Jude Isabella

The present moment is a wonderful moment. That’s the mantra that stuck in my head while reading Dead Bees Still Sting, Susan Cormier’s meditation on semi-agricultural life on a small farm. The book is a first for the spoken-word artist and filmmaker, and an outgrowth of her essay “Advice to a New Beekeeper,” which won the 2022 CBC Nonfiction…

In David Suzuki’s latest book — I say “latest” because even as a nonagenarian he remains a tireless firebrand — what struck me was the fish. Lessons from a Lifetime: 90 Years of Inspiration and Activism, written with Ian Hanington, is an unusual mash‑up: part coffee-table book, part memoir, part pre-obituary, for lack of a better…

Traditionally, a review should not begin with what is wrong with a book. But in the case of Jay Ingram’s The Science of Pets, it seems necessary to address two big flaws up front: the cover and the title. I suppose the choices were made with marketing in mind. The cynic in me suspects that if you slap an image of a pooch on…

The first thought that crossed my mind when I picked up Dan Rubinstein’s Water Borne: A 1,200-Mile Paddleboarding Pilgrimage was to question whether pilgrimages can even be real anymore. In an age of living out loud and creating personal brands through the internet, this skepticism stayed with me as I followed the author’s four-part circuit: Ottawa to…