Sheila Watt-Cloutier's story of protecting her Inuit culture is fraught and complicated. Many times, I had to set it aside, the core of my being all-a-shudder. In the past, this setting-aside was longer lasting. This is a book I have had trouble leaving between the covers. Ultimately, I read
Shirin Ebadi's Until We Are Free: My Fight for Human Rights in Iran landed on my stack thanks to Ali's description of hearing her speak and reading the book. Ebadi's tone is resolved and declarative. This, her third book, chronicles her experiences in the years surrounding Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's leadership
"She was bodacious. She was outrageous. She enjoyed shaking things up." One contributor to the "Jump at the Sun" documentary about Zora Neale Hurston described her this way. Peter Bagge's new graphic biography suggests "unencumbered passion" and "grit" (Fire!!! The Zora Neale Hurston Story). In Alice Walker's essay, which opens
How much of your reading is non-fiction? Does it fluctuate, or are you committed to reading (or not reading) it? When others were participating in non-fiction November last year, and actually reading a lot of the books that I'd been kinda-half-sorta thinking about reading, I realised that tending towards fiction
The Canadian Opera Company is now presenting a new 50th-anniversary production of "Louis Riel", originally written for the celebration of the Canadian centenary in 1967, with an attempt to shift that oh-so-colonial gaze, now including indigenous artists and languages with more nuanced representations of the historical figures. These are powerfully important
