Reviews
February 19, 2008
The Elusive Thread of Memory: The Displaced World of Mavis Gallant 3
by Andrew Saikali
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 19, 2008
Expat Laureate: Paul Bowles’s Too Far From Home 1
by Timothy R Homan
The short story was but one of many writing genres embraced by author Paul Bowles, known also for his novels, travel essays and poems. The influential American writer drew the admiration of other literary giants such as Tobias Wolff and Norman Mailer, who said Bowles “let in the murder, the drugs, the incest, the death [...]
February 11, 2008
Dangerous Liaisons: A Review of Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA 1
by Patrick Brown
More than any other government agency, the CIA has found itself the target of criticism from both the left and the right. Liberals tend to fault the agency for what it’s done – spying on American citizens, conspiring to overthrow legitimate foreign governments, operating secret prisons around the world – while conservatives lament what [...]
January 28, 2008
Trading Ideals: A review of Edward Gresser’s Freedom From Want 0
by Timothy R Homan
With the prospect of a Democrat in the White House, paired with a continued Democratic majority in Congress, many old and new ideas on the liberal agenda are poised to come to fruition in 2009. One item likely to be on the to-do list is the future of international trade.
In Freedom From Want: American Liberalism [...]
January 21, 2008
Only a Pawn in Their Game: A review of Robert Lohr’s The Chess Machine 1
by Andrew Saikali
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 [...]
January 15, 2008
Present-ing the 70s: A Review of Christopher Sorrentino’s Trance 0
by Garth Risk Hallberg
In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” the philosopher Walter Benjamin gives the old truism that all history is present history a characteristically gnomic twist. “Every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns,” he writes, “threatens to disappear irretrievably.” Perhaps it’s a measure of [...]
