex. The second half of the novel is revolutionary, in that it seems that Irving is re-evaluating his whole corpus, and his whole life. -- Robert Wiersema
A Long Way Down
By Nick Hornby
Riverhead, 333 pages, $35
It’s New Year’s Eve in London, and four depressives plan to make away with themselves by leaping from the 15-storey Topper’s House. What happens to them, how they interact, is the meat of Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down, told alternately in the voices of the four protagonists. Hornby, the most generous of novelists, has performed that magic trick of getting beneath the highly unlikable surface of character -- who we are on paper, our list of offences against others, our shames and weaknesses -- and made us care about this sad quartet.
-- Ken Babstock
Specimen Days
By Michael Cunningham
HarperCollins, 305 pages, $32.95
In the three-part The Hours, Michael Cunningham dramatized the life of Virginia Woolf and then riffed on her style. His new novel is also divided into three parts, each a separate story with 100 years or more between them, each governed in some way by the poetry and presence of Walt Whitman, and executed with daring, tact and intelligence. The first part is set in 19th-century Manhattan, the second around the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and the last in the far future. In grappling with the ghosts of New York, Cunningham has dramatized a visionary encounter with the fate of the Earth. But it is his characters and his astonishing ability to allow a scene to come alive that make this a novel the power of which fills your mind for ages. -- ColmToíbín
The History of Love
By Nicole Krauss
Norton, 252 pages, $33
New Yorker Nicole Krauss’s second novel is ambitious on many levels, especially those of plot and character. It excels in all, presenting that delicious conundrum of whether to read quickly to devour the goodness or to read slowly to make the experience last longer. Krauss moves freely about in time, and switches narrators when it suits the emotional needs of the plot. She uses lists, partially blank pages, letters, diaries and excerpts. These techniques are not new, but have seldom been used with such effectiveness and precision. Nothing in this novel is a mere verbal pirouette. The authenticity of the humour contrasted with the sadness is extraordinarily moving. Krauss is the real thing. -- Candace Fertile
Zorro
By Isabel Allende
HarperCollins, 390 pages, $32.95
Zorro is rife with coincidence, love at first sight, pirates and secret societies. It’s a book where a guy can put on a mask, draw a little moustache on his face and fool people who have known him all of their lives. And it is hugely enjoyable. It appealed both to the sober-sided book reviewer that I am and the bespectacled, television-viewing lad that I was. I have been missing this kind of thing for 40-odd years. We have lost our appetite for narratives of frolicking farfetchedness and preposterous implausibility. There has lately been nothing so bold and unabashed as Zorro, a cracking good yarn.
-- Paul Quarrington
Saturday
By Ian McEwan
Knopf Canada, 279 pages, $34
Even writing slightly below the level of his masterpiece, Atonement, Ian McEwan is superior to about 99 per cent of writers, as he proves in this novel of one eventful day in the life of London neurosurgeon Henry Perowne. In this story of a day that begins with a fireball in the London sky, which contains only the prospect of terrorism and ends in real terror, presented with his superb sense of menace, McEwan proves again that there may be no novelist in English better able to sustain the classical virtues of balance and clarity. Perowne himself is a triumph, as McEwan imagines his way deep into the pristine vulnerabilities of a materialist, empirical mind willing to admit ambivalence. -- Michael Helm
The New Annotated
Sherlock Holmes:
The Novels
By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Edited by Leslie Klinger
Norton, 904 pages, $70
This volume completes Leslie Klinger’s magnificent three-volume set (the first two volumes, which appeared last November, contain the stories). Like the earlier books, it is handsomely produced indeed: fully, judiciously and playfully annotated, copiously illustrated (with far better production than in William Baring-Gold’s much earlier annotated edition) and full of sharp and learned discussion of such thorny issues as the location of Baskerville Hall. In this labour of love and scholarship, Klinger has distinguished himself. He has given us a work that will appeal to both demanding Sherlockians and novices who may have wondered what all the fuss is about. -- Martin Levin
The Sea
By John Banville
Knopf, 208 pages, $33
Above all else, expect from The Sea a ceaseless tide of ravishing prose, the cadences of which are designed to slowly dissolve the shoreline separating the artificial exercise of recording felt experiences from the actual experiences themselves. Language is a force, almost an end unto itself in Banville, and in addition to being preternaturally eloquent, he is ambitious for every sentence he commits to print. The sea of the title is, in fact, the “inexorable slow flood” of mortality. The elegant and acute patterning of metaphor and thought are what Banville does better than nearly any other contemporary writer. -- Charles Foran
Memories of My Melancholy Whores
By Gabriel García Márquez
Translated by Edith Grossman
Knopf Canada, 115 pages, $25
This subject of a dry and bankrupt soul who discovers love and life in a twilight year is the central thread in Gabriel García Márquez’s new novella. In his first work of fiction in 10 years, Márquez turns the worm. He writes about an old man who calls a prostitute and finds love -- finally, fully, pitifully -- in the arms of the young woman. The book is quick; it flies. It is a surefire antidote for melancholy. There are hallucinations, dreams, fortune telling and murder. There is old love and there is madness. And with all this crazed love there is spanking new self-awareness. The result is a delight, a clean gem from a master storyteller. -- Peter Oliva
War and Peace
By Leo Tolstoy
Translated by Anthony Briggs
Penguin, 1,392 pages, $36
In his excellent new translation of War and Peace, Anthony Briggs points out, “It is not unusual for the great classics to be retranslated every couple of generations.” Briggs discusses earlier translations with respect in his brief note justifying the need for a new one. He suggests that the earlier versions share the following shortcomings: They are based on a corrupt text; they are marred by semantic errors; and their language sounds dated. If the ultimate sign of a good translation is that it makes you forget that you’re reading one, then Briggs’s War and Peace passes the test. It’s a very considerable achievement and should be the edition of choice for some time to come. -- Sam Solecki
Slow Man
By J. M. Coetzee
Secker & Warburg, 263 pages, $34
Amputee Paul Rayment, the main character of J. M. Coetzee’s 10th novel, is part of a tradition of the disfigured man in literature. His deformity removes him from society, especially from women (all but the right woman). In Slow Man, the disfigured man is the unhappy victim of a bicycle accident. Ostensibly, it is a story about Rayment’s physiotherapy, but rather than learn to walk again, he hopes to seduce his Croatian day nurse. It is only natural that these two outsiders should fall in love, but the situation is altered by the strange intrusion of Elizabeth Costello, the protagonist of Coetzee’s previous novel, who wants Rayment to quit obsessing over his flaws and do something.
-- Lee Henderson
Veronica
By Mary Gaitskill
Pantheon, 227 pages, $33
In Mary Gaitskill’s second novel, a beautiful girl, Alison, becomes a model in Paris in the early ’80s, in a world that opens for her like a “terrible heaven,” a sex- and drug-filled milieu in which she lives as the mistress of a powerful agent. After being cast out of that world, while working as a temp in Manhattan, she meets Veronica, a pathologically orderly proofreader several years her senior. The two women become unlikely friends, particularly after Veronica becomes ill. Veronica is a highly symbolic work, fundamentally a moral story about becoming human by opening oneself to emotion, particularly love.
-- Catherine Bush
Arthur & George
By Julian Barnes
Random House Canada,
360 pages, $34.95
Arthur is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. George is George Edalji, a solicitor in Edwardian England and, probably more important, the British-born son of a Scottish vicar’s daughter and an Indian from Bombay. When George is implicated, through a series of vicious poison-pen letters, in the grisly deaths of local livestock, as well as accused of authoring the deranged letters themselves, he refuses to consider that the anonymous letters, or his treatment by the police, and all of what follows, are racially motivated. Arthur plays Emile Zola to George’s Alfred Dreyfus, levelling his J’Accuse! at authorities with no less passion than the French author had a few years earlier.
