Joyce Kline

Spoiler alert: Robert McGill’s beautifully crafted second novel is a shape shifter. One minute it is a universal coming-of-age story full of astute character observations and sly social comment; the next, a mystery novel teeter-tottering between rural Ontario and war-torn Laos. Defying easy categorization, Once We Had a Country somehow manages to turn the struggles of a commune of well-intentioned but woefully inexperienced American draft dodgers into a novel that defines what it means to be Canadian in the most Canadian way possible—by observing…

Hot Art: Chasing Thieves and Detectives through the Secret World of Stolen Art creeps up on you. Wickedly entertaining, it turns out to be informative, unexpected and far more thought-provoking than its cheeky 007-ish cover would suggest. Joshua Knelman’s in-depth investigation of the international trade in stolen art may read like a TV crime…

Anarchy has always seemed to me to be the most benign of the political philosophies: intelligent, socially minded and (pace Katzenjammer-era cartoons where anarchists skulk around with black bombs like bowling balls) relatively non-coercive. The lifetime of experience that has led me to believe nature—including human life—is messy and infinitely complex, has also led me to believe that…