America Alone soon to be banned in Canada (apparently)

America Alone, by Mark Steyn
978-1596985278 | $18.50 pb | available April
Regnery Publishing / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

The paperback edition of America Alone is now scheduled for an April release, and since Canadian author Mark Steyn is a lightening rod for controversy, we should see a ton of media in Canada starting in early May. Regnery is going to try to get a big Canadian show in early May to launch it and then they’ll do a blast pitch to get other TV and talk radio. Already booked is an event at the Indigo Manulife store with Heather Reisman interviewing the author on May 7th, which will likely draw the national media as well.

Also note that the new edition has a starburst on the cover that says “soon to be banned in Canada,” which is apparently taken from Mark’s new introduction to the book.

Mark writes for Maclean’s magazine, and apparently he is involved in a little bit of controversy stemming from an excerpt that ran last year in the magazine. The Canadian Islamic Congress filed a human rights complaint to the Canadian Human Rights Commission, which has been in the news recently.

Rowe recieves three nominations for Other Men’s Sons

Other Men’s Sons, by Michael Rowe
978-1897151013 | $22.95 pb | in stock
Cormorant Books (UTP Distribution)

Michael Rowe’s book has been nominated three times in the LGBT book world, almost unprecedented in queer publishing.

The 20^th Annual Lambda Literary Awards has nominated Michael in two categories, LGBT Arts & Culture and LGBT Nonfiction. These awards will be announced in West Hollywood May 29th.

Publishing Triangle is pleased to announce that Michael has been nominated to receive the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction for 2008. The winner will be announced in New York at a ceremony at the New School University April 28^th. The award comes with US $1000.00.

This rare triple-finalist standing makes Other Men’s Sons the most honoured book by a gay author for 2007.

The Globe and Mail carried the news on March 19^th in The Biz column.

Winnipeg Free Press reviews This Common Secret

This Common Secret, by Susan Wicklund
9781586484804 | $30.00 hc | in stock
Public Affairs / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Abortion doctor’s memoir reviewed in the Winnipeg Free Press:

Thought-provoking account of 20 years as abortion doctor

March 9, 2008

Reviewed by Jessica Woolford

Dr. Susan Wicklund came to prominence in 1992 when she revealed her harrowing reality as an abortion provider in the United States on the CBS current affairs show 60 Minutes.

The Montana-based physician, now in her mid-50s, has penned a thoughtful and articulate memoir that takes readers beyond pro- and anti-choice rhetoric for an intimate look at her work, her motivations, and the ways protesters and politicians restrict abortion access.

As a poor, unmarried young woman, Wicklund endured a traumatic abortion and realized, “Something terrible had been done to me.”

Then, early in her subsequent medical training, Wicklund encountered a woman who begged her to end her pregnancy. “I can’t have this baby. He’ll kill it,” she said of her man.

She was right: A week after giving birth, the woman confronted Wicklund with her lifeless baby. “I had to learn to do safe, legal abortions,” Wicklund thought. “Abortion is about life: quality of life for infants, children and adults.”

Yet it wasn’t easy to learn: “In spite of the fact that almost half of the women in this country have an abortion,” she writes, “abortion was not acknowledged, discussed, or described during my ob-gyn rotation. When I asked to be taught… I was met with total resistance.”

Undeterred, Wicklund trained elsewhere and used the memory of her own abortion to inform her practice. She also learned from her patients, a group that includes “every possible woman,” among them several Canadians.

Wicklund shares their stories and what they’ve taught her, and her practices challenge anti-choice descriptions of abortionists.

Wicklund doesn’t perform abortions past 14 weeks and never without ultrasound. She proceeds only after a patient receives counselling and is certain about her choice.

“My biggest fear has always been to do an abortion on someone who will later come to regret it,” she admits. “We at the clinic have a right, even an obligation, to refuse an abortion if we don’t believe a patient really wants it.”

Wicklund also offers patients the option of viewing the fetal matter. One young woman who chooses to see it asks, “How can it be that my uncle believes I am less important than that tiny bit of tissue you just took out of me?”

Although abortion has been legal in the U.S. since 1973, this view is far from unique, and Wicklund has felt the brunt of it.

Protesters have followed, ambushed and assaulted her, attacked her clinics, traumatized her patients, leafleted her town, trespassed on her land, blockaded her driveway and filmed her daughter.