-- Zsuzsi Gartner
The March
By E. L. Doctorow
Random House, 363 pages, $35.95
Set in Georgia and the Carolinas, in the last years of the American Civil War, The March takes as its main character no single human being, but the movements and blind violence of an entire army. Sixty thousand men cutting a swathe of destruction 60 miles wide, Sherman’s army formed a “floating world” unto itself. Employing scorch-and-burn tactics, living off whatever they could confiscate, they ultimately won the war for the North and left the South in ruins. This is a compelling, complex and unsettling novel, featuring a vacuum of moral ambiguity where we’d normally expect a protagonist.
-- Ken Babstock
The People’s Act of Love
By James Meek
HarperCollins, 387 pages, $34.95
Because People’s Act of Love is set in Siberia in 1919, near the end of the Russian Revolution, it’s already being compared to everything from Dostoevsky to Pasternak. But the writer who most comes to mind is Graham Greene, whose own consummately crafted “entertainments” get hold of a reader and don’t let go. Among the novel’s many satisfactions is a genuinely scary and cleverly crafted murder mystery, and Meek’s scene-setting is equally impressive.
-- Thomas Wharton
Vita
By Melania G. Mazzucco
Translated by Virginia Jewiss
HarperCollins, 433 pages, $34.95
Vita, winner of Italy’s prestigious Strega Prize in 2003, is a non-fiction novel about the act of reliving (by imagining) family history. Melania G. Mazzucco shows her mastery with complicated, intertwining plots by filling out her family history through various versions of narrative about immigrant experience in the United States. Sometimes savagely brutal or sordid, sometimes achingly romantic or pessimistic, Vita has the suspense of a thriller, the breadth and force of a family saga, and the complex depth of a dynamic meditation on the immigrant experience.
-- Keith Garebian
The Turning
By Tim Winton
HarperCollins, 317 pages, $34.95
Tim Winton’s now-familiar country of coastal and rural Western Australia is a hard landscape, filled with shark schools and jarrah trees, old guns and even older cars. You never forget where you are, or how the place matters to Winton’s characters. His brilliant new book The Turning is peopled with drunken cops, stoned surfers and angry fishermen. There are the working classes with new money and the middle classes who have lost their way. It’s a raw and oddly beautiful place of mostly irreconcilable contradictions, and Winton got everything right. Each story is a lightning strike. -- Jonathan Bennett
CANADIAN FICTION
Last Notes:
And Other Stories
By Tamas Dobozy
HarperCollins, 179 pages, $24.95
In this remarkable debut story collection, Tamas Dobozy unites European sensibilities as diverse as those of Franz Kafka, Cees Nooteboom and W. G. Sebald to capture the paradoxes of exile, culture and art. The best stories deal with Hungarians in exile, plumbing the depths of displacement with energy and insight. The rest of the stories are also very strong, but are concerned with aesthetics, or puzzles of art, music and narrative, and are not for every taste. But at his best, Dobozy engages the complexity of life and art with a depth of sentiment and intelligence rarely seen in Canada, or indeed anywhere else.
-- Antanas Sileika
Lines of Truth and Conversation
By Joan Alexander
Porcupine’s Quill,
186 pages, $18.95
Joan Alexander’s character-driven short fiction is peopled with possessive daughters-in-law, social-climbing rabbis and New Age hairdressers. Her poignant, stylish and witty stories are worthy of a Robert Altman film, or even Woody Allen at his most acerbic. I can’t think of a fictional equivalent, and that’s because her work is fresh, original and quirky enough to defy categorization. Her stories are readable, her characters are finely honed and her sense of humour is wry. Alexander is a masterful storyteller who has captured our existential angst with grace and style.
-- Patricia Robertson
Nellcott is My Darling
By Golda Fried
Coach House, 178 pages, $17.95
When shy, virginal Alice tells her friend about her crush on a guy in her children’s lit class at early 1990s McGill University, he advises her to get some sexy underwear. So Alice cuts the bows off 10 pairs of cotton panties. It’s funny because it’s true. For anyone who was ever a raw, vulnerable, clueless teenager, it’s even hilarious. Golda Fried has a knack for capturing the awkwardness of youth, and Nellcott is full of such painfully accurate scenes. The reader sees only what Alice sees, which makes for a sensitive, sensual, funny and accurate map of the rocky and mystifying territory between childhood and maturity.
-- Wendy Banks
The Wildfire Season
By Andrew Pyper
HarperCollins, 324 pages, $29.95
Andrew Pyper’s third novel opens like a suspense thriller by Stephen King or Dean Koontz. A mysterious “firestarter” wanders the bush near the remote Yukon town of Ross River, looking for a good spot to start a forest fire. Like King and Koontz, Pyper can whirl a complex plot into motion while suggesting an other-worldly dimension of premonitions and visions, making clear that a mind in crisis might produce these effects, this psychological unravelling. Where he surpasses conventional thrillerdom, though, is in his evocative use of language and energetic sense of place, this time the Canadian North. -- Ken McGoogan
Three Day Road
By Joseph Boyden
Viking Canada, 351 pages, $32
What’s novel about the treatment of the Great War in Three Day Road is its point of view, that of Xavier Bird and his friend Elijah Weesageechak, young Oji-Crees whose experiences parallel those of the non-fictional Francis Pegahmagabow, the most highly decorated aboriginal soldier in the conflict. Boyden is precise and unflinching in describing how soldiers die in battle: screaming, writhing, bleeding, gasping, reaching out to companions. All the noisy, brutal deaths are contrasted to the quieter, technically precise kills that are Elijah’s specialty as a sniper. As he and Xavier become both victims and lovers of the will to violence, readers are led to a renewed and deeper understanding of the horror of war. A remarkable achievement.
-- T. F. Rigelhof
Ladykiller
By Charlotte Gill
Thomas Allen, 230 pages, $24.95
Vancouverite Charlotte Gill’s first book is an excellent collection of short stories from an important new voice, an intelligent, contemporary book full of complicated characters who, in their various anxieties and weaknesses, Gill subtly but entirely exposes. The narrative events that grip these characters do not manipulate the reader, but neither do they give back the control you find yourself surrendering to them. Gill’s voice is on each page, her sure eye for contemporary detail, her originality and unsentimental wit, her ability to deliver us to endings with a sense of having read tellingly about our own world. About ourselves, even. That is Charlotte Gill’s authority. Ladykiller kills. -- Timothy Taylor
Gently Down the Stream
By Ray Robertson
Cormorant, 335 pages, $29.95
Although the Beatles don’t make it onto protagonist Hank Roberts’s playlist, which runs heavily to the Doors, Dylan and proto-punk, Ray Robertson’s droll, astute novel does what the best Lennon-McCartney songs do: make us a little bit more appreciative of being alive. This character-driven work, with the comic-moralist influence of Mordecai Richler apparent, asks whether an overeducated and underachieving male can stay sane, solvent, sober and coupled in his gentrifying neighbourhood, with no more powerful weapons than Sudafed-laced coffee, a karaoke microphone and the love of a woman and a dog. -- T. F. Rigelhof
Sweetness in the Belly
By Camilla Gibb
Doubleday Canada,
408 pages, $32.95
Camilla Gibb’s ambitious third novel is a study in the complexities of context, a drama playing on concentric stages and set in the post-Selassie era of the 1970s in a poor district of the Ethiopian city of Harar, making periodic forays into its vibrant heart of markets and mosques. Through its white narrator, Lily, the Giller Prize-nominated novel explores identity and belonging. Using, simple, elegant, spare language, Sweetness in the Belly is vivid and rich with interesting detail, politically relevant and eminently readable. -- Karen Solie
What We All Long For
By Dionne Brand
Knopf Canada, 319 pages, $29.95
Dionne Brand’s third and most accomplished novel is the overlapping story of four twentysomethings -- the artist daughter of Vietnamese refugees, a black male poet, a mixed-race female bicycle courier and a Nova Scotia native in the schmatte business -- making their lives in Toronto, which is as central a character as any of them. Brand gives Toronto a textured poetic reality that speaks to the city’s unique qualities and gives the city the novel it has been awaiting.
