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Showing 1 - 20 of 46 items
By Trevor Greene, Debbie Greene. 2012
2006. Trevor Greene, a journalist and a reservist in the Canadian Army, was at a meeting with village elders in…
Afghanistan when a teenage boy under the influence of the Taliban swung an axe into his skull. After years of rehabilitation, setbacks and crises, Trevor learned to talk and move again, with the love and support of his fiancée Debbie. Their story is told in two voices: Trevor’s, up until the attack that changed their lives; and Debbie’s, as she works tirelessly to rehabilitate the man she loves. Some descriptions of sex, explicit descriptions of violence and explicit strong language. c2012.By Michel Renouard. 2012
" Derrière le héros mythique, joué par Peter O'Toole dans le célèbre film de David Lean, se cache un personnage…
complexe, non exempt de zones d'ombre. Archéologue et agent de renseignement, homme d'action et auteur des Sept Piliers de la sagesse, Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888 - 1935) se disait à moitié poète, se voulait intouchable, et mourut prématurément dans un accident de moto. Ce livre retrace la vie et les aventures de l'insaisissable Lawrence d'Arabie, dont Winston Churchill affirmait qu'il était un des êtres les plus extraordinaires de son temps. " -- 4e de couv.By Abu Bakr al Rabeeah, Winnie Yeung. 2018
Tells the story of Abu Bakr al Rabeeah, a young boy whose family moved from Iraq to Syria just before…
the start of the Syrian civil war. It recounts what it was like living in Syria during this time -- the normal things like video games, sleepovers, and family jarringly juxtaposed with car bombings, massacres, and the constant threat of what could happen next. In 2014 the family finally found safety in immigrating to Edmonton, Canada, and the book also recounts both the gratefulness and the loneliness of the family's immigration experience. 2018.By Christie Blatchford. 2007
Blatchford has covered the conflict in Afghanistan as an embedded reporter, and provides observations of military life in the twenty-first…
century. The troops share their accounts of their desire to serve, their willingness to confront fear and danger on the battlefield, their loyalty towards each other and the heartbreak occasioned by the loss of one of their own. Descriptions of sex, explicit descriptions of violence and some strong language. Winner of the 2008 Governor General's Award for Non-fiction. 2007.By Barth Hoogstraten. 2001
Hoogstraten was a Dutch medical student in 1942 when the Nazis wanted him to sign a loyalty decree to the…
occupying forces. He refused to do so and went into hiding, taking shelter with Ann and Bets Frank, two blind middle-aged music teachers. Some descriptions of sex, descriptions of violence, some strong language. 2001.By Ruth Martin, Bettina Stangneth. 2014
A total re-assessment of the life of Adolf Eichmann that reveals his activities and notoriety amongst a global network of…
National Socialists following the collapse of the Third Reich, and permanently challenges Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil.” Smuggled out of Europe after the collapse of Germany, Eichmann managed to live a peaceful and active exile in Argentina for years before his capture by the Mossad. Though once widely known by nicknames such as “Manager of the Holocaust,” in 1961 he was able to portray himself as an overworked bureaucrat following orders. How was this carefully crafted obfuscation possible? How did a central architect of the Final Solution manage to disappear? And what had he done with his time while in hiding? 2014. Uniform title: Eichmann vor Jerusalem.By Lynette Dawn Loeppky. 2014
The memoir tells the story of a young woman who has decided to leave an eight-year relationship. As Lyn begins…
to plan her exit, her partner Cecile suddenly falls ill. In a tumultuous drop towards a complicated end, the young woman is forced to become sole caregiver to the woman she had been planning to leave. Set against the "family values" of rural Alberta, this is a story about how we love and why we stay, especially in a time of crisis. 2014.By James Loney. 2011
Iraq, November 2005. James Loney and three other men, all members of Christian Peacemaker Teams, were taken hostage at gunpoint.…
The Swords of Righteousness Brigade released videos of the men, resulting in what is likely the most publicized kidnapping of the Iraq War. One man was murdered, the rest held 118 days before being rescued. 2011.By Carol Off. 2017
Tells the gripping story of a family's desperate attempts to escape Afghan warlords, Taliban oppression, and the persecutions of refugee…
life, in hopes that both their sons and their daughters could dare to dream of peace and opportunity. In 2002, Carol Off and a CBC TV crew encountered an Afghan man with a story to tell. Asad Aryubwal became key to their documentary on the terrible power of thuggish warlords who were working arm in arm with Americans and NATO troops. When Asad publicly exposed the deeds of one particular warlord, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, it set off a chain of events from which there was no turning back. Asad, his wife, Mobina, and their five children had to flee their home. Their only chance for a peaceful life was to emigrate--yet year after year of agonizing limbo would ensue as they were thwarted by a Byzantine international bureaucracy and the decidedly unwelcoming policies of Stephen Harper's government. Winner of the 2018 British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. Bestseller. 2017.By Mellissa Fung. 2011
October, 2008. Mellissa Fung, a long-time reporter for CBC’s The National, was leaving a refugee camp outside of Kabul when…
she was grabbed by armed men claiming to be Taliban, stabbed, stuffed into the back of a car and driven off into the desert. When the group finally reached a village in the middle of nowhere, her kidnappers pushed her towards a hole in the ground. For twenty-eight days, Mellissa Fung lived in that hole, which was barely big enough to stand up or lie down in, nursing her injuries, praying, writing in her notebook and, as a veteran journalist, interrogating her own captors. Some descriptions of sex and violence, some strong language. Bestseller. 2011.By Laura Hillenbrand. 2010
