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HUMANITIES 501 concentrating on his public life - at the League of Nations in the 1930s, at Canada's Foreign Exchange Control Board during the Second World War and later at the Bank of Canada, as well as his appointment as Canada's executive director to the International Monetary Fund - Muirhead has omitted many of the events, details, and facts that would help the reader to make sense of Rasminsky. The most revealing moment in this biography, and the most compelling chapter in the book, examines Rasminsky's deep disappointment when he was passed over for the position of governor of . the Bank of Canada in '954, a job he clearly coveted, sought, and believed he more than deserved. In this fleeting moment, the reader has a sense of Rasminsky's self-confidence, ambition, and demoralization. He is fully human, a man with whom the reader can empathize. Alas, for the most part, the man and his life rarely intersect. The result is an incomplete picture of Rasminsky, more line drawing than personal portrait. There is one aspect of Rasminsky's public life that Muirhead glosses over: his activism in the Jewish community after his retirement from the bank. Close scrutiny would have reinforced a theme that M1lirhead introduces early on in the biography and which pops up a few times along the way and appears again in the conclusion: that Rasminsky had to battle against anti-Semitism. The importance of Rasminsky's triumph over prejudice is implied in the title of the book: Against the Odds. There can be little doubt that Rasminsky faced prejudice, something to which he would be particularly vulnerable as a civil servant. And yet the reader has little understanding of the impact of anti-Semitism on Rasminsky or his professional success. Muirhead does not examine the history of antiSemitism in Canada, nor does he explain how anti-Semitism shaped Rasminsky. In short, Muirhead overlooked one important way in which a biography of his public career could have gone to the heart of Rasminsky as well as illuminated the prevalence of anti-Semitism in Canada. As it is, the full story of Rasminsky, part of the history of Canada, remains to be told. (FRANCINE MC KENZIE) David Boyd and Imre Salusmszky, editors. Rereading Frye: The Published and Unpublished Works University of Toronto Press. xxiv, 164. $65.00, $26.95 Rereading Frye is the second volume of a series of Frye Studies published by the University of Toronto Press. In a preface to the book, Alvin Lee, the general editor of Northrop Frye's Collected Works, suggests that it is time to reread Frye both in order to assert his continuing relevance and because of the abundance ofnew material which is available to scholars. Rereading Frye contains eight essays by scholars who have all made Significant contributions to the study of Frye; most of the essays make use of the unpublished 502 LEITERS IN CANADA '999 material. Robert Denham, in the first of two essays, gives a valuable description of this material. In their introduction, the editors write that Frye is 'a social, cultural, and religious thinker with something vital to contribute to current debates in the humanities, albeit in terms which challenge the current orthodoxy in those debates. His is a voice most vital, in fact, most needed at the present moment, precisely because of the challenge it offers that orthodoxy.' This view of Frye's continuing importance is shared by all the contributors, but it is the central argument of the essays by Joseph Adamson, A.C. Hamilton, and Peter Piisztor. Adamson's long essay 'The Treason of the Clerks: Frye, Ideology, and the Authority of Imaginative Culture' lucidly relates Frye's work to the dominant approaches to literary studies at present, and argues that literature forms a critical opposition in society, rather than merely functioning as a counter-ideology. This eloquent piece is the strongest contribution to the book. Hamilton makes a similar case, and provides a valuable discussion of Fryeas a cultural theorist. In a very interesting essay, Piisztor, who is one of Frye's Hungarian translators, shows how Frye's liberal humanism could make a positive contribution in the politically polarized situation...

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