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The blind mechanic: the amazing story of Eric Davidson, survivor of the 1917 Halifax Explosion
By Marilyn Elliott, Janet Kitz. 2018
Eric Davidson was a beautiful, fair-haired toddler when the Halifax Explosion struck, killing almost 2,000 people and seriously injuring thousands…
of others. Eric lost both eyes-a tragedy that his mother never fully recovered from. Eric, however, was positive and energetic. He also developed a fascination with cars and how they worked, and he later decided, against all likelihood, to become a mechanic. Assisted by his brothers who read to him from manuals, he worked hard, passed examinations, and carved out a decades-long career. Once the subject of a National Film Board documentary, Eric Davidson was, until his death, a much-admired figure in Halifax. Written by his daughter Marilyn, this book gives new insights into the story of the 1917 Halifax Explosion and contains never-before-seen documents and photographs. Winner of the 2019 The Robbie Robertson Dartmouth Book Award (Non-Fiction). 2018.Girls need not apply: field notes from the Forces /
By Kelly S. Thompson. 2019
At eighteen years old, Kelly Thompson enlisted in the Canadian Armed Forces. Despite growing up in a military family --…
she would, in fact, be a fourth-generation soldier -- she couldn't shake the feeling that she didn't belong. From the moment she arrives for basic training at a Quebec military base, a young woman more interested in writing than weaponry, she quickly realizes that her conception of what being a soldier means, forged from a desire to serve her country after the 9/11 attacks, isn't entirely accurate. A career as a female officer will involve navigating a masculinized culture and coming to grips with her burgeoning feminism. In this compulsively readable memoir, Thompson writes with wit and honesty about her own development as a woman and a soldier, unsparingly highlighting truths about her time in the military. In sharply crafted prose, she chronicles the frequent sexism and misogyny she encounters both in training and later in the workplace, and explores her own feelings of pride and loyalty to the Forces, and a family legacy of PTSD, all while searching for an artistic identity in a career that demands conformity. When she sustains a career-altering injury, Thompson fearlessly re-examines her identity as a soldier. 2019.A cave in the clouds: a young woman's escape from ISIS /
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.This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart: A Memoir in Halves
By Madhur Anand. 2020
“Wondrously and elegantly written in language that astonishes and moves the reader…This is an important book: an emotional and intellectual…
tour de force.” —Jane Urquhart An experimental memoir about Partition, immigration, and generational storytelling, This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart weaves together the poetry of memory with the science of embodied trauma, using the imagined voices of the past and the vital authority of the present. We begin with a man off balance: one in one thousand, the only child in town whose polio leads to partial paralysis. We meet his future wife, chanting Hai Rams for Gandhiji and choosing education over marriage. On one side of the line that divides this book, we follow them as their homeland splits in two and they are drawn together, moving to Canada and raising their children in mining towns and in crowded city apartments. And when we turn the book over, we find the daughter's tale—we see how the rupture of Partition, the asymmetry of a father's leg, the virus of a mother's rage, makes its way to the next generation. Told through the lenses of biology, physics, history and poetry, this is a memoir that defies form and convention to immerse the reader in the feeling of what remains when we've heard as much of the truth as our families will allow, and we're left to search for ourselves among the pieces they've carried with them.Two Pieces of Cloth: One Family's Story of the Holocaust
By Joe Gold. 2021
Torn apart by war. Reunited through faith. In this remarkable true story of the Holocaust, we follow David Goldberger from…
the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, back to Budapest where his wife, Aurelia, and infant son are hiding under false Christian identities. By the time he is liberated by the allies, Goldberger weighs a skeletal sixty-five pounds and is told to wait for the Slovakian legion to rescue him. With the threat of typhus looming, Goldberger instead escapes with a group of men to Hannover. There, he is given two pieces of wool cloth-the key to rebuilding his future as he searches for his wife and child. Drawn from survivor testimony, personal conversations, and archival documents, and vividly brought to life by Goldberger's son Joe Gold, Two Pieces of Cloth bears witness to the horrors of the Holocaust, while serving as a testament to the power and resilience of the human spirit.This Strange Visible Air: Essays on Aging and the Writing Life
By Sharon Butala. 2021
A collection of essays on women and aging from Canadian legend Sharon Butala "What I didn't have a clue about…
