Treating Health Care: How the Canadian System Works and How It Could Work Better

 Treating Health Care • How the Canadian System Works and How It Could Work Better By Raisa B. Deber 194 pages • ISBN 978-1487521493 Canada has been among the world leaders in recognizing the multiple factors that impact health. Focusing on Canada’s health care system, Raisa B. Deber provides brief

Book Review: Historical Atlas of Canada

 Book Review: Historical Atlas of Canada Historical Atlas of Canada • Canada´s History Illustrated with Original Maps By Dereck Hayes 272 pages • ISBN 978-1-77162-079-6 The Historical Atlas of Canada covers a period of a thousand years and contains essentially all the historically significant maps of the country. Here are

Book Review: The Weather Inside

 It’s summer in Toronto, and the snow and ice are relentless. Too bad no one but Avery can see it. Avery Gauthier can’t get far enough away from her past: the death of her beloved father, the abuse she suffered as a teen, and the religion that tore her parents

Book Review: The Worthington Wife

 New York Times bestselling author Sharon Page returns to the aristocratic world of lords and ladies in a gripping new novel After the death of her beloved fiancé, the Earl of Worthington, in the Great War, Lady Julia Hazelton is no longer interested in marriage. Instead she is devoting herself

Book Review: Saving Her

 Christian McPherson’s exciting new novel is a portrait of a woman coming unglued after devastating events send her spiraling out of control. Between popping pills and drinking vodka, Julie Cooper tries her best to do what she has always done: carry on. But when the line between what is real

Book Review: Free Fall

 With nearly two million books in print in over seventeen countries, internationally bestselling author Rick Mofina’s specialized thrillers are “scary in all the right places” (James Patterson). Mofina’s novels have received high praise from Penthouse, The Globe and Mail, National Post and other respected international news outlets. His stand-alone debut,

Book Review: Backs to the Wall

 Backs to the Wall: The Battle of Sainte-Foy and the Conquest of Canada The dramatic battle of 1760 is a timely reminder of the fragile nature of Canadian history. The 1759 Battle of the Plains of Abraham and subsequent capitulation of Quebec set the stage for an equally significant FrenchBritish

Book Review: Of Myths and Sticks

 Hockey Facts, Fictions and Coincidences TSN stats archaeologist Kevin Gibson, whose book Of Myths and Sticks blows the whistle on all hockey matters from the mainstream to the obscure. Fascinating, and at times unbelievable, the stories behind the National Hockey League are as engaging as the great game itself. Yet

Book Review: Forgotten Victory

 First canadian Army and the cruel Winter of 1944–45 During the winter of 1944–45, the western allies desperately sought a strategy that would lead to Germany’s quick defeat. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers in trenches and dugouts suffered through the bitterest European winter in fifty years. The Allied high command

Book Review: Torp

 The landlord, the husband, the wife, and the lover. ABOUT TORP Giulio di Orio, an assistant lecturer in Philosophy, brings one of his students, known as Torp to the Vancouver flat he shares with his wife Nicole. Soon their landlord is convinced that Torp is the devil incarnate, and the

Book Review: Marion Dewar

   A Life of Action A beloved mayor, Marion Dewar shaped not only the landscape of Canada's capital city, she was a role-model for social activism for the whole country. Her work on behalf of refugees gives her accomplishments special resonance today. August 11, 2016, Toronto–The desperation of refugees looking

Book Review: Time Out

 A teacher's year of reading, fighting, and four-letter words A book that asks the hard question: What has the education system done to help children suffering from mental health issues? What can we do? And how much spit can one person endure? March 2014, Toronto — Twenty-two years ago, Liane

Book Review: Bill Reid Collected

 “Reid’s creative journey has been interpreted as a lifelong quest towards a deep understanding of his Haida heritage and identity...”   —from Bill Reid: Deeply Carved Bill Reid is one of Canadas’s most renowned and well-known first nations artists: the man who reinvigorated northwest Coast artwork and brought it fully into

