McGill-Queen's University Press Blog

The Codex Canadensis wins the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize

"As a physical object, it is one of beauty... As an act of sustained editorial ingenuity... it is impeccable... As a work of interdisciplinary research, it is simply outstanding... [This work] can scarcely be praised too highly." Sir John A. Macdonald Prize Jury

 

The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas, edited and with an introduction by François-Marc Gagnon, with Nancy Senior and Réal Ouellet, has been awarded the 2012 Sir John A. Macdonald Prize by the Canadian Historical Association. 

Part art, part science, part anthropology, this ambitious project presents an early Canadian perspective on natural history that is as much artistic and fantastical as it is encyclopedic. Edited and introduced by François-Marc Gagnon, The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas showcases an intriguing attempt to document the life of the new world - flora, fauna, and aboriginal.

The Codex shows how the wildlife and native inhabitants of the new world were understood and documented by a seventeenth-century European and makes available fundamental documents in the history and visual culture of early North America.

 

 

More on The Codex Canadensis

More on the 2012 Sir John A. Macdonald Prize

 

 

François-Marc Gagnon at the Gilcrease
Museum with the original Codex

To learn more about The Codex Canadensis or to order online, click here.
For media inquiries, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

Omar Khadr, Oh Canada

In 2002 a fifteen-year-old Canadian citizen was captured in Afghanistan for allegedly killing an American soldier. A badly wounded Omar Khadr was transferred to the US Bagram Air Force base and then Guantánamo Bay detention camp. He would remain there without trial until October 2010. In Omar Khadr, Oh Canada, over thirty contributors analyze Khadr's background, his incarceration, the actions of Canadian authorities, and the implications raised by his legal case.

 

The following is excerpted from the Prism book review of Janice Williamson's Omar Khard, Oh Canada:

But an altogether different legacy is on show in Ms. Williamson’s tome, as interpreted by an equally eclectic set including legal jurists, human rights activists, journalists, filmmakers, poets and playwrights. Each of the prominent contributors here illustrate the slow decay of Canada’s democratic ideals, tied up as they have been to America’s constitutionally bankrupt detention of Canadian Omar Khadr (the Supreme Court of Canada’s sentiments, not mine).

Which narrative will attract the most attention? No one can deny that the “Khadr effect” has made Omar’s tale unpalatable for many Canadians.

“For years, as though exiled, Omar Khadr disappeared below the radar of what matters,” writes Professor Williamson in the introduction. “Why?”

Referencing Philosopher Simone Weil, she argues that people have a tendency to look away from those who need help. Her hope is that the anthology “reminds us of our responsibility to not look away.”

Indeed Canadians have looked away for too long from the emotionally challenging story of a child who “was dealt a sentence through his family name,” as activist Craig Kielburger notes in the book. “It’s unfair for any kids to have to live up to their parents,” he writes, reflecting on his brief encounter with Omar years ago in Pakistan. “It’s especially so when you’re a Khadr.”

(...)

As in an artful kaleidoscope, Ms. Williamson has brought together the voices and sentiments of those who refuse to look away from Omar despite his desperate need and the clinging albatross of his family name. Like the art exhibit in Massachusetts, this collection deserves to be widely acknowledged, too, for what it says about Canada, and about all of us.

 

Read the full review

 

 

Omar Khadr, Oh Canada Book Launch
May 30 2012 - 7:00pm
Octopus Books Centretown at Under One Roof
251 Bank Street, 2nd Floor, Ottawa

 

 

To learn more about Omar Khard, Oh Canada or to order online, click here.
For media inquiries, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

Igersheimer in Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre exhibit

Walter W. Igersheimer, the author of Blatant Injustice, will be featured in Enemy Aliens: The Internment of Jewish Refugees in Canada, 1940-1943, a new exhibit opening at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre on June 11.

Through eyewitness testimony and artefacts, the exhibit recounts the experience of Dr. Walter W. Igersheimer and other internment survivors during their journey from fascist Europe to refuge in England, imprisonment by Britain and Canada and eventual release.

 

Click here for more information about the exhibit.

 

 

 

To learn more about Blatant Injustice or to order online, click here.
For media inquiries, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

Book Award Honours Singing from the Darktime

Singing from the Darktime has won the 2012 Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award in the Poetry category.

 

The following is excerpted from The Canadian Jewish News:

S. Weilbach, an 80-year-old Holocaust survivor in Vancouver, has won the 2012 Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award in the Poetry category for a long poem she had put off writing for decades because the memories were too painful.

The author’s first book, Singing from the Darktime: A Childhood Memoir in Poetry and Prose (McGill-Queens University Press) recaptures the immediacy of Weilbach’s feelings as she travels with her parents and grandfather aboard the ill-fated refugee ship, the St. Louis, along with more than 900 refugees hoping to escape the Nazis’ clutches in 1939. Blocked from landing in Cuba, America or Canada, the St. Louis was ultimately forced to return to Europe.

In an online interview, Weilbach explained that the childhood feelings and memories she revisited in writing her story were far too delicate to be expressed in prose: only poetry would suffice. 

Read the full article

Or listen to a Q&A with S. Weilbach

 

To learn more about Singing from the Darktime or to order online, click here.
For media inquiries, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

Come visit MQUP

Visit McGill-Queen's University Press in

New York at BEA,

June 5th to 7th, booth #3432.

 

Click here for more information

In Search of R.B. Bennett

The following is excerpted from Quill & Quire's review of In Search of R.B. Bennett.

Canadian politics was a different beast in the early 20th century, and Richard Bedford Bennett (friends and associates called him “R.B.”) was very much a man of his time. It’s hard to imagine an obese, teetotalling bachelor with the ability to quote poetry at the drop of a hat getting to be prime minister today, let alone a conservative from Calgary who publicly spoke out against the pernicious influence of American values.

Bennett, who led Canada from 1930–35, wasn’t particularly charismatic or colourful – in those days a politician didn’t have to be – and history hasn’t been kind to his memory.

(...)

Veteran Canadian historian P.B. Waite does a sterling job making this a readable and at times downright entertaining study that goes some way to rehabilitating Bennett’s standing. 

Read the full review

 

To learn more about In Search of R.B. Bennett or to order online, click here.
For media inquiries, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

Fall 2012 Catalogue

McGill-Queen's University Press has released its Fall 2012 catalogue.

Click to view the virtual catalogue to browse MQUP's upcoming releases.





Notable Upcoming Releases

Q&A with writer Linda Kay on being a female journalist

The following is excerpted from the Ottawa Magazine article Q&A with writer Linda Kay on being a female journalist and a local reporter’s impact on history.

Linda Kay is the author of The Sweet Sixteen: The Journey that Inspired the Canadian Women’s Press Club. Her book recounts how a single train ride in 1904 ended with the creation of a club that would go on to count Nellie McClung and Lucy Maud Montgomery among its members. A young Ottawa reporter, Margaret Graham, asked a CP publicist for the same press pass her male colleagues were given to attend the St. Louis World Fair. He said if she could find 12 accredited female writers, he’d escort them to St. Louis himself. Well, she found 15. He named them the “Sweet Sixteen,” despite the fact that these were tough, tenacious women, working as journalists at a time when they weren’t even legally recognized as people.

Kay herself was the first female sports reporter at the Chicago Tribune, and is now chair of Concordia University’s journalism department.The Sweet Sixteen book launch will be held this Saturday at the Media Club of Ottawa, an offshoot of the Canadian Women’s Press Club.

What inspired the book?
I thought I was pretty cool as the first female sports writer at the Chicago Tribune, but when I became a teacher I started looking into journalists of the past, and realized there was a female sports writer at theGlobe and Mail in 1933. I started doing research on female journalists in Canada and found out that the first one became a full employee in 1886. I didn’t know about this; my peers didn’t know about this.

What’s the connection to Ottawa?
Shortly after the [Canadian Women’s Press Club’s] founding, 17 different branches spread across the country. The Media Club of Ottawa is the only remnant of the club that’s left. It is not an exclusive women’s club anymore though; it accepts men. The irony is that when women like myself came into the industry in the ’70s and ‘80s, they didn’t want to belong to a women’s-only club. Nevertheless, [the Media Club of Ottawa] still tie themselves to the original club and are the only branch left.

Why was the formation of the Canadian Women’s Press Club revolutionary?
The fact that it was a professional women’s business club. They laid down a constitution that they would be supportive of each other, because at that time there were no journalism schools, and men were very unfriendly to them in the workplace. Women were put in separate newsrooms until the ‘60s and ‘70s. One paper called the women’s area, “the cage.” Women were not treated or paid like the other staff. They were segregated.

 

Read the full article

Read an excerpt from The Sweet Sixteen

 

To learn more about The Sweet Sixteen or to order online, click here.
For media inquiries, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

The Sweet Sixteen

The following is excerpted from Linda Kay's The Sweet Sixteen: The Journey That Inspired the Canadian Women's Press Club.

Once underwritten by political entities or religious groups that espoused their own causes, most daily newspapers by the late 1800s were mass circulation journals attempting to appeal to a large audience. But without political or religious backers to fully fund a costly enterprise that was growing more sophisticated technologically, newspapers needed advertising revenue to stay afloat. Advertisers were eager to court women as the force behind most family purchases, so editors hired female writers expressly to attract female readers.

In 1886, Sara Jeannette Duncan became the first woman to break the gender barrier as a full-time employee at a newspaper in Canada. Hired by the Globe in Toronto – and later to become an acclaimed novelist – Duncan ushered in a new era for female writers in Canada, who were, for the first time, avidly recruited by astute editors and publishers across the country as these practical businessmen began to realize the economic value of including a “woman’s voice” in the newspaper.

