I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It's a book with only about 100 pages but it very informative and fun. It tells the story of the birth of the Cowboy to Cowboys today and the New Old West. It is packed full of interesting pictures. I have this book on my coffee table and have given this book as a gift to several of my friends who enjoy rodeo and the cowboy way of life. I highly recommend it.

Crabdance is no relaxing bath tub read, but it is worth the pain! Simons is a challenging writer who has no fear of causing discomfort and exposing social ills. Her play is unusual in its structure and imagery, but unusual in the best way: it is original, shocking, and, I think, freeing. The main character is a woman just past middle age. She is struggling to find her place (and sanity) in her world after the departure of her children and death of her husband. She is a woman living alone in the late 1960s with a ravaged sense of self and sexuality. The play explores her life with incredible honesty and love. This isn't the sort of work one would see on the Oprah Book Club list, but it is a liberating play about women, sexuality, and discovery of self in a time when women did not have so many options... I am VERY glad to have read it.

A broad humanity and an unusual depth and breadth of experience breathe palpably through this astonishing volume - the poet's 8th. and best. (And that is saying something.) A plain and honest man, whose tuned ear picks up not only the music of the dance and the most solemn symphony but the simple joys and sadnesses of everyday life, Christopher Wiseman's strength is not just in the telling of his own tale but in the listening and observing -- sharp and dry and fresh, warm and reassuring as chinks of familiar sunlight on a cloudy day.

There is a continuity here which carries Wiseman from early childhood and adolescence in northern England through travels in Europe and the United States (where he lived three years) to Scotland, and finally to his home for the past twenty-something years in western Canada. CROSSING THE SALT FLATS celebrates, with marvellous craft, mature dignity, clarity and deep compassion, not merely the poet's own fascinating journey, but one so familiar we can all quickly identify with it and respond to its fine music, its bright and sad cadences which remain firmly and delightfully in the memory. As befits a poet who has won many awards in Canada, this is a very fine book, which I strongly recommend.

Rikki Ducornet, better-known as a novelist, is one of very few writers of fiction with the talent to make the crossing to that most difficult of literary arts, poetry. Not only did she utterly succeed in making the crossing, but "The Cult of Seizure" is among the very best works of modern poetry I've ever read: it's grotesque and erotic, and the language typical of Ducornet--lush and sensual, amplified by her rather ample and surprising command of the arsenal of poetics. "The Cult of Seizure" ranks with Lew Welch's "Ring of Bone", Olga Broumas's "Beginning With O", Ted Hughes's "Crow", Sylvia Plath's "Ariel", Galway Kinnell's "Body Rags", and James Taylor III's "Fresh Leather: The Buffalo Poems" as a major contribution to poetry in English.

Dancocks again approaches Canadian Military history with a fresh eye. His easy writing style and clear prose makes absorbing both the historical facts and their context deceptively easy. He uses a combination of regimental histories and Official Canadian histories coupled with more recently declassified sources and personal oral histories to bring a fresh perspective to this important Canadian operation.

From the reasons Canada sent 1st Division to Italy in the first place to the ultimately successful conclusion of the Italian campaign, Dancocks embodies all of his narrative with first person accounts that remind the reader of exactly how these campaigns were fought and by whom.

This book occupies a valued place in my military history library. The fact that the author continues to concentrate on Canadian subjects is just another bonus.

A great book of poetry from one of Newfoundland's greatest poets.
Humourous, touching, and serious poems which everyone can relate to and enjoy.

It had good information. I like train and rural life and if you like these, you'll love this book. I really liked it.

I received this book 22 years ago when I was pregnant with my first child. I have given it as a gift to each friend who became pregnant. It is funny but oh so true. It makes you realize that you are not the only one going through it but in a very funny way.

This is one of those books readers might dismiss as too specialized. That would be a mistake. Kurk Dorsey is one of the first American diplomatic historians to treat relations with Canada. Beyond that he sees how transborder issues raised by wildlife treaties run into conflicting national agendas. The Canadian-American wildlife treaties anticipate more recent efforts to negotiate environmental issues. The writing in this book makes it an engaging read.

This is one of the most unique travel books I've ever read. The first 165 pages are written by Canadian novelist & short story writer Clark Blaise and are followed by a 115 page section by his wife, Bharati Mukherjee, also a novelist & short story writer & Berkeley professor. The book originally appeared in 1975 and documents in two distinct voices a year spent in the company of Mukherjee's family in India, first in Bombay then in Calcutta.
Blaise and Mukherjee met at a writers workshop in Iowa, married, and lived in Canada with their two children until their house burned down which left them homeless and prompted their journey east. Mukherjee spent her formative years in Calcutta and is returning to a largely familiar world but to Blaise everything is new. The first sixty pages of his narrative take place in Bombay and Blaise is never altogether at home there as they are staying with Mukherjees parents and her father is the uncontested head of the household. Blaise's trips into the city are flights from the congestion of stifling family life, his insights into the nature of Indian family life are in equal parts humorous and informative(the family does not even know the first name of a servant who has lived with them for years, nor do they show any interest in knowing). This view of India from an outsider given an insiders access is just one of many aspects of this book that distinguishes it from mere travel narrative. His initiation into the rituals and customs and (to him)peculiarites of Indian family life make for great reading. But the best section is the sustained amazement and energy of the 10-15 page description of Calcutta(where they have chosen to spend the better part of the year in a mission which caters to scholars) as he rides a rickshaw through its cluttered streets. Over the course of the year Blaise will meet many of Calcutta's elite including its most famous(to the west anyway)citizen, the film maker Satyajit Ray. Calcutta is the major city of Bengal, the eastern most province of India, filled with a proud and cultured people, and Blaise spends many fascinating pages analyzing both its culture and polotics:
The Bengali has lived with the English longer than any Indian, and he has absorbed him,while keeping his own soul, with astounding ease. -p.122
Blaise begins with illusions about India but over the course of his year in Calcutta he learns about its culture and people and the contact with this world different in every imaginable way from his own has a profound impact on him, the way he views the west, and the way he views his marriage.
In counterpoint to Blaise's description of the year is Mukherjee's. She is a westernised Indian who has married outside,and according to her father beneath,her caste and in caste conscious India that is often an unforgivable offense. The Mukherjee girls(Bharati and her sisters)are brilliant and Bharati is beautiful and her novel, The Tigers Daughter, just published to rave reviews, has made her famous in her home country. Her year is marked by equally profound realizations which include increased self awareness of her own very personal way of blending if not bridging the two very distinct cultures of which she is a part:
My aesthetic, then, must accomadate a decidedly Hindu imagination with an Americanized sense of the craft of fiction. To admit to possessing a Hindu imagination is to admit that my concepts of what constitutes a "story" and of narrative structure are noncausal, non-Western.-p.298
But perhaps the most fascinating part of her section is her portrait of her former classmates who have stayed in India and married and now make up the elite. These highly educated women are nonetheless stranded in their homes and live cloistered social lives atop an India which has grown restless and intolerant of the wide divisions that separate the rich from the poor. Riots and robbery are always imminent realities. The women Mukherjee observes clothed in silk saris and gold bracelets and diamond earings in their gated community of mansions in the worlds poorest city seem trapped in a world that they know cannot last. They go on as if immune(or wishing to be) from all the realites around them, a social elite with money to burn but drained of contact and significance to the greater India outside their own very high walls.

Rare book by two excellent writers & one that has not gone through too many reprintings so get a copy while you can. I especially like the sturdy(always good for a travel book) '95 Hungry Mind paperback edition with excellent cover art as well as updated prologues and epilogues by the authors.