By CHARLES MANDEL A Friend of the EarthBy T.C. BoylePenguin Canada, 271 pages Half-way through T. Coraghessan Boyle’s A Friend of the Earth, a dark comedy about environmental failure set in 2025, one of the planet’s few remaining hyenas escapes from a rock star’s
One-time media tycoon, British Lord and American convict Conrad Black generated controversy recently when the Calgary Public Library Foundation named him the recipient of the Bob Edwards Award. The honour is bestowed annually in the Alberta city on an outspoken Canadian author.
In June of 1963, when American president John F. Kennedy came “home” to Ireland, Brian Brennan lined up with thousands of his fellow Irishmen on O’Connell Street in the centre of Dublin. They waited for hours to catch a glimpse of a famous
Joyce Thierry Llewellyn first encountered author and convict Stephen Reid in 1988 when, as a university student, she interviewed him for an academic project. Back then Reid had been out on parole for just a year, having spent 20 years in jail for
By CHARLES MANDEL AUBURNDALE, Nova Scotia, Canada Thursday night in Auburndale, Nova Scotia, and what’s the big entertainment? A drive-in movie, perhaps? Maybe dinner out? How about staring at a big field of hay? That doesn’t sound terribly promising, but over four balmy nights
By CHARLES MANDEL Hooking UpBy Tom WolfePicador, 2001. 293 pages Tom Wolfe has talent to burn. That much is clear from his new collection of essays, Hooking Up. But his greatest talent may be for self-promotion. One thing becomes increasingly evident as you
Pledges by “have” countries to help the “have-nots” are almost all talk and no action, new research shows. Since 2003, when a Washington-based think tank started an index to measure development policies by wealthier countries, “the scores for aid, migration, trade and
For Chris Wood‘s family, the typhoon and aftermath that devastated the Philippines is personal: his nephew was in its path. Only one brief text, after the storm passed, has provided reassurance that Leighton Wood and his family were fine. Wood warns that
Vancouver, Canada’s west-coast big city, is known globally as host of the 2010 Winter Olympics, as North America’s (and one of the world’s) most expensive places, as the birthplace of Greenpeace, home to the world’s first automated-teller-machine to swap cash for bitcoin
CHRIS WOOD: NATURAL SECURITYPublished November 12, 2013 I’ve spent a good deal of the last few days glued to the computer screen, sifting theinternet for news from the Philippines. Not from any motive of disaster voyeurism (the armchair version of a new
