Книги

As a young girl growing up in 1970s Afghanistan, Nelofer Pazira seems destined for a bright future. The daughter of liberal-minded professionals, she enjoys a safe, loving and privileged life. Some of her early memories include convivial family picnics and New Years’ celebrations overlooking the thousands of red flowers that carpet the hills of Mazar. But Nelofer’s world is shattered when she is just five and her father is imprisoned for refusing to support the communist party. This episode plants a “seed of anger” in her, which is given plenty of opportunity to grow as the years unfold.

In 1979, the Soviets invade Afghanistan beginning a ten-year occupation. The country becomes an armed camp with Russians fighting U.S.-backed mujahidin fighters while trying to impose military rule. For Nelofer, daily life includes an endless succession of tanks, rockets screaming overhead and explosions in the street. During this time, she and her best friend, Dyana, seek refuge in their love of poetry. At eleven, the two girls throw stones at Soviet tanks and plot other acts of rebellion at the local school. As Nelofer gets older, she joins the resistance movement, distributes contraband books, studies guerilla warfare and hides a gun in her parent’s mint garden.

When Nelofer’s younger brother comes home from school in military garb, the family finally decides to flee Afghanistan. What follows is a perilous, clandestine journey across rugged mountains into Pakistan. But the life of a refugee is not what Nelofer expects. Though she once idealized the mujahidin as freedom fighters, she is shocked, as a woman, to find herself stripped of her personal freedom in their midst.

In 1990, Nelofer and her family are offered refugee status in Canada. Here she corresponds with her friend Dyana, whose letters reveal the increasing oppression of life under the Taliban. Fearing that her friend will kill herself, Pazira returns to Afghanistan to rescue her. This search becomes the basis for the acclaimed film Kandahar. Her journey to discover Dyana’s tragedy leads her finally to Russia, the land of her enemy, where she confronts the legacy of the Soviet invasion of her homeland first-hand.

A Bed of Red Flowers is a gripping, heart-rending story about a country caught in a struggle of the superpowers – and of the real people behind the politics. Universally acclaimed for its astute insights and extraordinary humanity, Pazira’s memoir won the Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize for 2005.The Winnipeg Free Press writes: “Powerfully written, A Bed of Red Flowers is a rare account of a misunderstood country and its intrepid people, trying to live ordinary lives under extraordinary circumstances.” The Gazette (Montreal) describes the book as “an outpouring of passionate non-fiction that captivates like the tales of Sheherazade.… It’s a remarkable journey. An inspiring read.”

As a young girl growing up in 1970s Afghanistan, Nelofer Pazira seems destined for a bright future. The daughter of liberal-minded professionals, she enjoys a safe, loving and…

Here is the first biography to appear in fifty years of Harvey Cushing, a giant of American medicine and without doubt the greatest figure in the history of brain surgery.
Drawing on new collections of intimate personal and family papers, diaries and patient records, Michael Bliss captures Cushing's professional and his personal life in remarkable detail. Bliss paints an engaging portrait of a man of ambition, boundless, driving energy, a fanatical work ethic, a
penchant for self-promotion and ruthlessness, more than a touch of egotism and meanness, and an enormous appetite for life. Equally important, Bliss traces the rise of American surgery as seen through the eyes of one of its pioneers. The book describes how Cushing, working in the early years of the
20th century, developed remarkable new techniques that let surgeons open the skull, expose the brain, and attack tumors--all with a much higher rate of success than previously known. Indeed, Cushing made the miraculous in surgery an everyday event, as he and his team compiled an astonishing record
of treating more than two thousand tumors.
This is the definite Cushing biography, an epic narrative of high surgical adventure, capturing the highs and lows of an extraordinary life.

Here is the first biography to appear in fifty years of Harvey Cushing, a giant of American medicine and without doubt the greatest figure in the history of brain surgery.…

Book Description Molly, an eighty-year-old artist, drowns in her bath while living alone on Vancouver Island. When her son, Toronto writer and photographer Michael Mitchell, arrives the next day he finds a studio full of her paintings and a

Book Description Molly, an eighty-year-old artist, drowns in her bath while living alone on Vancouver Island. When her son, Toronto writer and photographer Michael Mitchell,…

Book Description"What was it that I did to survive? Where did those ideas come from? Where did I find the resolve to enact them? At the time of my release, I had no ready answers beyond that I did what seemed natural and necessary. In looking back,

