One summer I began taking pictures of people on the street surreptitiously, by holding the camera at my waist and aiming it at passersby when they were about six feet away.
When Thoreau remarked that most of us lead lives of quiet desperation, he must have been reading David Adams Richards. For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down (McClelland & Stewart) is Richards’ latest novel, continuing his examination of life as it is lived in small-town New Brunswick.
The critics have not been kind to Nino Ricci’s new novel, In A Glass House (M&S), and we had hoped to be in disagreement with them. But generally the critics are right: there is a flatness in this book not to be found in The Lives of the Saints, despite brilliant passages and some very clear thinking.
The Old Farmer’s Almanac (Yankee Publishing Inc.) does not believe in chaos theory. “We believe,” state its editors in the 1994 edition which arrived in the mail recently, “nothing in the universe occurs haphazardly.” Which explains how the Almanac can predict the weather using a secret formula devised in 1792.
The critics have been unkind to Tom Walmsley, who wrote the script for the movie Paris, France which is just now released. Critics almost never pay any attention to script writers; so it surprising to see Walmsley singled out for attack.
In Leonard Gasparini’s Selected Poems (Hounslow Press), the themes range from urban night-life lyricism to wry, formally structured meditations on humanity, travel and the natural world. Gasparini’s vision of life is often dark but never obscure.
The New Northwest by Bill Waiser (Fifth House), is subtitled The Photographs of the Frank Crean Expeditions 1908-1909, but provides us with very little information about these two fascinating subjects. The New Northwest can be seen as another wacky vision of the North (in this case, the sub-Arctic region of Saskatchewan and Alberta) dreamt up by people who don’t live there, and Crean’s photographs are an example of the ambiguous truth-telling purposes to which photography was so often set in the cause of attracting settlers from Europe (in this case, by revealing a fertile north capable of sustaining agriculture on a large scale).
Thinking Out Loud: On the Personal, the Political, the Public and the Private (Random House) is a collection of Anna Quindlen’s syndicated newspaper columns. By definition the book shouldn’t work: journalism, especially this kind, is necessarily ephemeral.
Wendy Kaminer’s I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions (Random House-Vintage) took a lot of heat when it first came out. No wonder!
Isaac A. Block has taken some real chances in Assault on God’s Image (Windflower Communications), a thesis-turned-book about violence within Mennonite families living in Winnipeg.