-- Rinaldo Walcott
The Wreckage
By Michael Crummey
Doubleday Canada,
356 pages, $34.95
Youthful Wish Furey meets sexually alert, 16-year-old Mercedes (Sadie) Parsons in Sadie’s outport village in 1940. Their lurching toward a relationship is observed in sharp and lively fashion. Fleeing Sadie’s disapproving community, Wish bolts into military service and makes his way to the Pacific arena, where he is taken prisoner by the Japanese. Sadie waits in St. John’s. In the last part of the novel, set in 1994, Mercedes returns to Newfoundland for the first time since the war and bumps into Wish. We enter the force field of two deeply stubborn people. Their wary, turbulent re-encounters have jumpy power, all the more exhilarating for their lack of sentimentality. The slow reconnection of these two feels heroically human.
-- Catherine Bush
The Time in Between
By David Bergen
McClelland & Stewart,
269 pages, $34.99
In David Bergen’s Giller Prize-winning fourth novel, Charles Boatman is a Vietnam veteran who, decades after the war, is still fighting. He had come home to Washington state to nightmares, an unfaithful wife, rye whisky and a small daughter, and by the time he takes off alone to the B.C. mountains, he’s also leaving twins. When his wife dies, the kids come to him, but eventually move away. When he reads “a harrowing, non-heroic retelling” of a North Vietnamese author’s war experience, Charles feels a haunting kinship. He books a ticket to Hanoi, and disappears. This sets the stage for a parallel narrative in which two of his children go looking for him. -- Karen Solie
Three Views of Crystal Water
By Katherine Govier
HarperCollins, 418 pages, $32.95
Katherine Govier’s ninth novel moves from Vancouver to Japan to Kuwait to France and England, beginning in 1860 and ending after the bombing of Hiroshima. The story shifts between Vera Drew, 13 as the novel opens in 1934, and her grandfather James Lowinger, just back from the Orient with a Japanese wife, Keiko. When Lowinger dies, Vera travels to Japan with Keiko, to the island where she worked as an ama, a diver for abalone, seaweed and oysters. There she meets Ikkanshi, island’s sword-polisher, who introduces her to the way of the sword. Vera wants to become an ama too. In Govier’s deft hands, water and steel have equal resonance.
- Gordon Morash
An Audience of Chairs
By Joan Clark
Knopf Canada, 350 pages, $32.95
Moranna MacKenzie, the protagonist of Joan Clark’s novel, is deeply eccentric. She carries the weight of difference assigned to being the “crazy,” subject to her Cape Breton community’s scorn and fear. Her lover, Bun, works the ferries, and the two articulate a level of tenderness that surpasses most people’s experience. But she has come to this cautious equilibrium only after great turmoil. Moranna refuses to think of herself as mentally ill, bipolar or manic depressive. Clark dares to write about those who live with a disability that makes of life a labyrinth of potential disasters. Her risk is our benefit --if we have the wit to read as intensely as Moranna lives.
-- Aritha van Herk
The Sweet Edge
By Alison Pick
Raincoast, 284 pages, $21.95
Alison Pick’s debut novel, The Sweet Edge, is gorgeous. It’s also strange and funny and terribly sexy. It’s poetic without being turgid, topical without being trite, and peppered with lively pop-cultural touchstones you never trip over. The plot -- lovers on the cusp of breakup each separately contemplate the things that have divided and could conquer them forever -- is involving and fresh. The Sweet Edge has about as much in common with chick lit as Meryl Streep does with Pam Anderson, but you will root for and be riveted by the unique, colloquial, authentic way protagonists Ellen and Adam find their way back to forgiveness.
-- Lisa Gabriele
Luck
By Joan Barfoot
Knopf Canada, 307 pages, $32.95
Joan Barfoot’s 10th novel, Luck, bypasses “what if?” for “what now?” when hale, 46-year-old furniture maker Philip Lawrence “buggers off” suddenly in his sleep. What follows is a satirical romp through mortality, and the grief of Phil’s housemate-survivors, his artist wife Nora, their ebullient housekeeper Sophie, and Nora’s live-in model, Beth, a herbal tea-meister trapped in an ex-beauty queen’s body. Splicing the women’s points of view as events unfold between Phil’s demise and his cremation, Barfoot reveals the happenstances that have landed them in the old house on the hill. The results are doled out in fluid but barbed prose in this often hilarious, insightful danse macabre. -- Carol Bruneau
Afterlands
By Steven Heighton
Knopf Canada, 416 pages, $32.95
One of our finest poets gathers information about a historical incident that has captured his imagination, and excises, conflates, ad-libs and invents as he bends and blends real people, real places and another time into an intensely felt fiction. The incident Steven Heighton riffs on in Afterlands is the 1871-1872 voyage of the USS Polaris to plant the U.S. flag at the North Pole. Half of the expeditionary party -- 19 men, women and children -- were cast adrift on a large ice floe off Ellesmere Island, where they were marooned for more than six months with scant provisions as the floe wound its way down the Labrador coast. -- T. F. Rigelhof
A Perfect Pledge
By Rabindranath Maharaj
Knopf Canada, 401 pages, $32.95
V. S. Naipaul makes a formidable father figure, especially for Indian novelists writing in English, especially for writers who, like Naipaul, were born in Trinidad. Especially, I guess, for Rabindranath Maharaj, who confronts this oedipal angst head-on in A Perfect Pledge, which shares the comically neutral tone of Naipaul’s earlier novels, except that Maharaj’s humour is broader, the characters more hilarious in their physical and linguistic excesses. Also, unlike Naipaul, Maharaj’s mirth belies an implacable tenderness, an empathy and acceptance of human nature -- a respectfulness that precludes scorn.
-- Donna Bailey Nurse
Alligator
By Lisa Moore
Anansi, 312 pages $29.95
Teenaged Colleen Clark is hanging out with her Aunt Madeleine, who is producing a film about two young men who stole a priest’s collar and around hearing confessions in the 1830s. Madeleine has cast Isobel in the lead, drawing the Toronto actress back to her birthplace and into an affair with Valentin, a violent Russian criminal. Valentin extorts Frank, a kid with a hot-dog cart on the best location in St. John’s. Frank, to close the circle, falls in lustful love with Colleen. Moore uses her enormous technical skill to deepen and enhance both the emotional intensity and intellectual profundity of her portrait of the existential crises that underlie both the self-mocking folk charm and scathing wit of contemporary St. John’s. -- T. F. Rigelhof
The Lizard Cage
By Karen Connelly
Random House Canada,
516 pages, $34.95
It takes faith and courage to set a novel of more than 500 pages almost solely within the confines of a prison. The very nature of prison life -- its repetitiveness, the limited cast, the sameness of detail -- can break the back of the most tenacious reader. Karen Connelly avoids these pitfalls in The Lizard Cage, largely through her measured and graceful writing. In this debut novel, as in her previous books, there is a restless search for truth in a complex and tarnished world. The novel follows the prison routine of Teza, a Burmese protest singer who, while languishing in solitary confinement, tries to establish some significance to all that transpires within his squalid cell.
-- Rabindranath Maharaj
BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
Perfectly Reasonable Deviations
from the Beaten Track:
The Letters of Richard P. Feynman
Edited by Michelle Feynman
Basic Books, 486 pages, $36.95
These letters to and from the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, enthusiastic bongo player, painter, bon vivant and the man who solved the puzzle of the Challenger explosion, maintain intact and unsullied his vivid personality. The letters, which begin when Feynman was 21, can be wittily self-deprecating, or they can be moving, especially those from the years at Los Alamos during the Second World War, as his wife Arline lay dying in a nearby sanatorium while Feynman tried to understand the disease taking her from him. What we get is a man who is expansive, genial, wise and in love with life. We’ll be lucky to look upon his like again.
-- Martin Levin
Istanbul:
Memories and the City
By Orhan Pamuk
Knopf, 384 pages, $34.95
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk invites us into a fragile segment of Istanbul’s history, in the hapless Turkey of the 1950s and ’60s. This detailed, highly melancholy, generously illustrated study is as much about Pamuk’s own childhood and formative years as it is about his city. In turn, he describes the turbulent minutiae of a creative child in a dysfunctional family and then, with an all-perceiving, somewhat Joycean eye, the tapestry upon which that life is embroidered, drawing parallels between the two. Pamuk composes painterly, bittersweet prose-poems that evoke Istanbul’s smells, its music, its soul, its past, its decay and its incurable suffering.
