Title search results
Showing 1 - 20 of 21 items
Chong traces her family's history from China to Canada. Her grandfather left his wife and emigrated to Canada, accompanied by…
the concubine he bought in 1924. In Canada, they stinted and sacrificed to support his family in China. Chong tells of her grandparents and parents, and the visits she made to China to try to unite the strands of her family's past. Winner of the 1995 CNIB Talking Book of the Year Award. 1994.
Walker Brown was born with a genetic mutation so rare that perhaps 300 people around the world also live with…
it. Walker turned twelve in 2008, but he weighs only 54 pounds, is still in diapers, can't speak and needs to wear special cuffs on his arms so that he can't continually hit himself. Expanded from Brown's Globe and Mail series about Walker, he sets out to discover his son. Some strong language. Canada Reads 2012. 2009.
Author Derek Lundy, bearing in mind that the name "Lundy" is synonymous with traitor in Ulster, delves into the lives…
of ancestors Robert Lundy, Protestant governor of Derry in 1688, William Steel Dickson, a Protestant preacher of the early 19th century who advocated resisting the English, and Billy Lundy, born in 1890 and the embodiment of what the Ulster Protestants became - a tribe united in their hostility to Catholics and to the prospect of an independent Ireland. 2006.
For a brief period between 1938 and 1941, roughly 20,000 Jews found refuge from the Nazis in the one place…
not requiring visas, police certificates or proofs of financial independence: Shanghai. In 1939, the author's family made a month-long, 7,000-mile journey to Shanghai, struggling with heat, disease, poverty, and fear. With the war's end came the shock of learning what became of family and friends left behind in Europe. Descriptions of violence. 2002.
As Leo Tolstoy's wife, Sophia Tolstoy experienced both glory and condemnation during their forty-eight-year marriage. Drawing on newly available archival…
material, including Sophia's unpublished memoir, Alexandra Popoff presents a dramatically different and accurate portrait of the woman and the marriage. Some descriptions of sex. c2010.
Michael Manley, three-term prime minister of Jamaica, had stood at the heart of a decade of radical social reform in…
the 70s. From the vantage point of her father's bedside during his last six months of life, Rachel Manley searches the shadows that he cast on her as a child and as a woman. She explores how the enduring bonds that held them were tested time and again, not only by the ordinary conflicts of family life but by the heavy demands of the political arena and by a succession of five marriages. 2000.
Biography of Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922), inventor of the telephone and champion of the deaf. Discusses his temperament; creativity; marriage…
to Mabel Hubbard, who was deaf; family life; and friendship with Helen Keller. Covers his many inventions, years living in Washington, D.C., and association with the National Geographic Society. 2006.
British Captain Samuel Lewis, a merchant seaman and the author's grandfather, arrived in China in the 1930s. He married a…
Japanese woman and started a family in Pagoda Anchorage, the heart of the Chinese tea trade. Describes how Lewis and his family, later forced to leave the country, viewed events of the 19th century. Some descriptions of violence. 2002.
The Forrester family are slowly winning their fight for survival, but for 14 year old Helen, the battle is with…
her parents: to be allowed to lead her own life, after the years of neglect and inadequate schooling while she cared for her six younger siblings. She struggles against illness, caused by severe malnutrition and dirt, and the selfish demands of her parents, with amazing courage and perseverance. Sequel to "By the waters of Liverpool" (DC29720), followed by "Lime Street at two" (DC29719). 1979. (Autobiography ; 3)
A haunting elegy for a way of life that is fast disappearing with the loss of the family farm. It…
is also a beautiful memoir about the universal experience of growing up as Klatte describes his childhood on a Minnesota farm. 2007.
On August 28, 1922, thousands of Dubliners came to pay respects to Michael Collins, the martyred Irish revolutionary, while elsewhere…
in the same city on the same afternoon, Michael Lyons, a cooper who worked for Guinness and author Jarman's grandfather, inexplicably drowned in the Grand Canal. These events became the seed for this combination of memoir, history, and travelogue, which relates the events of author Jarman's visits to Ireland, his family's past, and Ireland's bloody political history. Some descriptions of sex and violence, some strong language. 2002.
2005. Borel and her French-born hotelier father set out on a French wine safari - she desired a deeper connection…
to her father, but was also seeking escape from both the aftermath of a breakup and a car accident. The trip's early stages were strained by travel sickness and father-daughter bickering. Eventually, despite the buried secrets and intense emotions, her wine-tasting experiences led Borel to genuine breakthroughs, bringing about a change in her relationship with her father. Descriptions of sex and violence, explicit strong language. 2009.
Louise de Kiriline Lawrence describes her aristocratic Swedish childhood during the 1890s, her gruelling experiences as a Red Cross nurse,…
her passionate marriage to a Russian army officer, and her heartbreak during the Russian Revolution. 1987.
In 2003, journalist Ghafour was sent to Afghanistan, which she had fled in 1981, to cover the country's reconstruction. In…
a place totally changed from the world her parents had described, she discovered a school which teaches women a new kind of independence, her cousin's determined parliamentary campaign, and the archaeologist digging for his country's lost civilization in the form of a giant sleeping Buddha. Some descriptions of violence. 2007.
In this memoir, the author shares stories told by her grandfather while she was growing up in Budapest, describing how…
these tales of heroes, strife and survival give her a sense of personal history. She also tells of her own experiences, from hiding Jews in her basement during World War II, through the advent of the Communist era, the 1956 Revolution in Hungary, and the family's exile to New Zealand. c2000.
In 1931, Helen Forrester's family left their middle-class life in south-west England for the slums of Liverpool. The eldest of…
7 children, 12-year-old Helen's desire for an education was frustrated by her parents' inability to cope with their abject poverty. Followed by "By the waters of Liverpool" (DC29720). 1981, c1974. (Autobiography ; 1)
A coming of age memoir about growing up in Lewiston, New York, in the 1950's. Though told with humour, the…
author underscores the dark side of what at first seems a Norman Rockwell existence. Her reminiscences include stories about her mother - with her intellectual preoccupations and aversion to housework and visiting neighbours, she is an emblem of prefeminist frustration, and Hollywood - Gildiner delivered sleeping pills to Marilyn Monroe on the set of Niagara. Strong language. Canada Reads 2012. 1999.
The author was 7 years old when his father died. He and his brother and sister were raised by his…
mother, with the help of friends and relatives in Stanstead, Quebec. McIntosh captures the sights and sounds of a small Quebec town during the Depression. 1984.
Through the use of his grandparents' diaries, the author recreates his family history. The Ignatieffs, firmly entrenched in the Russian…
nobility, served in the tsarist government. In late 1917, the events of the Revolution overtook the family and they chose exile in the West. 1987 Governor General's Award winner. 1987.
In 1966, Zhang was a teen in Beijing when Mao Zedong began the Cultural Revolution. Though he was the son…
of a "bad guy" (a famous writer), he became swept up in the revolution, until the violence and his father's arrest made him question its goals. In 1968 was sent to a small village to learn how to farm, where he discovered his true calling - art. Some descriptions of violence. Grades 2-4 and older readers. 2004.