National Network for Equitable Library Service

Bob Teather entered RCMP Basic Recruit Training three decades ago with no idea of what he was getting into. Along with 31 other confused young men, he found himself in Regina, Saskatchewan, as a lowly member of Troop 18. Bald, intimidated and soon to be bruised, Bob began a six-month ordeal that he candidly recalls in this engaging book.

John R. Jewitt's story of being captured and enslaved by Maquinna, the great chief of the Mowachaht people, is both an adventure tale of survival and an unusual perspective on the First Nations of the northwest coast of Vancouver Island. On March 22, 1803, while anchored in Nootka Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island, the Boston was attacked by a group of Mowachaht warriors. Twenty-five of her 27 crewmen were massacred, their heads "arranged in a line" for survivor John R. Jewitt to identify.

Ted Grant, the undisputed father of Canadian photojournalism, has made a career out of being in the right place at the right time. Over his sixty years in the business, he has immortalized some of the greatest events in history and caught some of the world’s most famous and elusive subjects in rare moments of unaffected humanity.

One Friday morning in the spring of 1972, an ad in the Vancouver Sun caught Nick Marach’s eye: Gillnetter for sale. A young architect who had just returned to the west coast from a yearlong motorcycle trip abroad, Marach was not looking for a change of career—but he was looking for a boat to live on, and the price of the old gillnetter was cheap. A Gillnet’s Drift takes the reader back to a time when the salmon runs on the BC coast were strong, and all it took to call oneself a commercial fisher was a boat, a net, and a licence. No experience was required.

Demonic to Divine: The Double Life of Shulamis Yelin is a weaving of the Montreal writer’s stories and selected diary excerpts and family photographs revealing a far-reaching creative personality who is haunted from the age of ten by the “moods taking over”. This book poignantly illuminates the dramatic duality of a public and private literary and emotional life through published and unpublished stories of an idyllic Montreal Jewish childhood contrasted with deeply troubled and often shocking diary entries that document the author’s lifelong battle with mental illness.

If Frederick Scott is remembered at all today, it is as minor Victorian poet or as the father of his illustrious son F.R. Scott. However, Frederick Scott was almost 55 years old and the pastor of St. Matthews Anglican Church in Quebec City when he volunteered to go overseas to serve as senior chaplain with the 1st Canadian Infantry Division during the First World War. The depth of his faith was tested when he lost a son at the Battle of the Somme.

The Veiled Sun: From Auschwitz to New Beginnings by Paul Schaffer and Translated from the French by Vivian Felsen with a Foreword by Serge Klarsfeld and an Introduction by Simone Veil. The Veiled Sun is a Holocaust memoir written in a highly literate style. Paul Schaffer spent his teenage years on the run from the Nazis in Austria, Belgium and France, and then in Auschwitz from 1942 to 1945. He survived to become a successful industrialist who was honoured by the government of France.

Jean-Claude Germain’s second volume of Montreal memoirs chronicles his coming of age: his draconian Jesuit education on the fringes of the city’s Red Light District, followed by his liberating discovery of the city’s fevered bohemian community in the dying days of the Duplessis regime and Quebec’s “grande noirceur.” Here, on the cusp between two worlds, we meet fire-breathing clerics intent on putting the fear of God into young souls, and writers, painters, theatre directors and performers, determined at all costs, and at great sacrifice, to transform the society in which they live.

Paul Bley was barely into his twenties when he left Montreal for New York City, yet he had already played with Charlie Parker and subbed for Oscar Peterson at the Alberta Lounge. The piano prodigy had been leading his own bands in Montreal clubs since he was thirteen. Stopping Time is the story of a unique Canadian artist and his odyssey through the most turbulent years in modern jazz.

A gutsy, no-holds-barred, coming-of-age story. In the Point St. Charles of the author’s childhood people move for one of two reasons: their apartment is on fire, or the rent is due. Starting in 1968, eight-year-old Kathy Dobson shares her early years growing up in Point St. Charles, an industrial slum in Montreal (now in the process of gentrification).