A Good Life, A Flawed Novel

 A God in Ruins - Kate Atkinson Reviewed by Don MacLean June 2016 Kate Atkinson likes to write about ordinary individuals swept up in extraordinary circumstances. In two separate but companion novels, Life After Life and A God In Ruins, Atkinson tells the stories of Isabel Todd and Teddy Todd,

Walking with Abel: Journeys with the Nomads of the African Savannah

 Author: Anna Badkhen Riverhead Books, New York, 2015 Reviewed by Don MacLean Anna Badkhen’s wonderful book Walking with Abel: Journeys with the Nomads of the African Savannah documents her journeys with members of the nomadic Fulani, perhaps the largest group of nomads living today. The Mali-based Fulani migrate across the

Book Review: Negotiating So Everyone Wins by David C. Dingwall

 David Dingwall. David Dingwall is a lawyer and former Member of Parliament who represented the riding of Cape Breton East Richmond for 17 years between 1979 and 1997. For a time, Dingwall was the most powerful and influential minister from Atlantic Canada in the Chrétien Liberal government of the 1990s. As Minister

Book Review: Missing Children by Gerald Lynch

 As tethered to the rest of the world as it is, Ottawa often feels like a small, even private, city. That’s why it can be so jarring to open a local book and find a character stepping into a park or market where you've spent countless hours or even just

Black in America

 Between the World and Me By: Ta-Nehisi Coates Reviewed by Don MacLean In the October 6, 2014 issue of the New Yorker Jennifer Gonnerman tells the remarkably tragic story of Kalief Browder, a Black 16 year old male living in the Bronx. On a Saturday evening in May 2010 Kalief

Review: A Neurosurgeon’s Challenge

 Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery Henry Marsh St Martin’s Press, New York, 2014. Reviewed By Don MacLean Consider, if you will, the delicate surgical task of removing a pineocytoma, which is defined as “an uncommon, slow growing tumour of the pineal gland.” The patient is

Book Review: The Gospel Truth

 In the opening chapter of Caroline Pignat’s latest Governor General’s Award Winner, The Gospel Truth, 16 year-old Phoebe steals a half-dead yellow bird from the jaws of her plantation’s predatory cat, Rufus. Phoebe locks the bird up, and although she feels bad for containing a creature that was meant to

Family Ties

 A review of Sugar in the Blood: A Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire by Andrea Stuart Family trees are all the rage. Part of their appeal is surely the element of surprise. The deeper one digs, the more likely a discovery that the tree’s roots twist and shoot in

Learning How to Die – Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

 In his latest thoughtful, moving book Being Mortal: Medicine And What Matters in the End the doctor and writer Atul Gawande tells the achingly sad story of Sara. In the prime of life and while pregnant with her first child, Sara was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. Doctors induced labour

Into the Blizzard: Walking the Fields of the Newfoundland Dead

 In October 1914, 537 young men from Newfoundland boarded the Florizel, the ship that would sail them across the Atlantic and towards the battle shores of Europe. The Great War had started in August of that year and Newfoundland’s governor had offered England this small contingent of soldiers. As a

Whip Smart: Lola Montez Conquers the Spaniards

 Whip Smart: Lola Montez Conquers the Spaniards, the first of the Whip Smart series by Montreal-based Kit Brennan, is an exciting page-turner transporting readers back to the Victorian era of 1842. Loosely based on the real-life adventures of Lola Montez, a notorious bad-girl of the era, Brennan fills in the

Music Meets Medicine: Allison’s Brain

 Robert McMechan and his wife Allison Woyiwada recently released Allison’s Brain, a book they wrote together. It is the story of Allison’s medical journey, from diagnosis to recovery. Woyiwada was diagnosed with a large brain aneurysm in 2011. In a surgery that followed, the aneurysm was clipped. After the procedure,