She calls her decision to appear on 60 Minutes “one of the most daunting choices I’ve ever faced.” In the end, “it brought added protection for me and other physicians.”

Nonetheless, Wicklund now carries a pistol for protection from pro-life extremists whose obsession with control she says has “infiltrated the laws and policies of our country and the lives of my patients.” Abortion seekers must negotiate parental notification regulations, mandatory waiting periods, lack of insurance coverage and scant clinic hours.

She notes that between 1982 and 2000, the number of U.S. abortion providers dropped by 37 per cent and that almost 60 per cent of them are 50 or older. As of 2006, she writes, “87 per cent of counties in the United States had no abortion provider.”

The situation is no better on this side of the border. As the Free Press reported recently, abortion services in Manitoba exist in Winnipeg and Brandon alone. Women elsewhere must trek south, carry to term or try to end their pregnancies themselves. The services that do exist in Manitoba owe much to the efforts of Dr. Henry Morgentaler, who opened a clinic in Winnipeg in 1983.

According to Wicklund, who makes no mention of Morgentaler, “women are still using coat hangers and sticks and toxic concoctions to end unwanted pregnancies.”

Hers is a thought-provoking account of more than 20 years as an abortion provider.

Winnipegger Jessica Woolford has written about abortion for the journal Social Politics.

Author Elizabeth Gregory on the Current this week

Ready, by Elizabeth Gregory
9780465027859 | $31.50 hc | in stock
Basic Books / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Author Elizabeth Gregory was on CBC Radio One’s The Current on Tuesday, March 25th for a live interview.

Jesus Sayings in Calgary Herald, Saskatoon Star Phoenix

The Jesus Sayings, by Rex Weyler
978-0887842122 | $29.95 hc | in stock
House of Anansi (HarperCollins)

This past weekend Weyler’s Jesus Sayings was reviewed by the CanWest system, and the review ran in the Herald and Star Phoenix, among other papers. From the review by Lorenzo DiTommaso:

“Weyler takes his readers on a historical tour of the ancient sources, describing how the earliest accounts of the life and message of Jesus grew over time and in response to changing circumstances.

Weyler has done his research and is a good storyteller. Readers must decide for themselves whether his tour actually leads to the authentic message of Jesus, or imposes Weyler’s own message on the sources through a selective reconstruction of their dates and priority.”

Another great quote from Brian Bethune in Macleans:

“In Weyler’s survey of the latest research, Jesus emerges as a revolutionary sage, a man for the ages whose ‘words and deeds are sublime’ … Weyler’s Jesus fits comfortably with the historical figure now envisaged by almost all scholars. Living without care for the future, keeping all assets in common, giving all we have to the poor, are other key parts of the authentic teaching as identified by Weyler and others.”

Winnipeg Free Press reviews Deborah Ellis

Sacred Leaf, by Deborah Ellis
978-0888998088 | $9.95 pb | in stock
Groundwood Books (HarperCollins)

The Winnipeg Free Press has reviewed Deborah Ellis’ Sacred Leaf:

New Ellis has plenty of suspense, action

Winnipeg Free Press
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Review by Helen Norrie

Ontario writer Deborah Ellis, best known for her Breadwinner trilogy about Afghanistan, switches continents to Bolivia, South America, in her latest book, Sacred Leaf.

While the Bolivian government, under American pressure, tries to eliminate cocoa farming by burning fields and seizing crops, peasant farmers who have grown the crop for tea and medicine for centuries are ruined.

Twelve-year-old Diego is caught up in the struggle as he flees from the cocoa pits where he has been forced to work and finds refuge with poor coca growers, only to have their crop destroyed by government soldiers.

Diego gets himself arrested, but finds a sympathetic commander who demonstrates the dilemma faced by the Bolivian military.

There is plenty of suspense and action in this contemporary story as Diego joins in a blockade against government troops that is bound to fail.

Once again Ellis has told a moving story about oppression and hardship of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. A longtime anti-war activist, Ellis has won the Governor General’s Award for children’s
literature, among many other honours for her books about children in difficult circumstances.

This book is the second novel in the Cocalero series, featuring Diego Juarez. It is suitable for readers 11 and older.

