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Showing 1 - 20 of 322 items
By Daniel Paisner, Krystyna Chiger. 2008
In 1943, with Lvov's 150,000 Jews having been exiled, killed, or forced into ghettos and facing extermination, a group of…
Polish Jews sought refuge in the city's sewer system. The last surviving member this group, Krystyna Chiger, provides a first-person account of those fourteen months with her family. Also describes Leopold Socha, a Polish Catholic and former thief, who risked his life to help Chiger's underground family survive, bringing them food and supplies. 2009, c2008.By Johanna Skibsrud. 2016
In this collection of poems, the author asks: is our world really what it appears to be? How do we…
shape it through language? And if language can create our world, can it also transform or destroy it? She brings us to the edges of dreams and waking. With lines that are searching, but spacious, she deftly turns over ideas of perception and reality, inviting us to join her as she releases the abstract figure from its painting, or brings the poet in from the wilderness. 2016.By James Chatto. 2005
They arrived as tourists in Corfu, Wendy from Canada and James from England. They enjoyed the sun, an idyllic beach,…
olives, fresh apricots and marinated lamb, and long evenings of storytelling at the local taverna. But what captivated James and Wendy was the way the islanders embraced them, and how their deep connection to Corfu and its people sustained them through tragedy just as it had carried them into love. Some strong language. 2005.By Lisa Appignanesi, Ma Yan, Pierre Haski. 2005
Ma Yan is a teenager from Ningxia, China, a drought-stricken rural area. Education can be the difference between a life…
of crushing poverty and a better future, but money is scarce. Ma Yan's diary chronicles her struggle to escape hardship and bring prosperity to her family, through her persistent, sometimes desperate, attempts to continue her schooling. Grades 4-7 and older readers. 2002, 2004. Uniform title: Journal de Ma Yan.By Sam Snake, Emerson S Coatsworth, David Coatsworth, Francis Kagige. 1979
During the 1930s, the stories told by the elders of the Rama Ojibway Band were compiled and translated into English.…
These 16 stories tell of Nanabush, one of the most powerful, and most mischievous, spirits of the Ojibway world. Grades 4-7 and older readers. 1979.By Gunda Lambton. 2003
In 1942 Gunda Lambton was a "war guest," a single mother sent from England to Toronto to avoid the war.…
While insanity raged throughout Europe she struggled to keep herself and her two small children going in a strange new home. While many people then were engaged in dramatic, heroic war work, her diary is a tribute to the quiet areas of endurance and pleasures of discovery that also distinguished those years. 2003.By Dan Yashinsky. 2004
The art of storytelling is very much alive in today's world. Yashinsky has lived with storytelling all his life, first…
listening to storytellers and then becoming one himself. It's the traveler who stops to hear the voice of the dusty little mouse on the road who is rewarded with the treasure. 2004.By Sandra Ridley. 2016
In a sequence of five feverish elegies, Ridley combines narrative lyric and experimental verse styles to manifest dark themes related…
to love and loss: the traumas of psychological suffering (isolation and confinement), physical abuse (by parent and partner), terminal illness (brain tumour and heart attack), revelation, resolution, and healing. With a blend of fervour and sangfroid, these serial poems accrue into a book-length testament to a grief both personal and human, leaving readers with the redemptive grace that comes from poetry's ability to wrestle chaos into meaning. Because of its overarching themes and serial form, "Silvija" is best read cover-to-cover, analogous to a work of fiction, rather than a book of individual or occasional poems. 2016.By Greg Mortenson. 2009
Author of "Three Cups of Tea" and cofounder of the Central Asia Institute chronicles his school-building efforts and promotion of…
female literacy in remote areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Discusses Mortenson's long-term goals and shares anecdotes about those impacted by his work. Bestseller. 2009.By Jill Frayne. 2002
After Jill Frayne's long-term relationship with her lover ended and her daughter left home, she packed up her life and…
headed for the Yukon. Sleeping in her car or pitching a tent by the road, she became a solitary traveller and lived close to the natural world. What started out as a three-month trip became a personal journey that lasted several years. 2002.By Laurie D Graham. 2016
In the stunning poems of "Settler Education", Graham explores the Plains Cree uprising at Frog Lake -- the death of…
