Ice and Fire: Dispatches from the New World, 1988-1998 Contributor(s): Osborne, Stephen (Author) |
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ISBN: 1551520613 ISBN-13: 9781551520612 Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press OUR PRICE: $13.46 Product Type: Paperback Published: July 2002 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Travel | Essays & Travelogues - Literary Collections | Essays - Travel | Canada |
Dewey: 917 |
Physical Information: 0.5" H x 6.2" W x 8.9" (0.70 lbs) 200 pages |
Themes: - Cultural Region - Canadian |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: "Ice and Fire" is a collection of nonfiction narratives from award-winning writer Stephen Osborne, who retains an abiding sense that the places and the people he encounters are still to be discovered. Negotiating the Trans-Canada Highway near Moncton during a whiteout, visiting Timothy Eaton's grave in Toronto, leaving offerings of tobacco at a Nez Perce battleground, drinking with his Japanese mentor in a revolving bar in Vancouver while debating Buddhism vs. class struggle?for Osborne, all of these are occasions to conjure our time and our place. Ice and fire are extremes of a Canadian North, from which several of these dispatches are written. But Osborne's special insight is that Kamloops, New Glasgow and even Toronto are as unknowable as Pangnirtung. We live in a country that can claim the world's only souvenir police force, and whose analogue is a department store; a country that believes itself to be part of a New World, even though people have lived here for ten thousand years. Smart, funny, moving, and full of wonder and surprise, the dispatches in "Ice and Fire" illuminate a very old world striving to make itself new. |