Louise Penny reviewed in People Magazine

The Cruellest Month, by Louise Penny
978-0-7553-2895-6 | $24.95 pb | in stock
McArthur & Co. (HarperCollins)

There is a fantastic review from People magazine for the Canadian mystery The Cruellest Month. This issue of People magazine just hit news stands today and says this is “impossible to put down.”

St. Martins Press is publishing it as a lead in the US, so watch for more media on this title south of the border soon.

One Soldier’s War gets great G&M review

One Soldier’s War, by Arkady Babchenko
978-0802118608 | $27.50 hc | in stock
Grove Press / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Fred Doucette reviewed One Soldier’s War in last weekend’s Globe and Mail:

In any language and in any place, war is hell

FRED DOUCETTE
March 15, 2008

This is a great book. From cover to cover, it is filled with the realities and horrors of a war that barely touched the West. To read it is to have a soldier’s-eye view of what some called the Russian Vietnam.

There were two wars fought over the breakaway Republic of Chechnya, the first in 1994 and a second in 1999. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Chechens led by General Dzhokhar Dudayev seized power in Grozny, the capital. The country quickly descended into anarchy, which was one of the reasons Russia felt it had to reassert its authority there. The second reason was to maintain Russian territorial integrity, to discourage other areas from seceding.

Sent into this maelstrom of death were thousands of young, poorly led and equipped Russian conscripts. The author, a law student in Moscow, was conscripted into the army in 1995 and sent to Chechnya as what he and his fellow soldiers called “cannon fodder.” Early in the book, you get a brutally honest look at life as a conscript inside the crumbling Russian army:

” ‘Fucking hell, what is this place?’ whispers Zelikman. ‘Is this the army?’ Zelikman is short-sighted and looks like a small cowering pony, so terrified is he of being knocked about: During the six months of training he hadn’t got used to the beatings and his status of trash. And we were going to get beaten all right, well and truly; you could tell right away that the army practice of dedovshchina, the violent beating of new recruits by older soldiers, was ingrained here.”

Demoralized, often drunken leaders brutalize and abuse these young soldiers before feeding them into the human meat-grinder battles around Grozny and the many nameless villages in the surrounding hills. Babchenko’s time at the base prior to deploying into Chechnya is almost surreal. No controls are placed on the soldiers; their daily routine is focused on getting money to pay off the older soldiers so they won’t get beaten. Reduced to begging and stealing, Babchenko and his mates are doomed. This is survival at its basest, and they are not even in the war zone yet. Over the ridge, in Chechnya, something awful is happening, and the fate of the soldiers here bothers no one. As one older soldier says to his young mates, “You may not have kissed let alone been intimate with a woman before meeting a horrible death in Chechnya.”

You are kept waiting for the inevitable move into Chechnya, and when it comes, it’s a bit of a relief because at least the young soldiers are free from their tormentors in the reinforcement camp. But one tormentor is replaced by another, the Chechen fighter, who has no mercy when it comes to the Russians. Added to the ever-present spectre of dying in battle is the fear of being captured, tortured and killed by the Chechens. Their lives are worthless; they are thrown into battle by drunken, inept leaders and they die by the hundreds. They look on with envy as the horribly wounded are evacuated, wishing it was them.

When they are not fighting Chechens, the soldiers are focused on finding food, cigarettes, alcohol and a safe place to sleep. As in wars before, they are always tired and hungry and living in primitive conditions; in the summer, they suffer from the heat, and for the rest of the year they are cold and wet. The misery of war is a constant, regardless of the era in which it is fought. Only the technology has changed since one man picked up a rock and killed another man.

The language of the book is “soldier speak,” rarely heard by those who have not served in combat zones. There is nothing fancy to it, no great adjectives or adverbs, just simple, in-your-face honesty. These are the dirt people, grunts, the “poor bloody infantry” who – other than killing the enemy – have no purpose in life but to stay alive. Home is a dream from a past life; family and friends are shadows. Cloaked in fear and despair, they count the days until their lives can resume again some day.

However, the reality of war is that many soldiers die, some are horribly wounded, and some disappear, and most return home haunted, empty shells of their former selves.

