Trevor Herriot0.0 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.
Irena Karafilly0.0 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
А. Б. Маккиллоп0.0 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.
