Fireside reading: Six new reviews + Maclean’s bestsellers

By Bookmarked - Friday, February 1, 2013 at 12:23 PM - 0 Comments

Universal History Archive/Getty Images

Our latest book reviews:

• Cataract, by John Berger, review by Brian Bethune

• Artful, by  Ali Smith, review by Mike Doherty

• The Dinner, by Herman Koch, review by Anne Kingston

• On the Map: A Mind Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks, by Simon Garfield, review by Colby Cosh

• American Lady: The Life of Susan Mary Alsop, by Caroline de Margerie, review by Sarah Murdoch

• Gun Machine, by Warren Ellis, review by Brian Bethune

Plus, an excerpt from Ross King’s Leonardo and The Last Supper, the second in our five-part series with The Charles Taylor Prize nominees.

Presenting Charles Taylor prize nominee Ross King

By Bookmarked and Brian Bethune - Friday, February 1, 2013 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

The Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, which recognizes excellence in Canadian non-fiction writing, will award $25,000 to the winning author on March 4. Join Maclean’s and the five finalists Feb. 27 for a panel discussion at the Harbourfront Centre in Toronto. 

Photograph by Jessica Darmanin

Ross King, 50, may have a Ph.D. in English literature, a couple of novels and six critically acclaimed books on art history to his credit, including Leonardo and the Last Supper, nominated for the Charles Taylor prize. But as a boy growing up in Saskatchewan, what King really wanted to be was a political cartoonist. A certain Prairie realism—“I had no ability to draw or paint,” he says—sent him to university for 14 years. Next, unable to find an academic job, he tried his hand at historical novels. They did “well enough,” says King, who has lived in Britain since 1992, but he still wanted to write about actual history, particularly art history. “What I took away from novels were the basics of writing them—plot, character, action, atmosphere. I wanted to put all that into books that read like novels except that everything was true.”

King may not be able to draw, but craft well-researched, beautifully written, novel-like illuminations of key moments in the history of Western art? That he can do like few others. Since 2003, three of King’s books have been nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award, with two of them winning it, including Leonardo.

Continue…

Short list for Charles Taylor Prize

By Jessica Allen - Wednesday, January 9, 2013 at 10:26 AM - 0 Comments

The five authors shortlisted for this year’s Charles Taylor Prize are:

• Carol Bishop-Gwyn for The Pursuit of Perfection: A Life of Celia Franca (read our review)

• Tim Cook for Warlords: Borden, Mackenzie King, and Canada’s World Wars

• Sandra Djwa for Journey with No Maps: A Life of P.K. Page

• Ross King for Leonardo and The Last Supper (read our review)

• Andrew Preston for Sword of Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (read our review)

The winner, who will take home $25,000 for penning a work of Canadian nonfiction that ”best combines a superb command of the English language, an elegance of style, and a subtlety of thought and perception,” will be announced on Mar. 4, 2013.

Andrew Westoll won the prize last year for The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary: A Canadian Story of Resilience and Recovery.