Literary Review of Canada April 2022

Kelvin Browne always listens to the pre-flight safety instructions, because he’s sure something bad is going to happen. Tim Cook wrote The Fight for History: 75 Years of Forgetting, Remembering, and Remaking Canada’s Second World War. David Dunne teaches business at the University of Victoria. Dan Dunsky is the former executive producer of The Agenda with Steve Paikin. Omar El Akkad won the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize with his novel What Strange Paradise. Sarah Ellis has published twenty-five books for children and young adults. Keith Garebian is working on a new memoir, Pieces of My Self. Rachel Gerry reads and writes in Toronto. J. L. Granatstein is the author of Canada’s Army: Waging War and Keeping the Peace, now in its third edition. Charlotte Gray is the author of Murdered Midas: A Millionaire, His Gold Mine, and a Strange…

WHEN PROTEST, OCCUPATION, and civil unrest crippled a capital city and, to some extent, crippled a nation, Mavis Gallant began to chronicle the moment so that she might work out something of a “theory of siege psychosis.” She watched as confusing if not conflicting demands were made of a government many thought had lost its way. She questioned the executive’s response to a multi-faceted crisis while showing qualified sympathy for a beleaguered leader. She contemplated the changing meaning of a nation’s flag, as demonstrators co-opted it for their own purposes. And she tried to understand those who defiled the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, those who had forgotten the sacrifices made for such freedoms of expression. “They remind me of children who keep insisting they are not sleepy,” she said…

RE: Sense of an Ending by David Marks Shribman (March) I READ THIS REVIEW OF STEPHEN MARCHE’S THE Next Civil War on the morning of Saturday, February 19, as the combined police forces of numerous jurisdictions attempted to reinstate a measure of law and order in Ottawa. While I personally, and reluctantly, supported the use of the Emergencies Act to achieve some measure of stability on the streets of our nation’s capital, it did not escape me that David Marks Shribman might be wondering if some revision to his review might be in order. At one point, Shribman extracts a quote from Marche that, for him, captures the essence of the book’s thesis. After watching hours of news coverage of the police and the insurrectionists, the debate over the Emergencies Act, and the various…

China Unbound: A New World Disorder Joanna Chiu Anansi 304 pages, softcover and ebook The Two Michaels: Innocent Canadian Captives and High Stakes Espionage in the US-China Cyber War Mike Blanchfield and Fen Osler Hampson Sutherland House 276 pages, softcover and ebook June Fourth: The Tiananmen Protests and Beijing Massacre of 1989 Jeremy Brown Cambridge University Press 294 pages, hardcover, softcover, and ebook LAST DECEMBER, IN AN END-OF-YEAR interview with Global News, Justin Trudeau said that China has been “very cleverly playing” democratic countries against each other and that the time has come for the West to “do a better job of working together and standing strong so that China can’t… play the angles and divide us.” The prime minister was referring mainly to trade tactics, and his assessment of China’s behaviour isn’t particularly surprising: other powerful countries have sometimes acted in the…

We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland Fintan O’Toole Liveright 624 pages, hardcover and ebook a I N 2017, IN THE WEST OF IRELAND, THE remains of almost 800 children were found in a mass grave. Shocking as the discovery was, few were surprised. The bones of several children had, in fact, been uncovered in 1975 by two boys playing in an orchard where the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home—a Catholic institution for “fallen” women and their infants — had once stood. In what now seems a cruel metaphor for a culture of devout denial, the site had been blessed by a priest and covered up again. In countless ways, the story of modern Ireland is the story of covering things up that don’t fit the national myth—with devastating consequences for…

Canadian Foreign Policy: Reflections on a Field in Transition Edited by Brian Bow and Andrea Lane UBC Press 312 pages, hardcover, softcover, and ebook THE STUDY OF CANADIAN FOREIGN policy is in disarray. That is pretty much the conclusion Brian Bow and Andrea Lane reach in Canadian Foreign Policy: Reflections on a Field in Transition, their edited volume on what they describe as an academic discipline—known by the initials CFP—that has “been crumbling for twenty years or more but manages to survive in some form.” It may well be that the practice of Canadian foreign policy is also in disarray, but that is not the subject of this book. In fact, the sixteen essays gathered here say very little about what ails our foreign policy, even though they imply that a revival of CFP scholarship…