Title search results
Showing 141 - 160 of 14235 items
Smart blonde: Dolly Parton
By Stephen Miller. 2008
Dolly Parton is the most famous person ever to have emerged from the American country music scene with her iconic…
cartoon image. This book includes interviews with family members, musicians and producers who have worked with her over the years. It includes a detailed assessment of her music, as a songwriter and singer over the last forty years. c2008.Silvija: poems
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.Stars between the sun and moon: one woman's life in North Korea and escape to freedom
By Lucia Jang, Susan McClelland. 2014
Born in the seventies in North Korea, Lucia Jang grew up in a typical household - her parents worked in…
the factories, and the family scraped by on government rations of rice and what little food they could grow in their small garden. For the nation, it was the beginning of a chaotic period. The country would face a decade-long famine resulting in more than a million dead. In this bleak landscape Jang dedicates herself to helping her parents and siblings survive. Eventually, she risks everything to flee her home country forever, determined to start a new life. This is her story. c2014.Sequence
By A. F Moritz. 2015
In "Sequence", the reader accompanies the poet step after step through a haunting and mercurial world that shimmers like sun…
on sand. Alternating moments of spare clarity with deep narrative flashes, the poem wanders the borders of the self, pursuing the eternal moment through imagined landscapes and the lush world waiting outside the writer's window. This is poetry of intense observation, finely tuned to a pattern that is sustained with breaks and returns, alive with eros and a hunger for Breton's "convulsive beauty." 2015.Something to declare: Essays
By Julia Alvarez. 1998
Alvarez, the author of "How the Garcia girls lost their accents" and other works, reminisces about her childhood in the…
Dominican Republic and her family's escape to New York City. Also describes how she became an author and how to experience the writing life. 1998.Steal away home: one woman's epic flight to freedom-- and her long road back to the South
By Karolyn Smardz Frost. 2017
Fifteen-year-old slave Cecelia Reynolds made her dangerous bid for freedom from the United States, across the Niagara River and into…
Canada. Escape meant that she would never see her mother or brother again. She would be cut off from the young mistress with whom she grew up, but who also owned her. Cecelia found a new life in Toronto’s vibrant African American expatriate community. Her rescuer became her husband, a courageous conductor on the Underground Railroad helping other freedom-seekers reach Canada. Widowed, she braved the Fugitive Slave Law to cross back into the United States, where she again found love, and followed her William into the battlefields of the Civil War. Finally, with a wounded husband and young children in tow, she returned to the Kentucky she had known as a child. But her home had changed: hooded Night Riders roamed the countryside with torches and nooses at the ready. When William disappeared, Cecelia relied on the support and affection of her former mistress - the Southern belle who had owned her as a child. Winner of the 2018 Speaker's Book Award. 2017.Something fierce: memoirs of a revolutionary daughter
By Carmen Aguirre. 2011
Covering the decade from 1979 to 1989, Aguirre takes the reader inside war-ridden Peru, dictatorship-run Bolivia, post-Malvinas Argentina and Pinochet's…
Chile. She captures her constant struggle to reconcile her commitment to the resistance movement with the desires of her youth and her budding sexuality. Winner of Canada Reads 2012. Some descriptions of sex, explicit descriptions of violence. 2011.Sixtyfive roses: a sister's memoir
By Heather Summerhayes Cariou. 2006
At the age of four, Cariou's sister Pam was diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis, a terminal disease of the lungs and…
pancreas marked by severe coughing and malnutrition; unable to pronounce her condition, young Pam dubs it instead "Sixtyfive Roses." Written to fulfill a deathbed promise Cariou made to write "our" story, and a promise to her mother to tell the truth, the result is an honest and gritty description of a family dealing with chronic illness. Canada Reads 2012. 2006.Simple things: the story of a friendship
By Karen Lavut. 1999
Karen Lavut recounts her friendship with painter Christiane Pflug who killed herself at Easter, 1972. She celebrates the joy and…
memories left by her lost friend, and laments the fact that she chose to leave life so early on. 1999.Sit how you want
By Robin Richardson. 2018
Plane crashes and automobile mishaps are the backdrop for female narrators who grapple with terror, anxiety, and powerlessness: "When I…
