Literary Review of Canada September 2021

Chris Alexander served as Canada’s ambassador to Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005. George Anderson is co-editor, with Sujit Choudhry, of Territory and Power in Constitutional Transitions. Ella Austin will head to McGill this fall. Matthew J. Bellamy is a historian at Carleton. Myra Bloom teaches English literature at York University, Glendon College. Kelvin Browne is learning to sail. Michael Doyle won a 2020 National Newspaper Award for his work with the Globe and Mail. Viviane Fairbank writes from Montreal. Hamar Foster is an emeritus professor of law at the University of Victoria and co-editor of the forthcoming To Share, Not Surrender. Graham Fraser wrote René Lévesque and the Parti Québécois in Power. Keith Garebian is working on a new memoir. Brett Josef Grubisic will soon publish his fifth novel, My Two-Faced Luck. Sharon Hamilton writes about baseball, literature, and Jazz Age cocktails. Alex…

WHEN MY FATHER WAS SEVENteen, he bought a used 1951 Chevrolet Styleline Deluxe, a three-speed coupe that was four years older than him. He paid a junkyard $35, which he earned over three days baling hay. I thought of my dad and his car—with a dashboard clock that he had to wind manually—as I fell into the pages of Thaddeus Holownia’s Headlighting: 1974–1978, a new collection of remarkable old photographs of automobiles and their owners. “The Chevy was a bit of an education, something to tinker on,” Dad told me recently. “If I screwed something up, it was no big loss.” With his bushy sideburns and inevitably greasy blue jeans, my teenage father could have easily stepped into one of Holownia’s frames, just like the dozens of his contemporaries who did…

RE: This Is America by Wade Davis (July/August) I wanted you to know that I consider this the best summary of the topic that I have ever read. And I thank Wade Davis for having written it. It’s a pity that most Americans will never see it. David E. Bond Kelowna, British Columbia RE: Inside Kingston Pen by Murray Campbell (July/August) I want to express my thanks for reviewing Murder on the Inside, the book that Catherine Fogarty wrote about Kingston Pen. I sent a letter to the editor in Kingston shortly after Fogarty’s book was released to state that even the tour guides at KP do not tell the truth about what went on behind the walls fifty years ago, nor about how little has actually changed inside our federal pens since then. All these years later, how…

Medicine and Morality: Crises in the History of a Profession Helen Kang UBC Press 168 pages, hardcover, softcover, and ebook MOST OF US HAVE A DELICATE relationship with health care. We appreciate its availability, of course, but we prefer not to acknowledge its existence until it’s necessary. We like to think of the healing arts only when we are already in danger — and then they serve not as a threatening reminder of mortality but rather as a comfort, a promise to try to delay suffering, if only for a while. Until the start of the COVID‑19 pandemic, it was possible for a relatively healthy person to maintain a calculated distance from the everyday activities of the medical world. But by the start of last summer, as more and more lockdown rules were implemented, evidence…

Take a Number: How Citizens’ Encounters with Government Shape Political Engagement Elisabeth Gidengil McGill-Queen’s University Press 248 pages, hardcover and softcover NONE OF US WILL EMERGE FROM these months and months of plague unchanged or unscathed, whether by personal suffering and loss or by the realization that we need to do better, be better. For decades, we were sold the idea that self-reliance and competition trump interdependence and cooperation, that government, rather than being the expression of our common will, was best viewed as a necessary evil—as overhead to be kept as small as possible. COVID‑19 has revealed the huge, even fatal costs of allowing our collective tool kit to atrophy. It has shown what happens when we neglect the so‑called care economy, which includes everything from public health to nursing homes, child care…

The Machinery of Government: Public Administration and the Liberal State Joseph Heath Oxford University Press 440 pages, hardcover THE PHILOSOPHER JOSEPH Heath ended his 2014 bestseller, Enlightenment 2.0, with a damp squib. That book explored the limitations of human rationality—both individual and collective—and presented a depressing portrait of a decline of reason in contemporary society, with its politics “enslaved by speed” and vulnerable to demagoguery. But even Heath seemed to recognize that his Slow Politics Manifesto—“a firm defense of quiet, rational deliberation is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life”—was pretty thin gruel as a recipe for what to do. With The Machinery of Government, Heath offers a proposal that is both meatier and more optimistic. The book, which deservedly won the 2020 Donner Prize, is a political philosopher’s take on…