Book Description"What was it that I did to survive? Where did those ideas come from? Where did I find the resolve to enact them? At the time of my release, I had no ready answers…

Now aged 75, Peter C. Newman at last tells the story of his stranger-than-fiction life. Try to keep up as we follow his many lives: as a pampered child in a Czech chateau; a Jewish kid in short pants being machine-gunned by Nazi fighter planes on the beach at Biarritz, en route to the last ship to escape from France in 1940; as a refugee on an Ontario farm; as an outsider on a scholarship at Upper Canada College; as a" Financial Post" journalist, then an author whose "Renegade in Power" made Canadian politics dramatic and disrespectfully exciting for the first time; as the man who revealed the secrets of the rulers of the Canadian business world in "The Canadian Establishment," and other huge business success stories, including "The Establishment Man," on Conrad Black; or the millionaire who turned his back on business books and tackled Canadian history ("Company of Adventurers" and other triumphs), in a career where his work has dominated the bestseller lists in politics, business, history, and current affairs.
In the midst of all this were his years at the "Toronto Star" and "Maclean's" where, as editor, he took the magazine weekly - a huge accomplishment. He is still a legend there, where his columns continue to run.
He knew and wrote about every prime minister from Louis St. Laurent to Paul Martin and every prominent Canadian - hero or villain - in between. Yet his most interesting character is - Peter C. Newman. Incredibly, this central figure known to millions of Canadians sees himself as a perennial outsider. In personal terms, the rich little Czech boy whose nannies never stayed talks frankly about his marriages and the women he has known before his ultimate marriage to his beloved Alvy. His enthusiasms - from jazz to the Canadian Navy, not to mention his adventures on his beloved sailboat - make for a rich portrait of an astonishingcharacter, one who never stops being controversial.

Now aged 75, Peter C. Newman at last tells the story of his stranger-than-fiction life. Try to keep up as we follow his many lives: as a pampered child in a Czech chateau; a…

For some young men, climbing Everest or sailing solo into polar seas isn’t the biggest risk in the world. Instead it is venturing alone into the deepest urban jungle, where human nature is the dangerous, incomprehensible and sometimes wildly uplifting force that tests not only your ability to survive but also your own humanity.

One cold November day, Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall heads out on just such a quest. He packs up a new tent, some clothes, his notebooks and a pen and goes to live in Tent City, twenty-seven lawless acres where the largest hobo town on the continent squats in the scandalized shadow of Canada’s largest city. The rules he sets for himself are simple: no access to money, family or friends, except what he can find from that day on. He’ll do whatever people in Tent City do to get by, be whatever bum, wino, beggar, hustler, criminal, junkie or con man he chooses to be on any given day.

When he arrives, he finds a dump full of the castaways of the last millennium, human and otherwise. On the edge of the world, yet somehow smack in the middle of it all, fugitives, drug addicts, prostitutes, dealers and ex-cons have created an anarchic society, where the rules are made up nightly and your life depends on knowing them. Not only does Bishop-Stall manage to survive until the bulldozers come, but against all odds his own heart and spirit slowly mend. An astonishing account of birth, suicide, brawls, binges, tears, crazed laughter, good and bad intentions, fiendish charity and the sudden eloquence and generosity of broken souls, Down to This is Bishop-Stall’s iridescent love song to a lost city like no other.


From the Hardcover edition.

For some young men, climbing Everest or sailing solo into polar seas isn’t the biggest risk in the world. Instead it is venturing alone into the deepest urban jungle, where human…

In 1892, the Bishop of Tasmania set sail for Melanesia with the intent of rescuing islanders from lives of fear, black magic and cannibalism. Over 100 years later, his great grandson, Charles Montgomery, followed the bishop's route through the South Pacific, seeking out the spirits and myths his missionary forebear had sought to destroy.

Montgomery explored remote shores where gospel and empire never took hold. He rubbed shoulders with barefoot preachers, witch doctors and gun-toting rebels, only to discover that the pagan spirits were more tenacious than the missionaries had imagined. Melanesians had stirred Jesus and Mary into an already spicy broth of ancestor worship, ghosts, shark gods and magic. Through confrontations with a bizarre cast of characters -- the randy ethnographer, the soft-talking assassin, the leper prophet -- the journey becomes a debate on the nature of magic, myth and faith, and a metaphor for the transforming power of story.

The Last Heathen marks the debut of an exciting young writer who charts his adventures with passion, insight and grace.

