Once again, Dr. Bercuson has rushed another book into print, leaving readers to wonder whether his inability to get the small details correct should affect their ability to take him seriously on the larger issues.

His colloquial style is a little jarring and seems put on, as if he is consciously trying to talk to the largest audience, eschweing his "intellectual" status. Perhaps he thinks that using soldier's slang will fool his readers into thinking his background was with the military (I am under the impression he is a labour historian, not a soldier). The whole text reads as if he didn't bother to proof it - clumsy mistakes, typos, and repetitive or silly phrases what usually get cut out on third or fourth reading.

Bercuson seems to make a habit out of getting the small details wrong - in The Valour and the Horror Revisited he didn't know the difference between a DSO and a DCM, in Battalion of Heroes he miscaptioned at least two photos (The StuH IV and the returning RCA unit), and in this volume he talks about a "Mark IV" rifle (perhaps he means No. 4 Mk 1)?

Bercuson ADMITS that he has not done all the research required when he tells us that no one has compared incidence of criminal behaviour in Korea with those in WW II. He tells that until that is done, "no one can conclude that Canadian soldiers in Korea were more, or less, inclined to break laws..." (p. 176) So why didn't Bercuson do it?

And like Battalion of Heroes, there are no useful appendices, no lists of casualties (incidentally the one in Battalion of Heroes is very unreliable - I have updated the entire list independently and there were many errors), no list of decorations, significant dates, personalities, etc. Only two monochrome maps show Canadian locations/movements in Korea.

In conclusion, a rushed job which does benefit from good primary research. One has to wonder though, if his conclusions, whether on the life of a soldier or the grand strategy, can be accurate given his poor grasp of details.

This book is exactly what the subtitle implies - a history of the Canadian army in Korea. As such, the scope is limited to army operations and the political background required to justify the Canadian government's commitment of ground troops in this war. There is very little about the forces of other countries involved except where they are intimately related to the Canadian brigade. This is a strength of the book - it has well defined boundries and is thorough within those boundries, including copious endnotes and sources. The maps are limited, but easily accesible (all collected at the beginning of the book, for ease of reference).

The author is quite critical with the politicians both in Ottawa and Washington, as well as the middle-ranking officers (say, major to colonel) in the field and in the training camps. He is highly critical at the lack of training in Canada before shipping out, and the complacency that set in along the front in the final year and a half of the war. Interestingly, he does not blame the senior officers, but rather the politicians, for this complacency in the lines (not allowing vigourous offensive action while the peace talks were stalemated but continuing, even in the face of powerful Chinese attacks).

For someone unfamiliar with the Korean conflict, this book would be inadequate. Bercuson seems to assume at least a cursory knowledge of the major events in the war. I would suggest Hasting's "Korean War" before reading this. Additionally, it seems a little strange to go into such detail on the army operations without mentioning Canadian naval and air forces. At 300 pages, surely he could have included this material - it feels incomplete without it. Finally, the prose is a little too dry.

All in all, this is a good, but not great, book not up to the standard of the same author's Maple Leaf vs. the Axis.

Chilton's is only useful until you have to physically do something.
I needed an electrical schematic at best. Some info at worst. This book supplied neither.
The first half of the electrical section was "replacing the heater core".
Stupid me. I've been burnt before by Chilton's but when your in a bind I guess you'll try anything.

The Book was very usefull, and easy to follow. It had a very thourough description of all vehicle components.

The author claims that having left behind her urban comforts to live in rural Saskatchewan eventually put her closely in touch with nature. Unfortunately, I was deeply disappointed with her version of 'in touch with nature'. I expected to read the words of someone who respects animals and wilderness. Instead I read about her views on mice as pests, how she and her husband made their living fattening cows before the slaughter, and her twisted comments about hunters having a greater capacity for pain and suffering than the animals they cruelly kill. Exploiting animals has clearly become an inherent part of her livelihood on the farm. She thinks nothing of attending rodeos where animals are wantonly abused, and she has no trouble inflicting pain on cows through branding without anesthetics. She describes environmentalists as mostly "urban" people who are only capable of fighting the corporate world and governments by attempting to put Nature in their own terms. (Huh?) She fails to realize that if us crazy "urban" environmentalist all moved out into the wilderness, there would be no wilderness left! (I for one am proud to live in the city, leaving wild areas free for the animals to roam.) The author also totally fails to acknowledge that an animal-based diet (which she and her husband directly rely on for their livelihood) is behind much of the mass-destruction of wilderness observed in the last century. I suppose I wouldn't have been so shocked reading this book had it not been advertised as "an apprenticeship in nature". I'd sooner see it called "a treatise in exploiting nature".