Margaret Graham was certainly the beneficiary of the burgeoning move among big city editors to cater to female readers. On that June day in 1904, when Graham climbed the stairs at Windsor Station headquarters in Montreal and strode confidently down the long corridor leading to the offices of CPR publicity director George Henry Ham, she may have felt empowered by the clout she commanded as a journalist. She had just snared an important interview with the wife of Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier.

With self-assurance, she prepared to address the CPR publicity chief, whose affability was legendary. Described as “a large body of superfine humanity entirely surrounded by the Canadian Pacific Railway,” George Ham’s jovial nature and wry sense of humour made him one of the most popular men in the country at the time. But Margaret Graham, dubbed “Miggsy” by family and friends, was not in the mood for jokes. She had a serious mission.

(...)

In Ham’s office that day, Margaret Graham wasted no time telling the railway executive the reason for her visit. You take newspapermen to all your functions, she told him, whether it be steamship landings, hotel openings, sight-seeing tours, or world’s fairs. What about women? Why, Graham wanted to know, weren’t newspaperwomen accorded the same rights as men?

In his 1920s memoir, Ham sketched out his version of the fateful encounter. Graham, a “champion of women’s rights,” began to “cyclonically” tell him that the cpr had transported men, free of charge, on various excursions, while “women had altogether been ignobly ignored.” She then demanded to know “why poor downtrodden females should thus be so shabbily treated.” When she finished, indignation blazing from her eyes, Ham politely motioned for her to take a seat: “Sit down, Miggsy, sit down and keep cool.” But Margaret Graham was accustomed to speaking her mind and fighting for equal treatment. Born in 1870 and raised in difficult circumstances with few material resources, she had nevertheless achieved what few women of her era could hope to attain.

 

The Sweet Sixteen Book Launch

Saturday May 12,2 pm to 4 pm
Ottawa City Archives
100 Tallwood Dr. (Corner of Woodroffe)

 

To learn more about The Sweet Sixteen or to order online, click here.
For media inquiries, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

Florida's Snowbirds and the Florida History Society Awards

Florida's Snowbirds by Godefroy Desrosiers-Lauzon has earned both the Charlton Tebeau Award for general interest book and the Rembert Patrick Award for a scholarly book from the Florida Historical Society. 

Florida's Snowbirds examines the effects of the seasonal migration, not only for travellers but also for local Floridians. Developing numerous themes, including leisure, state-promoted tourism, citizenship, and business investment, Godefroy Desrosiers-Lauzon considers advertisements, movies, policymakers, and the behaviour of snowbirds in Florida to provide the most thorough study of the vacation state to date. He also looks at the temporary communities of Canadians, Québecois, New Englanders, and Mid-Westerners that develop, showing how they blur the lines that usually divide national and regional identities, and youth and age.

An insightful work full of amusing details, Florida's Snowbirds pieces together a complete cultural atlas of Florida Snowbirds that goes far beyond the familiar postcards they send home.

 

To learn more about Florida's Snowbirds or to order online, click here.
For media inquiries, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

Sorrow's Rigging

Gary Adelman is the author of the recently released Sorrow's Rigging: The Novels of Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, and Robert Stone. In an innovative new reading, Gary Adelman presents these three authors as "Catholic cowboys", renegades, and above all furious parodists of Americana and its larger-than-life mythology, dreams, innocence, and power. 

Adelman, who passed away this January, is remembered by his colleague Curtis Perry:

 

A few weeks ago, I received in the mail a copy of Gary Adelman's Sorrow's Rigging: The Novels of Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, and Robert Stone (McGill-Queen's University Press).  This book, which I know to have been the focus of Gary's considerable scholarly energies during the last years of his life, uses the three writers in its subtitle to capture something distinctive about the relationship between cultural pessimism and artistic ambition in the post-Vietnam era United States. 

(...)

Gary Adelman, who enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a faculty member in our department, passed away this past January at the age of 76.  For former colleagues and students of Gary's who may have stumbled on this sad news here for the first time, I'm including a link here to an obituary that ran in the local paper in January.  This makes the printing of his book now at once especially meaningful and deeply poignant: as one family member put it, in a touching and heartfelt memorial written shortly after his passing, "Gary wanted desperately to see [the book] in print, but his body didn't make it."

Read the full blog post

 

 

This Great National Object

The following is exerpted from This Great National Object by Roberta M. Styran and Robert R. Taylor.

Almost a century and a half ago, engineer and historian William Kingsford wrote of the Welland Canal: “The history of this important work is so marvellous and so little known, to some extent even so misrepresented, that a consecutive narrative is indispensable, correctly to understand the vicissitudes through which it has passed. So far as the writer knows, no connected account of it exists.” How little has changed since 1865! As canal historian Robert F. Legget observed in 1987: “The Welland Canal is still but little known to most Canadians, [despite the fact that] the Welland today is one of the very few great ship canals of the world.

(…)

The saga of the construction of the nineteenth-century Welland Canals is long and complex, involving thousands of men (and animals) from 1824 to the 1880s, and documenting the progress from simple picks and shovels to steam-powered earth-moving machines. It is a tale of changing ship-building and construction technology and of increasingly sophisticated building materials from timber to stone to concrete. Among its protagonists are wind and rain, ice and blazing summer heat, floods and landslides, jolts to the existing social order, and shocking accident and violent death. It is set in the context of dramatic political and economic change in the Niagara peninsula and on the national and international stage. Moreover, its immutable technological and geological challenges had to be met by fallible human beings. And so the story of the canals’ construction grants us many glimpses into the characters and personalities of the men who built the waterway – the unskilled labourers, the talented artisans, the self-trained or formally educated engineers, the harassed or inventive contractors, and ultimately the conscientious – and not so conscientious – bureaucrats.

In other words, the Welland Canals’ construction is more than a simple account of digging an increasingly large ditch to enable increasingly large ships to bypass the physical obstacle of Niagara Falls. It is many stories, interweaving hope and despair, triumph and defeat, humour and violence, generosity and selfishness … a reflection of the whole human comedy.

 

Book Launch - St. Catharine’s, ON
May 12, 1pm at the St Catharine’s Museum
1932 Welland Canals Pkwy. (formerly Government Road)
St. Catharines, ON, L2R 7K6
Sponsored by the Canadian Canal Society

 

To learn more about This Great National Object or to order online, click here.
For media inquiries, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

How Canadian women make art history

The following is excerpted from the article How Canadian women make art history on Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson's Rethinking Professionalism: Women and Art in Canada, 1850-1970.

 

For Huneault, who holds a Concordia University Research Chair in Art History, “there is something unsettling about the role that professionalism has played in attempts to reinscribe women into Canadian art history. Because the issue of who and what has been deemed a professional in the art world has typically been decided by those with the highest social standing, an unquestioning acceptance of the division between amateur and professional robs us of opportunities to understand some of the most significant aspects of women’s art production.” 

Rethinking Professionalism, which will be launched at Concordia on May 4, looks to address this imbalance by embarking upon a series of detailed narratives about the varied careers of women in the art profession.

Huneault and her colleagues unpack the existences of Canadian female painters, sculptors, art teachers, photographers, architects, designers, educators, curators and gallery directors in order to position them in relation to the standard model of art-world professionalism that emerged in the second half of the 19th century and that, to a large extent, continues to dominate scholarship on women’s art history today.

Read the full article

 

Rethinking Professionalism book launch 
May 4th, 4:30 pm
Concordia University, room EV3.741 

 

To learn more about Rethinking Professionalism or to order online, click here.
For media inquiries, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

North American Society of Naval History Awards

Each year the North American Society for Oceanic History presents the John Lyman Book Awards, named after the late Professor John Lyman of the University of North Carolina, to recognize excellence in the publication of books that make significant contributions to the study and understanding of maritime and naval history.

 

A Bridge of Ships by James Pritchard
Winner of the 2012 Lyman Book Award, Category “Canadian Naval and Maritime History”

In A Bridge of Ships James Pritchard tells the story of the rapidly changing circumstances and forceful personalities that shaped government shipbuilding policy. He examines the ownership and expansion of the shipyards and the role of ship repairing, as well as recruitment and training of the labour force. He also tells the story of the struggle for steel and the expansion of ancillary industries. Pritchard provides a definitive picture of Canada's wartime ship production, assesses the cost (more than $1.2 billion), and explains why such an enormous effort left such a short-lived legacy. 

Praise from the jury:

“Excellent resource and excellent presentation, the author knows shipbuilding.”

“Most comprehensive, documented, and well written, detailing the tremendous contribution made by Canadian yards for the war effort.”

Click here for more information on A Bridge of Ships

Surveyors of Empire by Stephen J. Hornsby
Winner of the 2012 Lyman Book Award, Category “Naval and Maritime Science and Technology”

Using research from both sides of the Atlantic, Stephen Hornsby examines the development of British military cartography in North America during and after the Seven Years War, as well as advancements in military and scientific equipment used in surveying. At the same time, he follows the land speculation of two leading surveyors, Samuel Holland and J.F.W. Des Barres, and the publication history of The Atlantic Neptune. 

Praise from the jury:

“Packed with often-overlooked information, well written, replete with relevant illustrations.”

“Ambitious topic and research that went into the study of coastal exploration. Well-written, insightful, I could go on…”

Click here for more information on Surveyors of Empire

 

Media inquiries: Jacqui Davis, MQUP Publicist

Mike Babcock on being "better than good enough"

The following is excerpted from The Coaches Site's review of Leave No Doubt by Mike Babcock.

Detroit Red Wings bench boss Mike Babcock is no fan of just good enough. He says it’s his one fear and motivator.

