07 June 2018

The Amazon Customer Review 2018 Ontario Election Edition: Interesting and Easy to Read



Election Day in Ontario. If the pollsters are correct, Doug Ford is set to become the province's twenty-sixth premier. That's him smiling on the cover of Ford Nation, the book he wrote with his brother Rob.

Ford Nation ranks as one of the most remarkable achievements in Canadian publishing. Doug announced that he was writing the book at a 13 September 2016 news conference.  Two months later, there is was, finished and in stores.

Again, a remarkable acheivement... made more so by the fact that co-author Rob had died nine months earlier.


At that news conference, held in his mom's garden with Rob's widow Renata by his side, Doug described the work in progress as "the most exciting book that this country has ever seen when it comes to politics."

Does the finished product live up to Doug's claim? I haven't read Ford Nation myself, and so rely upon Amazon customer reviews:

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04 June 2018

The Dustiest Bookcase: C is for Child


Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).
They're in storage as we build our new home.
Patience, please.

The Village of Souls
Philip Child
Toronto: Ryerson, 1948
294 pages

I've long championed Child, praising God's Sparrows and Mr. Ames Against Time here and elsewhere. The Village of Souls was his debut novel. It was first published in 1933 by Thornton Butterworth of London, England, a full fifteen years before there was a Canadian edition. Ryerson went some way in making up for the delay. This may be the publisher's most beautiful book.


Roloff Beny, a man I'd known only as a photographer, provides the cover and the illustrations that open each chapter.


Child wrote just five novels. I haven't read this one for the simple reason that it's set in seventeenth-century New France. As mentioned a couple of weeks back, I'm not drawn to historical fiction. Should I be giving The Village of Souls a chance? According to Ryerson, I'm missing out on a novel that "will live as a Canadian classic."


The Ryerson edition of The Village of Souls was published seventy years ago. The novel hasn't seen print since.

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