Sandra Martin

Special Operations Executive — also known as the Firm — was established on July 22, 1940, a calamitous year that saw the Battle of Britain, the defeat of Norway, and the fall of France. SOE’s mandate was to support local resistance networks and carry out espionage, sabotage, and reconnaissance operations in German-occupied territory. Or, as Winston Churchill…

Although I have spent much of my working life reviewing fiction, interviewing authors, and giving talks to book clubs, there are embarrassing gaps in my reading history. Forget Moby-Dick, Ulysses, or Infinite Jest. There was a time when the list included Anna Karenina.…

How, other than through clandestine sex, does a married woman of a certain age find excitement in midtown Toronto during a record-breaking heat wave? That is the dilemma that Don Gillmor, an accomplished journalist and winner of a Governor General’s Award for non-fiction, sets himself in telling the story of Beatrice Billings. Back in the day when magazines proliferated in this…

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it has also spawned legions of journalists. The prospect of learning something new every day by asking nosy questions, searching the internet for long-forgotten connections, and digging deep into the morgue — as the archives are known at most media outlets — gets us out of bed in the morning and often keeps us up long into the…

Ho-hum. Yes, I too acquired a pet during the pandemic. Formerly a cat person, I switched allegiances to canines when Tessa, an English cocker spaniel, came to live with us late in January 2021. She was eight weeks old, adorable, and lots of trouble, but what baby isn’t? Now almost two, she no longer chews…

Nobody taught the journalist Mark Hume how to read the water. As he explains in his lean but elegant memoir, the tradition, the talent, the gift — whatever you want to call it — came to him by chance when he was seven, “the way poetry or dance or dreams come to others.” Tagging along behind an older…

In January 2015, I headed to the West Coast on a research trip for a book I was writing about the right to die. My lengthy interview list included John Hofsess, a journalist turned activist. He had been a key player back in the early 1990s, helping Sue Rodriguez challenge the Criminal Code’s blanket prohibition against assisting a…

As a parent, I remain a dud when it comes to shopping with my fashionista daughter and playing sports with my athletic son. What I loved, when they were younger, was reading with them — especially snuggling together in bed with chapter books long after they knew how to read by themselves. We had ground rules: no skipping ahead (I still blush at being caught in the act more than once by a wakeful offspring)…

It has been a year and a half since the law passed permitting physician-assisted death in Canada, and more than two since the landmark 2015 Supreme Court case Carter v. Canada, which struck down the Criminal Code’s prohibitions on medically assisted dying. The issue remains fraught with logistical and ethical challenges. Questions swirl about…

Julia Cooper takes on the eulogy in literature, popular culture and social media in The Last Word: Reviving the Dying Art of Eulogy and, not surprisingly, finds it wanting as an outlet to assuage grief. She argues that “in a culture that sees death every day and yet hides the traces of grief that…

Before I had children, I wondered if I could ever love a child as much as I adored my cat. Absurd, I know, but I remembered that embarrassingly naive attitude in reading The Wonder because the power of the mother-child bond is a motivating force in Emma Donoghue’s fiction. Yet, here is the twist: the Irish-Canadian writer is not interested in conventional takes in which Mamma falls desperately in love with…

The headline on Marian Engel’s obituary in The Globe and Mail in February 1985 misspelled both her first and last names. “Author wrote best seller, won award,” it declared. She was so much more than that skimpy accolade attests. Engel was both a citizen and a writer, as committed to cultural nationalism and improving the lot of her fellow scribes as she was dedicated to writing her own…

Last November, three days before I was set to celebrate a significant birthday, I had a freak fall—aren’t they all—and broke my pelvis in two places. I was hurtling through city streets dodging vehicles and pedestrians, composing random sentences in my head, when I tripped on uneven pavement. I landed in an intersection on my right…

The 1901 census listed 50 women journalists at a time when the population of Canada was about 5.4 million and newspapers were wildly popular—the equivalent of the internet today. Widespread literacy and rapidly increasing urbanization had made the daily newspaper “indispensible” to city dwellers, according to author Linda Kay, a journalism professor at Concordia University, in The Sweet Sixteen: The Journey That Inspired the Canadian Women’s Press Club…

Mordecai Richler was a complicated guy. The celebrated author of ten novels, the creator of such memorable characters as Duddy Kravitz, Jake Hersch, Joshua Shapiro, Solomon Gursky and Barney Panofsky, he was also an astute and often hilarious political and cultural essayist. Publicly acerbic, yet quick to feel slighted and even quicker to retaliate, he was a passionate protector of his family and his…