was that I was soon to be old, or what being old would mean to my dreams and desires. While dreading old age with every fibre, I was at the same time in full denial that it would ever happen to me, and so, was shocked down to the soles of my feet when it did." In this incisive collection, Sharon Butala reflects on the ways her life has changed as she's grown old. She knows that society fails the elderly massively, and so she tackles ageism and loneliness, friendship and companionship. She writes with pointed wit and acerbic humour about dinner parties and health challenges and forgetfulness and complicated family relationships and the pandemic -- and lettuce. And she tells her story with the tremendous skill and beauty of a writer who has masterfully honed her craft over the course of her storied four-decade career. Butala gives us a book to be cherished -- an elegant and expansive look at the complexities and desires of aging and the aged, standing in stark contrast to the stereotyped, simplistic portrayals of the elderly in our culture. This Strange Visible Air is a true gift.The Diary of Dukesang Wong: A Voice from Gold Mountain
By Dukesang Wong, Wanda Joy Hoe, David McIlwraith. 2020
Here is the only known first-person account from a Chinese worker on the famously treacherous parts of transcontinental railways that…
spanned the North American continent in the nineteenth century. The story of those Chinese workers has been told before, but never in a voice from among their number, never in a voice that lived through the experience. Here is that missing voice, a voice that changes our understanding of the history it tells and that so many believed was lost forever. Dukesang Wong’s written account of life working on the Canadian Pacific Railway, a Gold Mountain life, tells of the punishing work, the comradery, the sickness and starvation, the encounters with Indigenous Peoples, and the dark and shameful history of racism and exploitation that prevailed up and down the North American continent. The Diary of Dukesang Wong includes all the selected entries translated in the mid-1960s by his granddaughter, Wanda Joy Hoe, for an undergraduate sociology paper. Background history and explanations for the diary’s unexplained references are provided by David McIlwraith, the book’s editor, who also considers why the diarist’s voice and other Chinese voices have been silenced for so long.A guide to understanding the Indian Act and its impact on generations of Indigenous Peoples, as well as an examination…
of how Indigenous Peoples can return to self-government, self-determination, and self-reliance. Bestseller. Winner of the 2019 Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award. 2018.Barefoot Soldier
By Johnson Beharry. 2006
Born in 1979 in Grenada as one of eight children, living in a two-bedroom hut, surviving on meagre meals of…
beans and rice and walking barefoot, three miles to school. At 13 Johnson Beharry quit school and worked as a decorator and labourer. In 1999 he scraped together the airfare for England and joined the Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment. He served six months in Kosovo, three months in Northern Ireland and then went to Iraq. On 1 May 2004, Beharry helped assist a foot patrol caught in a series of ambushes. His vehicle was hit by multiple rocket propelled grenades but he drove through the ambush and extracted his wounded colleagues from the vehicle, all the time exposed to further enemy fire. He was cited on this occasion for 'valour of the highest order'. While back on duty on 11 June 2004, a rocket propelled grenade hit Beharry's vehicle incapacitating his commander and injuring several of the crew. Despite his very serious head injuries, Beharry took control of his vehicle and drove it out of the ambush area before losing consciousness. He required brain surgery for his head injuries, and he was still recovering when he was awarded the VC in March 2005.Ninjutsu The Art of Invisibility
By Donn F. Draeger. 1989
Ninja-the very word inspires awe and terror in equal measure. Master of espionage and assassination, stealth and concealment, the ninja's…
ability to move swiftly and silently gave rise to popular legends of amazing exploits, invincibility and supernatural powers.In Ninjutsu: The Art of Invisibility, Donn Draeger draws back the veil of mystery shrouding the arcane practices of feudal Japan's shadow warriors. Stripping away myth and exaggeration, Draeger reveals the secret tactics, exotic weapons, tricks and disguises that earned the ninja a reputation as history's most feared secret agents.War, Denial and Nation-Building in Sri Lanka
By Rachel Seoighe. 2017
This book begins from a critical account of the final months of the Sri Lankan civil war, tracing themes of…
nationalism, discourse and conflict memory through this period of immense violence and into its aftermath. Using these themes to explore state crime, atrocity and its denial and representation, Seoighe offers an analysis of how stories of conflict are authored and constructed. This book examines the political discourse of the former Rajapaksa government, highlighting how fluency in international discourses of counter-terrorism, humanitarianism and the 'reconciliation' expected of states transitioning from conflict can be used to conceal and deny state violence. Drawing on extensive interviews with activists, academics, politicians, state representatives and international agency staff, and three months of observation in Sri Lanka in 2012, Seoighe demonstrates how the Rajapaksa government re-narrativised violence through orchestrated techniques of denial and mass ritual discourse. It drew on and perpetuated a heightened majoritarian Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism which consolidated power under Sinhalese political elites, generated minority grievances and, in turn, sustained the repression and dispossession of the Tamil community of the Northeast. A detailed and evocative study, this book will be of special interest to scholars of conflict studies, political violence and critical criminology.Letters to Palestine
