February 24, 2004 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography
Emily Hahn (1905-1997) was a remarkable woman who was very ahead of her time. Known as “Mickey” to her friends, Hahn drove across the United States in the 1920s dressed as a boy; hiked across ... Read More »
Rudy Wiebe won the 1973 Governor General’s Award for Fiction for The Temptations of Big Bear, a book he wrote about Yvonne Johnson’s great-great-grandfather, the eponymous Plains Cree chief. Twenty-five years later, Wiebe and Johnson ... Read More »
February 24, 2004 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography
Charles Foran is an acclaimed author and contributing editor to Saturday Night magazine. His reputation, however, could hardly be enhanced by his memoir of childhood. The Story of My Life (So Far) is an experiment ... Read More »
February 24, 2004 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography
When Barbados-born Cecil Foster wrote on the meaning of being black in Canada, he won praise from his community and a Writer’s Development Trust award for non-fiction. Yet in a prickly review of his most ... Read More »
February 24, 2004 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography
When a stripper associate and I ran into Lindalee Tracey (aka “Fonda Peters”) in Montreal in the early 1980s, I was dutifully impressed. To be a famous stripper in a city that is so girl ... Read More »
February 23, 2004 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Memoir & Biography
Where the Hell Are the Guns? rounds out George Blackburn’s trilogy of Second World War memoirs, which began with the bestselling The Guns of Normandy in 1995 and moved on through The Guns of Victory ... Read More »
February 23, 2004 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography
Yes, all subsequent mercies must indeed have seemed small, blow-away small, compared to the monumental mercy that allowed a Dutch boy called Ernest Hillen to survive three and a half years behind the plaited-bamboo walls ... Read More »
February 23, 2004 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography
The Sharp End is the story of James R. Davis’s 11 years as a Canadian soldier. Those years spanned involvement in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and saw the dissolution of the Canadian Airborne Regiment. ... Read More »
February 23, 2004 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography
Schools of criticism create their own canons, elevating certain texts, discarding others. Yet some works – Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano is one of them – lend themselves readily to all critical approaches. Similarly, Lowry ... Read More »
February 23, 2004 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography
The haunting essence of Nega Mezlekia’s powerful memoir is captured in his opening lines: “I was born in the year of the paradox, in the labyrinthine city of Jijiga. After a three-year absence, the rains ... Read More »
February 23, 2004 | Filed under: Children and YA Non-fiction, Memoir & Biography