-- Byron Ayanoglu
Them:
A Memoir of Parents
By Francine Duplessix Gray
Penguin Press, 529 pages, $42
After several works of biography and fiction, substantial accomplishment and modest fame, Francine du Plessix Gray has written a book about her life. Or about her parents. Or about her parents and her stepfather and the huge and colourful cast who traipsed in and out of their luminous circle. This is a very complex story. Complex and, in the end, utterly captivating. Gray is not the central character, since the whole point of the book is to illustrate how peripheral she was to the giant figures around her and to show how we are shaped by the people, most of them loony, who reared us and hurt us and never allowed us to escape their grasp, even when they were dead.
-- David M. Shribman
American Prometheus:
The Triumph and Tragedy
of J. Robert Oppenheimer
By Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
Knopf, 719 pages, $47
Adored and reviled, icon and pariah, the left’s secular saint by the time of his death from cancer in 1967, the father of the atomic bomb was an enigmatic and paradoxical character. He remains so, despite Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s monumental biography, American Prometheus. Twenty-five years in the writing, it deepens the mystery of this tormented figure. In awe of “Oppie,” the authors veer at times toward hagiography, though Oppenheimer still emerges with a tarnished halo. Probably destined to become the canonical biography.
-- Chris Scott
Epileptic
By David B.
Translated by Kim Thomson
Pantheon, 361 pages, $35
This graphic memoir by David B. (né Pierre-François Beauchard) explores his childhood in a middle-class family in France, in the shadow of his elder brother Jean-Christophe’s debilitating epilepsy. Pierre-François is obsessed with war and warriors. Each page overflows with visions: a tangle of soldiers, shields and samurai, and swirling dragon-snakes, where people morph into fantastic creatures or hurtle through imaginary landscapes, reflecting his own powerlessness, psychological chaos and the power struggles within the family. Though the translation sometimes lacks the finesse of the original French, David B.’s rich visual tapestry, a personal archeology steeped in psychology, philosophy and history, transcends language and transforms Epileptic into a masterpiece of the medium.
-- Nathalie Atkinson
John Kenneth Galbraith:
His Life, His Politics, His Economics
By Richard Parker
HarperCollins, 820 pages, $39.95
This admirable biography examines how a 6-foot 8-inch Ontario farm boy bestrode the post-Second World War era in the United States. Parker traces Galbraith’s enormously distinguished career in academia, in government, as a diplomat (ambassador to India), anti-
Vietnam-war activist and, most of all, as an author who, in such books as The Affluent Society and The New Industrial State, showed himself to be an economist who could communicate iconoclastic but activist theories in lively style and with mordant wit. This authorized biography does not go into great detail about the private life, but it is a rich, well-written and fittingly large monument to this super-sized intellectual. -- Stephen Clarkson
The Molly Fire:
A Memoir
By Michael Mitchell
ECW, 250 pages, $19.95
Michael Mitchell is a Toronto photographer and filmmaker whose mother, Molly, an artist, drowned in her bath at the age of 81. Eventually, all of Molly’s things are packed up or distributed, all but a stack of paintings no one wants. Mitchell builds a fire to burn this “legacy of a life of looking.” The Molly fire seems like sacrilege, a perception that shifts subtly as Mitchell traces the provenance of what he’s kept -- his parents’ diaries, old letters, recipes -- and plunders a personal history no longer tied to objects. Out of these straightforward elements, Mitchell has conjured a memoir of such delicacy and complexity that it deserves to stand with the best of its genre. -- Merilyn Simonds
Incorrigible
By Velma Demerson
Wilfrid Laurier University Press,
172 pages, $19.95
Under the Female Refuges Act, Ontario, from 1896-1964, arrested and jailed, without trial or appeal, females 16 to 35 whom magistrates suspected of undesirable social behaviour -- promiscuity or having a child out of wedlock. Males were deemed “incorrigible” only for theft. In 1939, Velma Demerson was deemed incorrigible, largely owing to her engagement to a Chinese man. Now, at 84, Demerson returns to Ontario with a powerful account of the injustices she faced, including losing her citizenship, an abortion, divorce, the death of a son and possible victimization by medical advocates of the eugenics movement. The book, which made our reviewer weep, is a searing indictment of a time and attitude we would do well not to forget.
-- Maggie Mortimer
Germs:
A Memoir of Childhood
By Richard Wollheim
McClelland & Stewart,
259 pages, $29.99
This is the memoir of a childhood in London, England, in the 1920s and ’30s. Though Richard Wollheim -- better known as a philosopher whose specialties were art and psychoanalysis -- refers to his adulthood on occasion, he uses “childhood” as the circumference of his book. Germs is divided into three sections, and it was written over 20 years. Though Proust, along with Freud, is the presiding influence on the whole of Wollheim’s memoir, it’s in the first section that the writing is most obviously Proustian: delicate, precise, concentrated, introducing moments that will reappear in different guises later on. Germs is often very amusing, earnest in its absurdities and, ultimately, filled with wonder. -- André Alexis
The Year of Magical Thinking
By Joan Didion
Knopf, 227 pages, $33.95
Joan Didion’s brief book recounts the terrible, interminable year in which her husband of 40 years died without a word of warning at the dinner table one December evening while her attention was diverted by the salad, and her only daughter was in and out of comas in brightly overlit hospitals in various corners of the country. Possibly only something as quixotic as magical thinking would keep someone sane under these circumstances. Didion’s year takes place in her rarefied milieu, the bubble of fame and fortune and celebrity in which she lives. But her pain is that of every woman, wife, mother. Her terror and ignorance and aloneness are ours; her words resonate with the experiences we have either all had or are about to have.
-- Marian Botsford Fraser
Mao:
The Unknown Story
By Jung Chang and Jon Halliday
Knopf, 814 pages, $50
Jung Chang’s and Jon Halliday’s biography traces Mao Zedong’s rise from provincial pamphleteer to the Luciferian head of state of the world’s most populous nation. No book has come as close to unravelling the mystery of Mao’s character as this one. The authors combine scholarship (their use of the Soviet archives to reveal Mao’s actions is groundbreaking) with the narrative drive Chang brought to her Wild Swans, sweeping the reader effortlessly back to the bizarre and deadly world created by Mao and his circle of disciple-accessories. There is no cheap psychohistory. This is a book about what is really knowable.
-- Kenneth Murphy
Two Lives
By Vikram Seth
McArthur & Company,
499 pages, $34.95
Shanti and Henny, Vikram Seth’s uncle and aunt, are the couple at the heart of this compelling memoir, the story of how an Indian-born and -raised dental student meets and becomes fast friends with his German-Jewish landlady’s daughter in 1930s Berlin. Shanti and Henny’s friendship thrived despite, or perhaps because of, striking differences in race, religion, nationality, temperament and family traditions -- all during one of the most brutal periods of 20th-century history, that of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, and the duration and extended aftermath of perhaps the most obscene war in human history. -- Janice Kulyk Keefer
A Great Feast of Light:
Growing Up Irish
in the Television Age
By John Doyle
Doubleday Canada,
321 pages, $32.95
In John Doyle’s fresh, clear-eyed memoir, it’s television, not saints or scholars, that heralds the end of Ireland’s Dark Age. Born in 1957, Doyle is old enough to remember turning on the first electric light in his grandmother’s house and to register several years later the powerful cultural tremors when television spread across Ireland. If you’ve ever scheduled your social life around Friends or wondered why you like The Simpsons better than your next-door neighbours, this book’s for you. For all its sharp insights into recent Irish history, A Great Feast of Light is as much post-McLuhan fable as Irish memoir, a gifted writer’s story -- funny, original, compelling -- of his coming of age in one small outpost of the Global Village. -- Elizabeth Grove-White
Riding with Rilke:
Reflections on Motorcycles
and Books
By Ted Bishop
Viking Canada, 257 pages, $32
Mixing travelogue, autobiography and literary history with the art of motorcycle maintenance, Riding with Rilke focuses on relations between unlikely forces, especially between motorcycles and archives. Ted Bishop’s decision to ride from Edmonton to the Modernist archive at the University of Texas took him on a journey that revealed unexpected connections. His motorcycle journey through mountains and desert makes us understand the similar ups and downs of reading and research. His narrative conveys a constant enthusiasm for texts, whether landscapes or books. Riding a motorcycle or making an archival discovery propels one beyond the boundaries of one’s life.