In 1892, the Bishop of Tasmania set sail for Melanesia with the intent of rescuing islanders from lives of fear, black magic and cannibalism. Over 100 years later, his great…

Based upon childhood memory and his naturalist's journals, A Place between the Tides is the story of Harry Thurston's return to the beloved environment of his boyhood when he moves to the Old Marsh on the banks of the Tidnish River in Nova Scotia. The book describes the seasons in the life of the marsh as filtered through two decades of Thurston's living there.

Blending acute analysis and a poet's lyricism,Thurston explores and examines one of the most productive and biologically diverse habitats on Earth. This is a story of the salt marsh, but it is also the story of a personal odyssey, a homecoming for Thurston as a naturalist, culminating in the re-discovery of the bounty of nature where land meets sea.

Based upon childhood memory and his naturalist's journals, A Place between the Tides is the story of Harry Thurston's return to the beloved environment of his boyhood when he…

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.

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…

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.

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…

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

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…

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.

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…

Powerful, funny, moving and personal, Lake of the Prairies is a richly layered exploration of the ubiquitous childhood question: where do I come from?

Warren Cariou’s story of origin begins in the boreal Saskatchewan landscape of rock, water and muskeg that is Meadow Lake -- ensconced in the ethos of the north, where there is magic in a story and fiction is worth much more than fact.

Grounded in the fertile soil of Meadow Lake are two historical traditions -- Native and settler. Warren Cariou’s maternal grandparents were European immigrants who cleared acres of dense forest and turned it into pasture. This land also held traces of centuries of Cree settlement -- arrowheads, spear points and stone hammers, which Cariou stumbled upon as a boy. Though the tragic story of how these traditions came to share the same home would remain buried from Warren until much later, history’s painful legacy was much in view. In the schoolyard and on the street corners Warren witnessed the discrimination, anger and fear directed at the town’s Cree and Metis populations -- prejudices he absorbed as his own.

As an adult, Warren Cariou has been forced to confront the politics of race in Meadow Lake. He learned that a rambunctious Native schoolmate could be involved in a torture and murder that would shock the world. And then Warren discovered family secrets kept hidden for generations, secrets that would alter forever Warren’s sense of identity and belonging in Meadow Lake. In the tradition of Wallace Stegner’s classic Wolf Willow, Lake of the Prairies is an intimate and provocative memoir.

Powerful, funny, moving and personal, Lake of the Prairies is a richly layered exploration of the ubiquitous childhood question: where do I come from?

Warren Cariou’s story of…

When award-winning journalist Andrew Clark found the file on Harold Joseph Pringle, he uncovered a Canadian tragedy that had lain buried for fifty years. This extraordinary story of the last soldier to be executed by the Canadian military -- likely wrongfully -- gives life to the forgotten casualties of war and brings their honour home at last.

Harold Pringle was underage when the Second World War broke out, eager to leave quiet Flinton, Ontario, to serve by his father’s side. But few who volunteered to fight “the good fight” realized what horror lay ahead; soon Pringle found himself in Italy, fighting on the bloody “Hitler Line,” where two-thirds of his company were killed. Shell-shocked, he embarked on a tragic, final course that culminated in a suspect murder conviction.

His appeal was reviewed by the highest levels of government, right up to prime minister King. But Private Pringle was put to death -- the only soldier the Canadians executed in the whole of the Second World War. His own countrymen carried out the orders, forbidden to go home before completing this last grotesque assignment, even though the war had ended. The Pringle file was closed and stayed that way for fifty years -- until Andrew Clark uncovered it and began a two-year investigation on Pringle’s life in the army.

A Keen Soldier is a true-life military detective story that shows another side of what many consider our proudest military campaign. Andrew Clark examines the fallout of a crisis that disfigured our national conscience and continues to raise questions about the ethics of war. And he does so with eloquence and a deep compassion, not only for his subject but for all wartime soldiers -- even the men who executed Pringle and the officer who gave the order to fire.


From the Hardcover edition.

When award-winning journalist Andrew Clark found the file on Harold Joseph Pringle, he uncovered a Canadian tragedy that had lain buried for fifty years. This extraordinary story…

A graceful biography that was a #1 national bestseller, Flint & Feather confirms Charlotte Gray’s position as a master biographer, a writer with a rare gift for transforming a historical character into a living, breathing woman who immediately captures our imagination.In Flint & Feather, Charlotte Gray explores the life of this nineteenth-century daughter of a Mohawk chief and English gentlewoman, creating a fascinating portrait of a young woman equally at home on the stage in her “Indian” costume and in the salons of the rich and powerful. Uncovering Pauline Johnson’s complex and dramatic personality, Flint & Feather is studded with triumph and tragedy, mystery and romance—a first-rate biography blending turn-of-the-century Canadian history and the vibrant story of a woman whose unforgettable voice still echoes through the years.

