Larry Krotz

Peter Unwin’s Written in Stone begins at the end. Linda Richardson is driving an aging Westfalia van on one last journey from Toronto to Northern Ontario to scatter her husband’s ashes. Years before, when she first met Paul Prescot, he was “a sullen older man who cast an atmosphere of sullen disapproval.” He approached her at a party and asked if she was any good in a canoe — along the…

The most compelling memoirs are those that get beyond an individual’s life to tell larger stories, training beams of light on a time, place, or society that readers otherwise can’t see. Such is the case with Gretchen Roedde’s Deep Water Dream, a look at Canada’s evolving relationship with Indigenous peoples through one physician’s…

In Land’s End: Capitalist Relations on an Indigenous Frontier, a western anthropologist travels to far-off Indonesia, locates a community of indigenous people who live more or less isolated in the hills, and watches them struggle with the changes wrought by what one might broadly label the advancing “modern world.” The anthropologist is Tania Murray…

When I was a child, we were told to eat our vegetables because people in India, China, Africa (pick one) were starving. The question of how my eating vegetables was supposed to help those poor people remained unanswered. What we did presume was that they would be helped by missionaries, and then, with more up-to-date…

A first novel is a brave venture. Both of these, The Strength of Bone and My Heart is Not My Own, are in their own ways laudable, yet neither, likewise, is completely free of problems. The two books have many similarities. Each is the first novel by Canadians whose day jobs as medical doctors had them serving for a time in the countries where their stories are set—Lucie Wilk in…

The novelistic treatment of characters who are elderly, or at least mature, forces a writer into some predictable choices—just as, you might argue, is the case in our real life. The road in the rearview mirror, of course, is infinitely longer than that seen ahead through the windshield. So will we look back or forward? When we look…