National Network for Equitable Library Service

Former bank manager Ronald Dalton never got to watch his three young children grow up. In 1989 he was convicted for a crime that never happened. His wife, Brenda, was later ruled to have choked to death on breakfast cereal not strangled as a pathologist had initially claimed. Dalton’s daughter, Alison, was in kindergarten when he was charged with second-degree murder in 1988.

With the advent of Conrad Black’s new appeal, Steven Skurka is back to deliver a thorough, in-depth account of the controversial businessman’s legal difficulties. It was the trial that captivated observers on both sides of the Atlantic. Media titan Conrad Black, by turns respected and reviled for decades in Canada and around the world, faced off with U.S. prosecutors on charges of criminal fraud stemming from his activities with Hollinger International.

Gerald Augustus Archambeau was born in Jamaica in 1933. Raised in Kingston by his three aunts, he was sent to Canada in 1947 to join his mother and stepfather in Montreal. He trained in the plumbing and steam-fitting trade, but at age eighteen decided to join the railway as a passenger car porter. He worked for Canadian Pacific and Canadian National until the 1960s, when declining passenger rail traffic and the ascendence of air travel caused him to switch to a career with a major Canadian airline in Toronto.

Francis Pegahmagabow was a remarkable aboriginal leader who served his nation in time of war and his people in time of peace. In wartime he volunteered to be a warrior. In peacetime he had no option. His life reveals how uncaring Canada was about those to whom this land had always been home. A member of the Parry Island band (now Wasauksing First Nation) near Parry Sound, Ontario, Francis served with the Canadian Expeditionary Force in Belgium and France for almost the entire duration of the First World War, primarily as a scout and sniper.

George Parkin was born the thirteenth child of an immigrant New Brunswick farmer and died a knight of the realm and perhaps the most famous Canadian in the world. Charismatic, charming, eloquent and dedicated, Parkin devoted his immense energy to two causes. As an orator and journalist, he worked to strengthen the bonds between the English-speaking peoples; as Principal of Upper Canada College and Founding Secretary of the Rhodes Scholarships he promoted a vision of education primarily as the formation of character, not the training of the intellect.

This true story of the Bai Family in China traces how their devotion to truth placed them on a collision course with the Communist Party. When they became practitioners of Falun Gong, it paved the way for a painful and torturous, yet enlightening, path in life, especially for the two brilliant brothers Xiaojun and Shaohua. After the Chinese Communist regime began its systematic repression of Falun Gong practitioners in 1999, Bai Xiaojun was tortured to death in one of the laogai or "re-education through labour" camps.

Magic Carpet Flying traces psychologist Pamela Ryan’s journey through her life’s adventures, from the rapture of achievement to the personal anguish of loss.

Clickety Clack is Joy McDiarmid’s self- portrait of bipolar mental illness and one of the most ambiguous sexual identities imaginable for a woman coming of age in the 1950s. Amidst gender and sexuality confusion, this Winnipeg woman began to look for romantic love and sexual fulfillment: sometimes wanting to dress as a man, sometimes as a woman, sometimes attracted to men, sometimes to women.

Celtic Woman explores with open honesty and engaging irony how cycles of personal discovery have connected international performing artist Treasa O’Driscoll to heaven and earthbut not the way you’d expect. This surprising memoir of an Irish woman attuned to poetic updrafts and spiritual downloads in the lives of real people, many of them celebrities in Ireland and North America she counts as personal friends, exudes her Celtic heritage on every page. Her encounters in life have been testing, tragic, romantic, and highly comic.

Artist Frances Gage, born in 1924 in Windsor, experienced both artistic recognition and acute despair in her life, yet she flourished in her work and as part of the contemporary Toronto art scene. A friend of Frances Loring and Florence Wyle, she developed a greater connection with the Group of Seven, working closely with Frederick Varley and producing reliefs of both him and A.Y. Jackson while working in Tom Thomson's shack. Frances remained focused and positive and became a successful sculptor, creating more than five hundred works of art.