LRC

The Literary Review of Canada excerpts Jack Layton’s foreword to a new book about Charles Taylor, George Grant and CB Macpherson.

The Literary Review of Canada has apparently just obtained charitable status, which is great news for the publication.

The new LRC is out, of course!

Run don’t walk to your nearest newsstand. Can you really afford to be the person at BlogCentral who hasn’t read Paul Wells’ review of John English’s much-palavered new Trudeau bio? Oh, you want timeliness? Then check out David Dunne’s review of The Age of Persuasion, the O’Reilly/Tennant book that launched on Tuesday. It’s smarts you are looking for? Then dig in to Daniel Weinstock’s review of the two volumes of James Tully’s collected essays, Public Philosophy in a New Key.

Read those three and you’ve already got your $6.50 worth, and we haven’t even looked at Kate Taylor’s review of Sarah Jennings’ history of the National Arts Centre, Janice G. Stein’s essay on animal spirits in the global economy, or the always fun letters.

 

Yeah it’s more the-LRC-is-totally-bitchin’ blogging from me, so move along if you don’t care for it. But seriously, why don’t you subscribe? The October issue arrived yesterday, and it opens with a major opening essay by JRS about how we need to stop trying to fit the Canadian North into a Southern model. Things really heat up though with the review of Brian Crowley’s Fearful Symmetry, the book that has given half the pundits in the country something to write about these last few weeks.

I know it’s becoming a bit of a refrain around here, but apologies for the light blogging, even taking the usual summer lassitude into consideration. Anyway, I’m sure you’ve been preoccupied with the latest issue of the LRC. What, you don’t subscribe to the LRC?

My review of Parliamentary Democracy in Crisis is in the current issue of the LRC, on newstands everywhere. Christopher Moore has a note about the review on his blog, and for the most part he gets what I was trying to do with the review.

Month in, month out, the LRC is proving itself as an indispensible venue for the discussion of serious books and ideas in the country. The June issue has, among other things: a long and challenging essay by Amir Attaran about Canada’s newfound status as one of the “bad kids” on the world block and a very generous review of Filthy Lucre written by Bruce Little (who we still miss from the business pages of the Globe).

Ever since he burst onto the philosophical scene in 1992 with Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, a somewhat overdramatic look at the evolution of the western mind, John Ralston Saul has been engaged in two quixotic intellectual projects: bashing the Enlightenment and trying to make sense of Canada. The conceit that buckles these two projects together is the notion that the search for the Canadian identity will come to an end only when we come to see that what justifies Canada, the reason Canada makes any sense at all, is that it is an experiment in counter-modernity…

Unlike the books section of the Globe and Mail, the LRC consistently chooses competent and original reviewers. Which is why our Michael Petrou must be pleased with the critique Bob Rae delivers of his book Renegades: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War.