Sharon Butala has written a deeply personal book with universal application. She tells of her journey from a fulfilling but hectic urban life to one of isolation and introspection. She joins her new husband on a cattle ranch in southwest Saskatchewan and leaves behind her university teaching, her graduate studies, her support network of feminist friends, and her teenaged son. In her long, lonely hours of interaction with "Nature," she encounters the mysteries and messages of the natural world and experiences the gradual healing of her own wounds. As I read Butala's book I found myself stopping to write about my own pains, my own healing, and my own mysterious encounters with Nature. It was a journey we took together, and I am stronger for the experience.

"Marvelously self-taught in the school of poets," reads the copy on the back cover of this book, "mclennan's work is refreshingly free of pretense and category." mclennan? Not only does Rob McLennan of Canada vainly use lowercase letters to spell his name like a 99-cent-store e.e. cummings, but this book of bland workshop poetics has absolutely nothing to do with Richard Brautigan in either content or acknowledgement. Shameless. Don't be fooled as I was. A completely regrettable purchase.

"This poet insists upon a naturalness of stance and consequently of language, seeming to say poetry is after all day by day, night by night." This quote very accurately describes rob mclennan's approach to his work; however, it is an excerpt from Robin Blaser's introduction to Particular Accidents, George Bowering's selected poems, published in 1980 when rob was ten years old, reading spiderman comics and watching sesame street. Yet, this link is essential. Rob mclennan is one of Canada's most conscious inheritors of the TISH tradition, of Bowering and of Wah. rob mclennan is also extremely prolific and one of the least understood active poets. At the age of thirty, he has published five full length collections with some of the major presses, including bury my heart in the green wood, (ECW Press), The Richard Brautigan Ahhhhhhhhhhh (Talonbooks), and, most recently, bagne, or criteria for heaven (broken jaw). What appears at times to be a frenzied rate of publication is better viewed as a persistent, thoughtful engagement between mr. mclennan, the contemporary Canadian poetic canon, and his need to verbally catalogue the minutia of everyday experience. Where rob has begun to make his own way is in the decomposition of ideas into apparently illogical collisions of fragmentary thoughts. rob's voice is fundamentally lyrical and the design of his work is plastic, meaning that it is essential to regard rob's work with the same eyes you would use to look at a painting by, say, Greg Curnoe. To expect didactic meaning from rob's work is to miss the point. To be surprised by the resonance of his fragments with our experience is the joy of rob mclennan's writing.

The gospel according to McQuaig is quite simple: the private sector is ALWAYS bad. Why is this so? Because they operate for profit, that's the argument. Yet, Mcquaig also does not have much respect for government, unless, the government does what she wants it to do. Indeed, when reading this or any other McQuaig book on must ask: why does she still have faith in government? By asking this question one can come to only one conclusion: McQuaig is just as selfish as anybody else in the world (ie. she wants to the world to run according to her rules). Once this connection is made most of her arguments can be seen for the empty poorly researched rhetoric they are.

Basically a conspiracy theory, McQuiag believes that the corporate power brokers have manipulated the Canadian government to profit. Despite the fact that the government is half the problem in letting go along with the plan, McQuiag blames almost all the problems on solely on free enterprise

Short-shorted, poorly researched, and lacking any real economic insight, this book is of little value to a person who knows basic economic principles.

A worthless plea for government intervention into all aspect of human life.

McQuaig has written an economic book for all the people who don't make $500,000 plus a year. This is the book that has free enterprisers in shock! There is a conspiracy and it involves the massive transfer of ordinary peoples' wealth to the corporations that would not last a year without it. McQuaig, in a well documented readable argument, assails the myths of international business and exposes its complete moral and financial (!) bankruptcy. From the tyranny of the gold standard, used to imprison our grandfathers and grandmothers, to the current myth of the fickle international investor which is being used to destroy two generations of social progress McQuaig describes a world which is not kinder, or gentler to anyone not born into money.

