The Life And Magic Of Billy Bishop

This unique biography details the life of magician Marshall Brodien, most remembered for his long-running career as television's Wizzo the Wizard on WGN-TV's Bozo's Circus and The Bozo Show. Coverage begins in the late 1940s, when Brodien was a young magician in his first job as a Chicago magic shop demonstrator, then recounts Brodien's steady rise to show-business success, including details of his work as a performer at the Magic Lounge in Cicero and, as a nightclub hypnotist in Chicago's posh Cairo Supper Club. The work concludes with an examination of Brodien's current career as one of the most successful marketers of magic sets in the U.S.

This study brings together three major areas of interest - history, postmodern fiction, and myth. Whereas neither history and postmodern fiction nor history and myth are strangers to one another, postmodernism and myth are odd bedfellows. For many critics, postmodern thought with its resistance to metanarratives stands in direct and deliberate contrast to myth with its apparent tendency to explain the world by means of neat, complete narratives. There is a strain of postmodern Canadian historical fiction in which myth actually forms a complement not only to postmodernism's suspicion of master-narratives but also to its privileging of those marginal and at times ignored areas of history. The fourteen works of Canadian fiction considered demonstrate a doubled impulse which at first glance seems contradictory. On the one hand, they go about demythologizing - in the Barthesian sense - various elements of historical discourse, exposing its authority as not simply a natural given but as a construct. This includes the fact that the view of history portrayed in the fiction has been either underrepresented or suppressed by official historiography. On the other hand, the history is then re-mythologized, in that it becomes part of a pre-existing myth, its mythic elements are foregrounded, myth and magic are woven into the narrative, or it is portrayed as extraordinary in some way. The result is an empowering of these histories for the future; they are made larger than life and unforgettable.

Edmund Cosgrove tells of the exploits and adventures of Canadas outstanding pilots and aircrews in the First and Second World Wars.

A trilogy consisting of 'Hero in the Labyrinth', 'Finding the Centre' and 'Seeing Through Different Eyes'. Like Dante who, in middle age wakes up to find himself in a dark wood and responds with The Divine Comedy, our Hero, in the seventh year of the seventh cycle of seven years in his life, wakes up to find himself in a labyrinth. His response is to spin an Ariadne thread of consciousness through time to orient himself within it and hopefully uncover the mystery of his (i)-dentity. Is this too a comedy? If so, do we laugh at or with our struggling hero?