say I'm fine I mean the sky has opened / like an old wound under scurvy." In their grim wit, sinister straight talk, and sometimes violent bawdiness, Richardson's poems work as counter-charms against the lingering trauma of abusive relationships, both familial and romantic. The book embodies a belief in poetry as an instrument of change, a tool for transforming pain into exuberant verbal energy: "It is the thrill of ruination / makes us innovate." Winner of the 2019 Trillium Book Award for Poetry. 2018.Steal my rage: new native voices
By Joel T Maki. 1995
An anthology of poetry, short stories, and essays by aspiring Native writers from across the country. Topics range from spirituality,…
traditional values, and the recovery of aboriginal languages, to self-government, urban life, and healing. 1995.Stolen from our embrace: the abduction of First Nations children and the restoration of aboriginal communities
By Suzanne Fournier, Ernie Crey. 1997
Describes the treatment of aboriginal children in Canada who were taken to live in residential schools. The story is told…
using interviews and anecdotes shared by those who attended the schools. The current state of aboriginal affairs is also discussed. 1997.Shania Twain: on my way
By Dallas Williams. 1997
Snowshoes & spotted dick: letters from a wilderness dweller
By Chris Czajkowski. 2003
The uplifting and often humourous story of one woman's life in the raw wilderness. The author describes her experiences as…
she builds a cabin in the wilderness and relates the complications of the "simple life" - how she breaks trails by snowshoe, encounters grizzly bears, builds a stone oven and learns to bake bread - and spotted dick. 2003.Sharp: the women who made an art of having an opinion
By Michelle Dean. 2018
Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler, and Janet…
Malcolm. Their lives intertwine as they cut through the cultural and intellectual history of America in the twentieth century, arguing as fervently with each other as they did with the sexist attitudes of the men who often undervalued their work as critics and essayists. 2018.Still I rise: the persistence of phenomenal women
By Laurel Corona, Marlene Wagman-Geller. 2018
Still I Rise takes its title from a work by Maya Angelou, and it resonates with the same spirit of…
an unconquerable soul, a woman who is captain of her fate. This book profiles inspiring women who embody this strength of character. Each chapter outlines the fall and rise of great women heroes who smashed all obstacles, rather than let all obstacles smash them. 2018.At nine years old, Eugenie Clark developed an unexpected passion for sharks after a visit to the Battery Park Aquarium…
in New York City. At the time, sharks were seen as mindless killing machines, but Eugenie knew better and set out to prove it. Despite many obstacles in her path, Eugenie was able to study the creatures she loved so much. From her many discoveries to the shark-related myths she dispelled, Eugenie made wide scientific contributions that led to her being nicknamed Shark Lady. Winner of 2018 Forest of Reading The Blue Spruce Award. Grades K-3. 2017.Shirley Jackson: a rather haunted life
By Ruth Franklin. 2016
Still known to millions only as the author of the "The Lottery," Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) remains curiously absent from the…
American literary canon. A genius of literary suspense, Jackson plumbed the cultural anxiety of postwar America better than anyone. Biographer Ruth Franklin reveals the tumultuous life and inner darkness of the author behind such classics as 'The Haunting of Hill House' and 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle'. Placing Jackson within an American gothic tradition of Hawthorne and Poe, Franklin demonstrates how her unique contribution to this genre came from her focus on "domestic horror" drawn from an era hostile to women. With its exploration of astonishing talent shaped by a damaged childhood and a troubled marriage, this is the definitive biography of a generational avatar and an American literary giant. Winner of the 2017 Edgar Award for best critical / biography book. 2016.Stalin's daughter: the extraordinary and tumultuous life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
By Rosemary Sullivan. 2015
Born in the early years of the Soviet Union, Svetlana Stalin spent her youth inside the walls of the Kremlin.…
Communist Party privilege protected her from the mass starvation and purges that haunted Russia, but she did not escape tragedy--the loss of everyone she loved, including her mother, two brothers, aunts and uncles, and a lover twice her age, deliberately exiled to Siberia by her father. As she gradually learned about the extent of her father's brutality after his death, in 1967 Svetlana shocked the world by defecting to the United States. But she could not escape her father's legacy; her life in America was fractured; she moved frequently, married disastrously, shunned other Russian exiles, and ultimately died in poverty in Spring Green, Wisconsin. Winner of the 2015 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the 2016 British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, and the 2016 RBC Taylor Prize. Bestseller. 2015.