“That fear keeps me activated,” says Babcock, the only hockey coach to lead teams to Stanley Cub, World Championship and Olympic Games victories. “It keeps me grinding to get better. It’s a fear that has helped me take every step in my career.”

Babcock says it’s a good kind of fear, one that doesn’t paralyze or wear you out. “It can push you to break through and hit your potential – to make a difference. It can push you to a success that at first seems unreachable. Good enough is where you find average.”

The drive to be better is where you find and realize your potential. It’s where the fun is. It’s where you come up big, be a gamechanger, get to your dreams and find joy.

And it’s a fear that can get you to the podium for an Olympic gold medal.  Not settling for good enough was part of the credo that Babcock and long-time friend and ad exec Rick Larsen came up with for Team Canada in 2010. The credo hung in the dressing room throughout the two weeks of the 2010 Vancouver Games.

Leading off that credo was leave no doubt.

“Doubt is the biggest energy-taker there is. It eats away at our emotional core. It drains us of mental energy and physical energy. It demoralizes, distracts and demotivates. A lot of people say ‘coulda, woulda, shoulda’. But they never do.”

Read the full review

 

Mike Babcock will be signing books on June 17th (Father's Day) at 
McNally Robinson, Saskatoon, at noon.

 

To learn more about Leave No Doubt, or to order online, click here.
Media inquiries: Jacqui Davis, MQUP Publicist

Sex, Lies, and Cigarettes

The following is excerpted from Sex, Lies, and Cigarettes by Sharon Anne Cook.

The spectre of the independent woman smoker had haunted Canadian societal leaders since the nineteenth century. Women of this persuasion had rejected marriage and taken up work that interested and sustained them, were sure of their own minds and willing to share their opinions freely, and tested the boundaries of decorum by such acts as public smoking. Labelled a “New Woman” at the beginning of this period and a “Modern Girl” by the 1920s and 1930s, the independent woman was frequently portrayed as a smoker. She was often an early entrant to the new professions like nursing or social work or to the skilled labour force or an active member of the arts, and her image made larger statements about equal rights for women by asserting women’s rights to brandish cigarettes in public. This profile of the New Woman grew into a “type of female personality,”  which developed into the Modern Girl. In Canada, as in the United States and Britain, women who subscribed to modernity were identified as well-educated, independent-spirited, and insistent on the vote and a public role in society, while at the same time often wanting a fulfilling domestic life, either in conventional companionate marriages or in same-sex households. Hence, in this construction smoking carried with it a symbolic claim to many of the pleasures now taken for granted by privileged women in our society.

In Britain, the New Woman was also often a suffragette, demanding the right to vote. British journals carried advertisements for cigarettes (“Vallora” by name) and even launched “Votes for Women” cigarettes in 1910. They were sold alongside “Votes for Women” soap, marmalade, chocolate, and sweet pea seeds. Partly because of the Canadian suffrage movement’s close ties to temperance, no such products were sold in this country, but the image of the independent-minded New Woman/Modern Girl as suffragist otherwise thrived in this country as well. In addition to representations of independent-mindedness, the intellectual and often artistic New Woman might also have been considered sexually experienced. However, unlike her sisters who had been forced into this nether world through economic straits, the sophisticate was generally from a privileged background. She was often a recognizable figure in society.

For a photoset from Sex, Lies, and Cigarettes click here.

 

To learn more about  Sex, Lies, and Cigarettes or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

RMS Titanic: 100 years on

From The Birth of the Titanic by Michael McCaughan.

An advertisement for Titanic's return trip from New York.

Click for more pictures from The Birth of the Titanic

Leave No Doubt

The following is excerpted from the ESPN review of Leave No Doubt:

 

If you’re feeling down on your luck these days, and need a little pick-me-up, Mike Babcock’s recently published book called Leave "No Doubt: A Credo for Chasing Your Dreams" is just what the doctor ordered. 

The 138-page book, which the Detroit Red Wings head coach authored with the help of longtime friend Rick Larsen, is truly an inspirational read. It’s as much about life as hockey, the two intertwined throughout the book just like Babcock’s philosophies on life and hockey also share the same place in his heart and mind. 

The backdrop is the 2010 Winter Olympics, when Babcock and the rest of Team Canada faced the most pressure many of them would ever feel in their entire careers. 

"Leave No Doubt" is the credo Babcock chose for Canada’s quest to win Olympic gold on home ice in the most hockey-crazed nation in the world. 

And while in this book Babcock makes Canadians feel awfully proud of themselves and their hockey dominance, you don’t have to be Canadian to be inspired from what Babcock is selling here. 

His views on life, on commitment, on hard work, apply to everybody. 

While I covered Babcock at the 2003 Stanley Cup finals when he led the underdog Anaheim Ducks to a surprise finals appearance, I got to know him better while being one of only two reporters on hand in Prague at the 2004 IIHF world hockey championship, where Babcock coached Canada to gold. I remember flying home from that tournament thinking Babcock was a superstar in the making in the coaching world, and I would be proved right in the subsequent years when he was hired by the powerhouse Red Wings, coached them to a Stanley Cup and then raised the bar even higher at the Vancouver 2010 Games. 

Early in the book, you get a glimpse of the pressure in Vancouver, Babcock bringing us late to the third period of the gold-medal game with the United States. 

Read the full review

 

To learn more about Leave No Doubt, or to order online, click here.
Media inquiries: Jacqui Davis, MQUP Publicist

MQUP Authors @ Blue Met 2012

The annual Blue Metropolis Montreal International Festival takes place April 18 to 23 @ the Opus Hotel, 10 Sherbrooke St West. MQUP participants include Will Staw, Sherry Simon, Hugh Hazelton, Brian Busby, and recent GG finalist for translation Donald Winkler. For a full schedule of events visit the Blue Met web site here.

@ 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, 18 April 2012 # 11

CRIME WRITING: TRUE CRIME EVENT - MONTREAL' S MOST NOTORIOUS CRIMES AND CRIMINALS

McGill University’s Will Straw onstage with the man behind one of Montreal’s most notorious blogs, Coolopolis, discussing shocking Quebec crimes and how the media shaped the public’s perception of the stories. McCord Museum, 690 Sherbrooke St W. 514 398-7100

McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, McCord Museum

With Kristian Gravenor. Hosted by Will Straw

Panel discussion  
ENGLISH
McCord Museum $ 10,00

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@ 5:30 p.m. Thursday, 19 April 2012 # 18

BILINGUAL CITIES, BILINGUAL IDENTITIES

Montreal academic and teacher Sherry Simon and Barcelona resident and crime writer Teresa Solana discuss the nature and challenges of the bilingual city. With translator and critic Hugh Hazelton.

Institut Ramon Llull

With Sherry Simon, Teresa Solana. Hosted by Hugh Hazelton

Panel discussion  
MULTILINGUAL
Godin  $ 10,00

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@ 8:30 p.m. Saturday, 21 April 2012 # 76

CRIME WRITING: MONTREAL NOIR: THE CITY'S FORGOTTEN PULP PAST 

Cheap, disposable and sensationalistic, Montreal’s pulp fiction took its place on Canadian and American newsstands sixty years ago. It has since been ignored, neglected and, in some cases, hidden by its authors. What was so shameful about these books and why are we reviving them now?

Canadian Heritage, Montreal Review of Books

With Trevor Ferguson, Marcel Jeannin, Jim Napier, Will Straw. Hosted by Brian Busby

Panel discussion 
ENGLISH
Salon St-Laurent  $ 7,00

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@ 10:30 p.m. Saturday, 21 April 2012 # 48

MASTER CLASS ON TRANSLATION WITH DONALD WINKLER - PART I 

Translation is a bridge to another world, and it is the supreme openended word game, where meaning, music, and rhythm vie for primacy. Through our work on a sampling of passages, we will explore some of its possibilities. For registration details www.bluemetropolis.org/fesival/workshops or 514 932-1112 ext 33

Part II: April 22, 10:00 am

Canada Council for the Arts

Workshop 
ENGLISH
Salon  $ 60,00 
 
.

A John Glassco Soirée

A Lovely Gutting

The following is excerpted from Quill & Quire's review of A Lovely Gutting by Robin Durnford.

 

Robin Durnford’s debut collection guts the praise-song quality of nature poetry’s more traditional iterations in favour of a voice that is unafraid of tackling torment, loss, and the ebb and flow of nature’s sublimity. The poet presents the earth as simultaneously beautiful and damned: uncanny Newfoundland landscapes, ghosts, and rotting wrecks appear among attempts to salvage beauty from debris. “[F]rom this sea I am fished, / gutted and stripped, / bled and bound, / on your ship I sail, / or go down”, Durnford writes in the title poem. We follow the poet to “the worn beaches of the peninsula / stuffed with fossilized crabs / rotting wrecks”, where “black crows and cats, hungry dogs / forage among rusty kettles”.

In these poems, the sea carries history – or, perhaps more accurately, carries us through our various histories, where memory mixes with desire. 

Read the full review

 

To learn more about A Lovely Gutting or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

Blitzkrieg and Jitterbugs: College Life in Wartime, 1939-1942

The following is excerpted from The McGill Tribune review of Blitzkrieg and Jitterbugs by Elizabeth Hillman Waterston.

 

Elizabeth Hillman Waterston enrolled at McGill in September 1939—the same month that Hitler’s Panzer divisions first rolled into Poland and World War II began. When one thinks about how fraught with tension the McGill campus has been this year, with students locking horns over issues like the Quebec government’s proposed tuition fee increases, it is hard to even imagine how volatile campus politics must have been in Hillman’s time, when government proposals concerned policies of mass conscription, and when fighting for a cause was meant in the literal sense of the word.   

