THE CRUELEST month? We think not. Perhaps just a little full, withthe banning of a book, the destruction of a golden spruce, a new old novel, the superhero within, an interview with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and the world according to Osama bin Laden.
BROWNGIRLWORLD âe"Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a busy woman. The 30-year-old U.S.-raised, Toronto-based queer Sri Lankan writer is also a spoken-word artist, activist, event organizer and teacher. After 7 years of work on it, her first book, Consensual Genocide, has arrived. In this candid interview, Leah speaks with novelist Elizabeth Ruth about telling raw truths, brown-girl border crossings, mixed-race journeys and high-femme rebellion. >by Elizabeth Ruth >interview
QUIET NOW âe"Deborah Ellis wrote Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli Children Speak to share the stories she'd heard first-hand from children who struggle to live their daily lives against a backdrop of violence and danger. Author of the acclaimed Breadwinner trilogy, Ellis' youth-oriented book was recently banned by the Toronto District School Board, effectively silencing the voices of the children whose stories are shared in the book. An award-winning author of youth fiction herself, Mary-Lou Zeitoun, shares her observations on the book banning controversy. >by Mary-Lou Zeitoun >children's literature
A TREE'S LIFE âe"Beyond merely telling the sensational story of the destruction of a 300-year-old tree, John Vaillant's The Golden Spruce puts before us the basic human need for clear space on which to build shelter and grow food; then demonstrates how logging has altered the face of the planet in language so vivid it feels less like reading and more like being yanked up into space and forced to watch as mighty forests are inexorably razed from the Earth's surface. >by Rahat Kurd >non-fiction
IN LOSS'S WAKE âe" Emily Kato is a revisit of Itsuka, Kogawa's second novel, which followed her acclaimed Obasan. Obasan was published in the early 1980s as Japanese-Canadians fought to win redress from the Canadian government for their treatment during WWII, when many thousands were forcibly evacuated from their homes and interned in camps. Overwhelmingly, Emily Kato is a story about generations of Japanese-Canadians' labour to overcome the effects of loss: the loss of nationality, of home and of family. >by Mariko Tamaki >fiction
MR. COMMITMENT AND THE POWER OF LOVE âe"Andrew Kaufman twirls the reader through the story of Tom and âeoeThe Perfectionistâe in All My Friends are Superheroes, in a tale that, in the end, is a gentle love story. All of Tom's friends (and even his enemies) are superheroes but Tom's only superpower is the ability to love in the face of adversity and despair, making him a modern-day hero. >by Maha Zimmo >fiction
OSAMA BIN LADEN'S MESSAGE âe"Until the publication Messages to the World, Osama bin Laden's public interventions were available only in fragments. Now Duke religion professor Bruce Lawrence has assembled a comprehensive collection of speeches, fatwas, interviews and audiotapes, all carefully annotated. They reveal a persuasive and compelling polemicist, whose bitter, incandescent rhetoric is entirely coherent in his own terms. >by Matt Carr >international
excerpt from Consensual Genocide