A graceful biography that was a #1 national bestseller, Flint & Feather confirms Charlotte Gray’s position as a master biographer, a writer with a rare gift for transforming a…

For more than a decade, author-photographer Jerry Kobalenko has traced the roots of explorers, Inuits, and famous Mounties, and broken many new trails across the amazing frozen terrain of the Arctic s Ellesmere Island. He recounts the rivalries, the challenges, and the disasters that befell him.

For more than a decade, author-photographer Jerry Kobalenko has traced the roots of explorers, Inuits, and famous Mounties, and broken many new trails across the amazing frozen…

In less than a year, Neil Peart lost both his 19-year-old daughter, Selena, and his wife, Jackie. Faced with overwhelming sadness and isolated from the world in his home on the lake, Peart was left without direction. This memoir tells of the sense of loss and directionlessness that led him on a 55,000-mile journey by motorcycle across much of North America, down through Mexico to Belize, and back again. He had needed to get away, but had not really needed a destination. His travel adventures chronicle his personal odyssey and include stories of reuniting with friends and family, grieving, thinking, and reminiscing as he rode until he encountered the miracle that allowed him to find peace.

In less than a year, Neil Peart lost both his 19-year-old daughter, Selena, and his wife, Jackie. Faced with overwhelming sadness and isolated from the world in his home on the…

John Rae's accomplishments, surpassing all nineteenth-century Arctic explorers, were worthy of honors and international fame. No explorer even approached Rae's prolific record: 1,776 miles surveyed of uncharted territory; 6,555 miles hiked on snowshoes; and 6,700 miles navigated in small boats. Yet, he was denied fair recognition of his discoveries because he dared to utter the truth about the fate of Sir John Franklin and his crew, Rae's predecessors in the far north. Author Ken McGoogan vividly narrates the astonishing adventures of Rae, who found the last link to the Northwest Passage and uncovered the grisly truth about the cannibalism of Franklin and his crew. A bitter smear campaign by Franklin's supporters would deny Rae his knighthood and bury him in ignominy for over one hundred and fifty years. Ken McGoogan's passion to secure justice for a true North American hero in this revelatory book produces a completely original and compelling portrait that elevates Rae to his rightful place as one of history's greatest explorers.

John Rae's accomplishments, surpassing all nineteenth-century Arctic explorers, were worthy of honors and international fame. No explorer even approached Rae's prolific record:…

This is the biography of an idea, and the remarkable story of the man who created—and then convinced the world to adopt—a unified standard for telling time.

Today we take the accurate telling of time across the world for granted. Yet little more than a hundred years ago, people even in neighbouring towns lived by different time schedules: noon was simply whenever the sun happened to be overhead—Toronto time, for example, was different from Hamilton time some forty miles away. None of this mattered when people travelled in the slow style that had been the norm for generations. But then, as Clark Blaise makes vividly clear, trains arrived—and in the new age of communications myriad local times became a mind-boggling obstacle, and the rational ordering of time an urgent priority.

Sandford Fleming, a young emigrant from Scotland, performed the remarkable task of solving the unfathomable temporal riddle of how to knit together a world stippled with thousands of local times. That invention was the start of an exhausting campaign to persuade the squabbling international powers, the diplomats and scientists, to adopt a unified time system—a campaign that came to a dramatic conclusion at the Prime Meridian Conference in 1884. His achievement turned out to be one of the greatest gifts of the Victorian Age to our global modern world.

This was the great "Decade of Time," as Blaise calls it, that extraordinary ten years that also saw the invention of electric light, the telephone, Impressionism and high-speed cameras. Time Lord is an absorbing reflection on the mythic origins of time itself, as well as a meditation on science, psychiatry, art and literature (from Dickens to Sherlock Holmes to Hemingway); the roots of depression and anxiety; and the results of one man's fascination with clocks and watches and railway schedules. At the heart of the story is the mild but fierce-minded communications genius who sketched and surveyed his way from coast to coast, oversaw the building of the great Canadian railroad, designed the first Beaver stamp, and invented the world-circling, sub-Pacific cable; who saw the world as a whole and changed its nature forever.