Hillman, now a professor emeritus at the University of Guelph, has fortunately made the tricky task of imagining what the McGill campus was like during World War II a much easier one, having just published her memoirs, Blitzkrieg and Jitterbugs: College Life in Wartime, 1939-1942 with the McGill-Queen’s University Press. The book is written in a lively and engaging style, bringing to light a remarkable viewpoint of World War II, and of a very different student life compared to today’s.

On the one hand, Hillman’s view of the war is an abstract one, formed from the confines of an isolated ivory tower which remained unaffected by the fighting itself: Montreal was far from the tangible dangers of the war, and sonorous lectures,  “freshette tea parties,” and essay assignments continued in defiance of the Nazi threat.   

Yet on the other hand, Hillman makes it patently clear that the war still haunted McGill campus life, radically politicising classes and classmates alike, and transforming the university into a vital cog in Canada’s war machine: many students and younger professors signed up to the armed forces and were shipped off to Europe, the Middle East, or Asia; trigonometry professors were rushed off to help advise the government on how to lay mines and sink U-boats; multilingual professors were commissioned to crack enemy codes; chemistry classes focused on testing different forms of poisonous gases; physics classes specialised in improving radar technologies; psychology research looked at pain tolerance to assess the effects of torture; and female students spent a lot of their classes “knittin’ for Britain,” sending over knitted woolen clothes for families left homeless by the London Blitz.

Read the full review

 

To learn more about Blitzkrieg and Jitterbugs, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the editor, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

This week in publishing

What you may have missed this week at MQUP

MQUP books shortlisted

The Golden Dog

Babcock leaves no doubts

It's poetry month:

• Daylight Savings from Naomi Guttman’s Wet Apples, White Blood
• Riddle from Jeffery Donaldson’s Palilalia
• Marianna (poem to my first child) from Peter Dale Scott’s Mosaic Orpheus
• Excerpt from Cast from Bells by Suzanne Hancock
• Silver Threads from John Mikhail Asfour’s Blindfold
• Excerpt from Particles by Michael Penny
• Essence from Heather Simeney MacLeod’s 
  The Little Yellow House
• Easter Egg by Robin Durnford excerpted from A Lovely Gutting
  

 

 

What else?

"EBooks narrowly noses out print, 45% to 43%, as the favorite for reading in bed."

National Bookmobile Day

Publisher Macmillan says 'We did not collude' over e-books

China's e-publishing revolution puts writers on a fast track to freedom

 

Upcoming

April 28th, 6 pm - Book launch of Ulster's Men, Novel Idea Bookshop, Kingston

May 12th, 2 pm - Book launch of The Sweet Sixteen, Ottawa Archives, Ottawa

 

MQUP books shortlisted

Gabrielle Roy Prize Finalist

Honours the best work of Canadian literary criticism published in English.

A Gentleman of Pleasure: One Life of John Glassco, Poet, Memoirist, Translator, and Pornographer by Brian Busby

In a lively account of a man given to deception, who took delight in hoaxes, Busby manages to substantiate many of the often unreliable statements John Glassco made about his life and work. A Gentleman of Pleasure is a remarkable biography that captures the knowable truth about a fascinatingly complex and secretive man.

"A beautifully written and very well researched account of Glassco's life and, equally interesting, of his interactions with so many other Canadian writers, artists, and intellectuals. Never before has the mid-twentieth-century Canadian literary and cultural scene appeared so … scandalous!" Gabrielle Roy Prize Jury

More on A Gentlemen of Pleasure

John A. Macdonald Prize Finalists

The Sir John A. Macdonald Prize is awarded annually to the best scholarly book in Canadian history.

The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas: The Natural History of the New World, Histoire Naturelle des Indes Occidentales edited and with an introduction by François-Marc Gagnon, with Nancy Senior and Réal Ouellet

Part art, part science, part anthropology, this ambitious project presents an early Canadian perspective on natural history that is as much artistic and fantastical as it is encyclopedic. Edited and introduced by François-Marc Gagnon, The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas showcases an intriguing attempt to document the life of the new world - flora, fauna, and aboriginal.

"... a captivating, rich, and profoundly knowledgeable text." Laurier Lacroix, département d'histoire de l'art, Université du Québec à Montréal

More on The Codex Canadensis

 

 

Peopling the North American City: Montreal, 1840-1900 by Sherry Olson and Patricia Thornton

Many North American cities trace their population booms to the nineteenth century when immigrants and migrants flooded emerging industrializing urban centres in search of better lives. Peopling the North American City examines this phenomenon in Montreal through the eyes of a thousand couples to construct both an intimate portrait and a compelling overview of life in a nineteenth-century metropolis. 

"The authors cannot reconstruct conversations, but they still want us to remember that there were 'long evenings of discussions, fits of indignation, tears of rage, volleys of profanity, and peals of laughter.' These instincts for life in the city make Peopling the North American City an exceptionally good book." John C. Weaver, McMaster University

More on Peopling the North American City

 

 

Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry Finalist

Created by the Writers Guild of Alberta in 1982 to recognize excellence in writing by Alberta authors.

Particles by Michael Penny

"There's a gap between where / an electron is and where it might be / and that's the only real work-place. / You occupy that office of possibility."

Where are you in that space between the electron and the galaxy, and how do you find yourself there? Particles asks this question and answers it by asking more questions, conveying both the mystery and the uncertainty of the universe. Michael Penny addresses his poems directly to the reader, challenging you to satisfy your need to investigate and understand the sensory and intellectual assumptions we use to make sense of our world. 

 

More on Particles

 

 

 

Contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis for media requests.

The Golden Dog

The following is excerpted from William Kirby's Le Chien d'or / The Golden Dog, edited by Mary Jane Edwards. First published in 1877, Le Chien d'or draws upon the threads of legend spun around the real-life tablet of the Golden Dog, which can still be seen in Quebec City. Weaving historical, literary, and religious allusions together with a powerful lyricism, Le Chien d'or develops an epic narrative of the heroic past and promising future of the Dominion of Canada.

 

Upon the sandy beach a crowd of women, children and old men had gathered who were cheering and clapping their hands at the unexpected return of the Lady of the Manor with all their friends and relatives.

The fears of the Villagers had been greatly excited for some days past, by exaggerated reports of the presence of Iroquois on the upper waters of the Chaudiere. They not unnaturally conjectured moreover that the general call for men on the King’s Corvée to fortify the city, portended an invasion by the English, who it was rumoured, were to come up in ships from below, as in the days of Sir William Phips, with his army of New Englanders, the story of whose defeat under the walls of Quebec was still freshly remembered in the traditions of the colony.

“Never fear them!” said old Louis the one eyed Pilot. “It was in my father’s day. Many a time have I heard him tell the story, how in the autumn of the good year 1690, thirty four great ships of the Bostonais came up from below, and landed an army of ventres bleus, of New England on the flats of Beauport! But our stout Governor Count de Frontenac came upon them in the woods with his brave soldiers, habitans and Indians and drove them pell mell back to their boats, and stripped the ship of Admiral Phips of his red flag, which, if you doubt my word—which no one does—still hangs over the high altar of the church of Notre Dame des Victoires! Blessed be our Lady! who saved our country from our enemies, and will do so again if we do not by our wickedness lose her favour—! But the Arbre sec, the dry tree, still stands upon the Point de Levy, where the Boston fleet took refuge before beating their retreat down the river again, and you know the old prophecy that while that tree stands, the English shall never prevail against Quebec!—”

Much comforted by this speech of old Louis the Pilot, the Villagers of Tilly rushed to the beach to receive their friends.

The canoes came dashing into shore. Men, women and children ran knee deep into the water to meet them, and a hundred eager hands were ready to seize their prows and drag them high and dry upon the sandy beach.

“Home again! and welcome to Tilly, Pierre Philibert!” exclaimed Lady de Tilly offering her hand, “Friends like you have the right of welcome, here!”—Pierre expressed his pleasure in fitting terms and lent his aid to the noble Lady to disembark.

Le Gardeur assisted Amelie out of the canoe. As he led her across the beach he felt her hand tremble as it rested on his arm. He glanced down at her averted face and saw her eyes directed to a spot well remembered by himself, the scene of his rescue from drowning by Pierre Philibert.

The scene came before Amelie at this moment! Her vivid recollection conjured up the sight of the inanimate body of her brother, as it was brought ashore by the strong arm of Pierre Philibert and laid upon the beach. Her long agony of suspense, and her joy, the greatest she had ever felt before or since, at his resuscitation to life, and lastly her passionate vow which she made when clasping the neck of his preserver, a vow which she had enshrined as a holy thing in her heart ever since.

 

 

To learn more about The Golden Dog, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the editor, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

Donner Prize Shortlist Announced

Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums by Ruth B. Phillips has been shortlisted for the Donner Prize, the award for best public policy book by a Canadian.

 

The ways in which Aboriginal people and museums work together have changed drastically in recent decades. This historic process of decolonization, including distinctive attempts to institutionalize multiculturalism, has pushed Canadian museums to pioneer new practices that can accommodate both difference and inclusivity.

In Museum Pieces Ruth Phillips argues that these practices are "indigenous" not only because they originate in Aboriginal activism but because they draw on a distinctively Canadian preference for compromise and tolerance for ambiguity. Phillips dissects seminal exhibitions of Indigenous art to show how changes in display, curatorial voice, and authority stem from broad social, economic, and political forces outside the museum and moves beyond Canadian institutions and practices to discuss historically interrelated developments and exhibitions in the United States, Britain, Australia, and elsewhere. Drawing on forty years of experience as an art historian, curator, exhibition critic, and museum director, she emphasizes the complex and situated nature of the problems that face museums, introducing new perspectives on controversial exhibitions and moments of contestation. 

