Articles by Andrew Saikali
April 14, 2008
A Classroom Dialogue in Iraqi Kurdistan: A Review of Ian Klaus’ Elvis Is Titanic 0
There is a particular conundrum about teaching one’s national history abroad – finding the fine line where intellectual honesty and nationalist interest overlap, without compromising one or subverting the other. Ian Klaus diplomatically negotiates that fine line in Elvis Is Titanic: Classroom Tales From The Other Iraq, his eloquent account of the year he spent [...]
March 27, 2008
Gladwell and Gopnik Return to Their Roots 0
Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Gopnik, both incisive, witty journalists, staff writers at the New Yorker, and expat Canadians, return to Toronto this weekend for a live debate Sunday afternoon at the University of Toronto’s Convocation Hall. The topic: Canada: Nation or Notion? (And as a proud and sometimes confused Canadian myself, I’m eager to learn [...]
February 19, 2008
The Elusive Thread of Memory: The Displaced World of Mavis Gallant 3
Jean-Paul Sartre visited Montreal in the 1940s for a speaking engagement. In marked contrast to the socially progressive nature of much of Quebec today, Quebec then cowed under the unyielding hand of the Church. Hostile to Sartre’s visit, the media barons instructed their reporters – perhaps tacitly, perhaps not – to be as unwelcoming as [...]
February 4, 2008
The Blank Page On The Silver Screen 1
Maybe it’s the romantic in me, but I’ve always been a sucker for films that offer glimpses, no matter how superficial, into the working life of a writer. When it’s a real literary figure, say Truman Capote as embodied by Philip Seymour Hoffman, I marvel at how the actor, faced with the impossibly daunting task [...]
January 21, 2008
Only a Pawn in Their Game: A review of Robert Lohr’s The Chess Machine 1
In the summer of 2006, on a small stage in downtown Toronto, the Emperor Napoleon was facing off in a game of chess against the “Mechanical Turk.” It was 1809, continental Europe, and Malzel, who recently purchased the legendary chess-playing automaton, was transporting this curious contraption from town to town to square off against the [...]
December 8, 2007
Year in Reading: Andrew Saikali 2
The first half of 2007 was a Dark Age of reading for me. Virtually every time I sat down with even the most promising book, my mind would float to the massive Redesign project headaches we were having at the newspaper. I couldn’t relax, I couldn’t get drawn in. I was in the wrong frame [...]
