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Showing 1 - 10 of 10 items
The concubine's children: portrait of a family divided
By Denise Chong. 1994
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.The beak of the finch: a story of evolution in our time
By Jonathan Weiner. 1994
Discusses the work of Peter and Rosemary Grant, who spent more than twenty years in the Galapagos Islands researching Charles…
Darwin's finches to confront Darwin's notion of evolution as a time-suspended process. Weiner incorporates research from other scientists to assert that evolution is dynamic, involving constant, even observable, change. L.A. Times Book Prize for Science and Technology. Winner of the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. 1994.Ten green bottles: the true story of one family's journey from war-torn Austria to the ghettos of Shanghai
By Vivian Jeanette Kaplan. 2002
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.Canadian Tire was founded by A.J. and John Billes in 1922 and grew to become a national institution. In 1986,…
one of A.J.'s sons decided to sell his company shares to a group of Canadian Tire dealers, sparking a feud with his sister, Martha. 1990 winner of the National Business Book Award. Strong language.The year of magical thinking
By Joan Didion. 2005
Writer reflects on her emotional response to the unexpected death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, after a visit to…
their comatose daughter. Discusses the shock of suddenly facing a crisis, the memory of their time together as a family, and the meaning of marriage. National Book Award. Bestseller. 2005.The Russian album
By Michael Ignatieff. 1987
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.The man in the white sharkskin suit: my family's exodus from Old Cairo to the New World
By Lucette Lagnado. 2007
Lagnado's father, Leon, used to conduct business in his signature white sharkskin suit in Cairo in the years between World…
War II and Nasser's rise to power. But with the fall of King Farouk, Leon and his family, like other Egyptian Jews, lost everything and had to flee. With all of their belongings packed into 26 suitcases, the family departed for any land that would take them. 2007.Take my family - please!
By Gary Lautens. 1981
Lautens, winner of the 1981 Leacock Medal for humour, shares his hilarious and entertaining recollections of living, loving, and savouring…
his experiences with a wife, three children, and a dog. Nominated for the 1984 CNIB Talking Book of the Year Award. Winner of the 1981 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal. 1981.Rogue primate : an exploration of human domestication
By John A Livingston. 1994
In the 1970s, environmentalist John Livingston began to find serious flaws in the conventional conservation argument. He began to challenge…
the belief that the survival of undomesticated plants and animals in a world dominated by humans could be enabled through "resource conservation" managed by humans. He argues that our dependence on ideas -- in effect, our own domestication -- has cut us off from the natural world, and led us to believe that our domination over nature is itself "natural." Winner of the 1994 Governor General's Award for Non-fiction.A walk on the tundra
By Rebecca Hainnu. 2021
During the short Arctic summers, the tundra, covered most of the year under snow and ice, becomes filled with colourful…
flowers, mosses, shrubs, and lichens. These hardy little plants transform the northern landscape, as they take advantage of the warmer weather and long hours of sunlight. Caribou, lemmings, snow buntings, and many other wildlife species depend on tundra plants for food and nutrition, but they are not the only ones... A Walk on the Tundra follows Inuujaq, a little girl who travels with her grandmother onto the tundra. There, Inuujaq learns that these tough little plants are much more important to Inuit than she originally believed. In addition to an informative storyline that teaches the importance of Arctic plants, this book includes a field guide with photographs and scientific information about a wide array of plants found throughout the Arctic