 

To learn more about Museum Pieces, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

What 'national pastime' novels say about Canada

The following is excerpted from What 'national pastime' novels say about Canada by Adela Talbot:

 

That ‘good old hockey game’ is, without a doubt, ingrained in the Canadian identity and landscape. Hockey culture is omnipresent in Canada, prevalent in music, literature and art. The sport is packaged and marketed for mass consumption and, for better or worse, hockey, in a lot of ways, defines our nation.

But is the traditional mythologizing of hockey in Canada a good thing?

Western’s Michael Buma, who recently published Refereeing Identity: The Cultural Work of Canadian Hockey Novels, a book discussing the hockey myth as presented in Canadian literature, doesn’t think so.

Hockey, as a cultural myth, is quintessentially Canadian, explained Buma, who teaches in the English Department and School of Kinesiology.

“In its most basic version, hockey is distinctly Canadian. It says something about us; it has ties to winter and a rugged, pastoral, settler mentality. It’s played traditionally, nostalgically, out on the pond. There’s a spiritual purity to it; it’s ‘Canada’s game.’ And it has a gender component; hockey is a rugged, white man’s game. These are familiar ideas,” he said. “Hockey novels are very, very concerned with playing up this national mythology and with establishing certain icons of Canadian-ness and trying to put forward a national community.”

Read the full article or

Read an excerpt from Refereeing Identity

 

To learn more about Refereeing Identity, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

This week in publishing

The Ancient Mythology of Modern Science

MQUP Founder Robin Marlatt Farr

Omar Khadr's transfer to Canada nears approval

TLS reviews The Russian Jew of Bloomsbury

Architecture and Craft in Postwar Canada

 

What else?

What’s the greater fear for publishers? Amazon or piracy?

Extending the life of bookstores is critical, but devilishly difficult

A Slow-Books Manifesto

A new chapter for rare book collecting

 

Upcoming

March 30, 6 pm - Book launch of DisPossession, L'Espresso Bar Mercurio, Toronto

April 28th, 6 pm - Book launch of Ulster's Men, Novel Idea Bookshop, Kingston

May 12th, 2 pm - Book launch of The Sweet Sixteen, Ottawa Archives, Ottawa

 

TLS Reviews A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury

Samuel Koteliansky (1880-1955) fled the pogroms of Russia in 1911 and established himself as a friend of many of Britain's literati and intellectuals, who were fascinated by his homeland's more civilized side: the Ballets Russes, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov. Kot, as he was known, soon became an indispensable guide to Russian culture for England's leading writers, artists, and intellectuals, who in turn helped introduce English audiences to Russian works.

Galya Diment's A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury looks at the remarkable life and influence that an outsider had on the tightly knit circle of Britain's cultural elite.

 

The following is excerpted from The Times Literary Supplement:

For her part, Diment attributes Kot's mental instability, which caused a nervous breakdown in 1936 and a suicide attempt (with a safety razor) in 1947, chiefly to the violent treatment of Jew in Tsarist and Civil War in Russia and in Nazi Germany. This, she suggests, was too much for Kot's imagination to bear, even though he and most members of his extended family managed to escape prosecution. She also hints that Kot's loneliness (he seems never to have has a lover) may well have been the result of his (repressed?) homosexuality. However, his behavioural patterns generally point to an attention deficit disorder, whose true causes probably derived from his childhood and may never be fully established. By Galya Diment's own admission, Samuel Koteliansky's troubled spirit "is probably wandering still. I do not think my books will put him to rest either."

Read the full review in the print edition of the latest Times Literary Supplement.

To learn more about A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

Omar Khadr's transfer to Canada nears approval

In 2002 Omar Khadr, a fifteen-year-old Canadian citizen, was captured in Afghanistan for allegedly killing an American soldier. Khadr was transferred to Guantánamo where he would remain without trial until October 2010 when a military commission admitted evidence considered tainted by Canadian courts. A plea bargain and guilty plea initiated his promised return to Canada a year later. In Omar Khadr, Oh Canada, to be released in June, over thirty contributors analyze Khadr's background, his incarceration, the actions of Canadian authorities, and the implications raised by his legal case.

 

Today, Ottawa and Washington are close to approving Khadr's transfer back to Canada. According to the CBC:

A "frustrated" Omar Khadr could be back in Canada by the end of May, with both Ottawa and Washington poised to approve his transfer from Guantanamo Bay, where the convicted war criminal has been held for almost a decade, The Canadian Press has learned.

A source familiar with the file said U.S. Secretary of Defence Leon Panetta was expected to sign off on the transfer within a week.

"It's on his desk, it's ready," the source said Wednesday.

"The U.S. has no concerns about (Khadr)."

Khadr has been caught up in a bureaucratic "Catch-22" since becoming eligible to leave the American prison on Cuba last October under terms of a plea agreement struck a year earlier.

The Toronto-born Khadr, 25, pleaded guilty before a much maligned U.S. military commission to five war crimes he committed as a 15-year-old in Afghanistan in July 2002.

Click here to read the full article

 

To learn more about Omar Khadr, Oh Canada, or to pre-order, click here.
Media inquiries: Jacqui Davis, MQUP Publicist

MQUP Founder Robin Marlatt Farr

Robin Farr, founder of McGill-Queen's University Press, has died at the age of 85. The following is excerpted from his Quill & Quire obituary. 

Robin Farr, a builder of Canadian publishing and one of its true gentlemen, died last week in Oakville, Ontario, at the age of 85. Farr excelled as both a publisher and policymaker; his achievements include founding McGill (later McGill-Queen’s) University Press and creating major government support programs for publishing at both the federal and Ontario levels.

Robin Marlatt Farr grew up in Vancouver. He worked as a teacher on Vancouver Island, then, in 1950, became a sales rep at the Toronto-based textbook publisher Copp Clark under the renowned Marsh Jeanneret. Farr crisscrossed the Western provinces by train, stopping in every city to meet educators and sell books. It was the profitable heyday of educational publishing, and he remembered returning from one trip with an order for 175,000 copies of a single title. Eventually, he became head of Copp Clark’s Western office.

In 1960, Farr moved to Montreal to start up English Canada’s second university press at McGill University, where he remained for seven years, publishing a scholarly list specializing in the university’s areas of strength: law, medicine, and Islamic studies. 

Read the full article here

The Ancient Mythology of Modern Science

The following is excerpted from The Ancient Mythology of Modern Science: A Mythologist Looks (Seriously) at Popular Science Writing by Gregory Schrempp.

 

“It’s just matter”: this comment has stayed in my mind for over three decades now. I and a favourite uncle (a researcher at a pharmaceutical firm, and also the son of a Methodist minister) had been discussing the headline-grabbing story of an airliner that crashed in a snowstorm, leading the stranded survivors to eat the flesh of those who had died before rescue arrived. My uncle’s serene initial response to the incident – “it’s just matter” – reduced modern cannibalism to clinical truth. Almost immediately, however, he frowned and compromised this learned response with another, psychologically more primal, reaction. Noting that he himself probably would not have partaken of the meal, his reasoning was again terse: “it’s taboo.” In the space of several seconds, my uncle had tried out two opposing assessments – one obviously more professional, the other more personal (or at least intoned as such) – encapsulated by the words “matter” and “taboo.” While the man of science resolved a provocative quandary by categorizing the episode under a label – “matter” – that connotes moral distance and neutrality, the man of myth shuddered at the desperate breach of human decorum – a decorum that resists the levelling effect of this same label. The existence of taboos, their origin, and the consequences of their violation are popular themes in mythologies worldwide. Taboos are typically accompanied by a conviction that violations will produce cosmic repercussions, a belief which instances, in another form, the principle that the cosmos mirrors the settlement. By a modern society, “mythology” is typically regarded as the expression of a pre-scientific world in which the substance and structure of the cosmos are infused, irrationally, with deep human anxieties and hopes. “Science” connotes the opposite: in the interest of objectivity, the purging of such anthropocentric conceit from the idea of nature. The antinomy embodied in mythology and science has been felt profoundly by many individuals, and, continually evading closure, it has left a long trail in Western analytical thought.

Infused with this antinomy, popular science writing as a genre exhibits a strained hybridism of content and purpose. As writers like Smolin report the most exciting developments of contemporary scientific research, the ancient devices and strategies creep into their narratives even amidst proclamations of the triumph of science over myth. But while these devices are ancient, the context into which they are deployed is new and allegedly modern. We encounter, in popular science writing, not a mythologizing of the cosmos as it was perceived by purportedly naive, archaic peoples (an idea that has given rise to countless fables about our intellectual origins), but rather – and this is what makes the venture interesting – an attempt to mythologize the cosmos of matter, that is, the cosmos of de-mythologized, impersonal substance.

 

To learn more about The Ancient Mythology of Modern Science, or to order online, click here.
Media inquiries: Jacqui Davis, MQUP Publicist

 

This week in publishing

What you may have missed this week at MQUP

Marion: The Story of an Artist's Model

Ulster's Men

Leave No Doubt

New author Mike Babcock eyes another chance at coaching Olympic team

Mike Babcock talks about his new book on the CBC and Sportsnet 

Thomas D’Arcy McGee: the extreme moderate

"Oh, yes, they are not gentlemen." 

 

What else?

