-
Jimmy Carter wonders what happened to the Canadians in Argo
Nobody should expect the movies, or novels, or monographs by political scientists, to be the last or only word on the past. The Longest Day (1962), Saving Private Ryan (1998), and Pearl Harbor (2001) offer at best a partial view of the Second World War while telling us more about the times and places in which…
-
Archival Dialogues: Reading the Black Star Collection at the Ryerson Image Centre
Reviewed in this essay: “Archival Dialogues: Reading the Black Star Collection,” Ryerson Image Centre inaugural exhibition. Ryerson University recently became home to the Black Star Collection, a massive archive of photojournalistic prints (over 292,000 objects) that together document the cultural, social, and political history of the 20th century. To mark this significant acquisition (the collection was…
-
Giant: A Witty Revolution
Reviewed in this essay: Giant by Aga Maksimowska. Pedlar Press, 2012. In 1988, Eastern Europe is on the brink of revolution. The citizens of Poland are weary from the stifling Communist management of their lives. Workers set in motion an unprecedented series of strikes that ripple across the country and ignite a slow but steady…
-
Art and document: A review of the ROM’s “Observance and Memorial: Photographs from S-21, Cambodia”
In 1975, Cambodian dictator Pol Pot began purging the country of citizens accused of undermining his Khmer Rouge party. By 1979, over 2 million people had been arrested, tortured and killed. During that time, 14,000 men, women and children had been filtered through Security Prison-21 (S-21), an old high school-turned-prison used for interrogating detainees. Of…
-
CanLit Canon Review #10: Gabrielle Roy’s The Tin Flute
In an attempt to make himself a better Canadian, Craig MacBride is reading and reviewing the books that shaped this country. The Tin Flute, Gabrielle Roy’s debut novel, explores poverty, war, and Montreal, and it romanticizes none of them. The book centers on the 10-member Lacasse family, which is trapped by poverty in the suburban…
-
The History of Reading as Told by Students at the University of Toronto
This last semester I taught a course called “Readers and Readerships” to close to a hundred and fifty bright young Torontonians. A core second-year course in the Book and Media Studies program at the University of Toronto, the class surveyed the history of Western reading from the pre-history of writing to the present. We…
-
TRB Podcast: Deidre Lynch on the Culture of Scrap-books in the Georgian Period
Listen here: [audio: May2012/lynch.mp3] On March 22, Professor Deidre Lynch delivered a lecture as part of the Book History and Print Culture Lecture Series at the University of Toronto. Following is an excerpt from the U of T press release on Dr. Lynch’s talk, titled “Recycled Paper: Readers’ Scrap-books in Late Georgian Literary Culture.” Enjoy!…
-
TRB Podcast: Matthew Kirschenbaum on the Literary History of Word Processing
Listen here: [audio:May2012/kirschenbaum.mp3] On March 1, Dr. Matthew Kirschenbaum spoke at the University of Toronto’s iSchool Colloquium. Dr. Kirschenbaum’s lecture, titled “Track Changes: The Literary History of Word Processing” examines the past and continued influence that word processing technology has had on the craft of literary composition. Listen and enjoy! The U of T press…
-
CanLit Canon Review #1: Susanna Moodie’s Roughing it in the Bush
In an attempt to make himself a better Canadian, Craig MacBride is reading and reviewing the books that have shaped this country. Susanna Moodie’s Roughing it in the Bush is a memoir, written as an attempt to enlighten her people back home in the motherland to the terrible weather and accommodations in British North America.…
-
The Ghosts of Europe: Q & A with Anna Porter
As part of its Eh List Author Series, The Barbara Frum Library welcomed acclaimed author Anna Porter on November 17 to discuss her latest book, The Ghosts of Europe (Douglas & McIntyre, 2010). Marking twenty years since Central Europe wrenched itself free of its various Communist dictatorships, The Ghosts of Europe is a sobering glimpse…
-
“The Normal Heart” At Buddies in Bad Times Theatre
For a brief period of time, Larry Kramer was known as the angriest gay man on the planet. The Normal Heart, his molotov cocktail of a play about AIDS in New York in the early 1980s, was angrily hurled in the face of theatregoers in Manhattan as the disease was silently ravaging thousands of people…