William Brown's history of the Montreal Royals is a must read for anyone with a love of baseball. I had been searching for information on the story of this organization since my father told me about the Royals that he followed growing up 6 blocks from Delormier Downs in Montreal's East End in the 40's and 50's.
Mr. Brown's tells the history of professional baseball in Montreal from its beginnings in the 1890's up until the Royals demise in 1960. As the #1 farm team for the Brooklyn Dodgers many future stars passed through Montreal on their way to the major leagues including Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella and Duke Snider to name a few and William Brown has told their story from a fans perspective. The book includes numerous photos drawn from his personal collection in addition to the archival sources. I highly recommend this facinating bit of baseball history.

The city of Montreal is famous for more than the Canadiens hockey team and smoked meat: in 1946 the city was home to Jackie Robinson while he played for the city's International League club, the Royals. William Brown's book covers the history of the Royals from their early Eastern League years in the 1890s through to their end in 1960. While typical of the popular-history genre, the book is exceptionally well researched and informative.
Brown's story of the Royals is enhanced by photographs of the long-gone Atwater Park and Delorimier Downs stadiums that hosted the team. His story is further enhanced by the insights of people who saw or partook in Royals games.
Ken Singleton's foreword underlines Robinson as the central figure not only to this book, but the history of blacks in baseball. Understandably, then, Robinson's exploits as a Royal are central to the book: he graces the cover and merits an entire chapter of his own.
Readers will note with intrigue the number of other baseball legends who passed through Montreal as part of the Royals: Managers George Stallings, Ed Barrow, Rabbit Maranville; and players Robinson, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe, Tommy Lassorda; even Roberto Clemente suited up for the team. The book is a light read sure to entertain baseball fans young and old alike. It is well worth buying.

Travelling with kids in a big city like Montreal is made so easy and fun with this book. As a mother of 3, I know this. This book gave us everything we needed for our one month stay, and it provides even more if you live in this city. A complete listing of kid-friendly attractions, places to play and to learn can be found here. The book is really well organized, and the author never skimps on descriptions. Plus, for each site there are sidebars that reveal not only the most essential facts but also extra goodies about what's nearby, similar attractions, etc. And we were never second-guessing about how to get there: this book gives very precise instructions. The book is a must for tourists, but also for families and even child- care professionals that live in Montreal and are looking for yet unthought-of things to do with kids.

This is just a wonderful book on what to do with your kids in Montreal. Is is extremely user-friendly and provides gems of information, with supporting icons and a rating system for over 150 different activities in Montreal. Had we known there was so much to do in Montreal, we would have stayed much longer. Definitely a strong buy.

It's hard to imagine how much work went into the research of this book. To find the details and documentation is mind consuming. The story puts flesh and blood onto a part of history that was forgotten and lived only in bits and pieces. Truly the work of a dedicated individual.

Shadrach who?? This book provides amazing insight into the experiences of an unlikely hero whose story should be taught in grade school. A terrific amount of information condensed into a readable, enjoyable package--I can not imagine how difficult it must have been for the author to gather such little-known information. I only regret that I hadn't known the book or its main character years ago.

This book is a landmark, contemporary study of friendship. It is the most outstanding work on frienship for our generation. It is a must-read for scholars of friendship and social networks. It is a very important and highly readable presentation for any social scientist or interested general reader.

We found the most wonderful ethnic neighborhood restaurants by using this book. Although our restaurant bills were incredible inexpensive, the restaurants were wonderful. Typically, they were family owned and operated in charming neighborhoods, convenient to the underground stops. Without this book we would have missed, in our view, the best restaurants that Montreal has to offer.

This is an amazing collection, as most collections on the science of consciousness are, for the exitement the topic arises.
It is at times a bit too technical, like in E. Jones or Steriade's chapters on thalamic neurobiology. Other chapter are too abstract or "dated" (or is it classical?). But there are also jewels, like the clearest introduction to Edelman and Tononis, Crick and Kotchs, and Jeffrey Grays theories of consicousness. This last chapter was specially interesting, as Grays model of the contents of consicousness was used to study schitzofrenia. Gazzaniga and his interpreter seem more plausible solutions to some major troubles in consicousness theorizing every time I read him. Chapters on language and development are also there and great, as well as one on vision, by no other than H.Hubel, along with T. Weasel, one of the most influential neuroscientists of vision. Philosophical introductions by Patricia Churchland and D. Chalmers and other unmentioned contributions were also quite good.
The cream is however, found on the comment sessions after each paper and the general session at the end of the book. Debates at that level are seldom recorded, and are extremely interesting and though-provoking.
A must-have for serious researchers and thinkers on consciousness.

My husnand and I recently spent our honeymoon in the Charlevoix region of Quebec, Canada and enjoyed very much many of the places recommended in Traveler's Eastern Canada Companion. Hotels, restaurants, points of interest: this guidebook helped to make our trip one that we will remember fondly for years.

Jennifer Petrela

Amazon:

You have made a mistake in the title--please correct the spelling of Montréal.

Unlike most Holocaust literature, this collection, though it starts in Hungary, focuses on life after the Holocaust. I enjoyed the early stories more - the ones that showed how Dana's parents met and lived in Hungary both before and after the war. Once they get to Canada, we mostly see the various schools Dana attends and how her parents adjust -- the heartbreaking part is that her strong father, Apu, has the wind taken out of his sails once he leaves Hungary. Her once strong father walks with stooped shoulders. I did enjoy this collection and would recommend it. There's something lacking (perhaps lack of soul or depth) that prevents the reader from becoming 100% engaged, but it's hard to put your finger on it. Nonetheless, an impressive debut.