This is the biography of an idea, and the remarkable story of the man who created—and then convinced the world to adopt—a unified standard for telling time.

Today we take the…

Through research, fictionalized accounts of key events in Emily Carr’s life, and the author’s own forays into Carr territory, Crean makes startling connections between Carr’s nineteenth-century sensibility and our present concerns with the environment, assimilation, and destruction of native culture, spirituality, and identity.

Through research, fictionalized accounts of key events in Emily Carr’s life, and the author’s own forays into Carr territory, Crean makes startling connections between Carr’s…

With the same sensitivity and artfulness that are the trademarks of her award-winning novels, Carol Shields explores the life of a writer whose own novels have engaged and delighted readers for the past two hundred years. In Jane Austen, Shields follows this superb and beloved novelist from her early family life in Steventown to her later years in Bath, her broken engagement, and her intense relationship with her sister Cassandra. She reveals both the very private woman and the acclaimed author behind the enduring classics Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma. With its fascinating insights into the writing process from an award–winning novelist, Carol Shields’s magnificent biography of Jane Austen is also a compelling meditation on how great fiction is created.

With the same sensitivity and artfulness that are the trademarks of her award-winning novels, Carol Shields explores the life of a writer whose own novels have engaged and…

Trevor Herriot’s memoir and history of the Qu’Appelle River Valley has won the CBA Libris Award for First-Time Author, the Writers’ Trust Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize, the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award, and the Regina Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Non-fiction.

Trevor Herriot’s memoir and history of the Qu’Appelle River Valley has won the CBA Libris Award for First-Time Author, the Writers’ Trust Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize, the…

Irena F. Karafilly's memoir is a poignant account of how the person closest to us can become a total stranger. Nominated for a Drainie-Taylor Award, The Stranger in the Plumed Hat charts the progression of the author's elderly mother's affliction with Alzheimer's, documenting how the devastating neuro-degenerative disorder disrupts her memory, judgment, reasoning, and emotional stability. It also tackles the increasing prevalence of Alzheimer's, and the inadequacy of current geriatric facilities to care for persons suffering from dementia. But this book is more than a portrait of illness. The Stranger in the Plumed Hat is also the story of a family of Jewish immigrants in Montreal. By interspersing remembered snippets of their Eastern European and Israeli past with the present's irrevocable rush toward forgetting, the author of Ashes and Miracles: A Polish Journey tells an archetypal story of life in constant migration. Driving the narrative is the relationship between mother and daughter, although the author's persistent citing from Nancy Friday's old standard, My Mother/My Self, to explain this complex, often untidy bond does begin to wear on the reader. There is no denying, however, the emotional authenticity of Karafilly's confrontation with the change in her mother's personality, the shock of non-recognition, the need to form a new and better bond, and the ethical dilemma of making a private anguish public in writing this book. "I seem to be simultaneously exploiting my mother's ordeal and--irrationally, unfairly--balking at its endless exigencies. Ultimately, of course, the tension is not just between art and life, but between two kinds of duty."
While it lacks the drawing power of John Bayley's memoir of his life with Iris Murdoch, or the sheer brilliance of Michael Ignatieff's Scar Tissue, this book will resonate powerfully among those who have cared for a loved one suffering with Alzheimer's. --Diana Kuprel

Irena F. Karafilly's memoir is a poignant account of how the person closest to us can become a total stranger. Nominated for a Drainie-Taylor Award, The Stranger in the Plumed Hat…

In 1920, H. G. Wells published his best-selling The Outline of History. Several years earlier, Florence Deeks had sent a similar work to Wells's North American publisher. Deeks's The Web was a history of the world with an emphasis on the role that women played. Her book was rejected. Upon publication of Wells's massive opus (1,324 pages), which he completed in 18 months, Deeks discovered similarities between the two texts. The books had matching structures, scope, and even contained identical factual errors. From accounts of their contrasting lives (Wells was a philanderer and social progressive, and Deeks was a feminist who never married), personal memoirs, and courtroom transcripts — where Deeks fought her case of plagiarism — McKillop weaves the story like a legal thriller. Over 25 photographs add to this forgotten chapter in literary history.

In 1920, H. G. Wells published his best-selling The Outline of History. Several years earlier, Florence Deeks had sent a similar work to Wells's North American publisher. Deeks's…