-- Ira Nadel
Edge Seasons
By Beth Powning
Knopf Canada, 226 pages, $29.95
The opening of Edge Seasons places us at the door of Beth Powning’s year of discontent. With a quiet, understated lyricism, she takes us through a year of doubt and indecision toward the possibility of renewed hope and wonder and, for her, another life to live. This is a quiet, intense book. There are no huge catastrophes, no great fictional epiphanies, no deaths or resurrections. Instead, we get the quiet of a simple, quite ordinary life made beautiful by her perceptions. I read it in increments over several weeks, and each sentence rewarded me with fresh insight into the simple world we might call holy, if we dared. -- Patrick Lane
Neil Young Nation:
A Quest, an Obsession
(and a True Story)
By Kevin Chong
GreyStone, 284 pages, $22.95
Writing a combination buddies-on-the-road saga and ode to a great subject, novelist Kevin Chong defines what it is to be a Young man. Travelling literally the same route that carried Neil Young to fame in the mid-sixties, Chong weaves a critical history of his idol together with a journal of his travels along the road from his own hometown in Vancouver to Neil’s in Winnipeg, to Thunder Bay to Toronto to Albuquerque to Los Angeles, and home again, making for a nice mix of mandated reportage and observations of the road. We forgive Chong for being facile in his writing because he embodies both senses of that word. Like his formidably talented subject, he makes it look easy.
-- Douglas Bell
SCIENCE & NATURE
The Evolution-Creation Struggle
By Michael Ruse
Harvard University Press,
320 pages, $32.50
The argument between evolutionists and creationists, Michael Ruse says, is not a debate between science and religion, but one between rival religions the origins of which go back to the Enlightenment. “Evolutionism” and “creationism” denote complexes of ideas that surround the concepts of evolution and creation themselves. Ruse has bravely written a book that could offend all parties, and fundamentalists of all stripes. But for those willing to examine their own convictions, The Evolution-Creation Struggle offers a new perspective on an important contemporary debate. -- Alan Batten
Eating Stone:
Imagination and the Loss
of the Wild
By Ellen Meloy
Pantheon, 330 pages, $37
Read Ellen Meloy’s Eating Stone and you’ll want to run out to buy every other book she wrote before her sudden and unexpected death in November, 2004. The artist and writer’s books have won several literary awards, and time will likely show her to have been one of our finest natural-history writers. Her knowledge of the natural world is deep, and her prose breathtakingly beautiful and often startling. Here she leads us through the history of desert sheep from the Pleistocene onward, their predators, behaviour, and the points where their lives intersect with those of humans as evidenced in prehistoric petroglyphs and tribal myths. -- Annie Proulx
Why Gender Matters:
What Parents and Teachers
Need to Know about the Emerging
Science of Sex Differences
By Leonard Sax
Doubleday, 308 pages, $34.95
Is sex biologically based, with gender-specific behaviour having a profound neuro-anatomical substrate? Or are sissy and tough-guy roles into which boys and girls are socialized? In the last 30 years, the general answer has been that behaviour is socially constructed, not biologically determined. Wrong, says psychologist-pediatrician Leonard Sax. Many differences are biological. His challenging book discusses the neural basis of how boys and girls hear differently, how their aggressiveness is expressed, and so on. The book’s only failing is in its discussion of sex, in which the scientist turns moralist. Still, it’s enthralling, providing occasion to talk about where inborn differences matter. -- Edward Shorter
A Crack in the Edge of the World:
America and the Great California
Earthquake of 1906
By Simon Winchester
HarperCollins, 410 pages, $37.95
This remarkable work of historical reconstruction deals with the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Natural disasters share both a grim universality and, as Simon Winchester demonstrates, an inevitability we perceive but through a glass darkly: We know why, we know how, we know roughly where . . . we just don’t know when. This is a big, ambitious book. Winchester is bent on communicating everything about the quake, including everything about the geology of North America, and earthquakes in general. He delivers colour and anecdote. He evokes the terror and the horror, while also extracting meaning. This is a daring, brilliant extravaganza, the work of a master at the height of his powers.
-- Ken McGoogan
The Bedside Book of Birds:
An Avian Miscellany
By Graeme Gibson
Doubleday Canada,
384 pages, $39.95
Just in time for the Christmas season comes the most spectacular bird book of the year. Graeme Gibson dedicated himself to “collecting, and finally obsessively searching out texts that illustrated something -- almost anything -- about our shared response to birds.” The result is an astoundingly beautiful work that features some of the most sublime writings on the subject, as well as more than 100 illustrations ranging from early cave paintings through works by Mark Catesby and John James Audubon to more contemporary pieces. Great pains have been taken by both author and publisher to make this a work of art: They have succeeded marvellously.
-- Béa Gonzalez
SOCIAL STUDIES & IDEAS
Sweet Dreams:
Philosophical Obstacles
to a Science of Consciousness
By Daniel C. Dennett
MIT Press, 199 pages, $37.75
In characteristically playful mode, Darwinian fundamentalist Daniel Dennett turns his opponents’ arguments against them in a masterful display of philosophical judo. His title, Sweet Dreams, refers to philosophical arguments designed to show that consciousness lies beyond the ken of science, aimed thereby at securing the sanctity of the human spirit beyond the grasp of its own most powerful form of understanding. Dennett finds the position untenable, and assaults it with obvious glee. He is on his way to becoming the Herbert Spencer of our age, the man of ideas who can bridge tradition and science, giving us a sense of how it is that the robot in the mirror really is us. -- Jeffrey Foss
The World is Flat:
A Brief History
of the Twenty-First Century
By Thomas L. Friedman
Farrar Straus & Giroux,
473 pages, $37.50
“Flat” is a brilliant clarifying metaphor for the latest, arguably the most profound conceptual megashift to rock the world in living memory. For Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, the world has gone from round to flat. New global technologies developing at warp speed allow for multiple forms of collaboration -- the sharing of knowledge and work -- without regard to geography, distance, time or, soon, language. The book -- which describes and argues for the flat-world idea, assesses its implications for various countries and proposes a course of action -- is fast-paced, well-written and often wrong. But it is an important effort to jolt the United States out of its narcissism and complacency.
-- David Ticoll
Your Call is Important to Us:
The Truth about Bullshit
By Laura Penny
McClelland & Stewart,
278 pages, $22.99
In one of two successful books on BS this year (the other is a pamphlet-sized volume by philosopher Harry Frankfurt), young academic Laura Penny takes aim at specific political, corporate, media and entertainment industry targets with machine-gun prose and furious wit. Advertising, corporate public relations and the George W. Bush regime come in for the expected drubbing, but there’s also fun, though depressing, stuff on the insurance industry, call centres and mall culture. At her angriest, as in Pillzapoppin’: The Rise of Big Pharma, Penny -- a Naomi Klein for cranky people with a sense of humour -- is at her funniest, with sizzling riff after riff decrying the legal drugging of men, women, children and animals. -- Zsuzsi Gartner
Freakonomics:
A Rogue Economist Explores
the Hidden Side of Everything
By Steven D. Levitt
and Stephen J. Dubner
HarperCollins,
242 pages, $34.95
Freakonomics is a refreshing contrast to “serious” economics books, which are often hackwork reinforcing the existing divisions of middle-class politics. Levitt and Dubner promote contrarian thinking about hot-button issues such as abortion, crime rates and schooling. Their fundamental idea is that the conventional wisdom is often wrong, but there is a lot of social power it. This is an entertaining, cleverly subversive attack on dishonest “expertise” -- and proves that knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so. -- John Dizard
Worlds Apart:
Measuring International
and Global Inequality
By Branko Milanovic
Princeton University Press,
227 pages, $44.95
A lead economist at the World Bank, Branko Milanovic has written probably the most comprehensive, thorough and balanced assessment yet of global inequality. And for the most part, it shows the pessimists -- those who believe that the chronic economic crisis in Africa and stagnation in much of Latin America outweigh the economic boom in Malaysia, Taiwan and even China -- are right. Citing such numbing figures as the fact that 2.7 billion people live on less than $2 a day while the world’s 587 billionaires have net worth equal to 20 per cent of U.S. annual economic output, Milanovic makes a powerful and distressing argument for the intractability of inequality. His expertise and integrity inform every page. -- Thomas Homer-Dixon
The Collapse of Globalism:
And the Reinvention of the World
By John Ralston Saul
Viking Canada,
309 pages, $36
One of Canada’s leading public figures offers a radical critique of two governing assumptions of the contemporary world, both of which are familiar bêtes noirs to readers of Saul’s previous work. What is ostensibly a critique of “globalism” is not an attack on this or that set of trade rules, but rather on two deeply rooted mindsets: a narrowly economics-based interpretation of how societies develop, and a narrowly utilitarian and technocratic conception of public administration and corporate management, including education. The important issues Saul raises are somewhat undermined by his failure to address substantively the issue raised by globalization.
