Strange Ghosts
Essays
Awards
- Joint winner, Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction 1993
Description
From baseball to Picasso, Oscar Wilde to Tennessee Williams, post-modernism to American foreign policy, these essays are an appealing mixture of polemic, politics, memoir, travelogue, and literary theory.
In a series of essays about the US, Greer relates how his mother’s obsession wih baseball is overshadowed by her distaste for the American invasion of Iraq, which ends a family tradition of watching the Toronto Blue Jays play their season opener with the New York Yankees in New York.
In another series of travel essays, he recounts being in India during the height of the Pakistan nuclear crisis, his conversations with monks in Cambodia, and his spiritual revelations in Venice.
Reviews
“It’s never quite clear where the next paragraph will take you, who you will meet, and what you’ll discover about his world and your own … Greer’s remarkably in touch with himself and truthful about the people in his life and the artworks he feels offer redemption. And he’s smart enough to know when to be ironic and when to play it straight.”
— Books in Canada