By Vijay Prashad. 2015
Operation Protective Edge, Israel's seven-week bombing campaign and ground invasion of Gaza in the summer of 2014, resulted in half…
a million displaced Gazans, tens of thousands of destroyed homes, and more than 2,000 deaths--and, yet, it was only the latest in a long series of assaults endured by Palestinians isolated in Gaza. But, following the conflict, polls revealed a startling fact: for the first time, a majority of Americans under thirty found Israel's actions unjustified. Jon Stewart aired a blistering attack on Israeli violence, and a video of a UN spokesperson weeping as he was interviewed in Gaza went viral, appearing on Vanity Fair and Buzzfeed, among other sites. This book traces this swelling American recognition of Palestinian suffering, struggle, and hope, in writing that is personal, lyrical, anguished, and inspiring. Some of the leading writers of our time, such as Junot Díaz and Teju Cole, poets and essayists, novelists and scholars, Palestinian American activists like Huwaida Arraf, Noura Erakat, and Remi Kanazi, give voice to feelings of empathy and solidarity--as well as anger at US support for Israeli policy--in intimate letters, beautiful essays, and furious poems. This is a landmark work of controversial, committed literary writing.From the Trade Paperback edition.The Power of Ritual in Prehistory: Secret Societies and Origins of Social Complexity
By Brian Hayden. 2018
The Power of Ritual in Prehistory is the first book in nearly a century to deal with traditional secret societies…
from a comparative perspective and the first from an archaeological viewpoint Providing a clear definition as well as the material signatures of ethnographic secret societies Brian Hayden demonstrates how they worked what motivated their organizers and what tactics they used to obtain what they wanted He shows that far from working for the welfare of their communities traditional secret societies emerged as predatory organizations operated for the benefit of their own members Moreover and contrary to the prevailing ideas that prehistoric rituals were used to integrate communities Hayden demonstrates how traditional secret societies created divisiveness and inequalities They were one of the key tools for increasing political control leading to chiefdoms states and world religions Hayden s conclusions will be eye-opening not only for archaeologists but also for anthropologists political scientists and scholars of religionRemnants of the Sikh Empire: Historical Sikh Monuments in India & Pakistan
By Bobby Singh Bansal. 2015
A fascinating chronicle that focuses on architectural gems of the Sikh Empire. Remnants of the Sikh Empire is a unique…
guide to the many important Sikh monuments located both in India and Pakistan. It catalogues numerous structures historically associated with the reign of Maharaja Ranjit Singh during the early nineteenth century. From Mughal to Sikh edifices, this book shines a spotlight on undiscovered masterpieces including forts, havelis (mansions), memorials and palaces across these countries, pictures of which have never been published before. The author travelled extensively across remote regions along the Afghan?Pakistan border with the assistance of the Pakistan Army in order to compile rare footage that documents these habitations. Some of the structures include strategic forts built in the tribal areas of Pakistan by the legendary Sikh hero Hari Singh Nalwa, the existence of which is completely unknown to the general public. Not only does this volume narrate the aesthetic and strategic history behind these structures but it also sheds light on the rich cultural traditions associated with the powerful nobles and courtiers of the Lahore Durbar who reshaped the architectural landscape of Punjab and Kashmir in the nineteenth century. Remnants of the Sikh Empire catapults the reader into an unforgettable journey, retracing the rich heritage of the Punjab in these countries where numerous iconic monuments still stand testament to the power and influence of the Sikh Empire.Dean Worcester’s Fantasy Islands brings to life one of the most significant (but under examined) figures in the history of U.…
S. colonialism in the Philippines. Upon the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, Worcester, a scientist who had traveled twice to the Philippines on zoological expeditions, established himself as one of America’s leading experts on the Philippines. Over a fourteen-year career as a member of the U. S. colonial regime, Worcester devoted much of his time and energy to traveling among and photographing non-Christian minority groups in the Philippines. He amassed an archive of several thousand photographs taken by him or by government photographers. Worcester deployed those photographs in books, magazine articles, and lectures to promote his belief that the United States should maintain control of the Philippines for decades to come. While many historians have examined American colonial photography in the Philippines, this book is the first lengthy treatment of Worcester’s role in shaping American perceptions of the Philippines in the early twentieth century.Theodore Roosevelt
By Theodore Roosevelt.