Details the life of Louis Zamperini (b. 1917), an Olympic runner and World War II bombardier, who survived a plane…
crash and forty-seven days adrift at sea only to become a POW in Japan. Relates Louis's later religious awakening under Billy Graham's ministry. Violence. Bestseller. 2010.By Serge Marc Durflinger. 2010
A history of Canada's war-blinded veterans and of the organization they founded in 1922, the Sir Arthur Pearson Association of…
War Blinded. Durflinger details the veterans' process of civil re-establishment, physical and psychological rehabilitation, and social and personal coping, and describes their public advocacy for government pension entitlements, job retraining, and other social programs. Captures the spirit of perseverance that permeated the veterans' community, and highlights the impact made by the war blinded as advocates for all Canadian veterans and for all blind citizens. 2010.By Jessica Dee Humphreys, Roméo A Dallaire. 2010
In conflicts around the world, there is an increasingly popular weapon system that requires negligible technology, is simple to sustain,…
has unlimited versatility and incredible capacity for both loyalty and barbarism - children. Believing that no one should tolerate a child being used in this fashion, Dallaire has made it his mission to end the use of child soldiers. He provides an introduction to the phenomenon, as well as solutions to eradicate it. Explicit descriptions of violence. c2010.By Roméo A Dallaire. 2016
Roméo Dallaire, traumatized by witnessing genocide on an imponderable scale in Rwanda, reflects on the nature of PTSD and the…
impact of that deep wound on his life since 1994, and on how he motivates himself and others to humanitarian work despite his constant struggle. Though he had been a leader in peace and in war at all levels up to deputy commander of the Canadian Army, his PTSD led to his medical dismissal from the Canadian Forces in April 2000, a blow that almost killed him. But he crawled out of the hole he fell into after he had to take off the uniform, and he has been inspiring people to give their all to multiple missions ever since, from ending genocide to eradicating the use of child soldiers to revolutionizing officer training so that our soldiers can better deal with the muddy reality of modern conflict zones, and to revolutionizing our thinking about the changing nature of conflict itself. Bestseller. 2016.By Gérald Messadié. 2008
By Badeeah Hassan Ahmed. 2019
Captured by ISIS, known locally as Daesh, Badeeah was among hundreds forced into a brutal human trafficking network made up…
of women and girls of Ezidi ethnicity, a much-persecuted minority culture of Iraq. Badeeah's story takes her to Syria where she is sold to a high-ranking ISIS commander known as Al Amriki, the American, kept as a house slave, raped, and routinely assaulted. Only the presence of her young nephew Eivan and her friend Navine, also prisoners, keeps her from harming herself. In captivity, she draws on memories and stories from her childhood to maintain a small bit of control in an otherwise volatile situation. Ultimately, it is her profound sense of faith and brave resistance that lead her to escape with Eivan and reunite with family. Since her escape, Badeeah has brought her harrowing story of war and survival to the world's stage, raising awareness about the little-known acts of genocide against her culture and the strength of a people unknown to many around the world. 2019.By Ivan Coyote. 2019
Ivan Coyote is one of North America's preeminent storytellers and performers, and the author, co-author, or co-editor of eleven previous…
books, all but one of which have been published by Arsenal Pulp Press. Their most recent book, Tomboy Survival Guide, was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction, named an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book, and longlisted for Canada Reads. In their latest, Ivan takes on the patriarchy and the political, as well as the intimate and the personal in these beguiling and revealing stories of what it means to be trans and non-binary today, at a time in their life when they must carry the burden of heartbreaking history with them, while combatting those who would misgender them or deny their very existence. These stories span thirty years of tackling TERFs, legislators, and bathroom police, sure, but there is joy and pleasure and triumph to be found here too, as Ivan pays homage to personal heroes like the late Leslie Feinberg while gently guiding younger trans folk to prove to themselves that there is a way out of the darkness. Rebent Sinner is the work of an accomplished artist whose plain truths about their experience will astound readers with their utter, breathtaking humanity.By Cheri DiNovo. 2021
Cheri DiNovo went from living on the streets as a teenager to performing the first legalized same-sex marriage in Canada…
in 2001. This story of one queer kid will hopefully inspire other young people (queer and not) to resist the system and change it.By Charles M. Blow. 2015
"Universally praised on its publication, Fire Shut Up in My Bones is a pioneering journalist's indelible coming-of-age tale. Charles M.…
Blow's mother was a fiercely driven woman with five sons, brass knuckles in her glove box, and a job plucking poultry at a factory near their segregated Louisiana town, where slavery's legacy felt close. When her philandering husband finally pushed her over the edge, she fired a pistol at his fleeing back, missing every shot, thanks to "love that blurred her vision and bent the barrel." Charles was the baby of the family, fiercely attached to his "do-right" mother. Until one day that divided his life into Before and After--the day an older cousin took advantage of the young boy. The story of how Charles escaped that world to become one of America's most innovative and respected public figures is a stirring, redemptive journey that works its way into the deepest chambers of the heart." -- Provided by publisherBy Brad Snyder, Tom Sileo. 2016
Memoir of a former Navy SEAL blinded during his deployment in Afghanistan. Snyder discusses his combat experience, his recovery after…
losing his sight on the battlefield in 2011, and the competitive swimming that led him to win a gold medal at the London Paralympic Games in 2012. Some violence. 2016