Behind the Beautiful Forevers By Katherine Boo Random House, 256 pages, $32.00 Reviewed by Frances Backhouse Behind the Beautiful Forevers opens with sixteen-year-old Abdul Hakim Husain on the run from the police, hiding among the garbage he sorts for a living in an Indian slum called Annawadi. The one-legged woman whose home shares a wall […]
Frances Backhouse
Wild By Cheryl Strayed Alfred A. Knopf, 311 pages, $29.00 Reviewed by Frances Backhouse Two years ago, shortly before my fifty-first birthday, I went backpacking alone for the first time. Although the trip was short in both time and distance – three days, 26 kilometres – I felt immensely proud of my accomplishment. After […]
By John Vaillant (Knopf Canada, 2010, 329 pages, $34.95 Reviewed by Frances Backhouse A tiger, wounded by a hunter, returns to stalk and kill the man and terrorize his village before it finally meets its own death in a dramatic showdown. It sounds like myth or legend, but as the subtitle of John Vaillant’s latest […]
Directed by Michael Ostroff Reviewed by Frances Backhouse Like many contemporary British Columbians, I can’t hike on the West Coast without Emily Carr ghosting along beside me. I don’t even realize she’s there until suddenly a shaft of light strikes a cedar in just the right way and the scene before me transforms into […]