Never talk politics or religion at the dinner table, goes the old adage, but that doesn't stop us from swapping literary opinions on the topics. For starters, we were very pleased with Chantal Hebert's French Kiss: Stephen Harper's Blind Date With Quebec. Hebert, who writes for Le Devoir and the Globe and Mail, echoed our earlier election analysis, highlighting the importance that Quebec played as she focuses on the factors that led not only to the (heavily predicted) collapse of the Liberal party, but also the complaceny within the Bloc Quebecois that prevented it from successfully warding off the Conservatives' late surge. While her focus is Quebec, Hebert is able to construct a national context for Harper's victory and compares it to the coalition of diverse interests that allowed Mulroney to maintain power in the 1980s.
The differences between Mulroney and Harper though are perhaps best illustrated by Linda McQuaig, and her new book Holding the Bully's Coat. McQuaig's book on Canadian complicity in post-9/11 American military adventurism has been passed rather quickly through our office. Sean Marchetto even had the pleasure of sharing a cup of coffee with McQuaig on the patio of our favourite coffee shop, Higher Ground. McQuaig's concern with the increasing Americanization of Canadian political and social elites, long documented in her other works, extends here to argue that our history of peacekeeping and reputation as an honest broker, have been placed in jeapordy by the Harper government's eagerness to expand their military roke in the Middle-East. Once the key points to McQuaig's book was the Harper government's permissive attitude towards the torture of Afghan detainee's, a subject that's been all over the Canadian media in recent days.
On a lighter note, we have discovered Continuum Books 33 1/3 series of album reviews and are currently reading Daydream Nation and look forward to the many others they have published over the last few years.
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