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Showing 41 - 60 of 13918 items
By Lynn Crosbie. 2017
A sustained, confessional new collection of poems that tells the story of Crosbie's father’s battle with frontotemporal dementia and blindness,…
following a stroke. The poems chronologically recount the poet’s conversations and time with her father, and capture his still-astonishing means of communicating. The book’s title is his sardonic remark. Crosbie considers dementia to be a symbolic language and as such, similar to poetry. The author’s attempts to understand her father’s distress, pain, fear, and brave love are assisted by her understanding of the “negative capability” required of readers of poetry. 2017.By Anchee Min. 2013
Traces the author's journey from the painful deprivations of her homeland to the sudden bounty of the United States, where…
she endured five jobs, crime, and a painful marriage before the birth of a daughter inspired her writing career. 2013.By Rajiv Surendra. 2016
Actor Rajiv Surendra read "Life of Pi", discovered it was being adapted into a major motion picture, and embarked on…
a ten-year journey to land the role of a lifetime. But this is not a journey of goals and victories, this is a story of obsessively pursuing a dream, overcoming failure, and finding meaning in life. 2016.By Maisie Steven. 2001
A fascinating month-by-month account of a child's life in the Scottish Highlands in the thirties and forties. Hardship and adventure…
combine with a strong sense of the value of life, the beauty of nature and the importance of humour, to produce a fascinating new book, which provides both a nostalgic and insightful account of the Scottish countryside and of the traditional Scottish way of life. 2001.Reveals how our premiere national publisher, McClelland and Stewart, was eventually sold to Random House, a division of German media…
giant Bertelsmann, for a dollar. Drawing on interviews done with those who engineered the deal, and on documents never before revealed, Dewar tells the story of how a savvy businessman, an accountant, a University President, and three major law firms 'danced through the raindrops' to evade a thirty-year-old public policy created to defend Canadian national sovereignty; explores both how the Investment Canada Act was enacted and how it was taken down, piece by piece, deal by deal. 2017.By David A Wilson. 2000
A look at the way in which people in the past imagined their own future: prophets, self-proclaimed Christs, astrologers, witches,…
utopians and economists - all of whom predicted the future, and almost always got it wrong. The author argues that prophecies tell us little or nothing about what will actually happen, but reveal a great deal about the changing hopes, fears, dreams and aspirations that informed the imagination of the past. 2000.By George Bowering. 2016
Hockey forms the backdrop of our lives. The voices of 'Hockey Night in Canada' sportscasters are our soundtrack, and visions…
of skates scraping across the ice lull us to sleep. George Bowering, Canada's former poet laureate, is no different. Growing up in Oliver, BC, Bowering was entranced by the kids from Saskatchewan who skated and handled pucks as easy as breathing. His fascination with hockey followed him into adult life, from BC to Quebec and back again. Bowering followed his teams with a critical eye and a fan's passion, and his stories bring us on a cross-country hockey-themed road trip, with occasional forays into boxing, poetry, and sports fashion. 2016.By Erik Nielsen. 1989
Erik Nielsen was elected a Member of Parliament for Yukon in 1957 and has spent the last 30 years in…
politics, rising from a backbencher to deputy prime minister. Nielsen describes the events and the politicians of this period, and airs his opinions of public policy, party politics, and the leaders he served. 1989.By Maya Angelou. 1986
The fourth part of an autobiography of Maya Angelou. Maya becomes immersed in the world of black writers and artists…
in Harlem, working in the civil rights movement with Martin Luther King. Sequel to “Singin’ and swingin’ and gettin’ merry like Christmas”, followed by “All God’s children need travelling shoes“. 1986.By Constance Backhouse, Nancy Backhouse. 2004
In 1922, Elizabeth Bethune Campbell, a Toronto-born socialite, began a fourteen-year-battle with the Ontario legal establishment over her mother's will,…
and to prove that her uncle had stolen funds from her mother's estate. In 1930, as a non-lawyer and Canadian, she argued her case before the Privy Council in London - the first woman to do so. This is an annotated reprint of her self-published account of her campaign. 2004.By Rodney Barker. 1985
Japanese women who underwent surgery in the U.S. to repair the ravages caused by the atomic blast became known as…
