Michael Posner's Canadian Dreams: The Making and Marketing of Independent Films (D&M) is a passionate and at times hair-raising account of what's right and what's wrong with Canadian moviemaking. Posner follows the making and marketing of ten very di
On the same day that a parliamentary committee scolded the governor general for profligate spending by slashing her annual budget by ten percent, a book that purports to give the full story about life at Rideau Hall arrived on my desk. Working on the
Months ago someone walked off with our review copy of that Noam Chomsky book that was on the bestseller list earlier this year: Chronicles of Dissent: Conversations with Noam Chomsky, 1984-1991 (New Star). Well, it finally came back, just in time for
The myth of the West in Canada and the U.S.A. issues largely from a country almost unknown to most North Americans: the wide plains that spill over the forty-ninth parallel between Montana and Saskatchewan. Beth LaDow, who lives in Massachusetts and
It's been reported that my nephew in Ottawa needs to be encouraged to read, but he doesn't need to be encouraged to do sports. With this in mind I ventured into an unfamiliar genre. Sports books seem to come in two flavours—how-to books (which most t
The New Northwest by Bill Waiser (Fifth House), is subtitled The Photographs of the Frank Crean Expeditions 1908-1909, but provides us with very little information about these two fascinating subjects. The New Northwest can be seen as another wacky v
Roy Woodbridge tries hard to connect everything in his somewhat despairingly named book, The Next World War: Tribes, Cities, Nations and Ecological Decline (University of Toronto), in which he calls for a “war on ecological decline”—a war on the forc
The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship is the latest of Charles Bukowski's posthumously published books, of which there are at least five in the world (and possibly still more to come from the estimable Black Sparrow Pre
Receiving books for Christmas raises the question: What possible reason did anyone have to give me this? ... This year it was my uncle's turn: why exactly did he send me a copy of The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals: The Lost H