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The World Absurd
Reviewed in this essay: Look Down, This is Where It Must Have Happened by Hal Niedzviecki. City Lights Books, 2011. Hal Niedzviecki’s Look Down, This Is Where It Must Have Happened, will perturb you if you like to think the world is mostly a predictable place if you play your cards right. In each of…
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The Literary Revolution That Gave Birth to a Social Revolution
Reviewed in this essay: Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America by Christopher Bram. Twelve Books, 2012. Way before popular television shows like Will & Grace and Queer as Folk, there were a handful of gay American writers who introduced gay lives to mainstream America. Gay novelists, poets and playwrights of the 1940s and…
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Bookishness: Week of May 14, 2012
Where the wild things assemble A perfect combination of one of the highs and one of the lows of the last week in pop culture. On the promise of an unread book “When I read it, I will be completely absorbed by it. It will be all I think about. It will affect my daily life in…
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Michele Landsberg’s Writing the Revolution
Having begun life as, in her own words, “a docile little girl,” Michele Landsberg became a journalist whose descriptions in a 1981 column on female genital mutilation smacked a reader so hard that he fainted dead away while waiting for a flight to arrive at Pearson Airport. That column is included in “Writing the Revolution,”…
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The Oscillating Universe: A Review of Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell’s “Godhead: The Brain’s Big Bang”
Reviewed in this essay: Godhead: The Brain’s Big Bang, by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell. HG Publishing, 2011. For some time, scientists have been marshaling their knowledge and resources in an effort to answer some of the biggest questions about the universe. With each grandiose experiment, however, science seems to be little closer to solving…
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e-Reading! An Interdisciplinary Toronto Review of Books Symposium on March 31 at Massey College
Join The Toronto Review of Books at Massey College next Saturday, March 31st for the interdisciplinary symposium on e-Reading we’re hosting in collaboration with the University of Toronto’s program in Book History and Print Culture and the Toronto Centre for the Book. All are welcome to attend what promises to be a fascinating afternoon. The…
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A Window Into Baseball’s Golden Age
Reviewed in this essay: The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball from the Men Who Played It, by Lawrence S. Ritter. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2010. As winter turns to spring, the sports fan’s mind turns to baseball. Arguably, it’s the most literary of all the sports, even if only…
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A Boozy Reader’s Guide to Decadent Duos
It’s that time of year again: you step outside at 5pm and it might as well be midnight. The sky is black and starless, the air is bone-cold, and before you know it, seasonal affective disorder has you held fast in its goblin’s grip. What better way to fend off the dreary winter blahs than…
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The Magicians and The Magician King: Review
Reviewed in this essay: The Magicians by Lev Grossman. Viking Press, 2009. The Magician King by Lev Grossman. Viking Press, 2011. Lev Grossman’s books The Magicians and The Magician King are fantasy as it ought to be: dark, funny, and brilliantly realized. The books cannot avoid comparisons to Harry Potter — geeky boy, magical school,…
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How to Make $100,000 and Infinite Units of Charm
The Victoria College Book Sale—one of the great used book sales put on annually by University of Toronto colleges—is a fine example of how to make $100,000 in a single weekend while turning out vast quantities of enchantment and love. Outside the slick infinity of Googlebooks there is a world of heavy old paper things…
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Gleick’s The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood: “When Information is Cheap, Attention is Expensive”
Written by Pulitzer short-lister and National Book Award-finalist James Gleick, The Information sets out to offer an informative information history. Beginning in a pre-literate world when any “information” vanished as soon as it appeared, Gleick presents an account of talking drums in Africa, a widely misunderstood but incredibly advanced mode of communication. Gleick then moves…
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David Lurie on Early Japanese Books
On March 18, 2011, Columbia University Professor David Lurie spoke in the Toronto Centre for the Book lecture series at the University of Toronto on “Titles of the Current Realm: Script, Language, and the Earliest Japanese Bibliographies.” [audio:davidlurie.mp3]