If you want to understand why rabid antigovernment hedge fund investors receive billion dollar government (!) bail-outs while millions of people in hurricane ravaged Central America are offered less than a dollar each in aid to rebuild there lives this is the book for you.

This play, which I also had the fortune to see performed by Linda Griffiths, has it's merits. There are wonderful moments where it seems as though It really is Gwendolyn who could be speaking the lines on the page. But on the whole, you get more of an inside glimpse of MacEwan by reading her own work, rather than through Griffiths' play. It is a good attempt, but anyone who has read much of Gwendolyn MacEwan's work will likely be disappointed, as more of the writer's self-indulgence is visible than MacEwan herself. but it does pay a tribute to this often neglected brillant Canadian poet.

The book's title already tells about its content -- ghost stories from Canada. A big part of the book are narratives about people's supernatural encounters who shared their stories with the author. In the introduction, Barbara Smith points out that people have occasionally been "so overwhelmed by their experience that they have not been able to recall all the details. " (p 9) That's understandable, yet what remains is the doubt that a thorough research of circumstances could have helped to fill the gaps. Additional to the first-hand experiences people kindly shared with Barbara Smith, the author tells some more or less spooky folklore tales from all over Canada. She even adds the tragedy of "one ship [... which] will haunt our collective consciousness forever." (p 93) One may wonder why she felt the need to add the Titanic's horrible fate in a book about Canadian ghost stories. Barbara Smith doesn't fail to explain that to her readers: "My purpose here is to remind you that the ship will always be connected with Canada. The Titanic sank onto the underwater Newfoundland Ridge, and many of the recovered bodies are buried in Canadian soil in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Oh yes, and aboard the Titanic was an ancient, evil, Egyptian mummy whose ghost is known to have left a trail of deaths in its ruinous wake." (p 97/98) What has the Egyptian mummy to do with Canada?

The book is divided into six chapters -- "Haunted Houses," "Transported To Beyond" (ghost stories about traveling in or around Canada), "Spirit Snippets" (supernatural experiences from callers to various phone-in shows on radio stations), "The Spirit's Inn" (haunted hotels), "Historically Haunted," and "They Came Back" (incidents of people's spirits coming back). Despite the interesting theme, Barbara Smith's presentation of those ghost stories makes them sound boring. It just isn't enough to quote people having told her that "the ghost is said to still haunt the house." (p 57) In which way? Why? Such details are missing throughout the book.

However, something else is not missing -- Barbara Smith continues to enumerate the other ghost stories books she already published. At one point she even mentions having presented "a writing course to aspiring authors [...] for several years, at least a couple of times each year." (p 238). Those remarks aren't really professional -- she could have mentioned her earlier works and activities in the introduction or maybe in a final conclusion. However, they are out of place during a story, interrupting it rather than letting it flow. The author's narrative style strives to address the reader by asking questions like "Is there such a thing as ghosts? Isn't there such a thing as ghosts?" and to include the reader in the immediate answer: "I don't think we can ever know for sure." (p 10)

Readers hoping for "chilling paranormal tales" and "spine-tingling stories of the supernatural" as promised on the book's back will be disappointed by "Canadian Ghost Stories," yet readers who are just interested in Canada's ghostly folklore without deeper research or detailed description of a haunting might be well entertained by Barbara Smith's ghost stories collection.

Amazon's on-line information is not up to date. There was a new (and much expanded) edition of this book in 1997.

Informative, but contains nothing extremely extaordinary for the price of $250. Almost all of these letters can be found by themselves, and are not nearly as expensive. I would not recommend this volume except for those who have a very profound interest in the life of Lois Riel and his personnal thoughts. It also pricey for it's inherent value to the average from interested readers. Overall, I enjoyed reading these letters, although it seemed to drag at times.

One of the many things Bill Richardson doesn't know is what a limerick is. This book will be a great disappointment if you anticipated that five-lined verse form. It does have lots of sing-songs and some la-di-das, however.