The firsthand account of the life of adventurer, scholar, war hero, and twenty-sixth president of the United States Theodore Roosevelt.There…
must be the keenest sense of duty, and with it must go the joy of living. Here, in his own words, Theodore Roosevelt recounts his remarkable journey from a childhood plagued with illnesses to the US presidency and beyond. With candor and vivid detail, this personal account describes a life guided by a restless intelligence, a love for adventure, and an unflagging duty to his country. Roosevelt sheds light on his wide array of roles, from New York police commissioner, where he waged a battle against corruption, to cattle rancher in the Dakotas to assistant secretary of the US Navy under William McKinley to leader of the legendary Rough Riders at the outbreak of the Spanish–American War, when he led the 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry to victory in the Battle of San Juan Hill. These extraordinary accomplishments earned Roosevelt national fame and set the stage for his ascent to the White House. As twenty-sixth president of the United States, he ushered in the Progressive Era with his domestic policies, such as the Square Deal, and trust-busting of monopolies, such as Standard Oil. He was a war hero, scholar, statesman, adventurer, and Nobel Peace Prize winner. Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography provides unique insight into the truly remarkable life of one of America’s most beloved presidents. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.Revolution, Resistance, and Reform in Village China
By Edward Friedman, Mark Selden, Paul G. Pickowicz. 2005
Drawing on more than a quarter century of field and documentary research in rural North China, this book explores the…
contested relationship between village and state from the 1960s to the start of the twenty-first century. The authors provide a vivid portrait of how resilient villagers struggle to survive and prosper in the face of state power in two epochs of revolution and reform. Highlighting the importance of intra-rural resistance and rural-urban conflicts to Chinese politics and society in the Great Leap and Cultural Revolution, the authors go on to depict the dynamic changes that have transformed village China in the post-Mao era. This book continues the dramatic story in the authors' prizewinningChinese Village, Socialist State. Plumbing previously untapped sources, including interviews, archival materials, village records and unpublished memoirs, diaries and letters, the authors capture the struggles, pains and achievements of villagers across three generations of social upheaval.Wellington: The Iron Duke
By Richard Holmes. 2003
In this compelling biography, Richard Holmes charts the life of the Duke of Wellington, Britain's greatest soldier. He follows Wellington's…
remarkable career, from the ruins of his family seat in Ireland and the plains of India where he first gained his reputation as a brilliant commander, to the horrors of the Peninsular War and Waterloo. Holmes sees Wellington as a brilliant figure, idealistic in politics, War and Waterloo. Holmes sees Wellington as a brilliant figure, idealistic in politics, cynical in love, a man of enormous courage and iron duty often sickened by the horrors of war.The Fountain of Age
By Betty Friedan. 1993
Betty Friedan launches a new revolution with this powerful, bestselling book breaking through the American mystique of aging as decline.…
Through hundreds of interviews, Friedan confronts our denial and demolishes society's compassionate contempt -- to offer a vision of what can be embraced.Vietnam: An American Ordeal
By George Donelson Moss. 2010
This book provides a comprehensive narrative history of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, from 1942 to 1975--with a concluding section…
that traces U.S.-Vietnam relations from the end of the war in 1975 to the present. Unlike most general histories of U.S. involvement in Vietnam--which are either conventional diplomatic or military histories--this volume synthesizes the perspectives to explore both dimensions of the struggle in greater depth, elucidating more of the complexities of the U.S.-Vietnam entanglement. It explains why Americans tried so hard for so long to stop the spread of Communism into Indochina, and why they failed. Key topics: The Fall of Saigon: The End as Prelude. Vietnam: A Place and A People. The Elephant and the Tiger. An Experiment in Nation Building. Raising the Stakes. Going to War. The Chain of Thunders. The Year of the Monkey. A War to End a War. The End of the Tunnel. Market: For anyone curious to know about the long American involvement in Southeast Asia, 1942-1975.