When adverbs run amok - literally

On libraries and eBooks

Lloyd Shepherd: My parley with eBook pirates

 

Upcoming

March 30, 6 pm - Book launch of DisPossession, L'Espresso Bar Mercurio, Toronto

April 28th, 6 pm - Book launch of Ulster's Men, Novel Idea Bookshop, Kingston

May 12th, 2 pm - Book launch of The Sweet Sixteen, Ottawa Archives, Ottawa

 

Leave No Doubt

Mike Babcock is the only hockey coach in the history of the game to lead teams to victory in the Stanley Cup, the World Championship, and the Olympic Games. Currently head coach for the Detroit Red Wings, he is arguably the best coach in the game today. In Leave No Doubt, against the dramatic backdrop of the Canadian men's gold medal victory in Vancouver, Babcock provides an inspiring roadmap for achieving goals and fulfilling dreams.

Leave No Doubt is available for purchase online, and will be available in bookstores in April 2012.

 

This isn’t just a book about hockey. It’s about life.

While the story is anchored in Canada’s 2010 gold medal-winning Olympic experience, it’s really about potential, pressure, and turning dreams into reality. This book isn’t a chronological, game-by game review of the Olympics. It’s a book of perspective; snapshots of moments. It’s about learning moments – big and small.

Each chapter is headlined by a phrase from the “Leave No Doubt” credo that hung in our dressing room throughout the two weeks of the 2010Vancouver games. While the credo was written specifically for the Olympics, it represents my approach to life, to competing, and to chasing dreams. It’s an approach that I’ve embraced as an everyday commitment.

 

The Credo

Leave No Doubt

That this is our game.

That this is our time.

That 14 days in February will be two weeks for the ages.

That every day counts.

That every meeting matters.

That every practice makes a difference.

That each one of us will rise to every occasion.

That this isn’t about us, it’s about our country.

That we know 33 million Canadians will attend every game.

That home ice is an advantage.

That nothing can distract us.

That nothing will stop us.

That our determination will define us.

That we are built to win.

That we are a team of character.

That we are a team of destiny.

So let the world be warned on February 28, 2010 we will…

LEAVE NO DOUBT

 

To learn more about Leave No Doubt, or to order online, click here.
Media inquiries: Jacqui Davis, MQUP Publicist

Ulster's Men

The following is excerpted from Ulster's Men: Protestant Unionist Masculinities and Militarization in the North of Ireland, 1912-1923 by Jane G.V. McGaughey.

Importantly, these correlations between manliness and militarization were reserved for men only; women were cast as supporters, comforters, and loved ones, but not as combatants. Full citizenship within a patriarchal state was most often reserved for men, whose blood-sacrifice as citizen-soldiers and warriors was duly privileged and rewarded. Militarization was an important part of the relationship between the community and constructs of masculinity in Ulster. Ireland is an island where war and the threat of war have shaped all aspects of society and are key elements in modern Irish identity. Certainly stereotypes of Irish masculinity have been influenced by Irishmen’s presumed heritage as a warrior people or “martial race.” The Ulster Protestant soldier occupied an awkward place in the British popular imagination, as he was not as immediately recognizable as a Scottish Highlander, but he was not necessarily included in sweeping generalizations made about Irish soldiers, which often were predicated on stereotypes of Irish mania or effeminacy. According to Joanna Bourke, the popular belief that the Irish were “innately combative” meant that they were afforded a lower place on the evolutionary scale in Victorian and Edwardian military philosophy, so that their prowess on the battlefield hindered any concurrent political aspirations. These associations between regionalism, militarization, and ideals of manhood made the soldier one of the most powerful masculine constructions in Ulster society during the era of the Great War, but also one which could be redefined with a more specific Protestant unionist identity. While other manly images existed in concert with representations of the warrior, militarization was an inescapable theme in the public sphere between 1912 and 1923, making it one of the chief avenues of analysis in the following argument.

 

To learn more about Ulster's Men, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

Marion: The Story of an Artist's Model

The following is excerpted from the introduction to the new edition of Marion: The Story of an Artist's Model by Winnifred Eaton. 

 

In April 1916, Hearst’s magazine began serializing the novel Marion: The Story of an Artist’s Model by “the Author of ‘Me.’” For eight months, readers followed the tale of Marion Ascough, a young girl growing up in late nineteenth-century Quebec in a large family that, for reasons only vaguely explained, lives outside both French and English society. The narrative tracks Marion’s capricious adventures with men of different backgrounds, and her forays into the world of the stage and onto the pedestal. Early in the novel she meets Reggie, an upper-class Englishman, whom she hopes to marry. The marriage, however, is interminably delayed for reasons that, like her exclusion from French and English society, are not explicit. Ultimately, Marion decides to leave home and try her luck in the United States. At first, she seems to be even less successful there: she is professionally and personally degraded by having to support herself as an artist’s model rather than an artist, and she has to struggle to survive and keep her dignity intact in a bohemian corner of cosmopolitan New York. The conclusion of the novel, however, is satisfying, particularly for a readership that allowed itself to indulge in salacious stories as long as they ended with “a wicked life repented of,” as Daniel Defoe wrote of Moll Flanders, who also wrapped up her tale in the safe blanket of legal matrimony. Marion has neither wedded the man of her youthful dreams, nor has she become a great artist, but on the final page of the book, she is given one version of a generic fantasy ending: a sanctified marriage to the tall, blond, handsome man who loves her. This ending enabled readers to forgive Marion’s former lapses in judgment and decorum and to abandon the search for the secret of her identity—a secret that the advertised authors, “Herself and the Author of ‘Me,’” intimated existed by virtue of their own anonymity, as well as the elusive discussion of Marion’s “conspicuous and freaky” family and her mother’s “foreign” nationality in the opening pages (Marion 2, 1).

(…)

Like its predecessor, Marion is an interesting story of immigration, racial secrecy, and indiscreet romances. I argue, however, that, unlike Me, Marion offers itself to readers not merely as a story to be read but also as an experience that requires participation. If we understand modeling to be a metaphor for being racially different or ambiguous, we can see that by giving us Marion, who is scrutinized, examined, deconstructed, fragmented, and characterized in different ways for different purposes, Eaton creates a character who embodies the muddledness of categorization. Marion invites the questions and looks that ask, “Who are you?” “What are you?” and “Where do you come from?”; the costumes she is made to wear and painterly manipulations that alter her in diverse ways are the artists’ attempts to answer these questions. Yet artists in the novel who paint Marion are but stand-ins for the audience of this book. They—and, by extension, we—are spectators, investigators, classifiers who analyze the body/text and the accompanying features/illustrations for clues about Marion’s identity. And we, the readers, like the artists, are ultimately responsible for trying to force the heroine into a racial or ethnic category— one that Eaton does not provide.

 

To learn more about Marion, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

This week in publishing

What you may have missed this week at MQUP

Canada’s connection to the first PC

Canada's Game

These women paved the way

The sound of the word "cilantro"

The Jewish Public Library had humble beginnings

 

What else?

On Amazon's growth

Will Amazon give up eBook exclusivity? 

U.S. may sue Apple, top publishers on e-book price collusion

What it means to the business if the government eliminates agency pricing

Google rebrands Google eBooks as Google Play

The iTunesification of literature

 

Upcoming

March - Lecture, readings and book signings for Galya Diment's A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury

• March 19, 5 pm, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK
• March 21, 1 pm, University College of London, UK
• March 21, 6 pm, Gower Street Waterstones, UK

March 17 - Lecture and signing of David Wilson's Thomas D'Arcy McGee, Volume 2, Grano's Restaurant, Toronto

March 30, 6 pm - Book launch of DisPossession, L'Espresso Bar Mercurio, Toronto

 

 

These women paved the way

The following is excerpted from the op-ed piece, In Journalism, These Women Paved the Way by Linda Kay. Kay is the author of the upcoming book, The Sweet Sixteen: The Journey That Inspired the Canadian Women's Press Club.

In June 2004, I attended a big party in Ottawa.

The 100th-anniversary celebration of the Canadian Women’s Press Club sent me on a trip back in time.

For years I’d been curious about my female predecessors in the field, who, until recent decades, had been erased from journalism history. I had no idea that women were first hired as journalists in Canada as early as the 1880s.

The pioneers were a select group – and very talented. To earn a vaunted position on a newspaper or magazine they had to be, as publications invariably employed only one woman on staff in those early days. Hired for their literary ability, the first female journalists were published poets, writers of fiction or noted essayists.

At the anniversary celebration in Ottawa, I became intrigued by the story of how the Canadian Women’s Press Club was formed more than a century ago.

In June 1904, 16 Canadian women travelled by train to St. Louis to cover the World’s Fair. Eight were francophone and eight were anglophone. The Canadian Pacific Railway underwrote their trip. The women represented the most important Canadian publications of the day, including Saturday Night, La Presse, La Patrie, the Montreal Star, the Toronto Telegram, the Halifax Herald and the Manitoba Free Press.

The publicity man for the railway dubbed these women The Sweet Sixteen, even though he admitted the cliché did not fit. They were a tenacious and daring group. In 1904, Canadian women did not have the right to vote. They were not regarded as persons under the law. Higher education was discouraged. Marriage and motherhood were deemed a woman’s true calling.

Read the full article

To learn more about The Sweet Sixteen, or to pre-order a copy, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

 

Happy International Women's Day!

Canada's Game

The following is excerpted from the newly released, Refereeing Identity: The Cultural Work of Canadian Hockey Novels by Michael Buma.