To the uninitiated, it might seem strange that Babchenko, after serving his time as a conscript, re-enlists in the army and returns to fight in the second Chechen war. Like many soldiers returning from a war, he did not fit into the mundane day-to-day life of a civilian. He had become an adrenalin junkie. In the civilian world, there is a lot of grey between the black and white of living. In war, there is no grey; it’s simply kill or be killed. Babchenko also misses the brotherhood of arms and the bonds that are formed in war, without which life can be lonely and pointless. So, like many, Babchenko returned to be with the men and the life he knew, and to continue to feed the beast of war.

I have only one criticism of the book, which may be the fault of the translation. I felt that at times that the dialogue of the soldiers was a little off the mark.

Regardless, this is a very powerful book, and Babchenko’s words convey all there is to know about war from the pointy end: The death, maiming, cruelty, inhumanity, depravity, atrocities and rare flashes of compassion are finely woven into a great memoir of a faraway war, fought by someone else’s sons and brothers.

Fred Doucette is a former soldier and the author of Empty Casing. He lives in Lincoln, N.B.

Night Train To Lisbon reviewed in the Globe

Night Train to Lisbon, by Pascal Mercier
978-0802118585 | $26.00 hc | in stock
Grove Press / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

The Globe and Mail has reviewed Night Train to Lisbon in last weekend’s Book Section:

Gregorius takes the long way home

STEPHEN SMITH
March 15, 2008

I guess it happens to all of us, eventually, and until it does you never really know how you’re going to respond. One day, walking to work, rain coming down, there’s a woman. Could be anywhere. Bern in Switzerland, for instance. On a bridge. In Bern, in the rain, a bridge, a woman you’re passing by, it only takes a moment, this woman, your first thought could be that she’s about to jump, but no, she doesn’t jump, instead she finds a pen and the next thing is she’s writing a phone number on your forehead.

This, at least, is what happens to Raimund Gregorius at the start of Pascal Mercier’s novel Night Train to Lisbon. A great start it is. There’s a word for a scene such as this and here it comes now: bravura. For Gregorius, it packs a powerful promise: Nothing, now, will be the same.

Mercier is a professor of philosophy in Berlin. Night Train to Lisbon is his third novel. There’s a list of prizes it won when it first appeared in Germany in 2004, and about that let me just say this: The prizes on that list number three and the medals one. About Gregorius, the human Post-it note: Here’s a man – 50, maybe? – who’s a philologist of ancient languages at a Bern college. He’s a good man, perhaps a little predictable. Thirty years he’s taught at the college. He thinks of himself as reliable and boring. He’s popular with his students and his colleagues envy his popularity. They call him the Papyrus.

The woman with the phone number goes with him to class. This causes a bit of a stir. She stays for a while, then leaves. She smiles and puts a finger to her lips and – gone.

Gregorius goes home, later, all in a fluster. By now he’s copied down the telephone number and washed off his forehead. You don’t really need to know that, but at the time it seems all-important. He doesn’t know what to do. He stops in at a Spanish bookstore, buys a Portuguese book he happens on. He doesn’t speak the language, but never mind, because what’s a philologist for? Plus, later, he’ll pick up a dictionary.

This, I realize now, is where Mercier lost me. Or I lost him. We lost one another. The bookstore, to me, was just a diversion, the real business being back on the bridge. What an odd intimacy between strangers. Where will it lead? To love? To murder? No. Wrong. What’s that old Chekhov maxim about a pistol that shows up in Act 1? Someone has to fire the thing before Act 3 ends, right? It’s a different rule, apparently, with phone numbers scrawled on foreheads.

I was a fool. I see that now. Gregorius was never going to track her down. He doesn’t have time, for one thing, now that he’s got his new book to read. It’s by a doctor, Amadeu de Prado, and it’s good stuff: Right away, Gregorius feels like it was written specifically for him. He reads and reads, leaving himself barely enough time to make the wild decision to drop everything and depart for Lisbon. Calls the station, packs a bag, writes a letter to his boss, leaves that very night. He does call his eye doctor, a good friend, and gets his blessing. Then he and his book get on the train.

The train journey is important. This we know because, well, it’s right there in the title of the novel, isn’t it? As a woman says later, on the subject of some trees, “It wouldn’t surprise me if they were a metaphor for something.” Exactly. But somewhat? Life, maybe? Could be. Gregorius does take the time, on the train, to think about the merciless decline of all living things. And with all those kilometres speeding by, why not a few flashbacks? This is where we learn about his childhood, his marriage, sad sceneries both: His mother never saw the sea, his wife left him. Salamanca, a brief stop on the route south, reminds him of the life not lived. In his youth, a career he considered was – fire-jumper? stunt kayaker?