For those who believe literature can assist us in understanding the past and recurrent terror of unparallelled loss, of the virtual effacement of a people that is the Holocaust, "The County of Birches" will stand proudly and with dignity in their libraries. This extraordinarily well-crafted series of interlocking short stories, treating the experiences of Dana, the daughter of two survivors, compels the intellectual and emotional attention of the reader. For this novel is an excursion into geographic, temporal and existential displacement. We come to perceive life through Dana's eyes, a prescient child who begrudgingly accepts the precarious balance of her life and her parents' perceptions of survival - that a false step leads to abyss, that being Jewish in the post-Holocaust world poses terrible ethical quandires unknown and of no concern to the outside world, that present childhood carries the unfathomable weight of the past, of generations obliterated, of families literally disappearing. The author, Judith Kalman, has produced a dazzling, memorable and significant first novel.

Dana Weisz is no ordinary protagonist. She shoulders the seemingly herculean task of being a child of survivors, one a proud, defiant mother whose integrity provides strength to Dana, the other, a once-aristocratic, now-humbled father whose quiet, "mysterious" love provides comfort and identity. At once, Dana senses her very existence as a replacement for her murdered half-sister but feels guilty even living a "normal" life, perceiving her own "normal" concerns as superfluous to her parents, given the trauma they have experienced.

To be Jewish under these circumstances produces its own internal ambivalence. "What good had it brought any of them being Jewish...[Name] one time it ever proved an advantage to be Jewish." When her parents aggressively promote academic prowess in her older sister, Lillian, they claim: "With your brains...there is nothing you can't do." Dana responds that anything is easy "if your standard was being gassed, tortured or stripped of everything you hold dear; the rest would seem a breeze." Kalman is at her best when she describes Dana's devastating encounter with contemporary Jewish indifference (circa 1965) to the Holocaust. Dana's experiment in Sabbath school results in her being profoundly insulted by her Jewish classmates who make crass jokes about the Holocaust when they examine a Life magazine twenty-year retrospective.

Judith Kalman's stirring narrative alone, which encompasses three generations of history and three distinct geographic settings, distinguishes this novel. But Ms. Kalman peppers her stories with sentences about the Holocaust that hit home very, very hard. This rather compact novel has unbelievable impact. It is not an easy or quick read; it forces the reader to stop, to ponder, to question, to try to understand. The author serves both history and memory admirably.

This collection of short stories is certainly exceptional. I couldn't put the book down after I picked it up. Anyone even remotely interested in Holocaust or post-holocaust literature absolutely has to read this collection. It is both powerful and moving, evoking startlingly beautiful description and poetry. If you read one more book in your life this absolutely has to be it.

This documentary is a reasonable exposition of Chomsky's views. For those unfamiliar with Chomsky's (and Edward Herman's) propaganda model, this film is highly recommended. Those already conversant with Chomsky will probably revel in the extension of his ideas to real Living Color (those who agree with him anyway). However, I have one complaint: the propaganda system is complicated, and the film seems to take a dive on the specifics instead of dealing with its essential details. The failure to explicate what exactly Chomsky means when he speaks of "thought control in a democratic society" allows the pejorative claim that his ideas are "conspiratorial" to seep into the argument. Tom Wolfe scoffingly impugns what he calls, "the cabal"- I doubt he's actually read Chomsky. Anyone who understands the propaganda model, even if they fervently deny its existence, realizes that it is not worthy of "conspiracy theory" derision. The film would have done well to debunk this myth.

The other flaw as I see is the focus on Chomsky's background and personal life, which are superfluous to the film's main message and inconsistent with Chomsky's own feelings about celebrity.

As you can imagine, the film is rather one-sided in favor of Chomsky's views. Once you've seen this, it's absolutely imperative to read "Necessary Illusions", "Manufacturing Consent", and even some of Chomsky's other books- "The Washington Connection" and "Rouge States" are recommended. Also of note is that Chomsky may be Godfather of media criticism, but others including Nancy Snow and Michael Parenti have written well on the subject.

This book is much more than a simple transcript of the documentary of the same name, it also offers a lot of information and excerpts from interviews with and writings by Noam Chomsky not included in the film. It is a very wonderfully put together book. This might be the best introduction to Chomsky's thought around. and the philosopher all star trading cards in the back of the book are a great idea. Plus, it really looks good on the coffee table.

"While the film has met with large-scale success throughout much of the world, it is as a book that Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media is most useful. A virtual transcript of the film, it also includes a range of other materials--extended extracts from Chomsky's writings, reviews of those writings, interviews and a variety of novelty items, from comic strips through to a set of "Philosopher all-Star" trading cards attached to the spine. Through these, the emphasis on Chomsky's personality with marks the film (and about which Chomsky himself was concerned) is diminished, and the result is a highly skimmable guide to Chomsky's political ideas, the controversies in which he has been embroiled, and the notoriously thorny question of the relationship between his political and linguistic ideas. It is, perhaps, too fragmentary and montage-like in its organization to serve as a course text, but as a distillation of one important current within Western radical thought it is extremely useful."

Will Straw,
Canadian Journal of Communication