The Literary Review of Canada

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Magazine Issue ›› Jan/Feb 2013

Editor's Note

For her book about Western Canadian alienation, author Mary Janigan chose to provocatively echo the Alberta bumper-sticker of the 1980s, Let the Eastern Bastards Freeze in the Dark. Our reviewer Roger Gibbins, who has just stepped down as head of the Canada West Foundation based in Calgary, is critical of that choice of title, which he says places too much emphasis on the conflict between the West and the rest, and not enough on nation-building. Otherwise, he gives Janigan top marks.

First there were the Occupy protests - on Wall Street and later around the world. Now come the Occupy books, trying to sort out who the occupiers were and what the occupations meant. Zeroing in on two of the many titles published this season, one written by Judy Rebick and the other edited by Kalle Lasn of Adbusters, reviewer Greg Shupak calls the books "a corrective to mainstream media coverage of the movement that, on the whole, ran from hostile to lazy."

Although he is not entirely taken with Katherine Monk's Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell, music critic Carl Wilson does enjoy the way the book takes us back to "Joni-land" - "full of frozen rivers, bottle-green back alleys and blue dive bars, open-tuned weather systems and sprung-rhythm grandfather clocks, ecstatic peaks and bullshit mountains."

Quite a trip.

Bronwyn Drainie
Editor

In the Jan/Feb 2013 Issue

  • Book Is Here

    A review of Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times, by Andrew Piper

    Adam Hammond
  • Spending Like There's No Tomorrow

    Why don’t Canadians save more of their resource wealth?

    Madelaine Drohan
  • The Western "Colonies"

    A review of Let the Eastern Bastards Freeze in the Dark: The West Versus the Rest Since Confederation, by Mary Janigan

    Roger Gibbins
  • Occupy the Shelf

    A review of Occupy This!, by Judy Rebick and Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics, by Kalle Lasn

    Greg Shupak
  • Peripatetic Poet

    A review of Journey with No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page, by Sandra Djwa

    Molly Peacock
  • An Awkward Original

    A review of Joni: The Creative Odyssey of Joni Mitchell, by Katherine Monk

    Carl Wilson
  • After Le grand dérangement

    A review of The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth- Century History, by Christopher Hodson

    Donald Akenson
  • How Did It Come to This?

    A review of Fight the Right: A Manual for Surviving the Coming Conservative Apocalypse, by Warren Kinsella

    Tasha Kheiriddin
  • Handle with Care

    A review of The Merger Delusion: How Swallowing Its Suburbs Made an Even Bigger Mess of Montreal, by Peter F. Trent

    Frances Bula
  • Public Hostility

    A review of The Harm in Hate Speech, by Jeremy WaldronA review of My Life on Earth Molly Peacock

    Michael Plaxton
  • Picasso at 90

    Merle Nudelman
  • Hung Jury, Sable Island

    Janet Barkhouse
  • The Bird Caged

    Janice Colbert
  • Her Human Voice

    Cora Siré
  • Sonnet beginning & ending with a line from Merwin

    Catherine Owen
  • Winter Love

    Brian Stanley
  • An Everyday Extraordinary

    A review of The Dead Are More Visible, by Steven Heighton

    J.C. Sutcliffe
  • Fascinating Boredom

    A review of Dark Diversions: A Traveller’s Tale, by John Ralston Saul

    Robert McGill
  • Defiant Individualism

    A review of My Life on Earth and Elsewhere, by R. Murray Schafer

    Colin Eatock
  • Patrician Bohemianism

    A review of Inward Journey: The Life of Lawren Harris, by James King

    Maria Tippett
  • Beautiful Losers

    A review of Donald Shebib’s Goin’ Down the Road, by Geoff Pevere

    Noreen Golfman
  • Renaissance Man

    A review of Leonardo and the Last Supper, by Ross King

    John Lownsbrough
  • The Chaos of Creativity

    A review of Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream, by Neil Young

    Mark D. Dunn
  • Cover art and pictures throughout the issue by Jake Pauls.

    Jake Pauls is a Toronto-based illustrator whose work has appeared in The Walrus and other magazines.



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