Review continued on Globe & Mail site…

G&M reviews Days of Sand & Mercury Under My Tongue

Days of Sand, by Hélène Dorion
978-1897151075 | $18.00 pb | in stock
Cormorant Books (UTP Distribution)

Mercury Under My Tongue, by Sylvain Trudel
978-1933368962 | $15.50 pb | in stock
Soft Skull Press / Publishers Group Canada (Raincoast)

Elizabeth Johnston reviews both Mercury Under My Tongue and Days of Sand in last weekend’s Globe & Mail:

Earth to earth, air to air

ELIZABETH JOHNSTON
March 15, 2008

In Grade 8, I asked my science teacher, “When a person has a seizure, could it be that they’re just expressing something from deep within the Earth, rather than having a medical problem?” An odd question, but one that would probably make sense to Fréderic and Hélène, narrators, respectively, of Mercury Under My Tongue, by Sylvain Trudel, and Days of Sand, by Hélène Dorion. In very different ways, both try to come to grips with life, death and illness – just a few of those earth-shaking unknowns existence sends our way.

Death, near-drownings, houses burning, the moment one realizes the separation between self and others, or even tonsillitis – these pivotal, inexplicable events in Days of Sand brand the narrator for life. “For fear attacks the body at the same time as illness. Never again do we find the gentle forgetting, the serene innocence of having a body – at any moment, it reminds us that we never possess it…”

At school, young Helen in Days of Sand finds not answers, but a measure of control. “My father dropped my sister and me off at school, and as soon as the door closed, the Earth stopped shaking me.” At school, she is taught to read, something she saw her father do incessantly. Hélène senses that reading was is the answer to escaping into a place that makes sense of the unknown.

In Hélène’s home, the windows are so transparent birds fly into them and die. Wanting to believe in God, she prays that when she looks again, they will have flown away. More often than not, they’re still dead. “So God did not exist. Nor did meaning.”

Later, reading transforms into writing, giving Hélène more mastery over her search; meaning becomes a solo act of creation.

A lack of belief characterizes Fréderic Langlois’s story in Mercury Under My Tongue, too, but where Dorion’s book is poetic and expressive, Fréderic’s first-person narrative reads like a high-speed train barrelling toward a head-on collision with a mountainside. Trudel, recipient of a 2007 Governor-General’s literary award, creates a character filled with the anger and energy of one who refuses to go gently – which is completely understandable when it comes from a 16-year-old virgin dying of bone cancer.

“When I woke up in the recovery room where everything is bathed in fluorescent light and moaning, the man seemed quite sorry to tell me that my hipbone is a sheet of paper; if you stood a candle behind it you would see the flame through the bone and it would have a bleak and terrible beauty.”

Such bare and honest writing is hard to take, but Fréderic is relentless in pursuing truth. Having rejected his Catholicism, he refuses last sacraments and even causes the resident shrink some concern when he christens himself “Metastasio,” after an 18th-century Italian poet.

Sprinkled throughout Mercury are Fréderic’s poems, which try to capture the essence of his fleeting moments, the last days of his life in hospital, where he forges ephemeral friendships with other patients, some of whom he forgives for being healed.

While no words take away Fréderic’s pain, he nonetheless pursues his life with words, just as Hélène does in Days of Sand. The difference is that the latter is imbued with the security of one who has been healed. Dorion is winner of the Prix Anne-Hébert and is a highly regarded Quebec poet, and her images are soothing and comforting even while they probe the frightening unanswerables of life. There is a luxuriousness in her prose that is missing in Trudel’s, because Fréderic knows he is doomed, while Dorion is the survivor.

At the beginning of Mercury Under My Tongue, Fréderic muses that he will die a man “without qualities, without richness.” That may be true, but in creating Fréderic, Trudel lends a richness to all those Fréderics we will never hear of. If Dorion is what we read now, from the vantage point of survival, perhaps Trudel will be what we read just before the Earth seizes us one last time.

Elizabeth Johnston’s No Small Potatoes will be out this fall.