Choice 评论

Further evidence of the "Atwood industry" that has grown up around Canada's prolific and well-recognized novelist, poet, and critic, this is an "unauthorized" biography of the writer, who turns 60 this year. Cooke (McGill Univ.)--coeditor (with Russell Brown and Donna Bennett) of An Anthology of Canadian Literature in English (rev. abridged ed., 1990)-- interviewed Atwood twice during her research and extensively consulted Atwood's colleagues and relatives and various collections of her papers. The resulting text is factual, imposes no particular critical framework, and provides abundant detail about Atwood's childhood, education, the progress of her career, and her personal life--loves, abodes, physical status, personality. Cooke resists the impulse of many biographers of literary figures to indulge in extensive analysis of the oeuvre, but she does draw parallels between real life settings and people and those in Atwood's fiction. With its 21 photos and a very useful index, the book will be useful to Atwood scholars and enjoyed by general readers. Recommended for all collections. E. R. Baer; Gustavus Adolphus College