 

I don’t think I’ve ever felt so Canadian as on 24 February 2002. The men’s hockey finals were taking place at the Salt Lake City Olympics, Team Canada versus Team USA, and I was watching the game from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, with an exuberant group of fellow expatriates. The tension in the room was palpable when the Americans scored first; it was as if the goal had thrown a blanket on the fire of our collective hopes, reinforced our doubts about Canada’s chances against a strong American team. But then it happened: only minutes after the American goal, Canada’s Chris Pronger made a cross-ice pass to team captain Mario Lemieux. As if by clairvoyance or extrasensory perception, Lemieux somehow sensed teammate Paul Kariya directly behind him and in better position to get a shot away. As the puck sped toward Lemieux, the captain opened his legs and allowed it to glide through to Kariya, who converted the pass for a game-tying goal. I’ll never forget the split second before the room erupted into cheering, screaming, and applause. It was a moment of mutual understanding, an awareness among everyone present that we had witnessed an act of inimitable athletic brilliance. Certainly our shouts and cheers paid tribute to Lemieux’s remarkable unselfishness and astonishing hockey sense, but the moment felt bigger than simply this; in a way, we were celebrating our shared capacity to perceive such brilliance and be thrilled by it. What was most striking about this feeling of unity and togetherness, however, is that it somehow brought us closer to home. It was as if Kariya’s goal had connected us to our fellow Canadians, whoever they were and wherever they were watching from. After that there could be no doubt that Canada would win, and the simmer of our enthusiasm was carried to full boil by four more Canadian goals before the game was over. The final score was 5–2, and Team Canada brought home Olympic gold for the first time in fifty years.

When I think back on my reaction to Canada’s 2002 gold-medal win, I’m struck by how much the way I felt resembled the way I was supposed to feel. In other words, my reaction fell almost perfectly into line with certain cultural expectations and assumptions about what it means to be Canadian. Canadians are bombarded by cultural representations of hockey that encourage them to think about the game as contributing to national unity and identity. Hockey has been seen by many commentators as “Canada’s game,” and has frequently been mobilized in the rhetoric of identity discourse and cultural nationalism. In this configuration, the game purports to unify diverse internal populations while at the same time marking Canada as symbolically different from external others such as the United States. In other words, hockey has often been represented in popular culture as an expression of Canadian character, unity, and identity. Much of the basis for such nationalistic representations has arisen from hockey’s purportedly “natural” connection with Canada’s northern setting, as well as from the idea that Canadians symbolically possess hockey in a way that other nations don’t (we invented it, are best at it, care most about it, etc.). As Jamie Dopp and Richard Harrison suggest, “investigating hockey critically is to think of it not as expressing some real connection between nature and culture, but to see it as carrying a story, often expressed in mythic terms, that people desire to be true about themselves and their place in the world”.

 

 

To learn more about Refereeing Identity, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

Canada’s connection to the first PC

The following is excerpted from Canada’s – and York’s – connection to first PC detailed in new book by Sandra McLean.

 

At one time, computers were thought to be large brains too complex for the average person to understand, never mind use or own for their personal use, says York Professor Zbigniew Stachniak, standing in a cramped room on the second floor of the Lassonde Building surrounded by tall shelves of outdated computers and computer remnants.

That small room with its window display of ancient computers is easy to miss, but it boasts one of the world’s first personal computers, the MCM/70 microcomputer, as one of its artifacts. Stachniak, as the York University Computer Museum’s curator, possesses a mental encyclopedia of fascinating historical and computer details.

“In April 1965, Time magazine ran ‘The Computer in Society’ story with a picture of a computer drawn as a big brain on the cover. At that time, computers were mostly hidden from us and we, the society, were most ignorant about them,” says Stachniak, a professor in York’s Department of Computer Science & Engineering in the Faculty of Science & Engineering.

All that changed in 1973 when Toronto- and Kingston-based company Micro Computer Machines Inc., with Mers Kutt at the helm, designed and manufactured a computer for personal use. With its tiny built-in screen and keyboard, the MCM/70 challenged the computing status quo around the world.

The history of that early personal computer, the vision behind it and the innovations it brought to the world, can be found in Stachniak’s recent book, Inventing the PC: The MCM/70 Story (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011). It looks not only at the history, politics, business and social issues surrounding the invention of the MCM/70, but at its Canadian, as well as York University connection.

Read the full article

 

To learn more about Inventing the PC, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

This week in publishing

What you may have missed this week at MQUP

Poet John Asfour on The Sunday Edition

Raymond Tallis in The Economist's Intelligent Life

The late Istvan Anhalt

Genocide in Canada's Indian residential school system

 

What else?

Distributors sign with Kindle under eBook coop agreement

EBook "Power Buyers" purchase more titles and have more total spending on books in all formats

France passes law permitting state to seize authors' rights on out-of-print books

Price for Random House Ebooks rises

Kobo e-reader app available for Windows 8

 

Upcoming

March 8, 7 pm - Book launch, Intergovernmental Policy Capacity in Canada, Ryerson, Toronto

March - Lecture, readings and book signings for Galya Diment's A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury

• March 19, 5 pm, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK
• March 21, 1 pm, University College of London, UK
• March 21, 6 pm, Gower Street Waterstones, UK

March 17 - Lecture and signing of David Wilson's Thomas D'Arcy McGee, Volume 2, Grano's Restaurant, Toronto

March 30, 6 pm - Book launch of DisPossession, L'Espresso Bar Mercurio, Toronto

 

John Asfour on The Sunday Edition

Poet John Asfour will be on The Sunday Edition, March 3rd, at 9 am, on CBC Radio 1.

Blinded by a grenade in Lebanon as a teenager, poet John Asfour came to Canada armed with James Joyce's words, "For the eyes, they bring us nothing. I have a hundred worlds to create and I am only losing one of them."

Blindfold, Asfour's latest work, investigates the ways in which disability influences our lives and is magnified in our minds. In a series of thematically linked poems, Asfour draws the metaphor of the blindfold across the eyes of sighted citizens who are impaired by estrangement, emotional complexity, and social pressures. 

 

 

A Different World

There’s no joy
in losing
one of your senses,
it is a falsehood
that other senses will make up for the loss.

One fifth of the world
shifts,
turns into images
and the sight you once had
is replaced by a metaphor.

The vision you scanned the world with
moves
to settle in the recesses
of your memory,
to form permanent scenes
imprinted in your visual field,
etched in sharp clarity
like the pain of love
like nothing
other senses can be
a surrogate for.

Some retains its original value but the rest
fades over the years
or alters
into reconstructed pictures
caused by sound
and touch or
relayed by taste or smell.
Each sense

is responsible
for one definition of your life
and each question others ask
confirms your doubt
something is missing in the equation,
something you will have to do without
demands an explanation of how it feels to lose
something so valuable, so essential

to your life.
How can any of us accept
or, at least, understand
that it is only
the visible world being turned inward
or the world of sight and vision
transposed into ideas and revisions?
How, then, can you get to a point
where the loss is a mere non-sense,
a thing, a momentary frustration
when you try to locate
something you dropped,
something you hear rolling away from you
or when you try to recall your parents’ features?

Once the judgment is confirmed,
tasting a plum is a poem,
or touching her skin under the night thunder,
and the smell
of April brings you closer
to being alive.
That is how you discover that the relationship between you and
the universe
is a pure theory
waiting to make itself clear,
only to be abandoned.

 

To learn more about Blindfold, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

Raymond Tallis in The Economist's "Intelligent Life"

The following is excerpted from Neurons V Free Will by Anthony Gottlieb.

 

There are now hopeful signs of what might be called a backlash against the brain. Hardly anybody doubts that the grey matter in our skulls underpins our thoughts and feelings, in the sense that a working brain is required for our mental life. This is not a new, or even a modern, idea: Hippocrates proclaimed as much in the fifth century BC. But there is a growing realisation among some neuroscientists that looking at flickers of activity inside our heads can be a misleading way to see how our minds work. This is because many of the distinctively human things that people do take place over time and outside their craniums. Perhaps the brain is the wrong place to look if you want to find free will. This is a theme of recent books by Michael Gazzaniga, a neuroscientist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Raymond Tallis, a retired British doctor and neuroscientist. As Dr Tallis puts it in his “Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity”, trying to find human life in the brain is like trying to hear the rustle of a forest by listening to a seed.

In part, this backlash against the brain results from the conviction that today’s technologies for investigating it have been hyped. The existence of diagnostic hardware such as fMRI and PET scanners, which let you peek inside brains while they are still alive and thinking, has encouraged some neuroscientists to think they can find the locus of moral responsibility, the seat of love and all manner of things in the gaudy images produced by brain scans. But although our mental lives depend on the brain, it doesn’t necessarily follow that our behaviour is best understood by looking inside it. It’s like the old joke about a drunk who drops his car keys at night and walks down the road to look for them under a distant streetlight—not because that’s where they’re likely to be, but because it’s where he can see.

Read the full article

 

To learn more about Aping Mankind, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

The late Istvan Anhalt

Istvan Anhalt, one of Canada's great innovative classical composers and a founding father of Canadian electroacoustic music, has passed away at the age of 92. 

Born into a Jewish family in Budapest in 1919, studied with Zoltán Kodály before being conscripted into a forced labour camp during World War II. In the late 1940s he studied under Nadia Boulanger and Soulima Stravinsky before emigrating to Canada in 1949.

A prolific classical composer, he created over two dozen pieces including La Tourangelle, Millennial Mall (Lady Diotima's Walk), Fantasia and The Tents of Abraham (2005 Juno award winner). During the course of his career he received commissions from the Esprit Orchestra, the National Arts Centre Orchestra, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Vancouver New Music Society and the CBC.

The following is excerpted from Istvan Anhalt's chapter, “From ‘Mirage’ to Simulacrum and ‘Afterthought,’” an essay by Anhalt where he describes his compositions' relationship to the perception of time, memory and his past.