the "Hiroshima maidens". The author documents the medical, humanitarian and diplomatic undertaking that brought them to the States. 1985.1734. Marie-Joseph Angélique is a slave woman convicted of starting a fire that destroyed a large part of Montréal. On…
appeal, her punishment of death was modified to torture, to encourage her to name an accomplice, a white man, Angélique's sometime lover. A narrative of a rebellious Portuguese-born Black woman who refused to accept her indentured lot. Explicit descriptions of violence. c2006By Elise Gravel. 2016
He weighed as much as a horse; he once wrestled a bear; he could devour twenty-five chickens in one sitting.…
This whimsical book tells the story of Antonio Barichievich, the larger-than-life strongman who had muscles as big as his heart. Grades K-3. 2016.The author began a quest to find out more about an artist from the Cariboo named Sonia Cornwall (1919-2006). Through…
interviews, letters, original artworks, articles, exhibition catalogues, imaginings of conversations and occurrences, along with her own reflections on the experience, she pieced together a story of pioneering, love and the pursuit of art. But in searching for Sonia, the author found an unanticipated new friend in Sonia's mother, Vivien Cowan (1893-1990), who became a larger part of the story than she could possibly have imagined. 2013.By Ashis Gupta. 2007
Crafted as a long poem, a libretto for stage presentations, this book is less about Clarence Thomas than it is…
about the devastating reign of the Bush administration. The central idea of the book is: ‘War is an Evil product of Evil/Hypocritical Minds’. The ‘Chorus of the Homeless’ occupies a central role in the poem, performing a function much like the Chorus in Greek Tragedies, providing a reasonably objective commentary. In a sense, the central story is a tragedy too – George Bush is a tragic figure. And, towards the end, he is conceived as a tragic hero, a Samson-like figure who pulls down the temple over his head to crush the Philistines. 2007.By Jeannette Walls. 2006
Reporter for MSNBC.com looks back on her unsettled life. Describes growing up in a dysfunctional family, which was always on…
the move. She recalls her father's dream of building a "glass castle," and relates how she and her siblings escaped to make lives of their own. Bestseller. 2006.By Ken Cuthbertson. 2017
On December 6, 1917, the French munitions ship Mont Blanc and the Norwegian war-relief vessel Imo collided in the harbour…
at Halifax, Nova Scotia. That accident sparked a fire and an apocalyptic explosion that was the largest man-made blast prior to the 1945 dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Together with the killer tsunami that followed, the explosion devastated the entire city in the wink of an eye and instantly killed more than two thousand people. While much has been written about the disaster, there is still more to the story, including the investigation of the key figures involved, the histories of the ships that collided and the confluence of circumstances that brought these two vessels together to touch off one of the most tragic man-made disasters of the twentieth century. Bestseller. 2017.By Brian McFarlane. 1996
Hockey writer Brian McFarlane tells the story of the Montreal Canadiens, the most successful sports team in North America. On…
the way to winning 24 league championships, the Habs featured some of the greatest players in hockey. McFarlane chronicles their stories as well as the franchise they turned into a hockey legend. 1996.By Michelle Morgan. 2018
When Marilyn Monroe stepped over a subway grating as The Girl in The Seven Year Itch and let a gust…
of wind catch the skirt of her pleated white dress, an icon was born. Before that, the actress was mainly known for a nude calendar and one-dimensional, albeit memorable, characters on the screen. Though she again played a "dumb blonde" in this film and was making headlines by revealing her enviable anatomy, the star was now every bit in control of her image, and ready for a personal revolution. The ripple effects her personal rebellion had on Hollywood, and in trailblazing the way for women that followed, will both surprise and inspire listeners to see Marilyn Monroe in an entirely new light. 2018.By Kristin Kimball. 2010
Single, thirtysomething, working as a writer in New York, Kimball was beginning to feel a sense of longing for family…
and home, and when she interviewed a dynamic young farmer, her world changed. Smitten, she moved to five hundred acres near Lake Champlain to start Essex Farm. This chronicle of the first year describes how she and her future husband grew everything needed to feed their community. Some descriptions of violence and some strong language. 2010.