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Showing 1 - 7 of 7 items
Shake hands with the devil: the failure of humanity in Rwanda
By Roméo A Dallaire, Brent Beardsley. 2003
As former head of the 1993 U.N. peacekeeping mission in Rwanda, Canadian general Dallaire's initial proposal called for 5,000 soldiers,…
to permit orderly elections and the return of the refugees. Nothing like this number was supplied, and the result was an outright attempt at genocide against the Tutsis that nearly succeeded, with 800,000 dead over three months. Dallaire's argument that Rwanda-like situations are fires that can be put out with a small force if caught early enough will certainly draw debate, but the book documents in horrifying detail what happens when no serious effort is made. Explicit descriptions of violence. Winner of the 2004 Governor General's Award for Non-fiction. Canada Reads 2012. 2003.100 cigarettes and a bottle of vodka: a memoir
By Arthur Schaller. 1998
Arthur Schaller was eleven years old when Germany invaded Poland in 1939, a time when the reward for turning in…
a Jew was 100 cigarettes and a bottle of vodka. Separated from his family in the Warsaw Ghetto, Arthur managed to escape to the other side of the Ghetto wall, and posed until the end of the war as a Catholic orphan. Winner of the 1999 CNIB Talking Book of the Year Award. 1998.The mummy congress: science, obsession, and the everlasting dead
By Heather Anne Pringle. 2001
After covering a conference of mummy experts, science reporter Heather Pringle became so intrigued with mummies that she spent a…
year circling the globe, visiting leading scientists in the field. She also investigated preserved Italian saints, Scandinavian mummies in bogs, and frozen Inca princesses. Pringle researched Egyptian embalmers, the past public craze for mummy unwrappings, and the Russians' attempts to preserve Stalin, and along the way learned what mummies have to tell us about ourselves. Winner of the 2002 CNIB Torgi Award. 2001.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.Vimy
By Pierre Berton. 1986
In 1917, the Canadian Corps seized and held the best-defended German bastion on the Western Front, a feat thought impossible…
by the British, French and German forces. The author believes they succeeded because the men were civilians, with flexible minds unfettered by military rules. Bestseller 1986. Winner of the 1987 CNIB Talking Book of the Year Award.The first major effort to portray the intellectual forces which have moulded the thinking and writing of those English-speaking historians…
who sought to explain our past during the period 1900-1970. Winner of the Governor General's Award. 1976.The armies of the night: history as a novel, the novel as history
By Norman Mailer. 1968
The story of the 1967 march on the Pentagon, skirmishes between armed guards and anti-war demonstrators, and the subsequent arrest…
of hundreds of people. The author describes his own experience as a demonstrator and also gives a historical account of the action. Winner of the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. 1968.