Memoir & Biography

After Thought: The Computer Challenge to Human Intelligence

In the weeks following Garry Kasparov’s loss to IBM’s Deep Blue this May, editorial pages were full of breathless soul-searching about What It All Meant. Had machines crossed the intelligence barrier? Could Deep Blue really ... Read More »

October 1, 2013 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

The Pope’s Bookbinder

By David Mason

Here’s how David Mason, Toronto’s leading antiquarian book dealer, explains the title of this memoir: in the late 1950s, aged 19, he left Canada, eventually landing in Spain, where he found work as a bookbinder. ... Read More »

July 2, 2013 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

Free Magic Secrets Revealed

By Mark Leiren-Young

In his new memoir, Mark Leiren-Young, winner of the 2009 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, reminisces about six months in the late 1970s when he and a group of friends, backed (at least initially) by ... Read More »

June 18, 2013 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

Still Hunting

By Martin Hunter

Director and playwright Martin Hunter, who turns 80 this year, pops up almost everywhere in Canadian stage history and frequently in the arts world generally. Readers of Still Hunting, a companion to his 2008 memoir, ... Read More »

June 18, 2013 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

The Memory of Water

By Allen Smutylo

“Since childhood I’ve been both drawn to water and frightened by it,” writes Allen Smutylo, a Canadian adventurer, writer, and artist who has spent 40 years of his professional life exploring the extremes of the ... Read More »

June 18, 2013 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

The Writing Life: Journals 1975–2005

By George Fetherling; Brian Busby, ed.

George (formerly Doug) Fetherling has been a fixture on the CanLit scene for nearly half a century. During a prolific and wide-ranging career that has included significant ties to Toronto, Kingston, and Vancouver, Fetherling has ... Read More »

June 18, 2013 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

Summers in Supino: Becoming Italian

By Maria Coletta McLean

It is impossible to approach a book entitled Summers in Supino: Becoming Italian without wary anticipation of the cloying pastoral scenes found in the likes of a Frances Mayes novel. Thankfully, the follow-up to Maria ... Read More »

April 17, 2013 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

Bilingual Being: My Life as a Hyphen

By Kathleen Saint-Onge

In her debut memoir, teacher and linguist Kathleen Saint-Onge details her fraught relationship with her native languages, English and French. Appropriately, Bilingual Being is itself written in two “languages”: prose and poetry. The latter tackles ... Read More »

April 17, 2013 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

The Perfume Lover: A Personal History of Scent

By Denyse Beaulieu

In mostly breathless, giddy prose, Denyse Beaulieu, a Canadian who has made Paris her home for many years, attempts to combine the history of perfume with her own experience of it. Beaulieu writes about perfume ... Read More »

April 17, 2013 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

★ Nocturne: On the Life and Death of My Brother

By Helen Humphreys

Loss is an open wound, a pain so enormous we reflexively turn away from it to keep from breaking. To examine grief would be to welcome the pain, to keep it alive. In her new ... Read More »

April 15, 2013 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Memoir & Biography

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