Geoffrey Stevens0.0 In his final years, Dalton Camp was working on a memoir of the latter half of his life. The Player draws on the manuscript of that memoir, and so, once again, Canadians can take pleasure in the voice and the wisdom of Dalton Camp. Dalton Camp left deep impressions on the Canadian political landscape. His skill as a political strategist and advertising genius revived the fortunes of the Conservatives in the Maritime provinces. His hard-won reforms in the federal Tory party democratized the practices of both major parties. Following his second unsuccessful attempt to win a seat in Parliament in 1968, Camp moved seamlessly from the role of political insider to that of political pundit. His gracefully crafted newspaper columns, written twice weekly and syndicated nationally, set the standard for political analysis in Canada. In 1986, Camp accepted Brian Mulroney's invitation to join the Prime Minister's Office as a senior policy advisor. Camp later called this the worst mistake he ever made. He left Ottawa two-and-a-half years later, his health ravaged, his marriage in ruins and his disenchantment with Mulroney deep and abiding. A heart transplant in 1993 gave him a new lease on life, extending it by more than eight productive years. To the very end of his life, Dalton Camp found fulfillment in his role as Canada's most respected political columnist. He took great delight in his weekly radio debates on CBC's Morningside, with Eric Kierans and Stephen Lewis. He died on March 18, 2002.
Paul Adams0.0 A father’s heart-rending account of his baby’s extraordinary will to live
When Alexandre Julius Adams was born – at Gatineau Hospital, in the summer of 1998 – he seemed a healthy little boy. When he had trouble breast-feeding, his parents assumed it was normal. As the days passed, however, he grew dehydrated, inconsolable, and then listless. His parents phoned a government hotline. A nurse suggested they take the baby to emergency.
So began an extraordinary life-and-death saga. Alexandre was diagnosed with a congenital heart defect, and only a combination of good fortune, superb medical expertise, and inner resilience enabled him to survive. “He was on a knife’s edge in there,” the anesthesiologist grimly told Alexandre’s father after the first operation. “A knife’s edge.”
This book is a father’s beautifully terse, stirring account of the saving of his son. At times it reads like an episode of ER – Adams chronicles the intricate, brusque mechanics by which a critically ill infant is sustained. Pediatric cardiology is deftly explained, and the history of our understanding of human anatomy is woven in.
But this is a deeply personal story, and it occasions as many chuckles as tears. The numbing strain felt by Paul and Suzanne is almost unbearable; their lives become an emotional roller coaster there is no stepping off. Alexandre’s will to live is stirring – “Some children have it,” a doctor shrugs, “and some don’t.” The grueling experience strains their relationship in unexpected ways before ultimately strengthening it.
Adams will always be haunted by the knowledge that Alexandre’s survival was, in some ways, an accident of timing. Had he been born a couple of years earlier, the technology that saved him would not have been invented. If he’d been born a couple of years later, health-care cutbacks would probably have cost him his life.
Summer of the Heart will touch every reader, for it reminds us again and again what’s truly important.
Кевин Баззана4.6 Book DescriptionWhen Mikhail Baryshnikov defected in Toronto in 1974, he admitted that he knew only three things about Canada: It had great hockey teams, a lot of wheatfields, and Glenn Gould. In Wondrous Strange, Kevin Bazzana vividly recaptures
Joel Yanofsky0.0 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards Bronze Award - Autobiography/Memoir
Quebec Writer's Federation Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction Winner (2004)
Canadian Jewish Book of the Year Award Winner (2004)
Canadian Jewish Book Award for Memoir/Biography
Drainie Taylor Biography Prize Nomination
Alberta Trade Nonfiction Book of the Year Nomination
Mordecai and Me: An Appreciation of a Kind is the story of one writer's obsession with another. In this "really unauthorized biography," Joel Yanofsky, a veteran Montreal book reviewer, literary journalist and novelist, tracks the elusive legend of Mordecai Richler in the year following his death. This insightful and quirky quest leads Yanofsky to consult - though pester may be more like it - a rabbi, a shrink and a dream analyst.
What starts out as a literary appreciation turns into a literary stalking, propelled as much by envy as admiration, irreverence as affection, confession as critical judgment.
A Montrealer himself and a journalist by trade, Joel Yanofsky has covered the Canadian literary scene, interviewing and reviewing Richler, while taking the measure of the city that he believes was destroyed culturally by the reign of separatist governments. Yanofsky cuts through the recent public adoration, as well as through Richler's own carefully protected persona, to reveal the depth and contradictions hidden beneath.
