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Diamonds Are Forever: Artists and Writers on Baseball
For the uninitiated, the poetic mysteries of baseball can seem elusive if not downright silly. Diamonds Are Forever: Artists and Writers on Baseball (Chronicle), a print version of the Smithsonian Institution exhibition of the same name, doesn’t set
Detective Samuel de Champlain
One of the pleasures of reading for no particular reason is coming across hidden stories, involuntary essays, samples of what someone once called “found literature”—as opposed, I imagine, to the literature that states its official identity on the cover. Leafing through a book on Samuel de Champlain, I came across, of all things, a detective story.
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Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War
Only now, eighty years after the war, are we given the explanation of that process of transformation, in the pages of Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War, by Jonathan F. Vance (UBC Press). Vance tells the story of a tiny country
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Punch
It was at about this moment that I hit him in the face, which is something I’ve never done before. I don’t know what perfect form the punch took in my mind, but by the time the impulse had pushed its way through me, my hand had bent inward like an old person’s claw, or a doll’s hand—curved around but without a bottle to clutch.
Fields of Time
With the approach of her tenth summer, Julia considers the holidays that lie before her: will there be too many things for her to do? Trying to look ahead from school time, with its time-tables and schedules, makes it hard to remember, or to imagine, what summertime will be before summer arrives and the school year ends. In the summer when I was Julia’s age I heard Elvis Presley for the first time, down by the river on the jukebox in the fish-and-chip joint where teenagers went to hold hands and drink ice cream sodas and eat salted french fries drenched in vinegar.
Wild World
One day a Swiss couple stopped in at the carpet shop, just as they had each year for the last ten years. Every spring they loaded up a cargo van with nets and jars and drove from their home in Switzerland to east Turkey, where they collected butterflies together. The man, Walter, had caught snakes in Africa and South America all his life and sold them to universities and private collectors, but that day he was turning seventy-five and, he said, it is not so wise at my age to play with snakes.
Strays
In early March 2003, when I arrived in Taiwan to teach English, I took to the streets of Taoyuan County to take some photographs. I was looking for anything—signs, market scenes, strange faces, cityscapes, bus stations, barber shops—but all I could see was dogs. These dogs were not pets, though they may once have been. They were strays—dogs that lived on their own.
Re-hanging the National Wallpaper
When I lived in Ottawa in the 1970s, I used to enjoy passing lazy afternoons at the National Gallery looking at the pictures. I remember how surprised I was when I first encountered the Group of Seven collection. These paintings were completely familiar—I’d seen them in schoolbooks and on calendars, posters, t-shirts, everywhere—yet at the same time they were completely unexpected.
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Paper Boom: Why Real Prosperity Requires a New Approach to the Canadian Economy
This review was accepted for publication by the Vancouver Sun in January 2000, and then rejected by editors who found it "too one-sided and unfair to the bank." This is the first financial book review to be published in Geist, and is offered here in
Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books
Yiddish is a language of survival. Although spoken by only five percent of the world's population, it's one of the seven most widespread languages, spoken in every corner of the globe. In Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescue
On Kiddie Porn: Sexual Representation, Free Speech and the Robin Sharpe Case
Stan Persky and John Dixon ask important questions in their book On Kiddie Porn: Sexual Representation, Free Speech and the Robin Sharpe Case (New Star). Is possession of a photograph depicting a criminal act a criminal act?
Separate Crossings
Dr. Portillo, a Mexican physician, lives with her husband and son in a balcony-festooned six-bedroom house in a gated suburb. The adobe walls that enclose the garden, the coloured tiles embedded in the walls and the servants’ garden house are all typical of the home of a prosperous Mexican family. The multi-generational collection of relatives who occupy the spare bedrooms also reflect Mexican tradition. Dr. Portillo receives her patients in an office located in a tower in the northern Mexican city of Tijuana; since many of the patients are American, much of her working day takes place in English. When she goes home at night, she relaxes by speaking to her husband and son in Spanish. Her son, however, often responds in English because Dr. Portillo’s typical Mexican home is located in suburban California.
Witch Hunt
In a letter of 350 words, published in Geist 65, Michael Redhill calls me a racist once and implies that I am a racist on at least four other occasions. Redhill’s repetition of the ultimate insult of the postmodern era offers a fascinating, if depressing, window into how certain Canadian writers betray their responsibility to the society they live in.
Van Gogh’s Final Vision
Auvers-sur-Oise is a town of ghosts. Among the summer tourists and art-loving pilgrims who visit Auvers from all over the world, drift flocks of long-dead artists with folding easels and boxes of paints, who a century ago would disembark every week at the small railway station.
The Self-Destruction of the CBC
The federal government recently announced it is reviewing the CBC’s mandate. This review is the latest chapter in a long story of questioning the value of the CBC since its inception seventy years ago. Clearly there are politics involved here; the CBC is an easy target for attack by parties of all stripes.