-- Will Kymlicka
Lilac Moon:
Dreaming of the Real West
By Sharon Butala
HarperCollins, 256 pages, $34.95
This compelling blend of family stories, memoir, research, history and commentary guides the reader to a fresh understanding of the primary myths of Canada’s West -- for instance, that it is predominantly rural or that it was built by brave, virtuous and successful men. Sharon Butala examines the icons of the West -- the cowboy, the noble savage, the fierce individualist -- and transforms them. This book will surprise you with the real take on cowboys, on Western Canadian literature, on gun control, on Western alienation and on the divide between aboriginal and non-aboriginal. It will guide you to an understanding of the spirit of our prairie West. -- Trevor Herriot
American Backlash:
The Untold Story of Social Change
in the United States
By Michael Adams
Viking, 230 pages, $35
Michael Adams -- the Canadian social-political survey analyst whose 2003 prize-winning Fire and Ice probed the distinction between Canadians and Americans -- has now given us an important study of currents within American values and mentality. The result is a thoughtful, provocative start to moving beyond myth and banality. Drawing on a decade of probing and sustained polling, Adams and his team don’t minimize the sharp contrast between liberal and conservative, progressive and reactionary, but find surprising agreement on root issues of jobs, civil liberties and even foreign policy. In fact, he locates the ultimate source of division in a national majority of hedonist, consumerist, politically disillusioned and/or disengaged white Americans. -- Roger Morris
No Time:
Stress and the Crisis of Modern Life
By Heather Menzies
Douglas & McIntyre,
291 pages, $24.95
In this memoir cum critical analysis, Heather Menzies sounds an urgent wake-up call: Slow down! The Ottawa writer argues that stress, physical and emotional burnout and institutional malaise are now features of everyday life. The blurring between virtual and non-virtual life has created an intensification in our commitments and led to an anesthetizing disconnection from reality. She ends, though, on an optimistic note, admonishing us to seize and control our own time, and for citizens and those within the corridors of power to engage in public dialogue to transcend the “unbearable lightness of being digital.” -- Leslie Regan Shade
An Irish History of Civilization
By Don Akenson
McGill-Queen’s University Press,
1,522 pages in two volumes,
$39.95 each
Historian Don Akenson’s monumental work begins with Paul in 16 BC and ends with the Presidential Prayer Breakfast in Washington in 1970: Billy Graham and Richard Nixon. What’s between requires four books in two volumes, divided into chapters on particular places and periods, themselves divided into numerous brief stories, each with its own point. Iconoclastic, original and eclectic, Akenson has produced a unique opus that is absorbing and entertaining, sometimes exhilarating and occasionally exhausting. The sheer vitality and multiplicity of these thousand and one stories produces a cumulative richness of imagery and narrative unmatched in much conventional fiction. It is an extraordinary feat of writing. -- Peter Hart
Collapse:
How Societies Choose
to Fail or Succeed
By Jared Diamond
Viking, 575 pages, $44
Jared Diamond’s mega bestselling Guns, Germs, and Steel was a phenomenon. Last week was its 189th on The Globe paperback bestseller list. But Collapse is better: more original and accurate, even if at times overweight and repetitious. Diamond demonstrates the frailty of European civilization and the precariousness of civilizations trying to live beyond their means. He unveils a rogues’ gallery of failed societies, relieved by a depressingly short roll of a few that managed to keep going thriftily. He also focuses on current destructive U.S. practices. The human failings that undid ancient cultures are hard at work in ours. -- Ronald Wright
Written in the Flesh:
A History of Desire
By Edward Shorter
University of Toronto Press,
321 pages, $40
Written in the Flesh is a brave, honest book with which the reviewer has fundamental disagreements. Edward Shorter argues that sexual behaviour and pleasure are biologically driven, not environmentally determined. “[T]e history of desire is the history of the almost biological liberation of the brain to free up the mind in the direction of total-body sex,” the capacity to derive sexual pleasure from any part of the body. Freud viewed this as a natural children repress due to rules imposed by society. Shorter gives Freud’s theory an ingenious twist. He converts it from psychological analysis into a tool of historical interpretation, which he wields over nothing less than the scope of Western civilization. Audacious.
-- Wendy McElroy
Don’t Get Too Comfortable
By David Rakoff
Doubleday Canada,
222 pages, $29.95
Don’t Get Too Comfortable is easily as funny as Fraud, Rakoff’s debut collection of humour essays. But in this, his sophomore effort, Rakoff -- a former Torontonian who burrowed into the Big Apple more than 20 years ago -- also wants to tickle our consciences as he weaves moral fibre between the punchlines. By abandoning the memoirish form of Fraud, Rakoff generates the elbow room necessary for social critique and philosophizing. The book is powered by a vicious and efficient two-stroke engine of anger and wit; it is a sustained and successful assault on that old yuppie bumper sticker, Whoever Dies With The Most Toys, Wins. -- Ryan Bigge
Against the Grain:
An Irreverent View of Alberta
By Catherine Ford
McClelland & Stewart,
256 pages, $34.99
Against the Grain is former Calgary Herald columnist Catherine Ford’s contribution to the developing portrait of la belle province sans merci. A pastiche of opinion and observation, the book whips up an enjoyable mixture of personal memoir and provincial gossip, acerbic critique and porcupine defensiveness. In short, it reflects the province it portrays: opinionated, fascinating and funny. It is also a serious examination of this distinctive geopolitical region. Ford captures the ineffable spirit that drives Alberta. This journalist and writer, who rocks the boat and enjoys the waves, who speaks her mind and who will never recant, is absolutely the daughter of her province.
-- Aritha van Herk
Race Against Time
By Stephen Lewis
Anansi, 198 pages, $18.95
Stephen Lewis, in this year’s Massey Lectures series, adds his always articulate and emotional voice to the cause of Africa’s struggles and hopes. Lewis has come to be the most dramatic prophet sounding the alarm on the spread of AIDS in Africa, as UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s special envoy on HIV/AIDS. In this book, he broadens the target of his alarm to the eight UN Millennium Development Goals adopted in 2000 and to be achieved by 2015. In Africa, Lewis says, “it is entirely likely that not a single country in the region will make the goals.” This book is a heartfelt call to overcome that failure.
-- Steven Langdon
Men’s Style:
The Thinking Man’s Guide to Dress
By Russell Smith
McClelland & Stewart,
247 pages, $27.95
Hardly anyone knows as much about decoding the sumptuary rules of masculine attire as Russell Smith, novelist, columnist and cultural agent-provocateur. Smith finds sartorial fulfilment in defining a philosophy of dress that supersedes other men’s style guides. His restless intellectualism, muscular prose and signature wit make him the auteur de mode for the club crowd and fashion literati alike. Whimsically illustrated by Edwin Fotheringham, Men’s Style is both a practical guide for the elegant man and a cultural survey of fashion and trends. It is even more entertaining for Smith’s seductive prose and often hilarious observations about the urban landscape.
