Just a note to thank you for Geist in the Classroom. For many years I’ve taught the Editing and Publishing course in the Creative Writing Department at Concordia University, and this year I signed up for the free class sets and used Geist as a tool—to great effect.
About “The Fiction Question,” Stephen Osborne’s Letter to Subscribers enclosed in Geist 65 (and the thunderous response to it in Letters, No. 66): I love my subscription to The New Yorker, a gift from a friend, but yes! I do get that sinking feeling when the summer fiction issue slides through the letter slot.
About Michal Kozlowski’s note on Brian Mulroney’s Memoirs: 1939—1993: this is a review? According to my reading of the text on your website, Kozlowski didn’t do more than pick this book up, check out the price sticker, read the last page and flip through the index and the photos.
Thanks very much. The information I have found thus far is a chapter in the book The Great Game, by Peter Hopkirk, entitled “The Mysterious Vitkevich.”
In researching my family history, I came across Stephen Osborne’s “Stories of a Lynching” (Geist 60) about the lynching of Louis Sam, a young Sto:lo man, near Sumas Lake, B.C., in 1884. The story mentions Thomas York (Whatcom County, Washington), my great-great- grandfather, and Thomas Fraser York, my great-grandfather, but nobody in my family has ever told me about the Louis Sam incident.
For most of her adult life, my mother, Danuta Rago, was a professional photographer in Poland. In the early seventies she travelled to the Asiatic republics of the ussr and to Siberia. Her assignment was to take portraits of happy members of the collective farms and pictures of the greatest industrial projects of the Soviet empire to be used as illustrations in heavily censored Polish publications.
Several years ago Ian McKay, a Queen’s University history professor, published a book called The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia (McGill-Queen’s University Press)in which he argued that the image many of us have of Nova Scotia as a tartan-wearing, bagpipe-squealing mini-Scotland is pretty much a fabrication.
Bologna, Italy, known as both “the Fat” and “the Red,” is a city to a make a bookish vacationer salivate. Less overrun by package tours than Rome, Florence or Venice, Bologna combines superb food with the wonderful bookstores that seem to be the inevitable companion of left-wing politics.
Art museums and geographical exploration curiously share a common story. The first chapter of the story takes place in Peru. In 1540, the conquistador Gonzalo Pizarro, lost in the strange Amazonian jungle, entrusted one of his men, Francisco de Orellana, to take their remaining brigantine and set off down the Napo River in search of provisions.