nine settlers, the hanging of six Cree warriors, the imprisonment of Big Bear, and the opening of the Prairies to unfettered settlement. In ways possible only with such an honest act of imagination, and with language at once terse and capacious, she reckons with how these pasts repeat and reconstitute themselves in the present. Poems from this book won the 2013 Thomas Morton Poetry Prize. 2016. Uniform title: Poems.By David Shipley, Will Schwalbe. 2007
When should you email, and when should you call, fax, or just show up? What is the crucial - and…
most often overlooked - line in an email? What is the best strategy when you send (in anger or error) a potentially career-ending electronic bombshell? This guide shows how to write the perfect email, and also points out the numerous times when email can be the worst option and might land you in hot water (or even jail!). 2007.By Gary Geddes. 2001
Poet, writer, and critic, Gary Geddes, sets out to discover his roots in a 31-foot British sailing sloop called the…
Groais. Sailing up British Columbia's famed Inside Passage, an ancient sea route of nearly one thousand miles and an often turbulent waterscape, Geddes discovers a vibrant history, livelihoods come and gone, dramatic scenery, and ghosts of the past. 2001.By Tom Allen. 2001
Tom Allen travels with his family and alone, from Halifax to the interior of British Columbia, riding everything from a…
two-car dayliner held together with duct tape to a luxury rail cruiser through the Rockies that is packed with wealthy tourists. Along the way, he meets honeymooners and abandoned spouses, ordinary folk and deranged passengers, and veteran railwaymen who sustain pride in their work despite the massive cuts to their industry. Allen weaves his own memories of railroad travel with a family narrative past and present, all the while conjuring the drama, the disappointments, and the magic of Canada's railway history. 2001.By Barbara Bradbury Kingscote. 2006
In May 1949, at the age of twenty, Barbara Kingscote left her farm in Mascouche, Quebec, and set out for…
the Pacific Ocean on horseback. Barbara and her equine companion Zazy reached the West Coast just over a year later. After travelling 4,000 miles, she discovered both herself and her country on the journey of a lifetime. 2006.By Ariel Schrag, Katie Rain Hill. 2014
Katie never felt comfortable in her own skin. She realized very young that a serious mistake had been made; she…
was a girl who had been born in the body of a boy. Suffocating under her peers’ bullying and the mounting pressure to be “normal,” Katie tried to take her life at the age of eight years old. After several other failed attempts, she finally understood that “Katie” - the girl trapped within her - was determined to live. She reflects on her pain-filled childhood and the events leading up to the life-changing decision to undergo gender reassignment as a teenager. She reveals the unique challenges she faced while unlearning how to be a boy and shares what it was like to navigate the dating world and experience heartbreak. For senior high readers and older. 2014.By Marissa N Batt. 2005
L.A. deputy district attorney Batt draws on more than 25 years of experience in recalling her most challenging cases, also…
describing those involved, including biased judges, hardworking police, sleazy lawyers and expert witnesses. Batt's compassion toward crime victims and good case preparation are contrasted with rulings that reflect the fragility of the US criminal justice system. Explicit descriptions of sex, violence and explicit strong language. 2004.By Erin Robinsong. 2017
In this time of ecological precarity, "Rag Cosmology" is an urgent invitation to reinvent our modes of engagement with the…
environment we not only inhabit, but are. Refusing the lamentation that leaves us as resigned witnesses to devastation, "Rag Cosmology" counters fatalist narratives with the pleasures of ecological entanglement and engagement. Tracing relationships between seemingly irreconcilable things--economy and ecology, weather and lust, bills and inner voices, wages of avoidance and wages of listening--these poems offer the intimate and lush language of thought that yearn for an imaginative reinvention of how we understand what we are part of and what we are losing. Winner of the 2017 A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry (QWF). 2017.By Erik Orsenna. 2005
By Colleen Murphy. 2015
At 4:00 a.m. on a secluded farm, a woman fights to take her life back from a serial killer as…
her desperate sister and a haunted police officer reach across time and distance in an attempt to rescue her. Winner of the 2016 Governor General’s Award for Drama. 2015.