-- Julie Enfield
HISTORY
Bury the Chains:
Prophets and Rebels in the Fight
to Free an Empire’s Slaves
By Adam Hochschild
Houghton Mifflin,
467 pages, $39.95
Adam Hochschild provides another exemplary contribution to the saga of human rights, after King Leopold’s Ghost. The book chronicles the 18th-century British activists who fought to end the slave trade and helped to energize other human-rights struggles such as those on behalf of disenfranchised workers and women. Hochschild’s dramatic story focuses on the lives of heroes and villains: a slave-ship captain, a slave, an organizer, a pamphleteer and a lawyer. In this superb book, he depicts the great sweep of events in vivid brushstrokes, while offering rare and detailed insight into human-rights campaigns and the demands of investigative journalism.
-- Micheline Ishay
The Incendiary:
The Misadventures
of John the Painter,
First Modern Terrorist
By Jessica Warner
McClelland & Stewart,
298 pages, $32.99
Jessica Warner’s second book -- her well-regarded first, Craze, was a look at the influence of gin in the Age of Reason -- is an account of Scotsman James Aitken, known throughout the England of the mid-1770s as John the Painter. He attempted, on a supposed commission from an American agent in Paris, to set fire to some of the six British Navy Royal dockyards, apparently under the delusion he was aiding the American Revolution. Warner has told his story quite magically, with a flair both for research and literary narrative, and a formidable enthusiasm that makes this work well-nigh perfect.
-- Simon Winchester
The Great Dominion:
Winston Churchill in Canada,
1900-1954
By David Dilks
Thomas Allen,
472 pages, $45
British historian David Dilks has produced a thorough, careful chronicle of Churchill and his relationship with Canada, built on material gleaned from newspapers and magazines of the period. It is rich in research, relaxed in pacing and unique in concept. Seeing a lacuna in the literature, Dilks delves into the archives and single-handedly turns a footnote into a focus. Woven together with his elegant commentary and explanatory footnotes, it gives us our first full-dress portrait of Winston Churchill’s nine visits to Canada. -- Andrew Cohen
Saskatchewan:
A New History
By Bill Waiser
Fifth House, 563 pages, $49.95
In his authoritative, well-written centennial history of Saskatchewan, Bill Waiser skillfully narrates the rise and fall of King and Queen Farmer, a tale of “next year country” where last year’s optimism is never quite dashed by this year’s failures. Waiser makes a strong case for Saskatchewan’s distinctiveness, and his account of the lives of waves of immigrants, including the struggles faced by women and the hardships experienced by children, is brilliant. Biographies of outstanding individuals enliven his detailed social, cultural and economic history. -- Ramsay Cook
Bitter Embrace:
White Society’s Assault
on the Woodland Cree
By Maggie Siggins
McClelland & Stewart,
322 pages, $37.99
Pelican Narrows, Sask., is not an exceptional place. But historian Maggie Siggins shows that this seemingly unremarkable Rock Cree community has been the site of a heart-wrenching struggle for identity and survival. Her people-centred tale shows in brutal detail how colonization has left its mark on individuals whom we come to know and empathize with. The book does not allow a self-congratulatory smugness about how far we have come since the bad old days, but shows that the problems of colonialism have not been alleviated in Pelican Narrows.
-- Warren Cariou
Shockwave:
Countdown to Hiroshima
By Stephen Walker
HarperCollins, 384 pages, $36.95
Stephen Walker’s moving and accessible account of the last few weeks, days and hours leading up to the dropping of 15-kiloton Little Boy on Hiroshima -- as well as the explosion’s immediate aftermath -- makes a unique contribution to the historical literature on these bombings. It’s also one of the most personal, tangible narratives ever produced about the surreal and distorting history of the split atom. Walker makes it his business not to judge, but to describe, in close and palpable terms, details memorable and real, so that the scenes jar his readers into a familiar and always affecting recognition: It could have been me; it could have been us.
-- Lydia Millet
The Third Reich in Power:
1933-1939
By Richard J. Evans
Penguin Press, 941 pages, $53
Cambridge University historian Richard Evans’s projected three-volume history of the regime created by Adolf Hitler and his followers is a major achievement, likely to be the best survey in any language. This second volume takes the story from the Nazis’ seizure of power in Germany, in 1933, to the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939. Keeping track of Hitler and his henchmen on the one hand, and the apparatus of the state and its institutions on the other, Evans also has an eye for ordinary Germans, who remind us constantly of the diversity of perspectives, and also that no one saw things quite the way we do today. Brilliantly told, this is an ominous account of a sophisticated, advanced, talented, educated society, both driven and driving itself over the brink.
-- Michael Marrus
Team of Rivals:
The Political Genius
of Abraham Lincoln
By Doris Kearns Goodwin
Simon & Schuster, 916 pages, $48
On March 4, 1860, as Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office as 16th president of the United States, he had reason to believe that the union might not last another two months. The constitution he promised “to preserve and protect” was dissolving under the weight of slavery. The Confederacy had seized federal forts in the South and threatened to march on Washington. No president before or since would face as grave a threat. Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Lincoln is heroic and visionary, and Team of Rivals is original in conception and brilliant in execution. This is history at full flood, an absorbing narrative flowing briskly with few tributaries.
-- Andrew Cohen
Curse of the Narrows:
The Halifax Explosion 1917
By Laura M. Mac Donald
HarperCollins, 356 pages, $36.95
On Thursday, Dec. 6, 1917, the Halifax Explosion became the largest man-made disaster in history. Anyone exploring the disaster faces challenges: finding a narrative line, which individual stories to highlight, where to look for new insights and, given the avalanche of available material, how to avoid getting bogged down in detail. Laura Mac Donald has risen to these challenges and produced a powerful, moving book. She writes with a quiet humanity that brings home the wretchedness of the victims and the generosity of relief workers. Curse of the Narrows is the definitive account of the Halifax Explosion, written with elegance and authority. It is also a gripping story.
-- Charlotte Gray
Ghost Empire:
How the French Almost
Conquered North America
By Philip Marchand
McClelland & Stewart,
444 pages, $37.99
In his book about the voyages of the great and peculiar 17th-century French explorer Robert de La Salle, Philip Marchand doesn’t tell us much that is novel about La Salle. But in recounting the daring explorer’s epic wanderings, he manages to compose an amazingly fresh, surprising take on North American history, French Canada, Catholicism and the author himself, a faintly quixotic character, bookish, erudite and appealing. Ghost Empire is part history, part travelogue, part memoir and part philosophical meditation on the Catholic religion, modernity and the ironies of progress.
-- Douglas Glover
Lady Franklin’s Revenge:
A True Story of Ambition, Obsession
and the Remaking of Arctic History
By Ken McGoogan
HarperCollins, 451 pages, $36.95
This examination of Lady Jane Franklin’s distortion of the historical record in favour of her Arctic-explorer husband delivers more of what readers recognize as Ken McGoogan hallmarks: intelligence, curiosity, strong research and highly readable prose. Through the prism of an extraordinary woman’s life, McGoogan presents a compelling account of cutthroat politics and manipulation as practised by the Victorian social elite to which Lady Franklin belonged. She was not unique in seeking to achieve indirectly what she could not pursue directly. What set her apart was her skill at the game, the obsession to which she dedicated that skill, and its enduring success.