 

I now hear some of you reminding me about the promise I made earlier to tell about a discovery I made a day or so ago. Yes, now is perhaps a good moment to speak about this. It takes me back once again to the title of the work, Simulacrum, which means a number of things, as we know, including the notion of “mirage”. All the remembrances that I included in this piece, all the glances to the past, as it were, can be seen as conversations, however fleeting they may be, with persons who are no longer here, with situations (can one “converse” with a past situation? It seems far-fetched … but perhaps as a figure of speech it might be allowed to stand), and so on – all these being integrally woven into the tissue of one’s present. This much we know of the work, but the new information is this: forty-five years ago, while serving in a labour battalion of the Hungarian army, a unit especially created for young Jewish men, and being stationed in a dusty little village in Transylvania, called Elöpatak, on a very hot Sunday afternoon in the month of August, I wrote a poem, my first poem ever, entitled “Mirage in Elöpatak”. That “mirage” was, actually, what I felt must be done in that distant moment – namely, to take a look into a future in which, so I wanted to convince myself, resided hope for good things to come, in contrast with the severely restricted horizon that was available to me and to my comrades at that point in time. Yes, it was a kind of wishful thinking that helped to sustain me, and it did precisely that.

 

Mirage in Elöpatak

Strolling happy friends with wit abounding,
Thoughtfully smiling, invite you to join:
Come along, pal, if it suits you;
Surely you know us – forever calling,
Yet also keeping you at a distance …
Familiar? Of course. You also play by the same rule.

Look: the sage is resting in the shady gardens,
Streams of flushed-faced young
Press towards him – the hub –
Along the spokes of the wheel,
With thirsty lips gently curving,
Spirits alight
To await word of the coming dawn.

Ideas flow following idea
Trust from the past welding onto offspring;
An unringed migrating crane – leading
At the apex of a swift winging v …
Oh, what a splendid morning!

Lo: safely nesting in his roomy basket
Contentedly the just-fed infant coos,
Delighting all with the primeval song.
Soup on the stove; the bubbles are bursting,
Tiny pea-balls dance in the sweet-smelling stream
Tender shoots blending into flavour,
Surrendering self to form a whole
For the mid-day meal of a scorching day.
So the soul fuses all that is worthwhile to keep.

Reflecting the pane, by the window, a brother is speaking:
Do you accept this? Something in which you could share?
A magical call: to excel by doing well
The job at hand, yearning for mastery,
As the distant spires of shape
Urge you on to find the right place.

You uncatchable slippery buddy of mine
Time, all cartwheels, tumbles and twirls;
You are full of tricks.
You make me dizzy
As you turn the “now” into “past”
What will you do to the moment about to arrive?

The minute-hours roll by on the wheels of substance.
The view is rewarding, never twice the same.
On and onward towards the Crystal City
Until, in a well-guarded courtyard – we hear it –
The great bell is sounding;
The word of the king, the voice of the sun.
Noon!

If that’s what you need: well … then rest.
Stretch out your limbs in the hollows of hills
By the edge of the darkly-pensive woods
Where you just might catch, unexpectedly,
A few words resounding from a generous spring:

“On the grassy plains you feed me, my Lord,
And even by the rim of the abyss you are my shepherd … ”
Comes from a distance.
Then … silence
The voiceless word echoes as long as you hear the thought.

The heat of the hour wets palm and fingers.
For a while it is an effort to move.
But slowly the disc descends along its arc
And life returns to the squares and streets.
The multitude moves … each looking for something,
Peeking, peering as far as the eye can see.

The afternoon gardens prepare for the evening,
Distilling scents for the feast ahead
To please the dearest ones:
You, darling Ágicám.

In the waning warmth of the dusk
Your firm back trustingly fills the bay of my caress
And your peach-tasting lips chase
The last specks of dust from our content and joy.

 

Further Reading

CBC obituary: Composer Istvan Anhalt dies at 92

Istvan Anhalt: Pathways and Memory edited by Robin Elliott and Gordon E. Smith

Compositional Crossroads: Music, McGill, Montreal edited by Eleanor V. Stubley

Growing with Canada: The Émigré Tradition in Canadian Music by Paul Helmer

This week in publishing

What you may have missed this week at MQUP

David Thompson and the War of 1812

Introducing The 49th Shelf

DisPossession and Alias Grace

Canada and Mexico’s Unfinished Agenda

Education as Dialogue

Vanguard of the New Age

 

What else?

Confessions of a library addict

Amazon.com withdraws thousands of ebooks in pricing row with publishers

The Digital South

Tools of Change digital publishing conference

 

Upcoming

Feb - March - Book launch for Interregional Migration and Public Policy in Canada

• Feb 29, 5 pm, Carleton University, River Building, 5th floor, Ottawa
• March 1, 5 pm, University of Ottawa

March 8, 7 pm - Book launch, Intergovernmental Policy Capacity in Canada, Ryerson, Toronto

March - Lecture, readings and book signings for Galya Diment's A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury

• March 19, 5 pm, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK
• March 21, 1 pm, University College of London, UK
• March 21, 6 pm, Gower Street Waterstones, UK

March 17 - Lecture and signing of David Wilson's Thomas D'Arcy McGee, Volume 2, Grano's Restaurant, Toronto

March 30, 6 pm - Book launch of Disposession, L'Espresso Bar Mercurio, Toronto

 

Mexican author and diplomat talks about the Mexico Canada relationship

The following is an excerpt from the Globe & Mail article Mexican author and diplomat talks about the Mexico Canada relationship.

 

Andres Rozental, a Mexican author, diplomat and Ambassador-for-life, talks to the editorial board about his country’s 2012 election, and a new book on the Canada-Mexico relationship, Canada Among Nations: Canada and Mexico’s Unfinished Agenda, to be published next month.

Q: Tell us about the upcoming book that you co-edited, with Alex Bugailiskis, a career diplomat with Foreign Affairs.

The book focuses on the Canada-Mexico relationship. Policy makers, politicians and journalists contributed chapters, including Globe and Mail editorial board member Marina Jimenez.

The book is part of a long-standing effort on my part and on the part of many Mexicans who really believe in a strong, close relationship with Canada. Since North American Free Trade Agreement was signed 17 years ago, the emphasis has been more on trilateral part of the relationship than the bilateral, even though bilateral part has been important in terms of growth of our economic, political, tourism ties, notwithstanding the visa issue. There is a very strong interest in Mexico in Canada. The book looks at security co-operation, co-operating at our mutual borders with the U.S., energy co-operation, more efficient use of energy, media relations. There is unfortunately not a strong presence of journalists covering either country. The book is also meant to try to dispel a growing feeling in Mexico that Canada was moving away from interest in Mexico, more towards a bilateral relationship with the U.S. There has been a fair amount of discussion in Canada about the bilateral versus the trilateral. The book is an effort to focus on the bilateral relationship Mexico and Canada have had and could have in the future. We are close geographically and we have close trade and tourism ties.

Read the full Globe & Mail article here

 

To learn more about Canada Among Nations, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.

 

 

DisPossession and Alias Grace

The following excerpt from DisPossession by Marlene Goldman discusses the social constructs of hysteria and its portrayal in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace.

 

As noted in the introduction to this chapter, “hysteria” originates from the Greek word for uterus, and the disorders that went by this name were understood by the Egyptians to stem from the wandering movement of the womb. These ancient Egyptian beliefs, in turn, provided the foundation for classical Greek medical and philosophical accounts of hysteria. The Greeks adopted “the notion of the migratory uterus and embroidered upon the connection ... between hysteria and an unsatisfactory sexual life.”

(…)

For the purposes of this study, it is important to recognize that wandering, haunting, and possession figure prominently in the earliest accounts of the disease. Whereas early scholars believed that the uterus pathologically “possessed” women and drove them to distraction, the concept of extrinsic, diabolical possession gained momentum with the arrival of Christianity in the Latin West. From the fifth to the thirteenth centuries, biological or “naturalist pagan” constructions of the disease were increasingly displaced by “supernatural formulations”. With its shifting and highly dramatic symptomatology, hysteria was viewed as a sign of possession by the devil.

(…)

One of the strengths of Atwood’s novel lies in its refusal to label Grace as “mad” and “bad.” In contrast to healers and physicians from antiquity who adopted the hysteria diagnosis to account for women’s supposedly pathological minds and bodies, Atwood’s representation of Grace’s hysteria, in keeping with feminist analyses of the disorder, suggests that hysteria had more to do with women’s social roles and the unequal relations of power associated with these roles than with any innate gendered or racial aetiology. Contemporary medical historians now acknowledge that in the early 1800s women’s madness typically resulted neither from a wandering uterus nor from lesions of the nervous system – signs of degeneration – but, instead, from what was referred to in 1820 as “domestic affliction,” traumatic experiences including physical and sexual abuse, death of loved ones, and bereavement that were often exacerbated by alcoholism and poverty. In Atwood’s novel, Grace’s early account of her stay at the newly opened Toronto Asylum explicitly addresses the role played by “domestic affliction” in instigating madness. As Grace explains,

"[A] good portion of the women in the Asylum were no madder than the Queen of England. Many were sane enough when sober, as their madness came out of a bottle ... One of them was in there to get away from her husband, who beat her black and blue ... and another said she went mad in the autumns, as she had no house and it was warm in the Asylum ... But some were not pretending. One poor Irishwoman had all her family dead, half of them starving in the great famine and the other half of the cholera on the boat coming over ... "

 

Meet the author at the DisPossession book launch:
Friday, March 30th, 2012
5 pm to 7 pm
L'Espresso Bar Mercurio
321 Bloor St West
Toronto, ON

 

To learn more about DisPossession, or to order online, click here.
To arrange an interview with the author, contact MQUP Publicist Jacqui Davis.