-- Penny Williams
BELLES LETTRES
Break, Blow, Burn
By Camille Paglia
Pantheon, 247 pages, $27
This is both a handbook for poetry readers and an implicit defence of poetry. Camille Paglia reads 43 poems not for their politics, not for their message or sentiment, but because they are unique verbal creations. She is reading poetry for itself. For Paglia, poems have authors, they are made of words and they deploy the lexical resources of metaphor, allusion, argument and rhythm. Her method is close explication, guided readings unravelling the knottier allusions, not too intensely technical but giving notice to the poetic form -- sonnet, lyric, narrative -- and suggestively offering her own account of theme and aim. -- Rex Murphy
The Enamoured Knight
By Douglas Glover
Oberon Press, 188 pages, $21.95
The winner of the Governor-General’s Award for fiction in 2003 (for Elle) offers an essay on fiction in general and Cervantes’s Don Quixote in particular. As Glover notes, it’s both the first and most influential novel, and an anti-novel, a “book against books.” Glover fuses an informed and readable run of literary criticism with a passionate and playful artist-on-art commentary. He’s a shrewd guide to Don Quixote‘s “cascading points of view,” “parallel action” and “shadow books,” as well as to how novels work. -- Darryl Whetter
The Short Version:
An ABC Book
By Stan Persky
New Star, 333 pages, $24
Inspired by the late Polish poet, essayist and Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, specifically by Milosz’s ABC’s, Stan Persky states, “This ABC book is the record of what I think about certain people, places and ideas, part of what I want to leave to posterity, for its use and to prevent forgetting.” Within its pages the reader will find the most insightful and wide-ranging of narratives. “Life itself,” Persky writes, “is the short version of the dream of immortality.” He asks the reader, “What would be in your ABC book?” Indeed, what would each of us pour into the vessel that is our lives so that we and our times might not be forgotten? It is a crucial question.
-- M. A. C. Farrant
CURRENT AFFAIRS & POLITICS
Dancing in the No-Fly Zone:
A Woman’s Journey Through Iraq
By Hadani Ditmars
Raincoast, 261 pages, $24.95
If all Canadian journalist Hadani Ditmars’s first book did was to provide a forum for Iraq’s disenfranchised and voiceless, it would be a remarkable and exemplary document. That Dancing in the No-Fly Zone goes so much farther, especially in Ditmars’s ability to penetrate the closed world of Iraqi women, and is written with elegance, wisdom and compassionate humour, makes it a unique triumph and a daunting debut. Anyone who cares about the truth of this squalid invasion owes her an enormous debt of gratitude for what is one of the few great books written about it, and for the grace she invariably displays under pressure.
-- Paul William Roberts
The Torture Papers:
The Road to Abu Ghraib
Edited by Karen J. Greenberg
and Joshua L. Dratel
Cambridge University Press,
1,249 pages, $67.95
This important book documents the emptying out of cherished provisions of international law. A true public service, The Torture Papers is a block of granite on the path of any forgetfulness, bringing the whole twisted story of the excesses at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison into public view. The documents themselves, unvarnished by commentary, show not some aberrant behaviour, but an officially sanctioned policy that began in the fall of 2001 with the decision to throw away the Geneva conventions, and gathered force as the insurgency in Iraq inflicted mounting casualties and mounting dread on U.S. soldiers and their commanders. -- Wesley Wark
The Other Side of Israel:
My Journey Across
the Jewish/Arab Divide
By Susan Nathan
Doubleday, 310 pages, $35
An elegant and heartfelt appeal to the conscience of her adopted country, Susan Nathan’s groundbreaking work shines a light directly on Israel’s dark secret: that government-mandated rights violations are carried out not only against Palestinians in the occupied territories, but against those within its borders. She lays bare a program of forced disenfranchisement that Israel has practised, preventing Arab Israelis from integrating or identifying with their state. Land expropriation, denial of building permits and the resulting house demolitions top the list of indignities that have faced Palestinian communities. -- Nomi Morris
The Next Attack:
The Failure of the War
on Terror and the Strategy
for Getting it Right
By Daniel Benjamin
and Steven Simon
Henry Holt,
330 pages. $34.95
The Next Attack is a deeply serious treatise by men who are acknowledged experts in counter-terrorism. They mount a stinging critique of the Bush administration’s conduct of the war on terror, distinguished by its depth of insight into the failures of U.S. policy, the rigours of the authors’ account of what must be done, and the burnished quality of anger and anguish over the U.S. position that gives the book its tone. This is a must-read on the failures of four years in a war on terror. It’s not the final word on what is to be done, but it prepares the ground. If there was too little societal warning about terrorism before 9/11, Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon are pioneers in making sure that such a condition of blissful ignorance is not repeated.
-- Wesley Wark
The Politics of Bones:
Dr. Owens Wiwa and the Struggle
for Nigeria’s Oil
By J. Timothy Hunt
McClelland & Stewart,
389 pages, $36.99
This is a skillfully written book with many strands: the politics of development in an oil-rich nation; the local practices of large multinational companies; the colourful but often violent recent history of Africa’s most populous nation; and a story of personal tragedy, flight and survival. The book focuses on Owens Wiwa and his wife, Diana. Wiwa was the brother of Ken Saro-Wiwa, charismatic leader of the Ogoni people, hanged by Sani Abacha’s regime in 1995 on murky charges of political murder.
-- David M. Malone
Under the Bridge:
The True Story of the Murder
of Reena Virk
By Rebecca Godfrey
HarperCollins,
347 pages, $32.95
In November, 1997, 14-year-old Reena Virk was beaten bloody under a bridge in Victoria by a group of seven teenage girls and one teenage boy. Later, after she struggled to escape, two of her original attackers, a boy and a girl, followed her and inflicted an even more severe beating. Finally, they dragged her into the gorge and the girl held Reena’s head under water until she drowned. Rebecca Godfrey, in her stunning new book, accomplishes the difficult task of both humanizing the participants in this very sad event and speaking clearly about who has and who has not taken moral responsibility for this crime. -- Neil Boyd
POETRY
Modern and Normal
By Karen Solie
Brick, 95 pages, $17
Karen Solie is among the best poets of her generation. Modern and Normal is the work of a seasoned, established poet at the top of her game, but in the disguise of a humble second book. Solie’s poetry shows greater control, skill and aplomb than the work of many, if not most, of Canada’s “establishment” poets. The collection is simultaneously wide-ranging in scope and unified in depth, seeking constantly to redefine subject and style while maintaining a consistent pitch between boredom with the simplicity of modern life and wonder at its complex underpinnings. Its language is muscular and strong-willed, its poems executed with deadly seriousness and a sidelong smirk. -- George Murray
Always Now:
The Collected Poems, Volume Two
By Margaret Avison
Porcupine’s Quill,
284 pages, $19.95
The surprise of Margaret Avison’s poetry is the extent to which we have underestimated it. Awarding her with canonical respectability, misreading her interest in Christian ideas as anti-experimental, has allowed us to tune out what’s disquieting about them. Avison, at 87, represents nothing less than the future of Canadian poetry --a future sympathetic to originality and the individual imagination. And her imagination in these precise, edgily exquisite poems, with their spiritualized syntax, takes its creative direction from God -- the “light/ shining from beyond farthestness.” She is one of our greatest writers, and her career will prove one of Canadian poetry’s finest hours.
-- Carmine Starnino
Little Theatres
By Erin Moure
Anansi, 90 pages, $16.95
Erin Moure’s Little Theatres is a song of materialist reverence for the natural world. It recreates a work by one of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms, Alberto Caeiro (heteronyms are “complete poetic personalities/characters with different bodies of work, biographies, etc.”). Many poems are in Portuguese or Moure’s ancestral Galician, and “transcreations” appear when line lengths change dramatically, or the English contains a Portuguese phrase absent from its “original.” Moure’s poems tug against the constructs of language. -- Meg Walker
Souwesto Home
By James Reaney
Brick, 80 pages, $17
The “Souwesto” in Souwesto Home is an acronym for southwestern Ontario, which James Reaney has made his poetic terrain for more than five decades. To read Reaney is to take an unpredictable holiday, as well as to join in a game of hit and miss. Like Reaney’s own drawings, which illustrate the book charmingly, the poems are funny, quirky, occasionally wispy. In every case, the reader never quite knows what slantwise perception or insight will leap out of the shrubbery next. At every sharp turn, Reaney is a highly sophisticated (but not faux) naif. Among the despondent obsessives who populate the ranks of Canadian poetry, how delightful it is to find one poet who remains sensationally alive in a living world.
-- Fraser Sutherland