National Network for Equitable Library Service

Eugene T. Kingsley led an extraordinary life. Born in mid-nineteenth-century New York, in 1890 he was a railway brakeman in Montana. An accident left him a double amputee and politically radicalized, and his socialist activism that followed took him north of the border where he eventually was considered by the government to be 'one of the most dangerous men in Canada'. Able to Leadtraces Kingsley's political journey, starting with his time as a soapbox speaker in San Francisco. As a leading member of the California left, he ran for the US House of Representatives.

Larry Audlaluk was born in Uugaqsiuvik, a traditional settlement west of Inujjuak in northern Quebec, or Nunavik. He was almost three years old when his family was chosen by the government to be one of seven Inuit families relocated from Nunavik to the High Arctic in the early 1950s. They were promised a land of plenty. They were given an inhospitable polar desert. Larry tells of loss, illness, and his family's struggle to survive, juxtaposed with excerpts from official reports that conveyed the relocatees' plight as a successful experiment.

In 1970, when he was travelling in Spain as an 18-year-old, David Homel took a false step and ended up in pieces at the foot of a cliff. After a spell in a Spanish hospital, he was gathered up in the arms of a nearby US military hospital where he began a long march back toward life, through botched surgeries, opiate addiction, and the loneliness of being a crippled traveler. Many years later, living in Montreal with growing pain and incapacity, he made an appointment with an orthopaedic surgeon who gave him advice to live by.

Kerouac & Presley starts in the Montreal neighbourhood where a teenage girl was brutally murdered in the International Year of the Woman, and from there it moves to Connecticut and the Abbey where one of Elvis's co-stars became a nun after fleeting Hollywood. Telling the story of a wanderer who sets out to rewrite “the blank and flawless page” that is America, André Pronovost's memoir is inspired both by the history of Quebec and by that of America. Taking you on the road, guitar slung over your shoulder, Kerouac & Elvis is an American prayer.

No other figure, historical or political, features more prominently in recent Newfoundland history than Joey Smallwood. During his long career in Newfoundland politics, Smallwood used the literary, rhetorical, and theatrical skills honed in the first five decades of his life to create a distinct and celebrated persona. He told his own story in his lively autobiography, I Chose Canada, published in 1973 only a year after he left office.Talented, venturesome, and above all resilient, he was no ordinary Joe. Smallwood was born in Gambo, Bonavista Bay, but grew up in St John's.

In the turbulent period following the First World War the young Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi founded the Pan-European Union, offering a vision of peaceful, democratic unity for Europe, with no borders, a common currency, and a single passport. His political congresses in Vienna, Berlin, and Basel attracted thousands from the intelligentsia and the cultural elite, including Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, and Sigmund Freud, who wanted a United States of Europe brought together by consent.

The personal journals examined in Reading the Diaries of Henry Trentare not the witty, erudite, and gracefully written exercises that have drawn the attention of most biographers and literary scholars. Prosaic, ungrammatical, and poorly spelled, the fifteen surviving volumes of Henry Trent's hitherto unexamined diaries are nevertheless a treasure for the social and cultural historian. Henry Trent was born in England in 1826, the son of a British naval officer. When he was still a boy, his father decided to begin a new life as a landed gentleman and moved the family to Lower Canada.

Monica Graham got her first inkling that her eighty-nine-year-old mother might not be able to continue living on her own when she coated chicken breasts with dishwashing liquid for dinner. It was an easy mistake—the yellow detergent lived right beside the olive oil on the kitchen counter. Graham could easily have done the same thing herself, she thought.

In 1960, Roy Boutilier and twenty-five fellow Nova Scotians set sail for Tahiti aboard the newly built replica sailing ship Bounty. The ship stayed in Tahiti for almost a year while MGM Studios filmed the epic historical drama Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Marlon Brando. Roy’s year on Bounty and his experiences in Tahiti are themselves the stuff of movies, but it took a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease for Roy and his old friend, Janet Sanford, to realize that his fascinating stories would be lost if someone didn’t capture those memories.

It's November 2006 and Brent MacGrath, a car salesman from Nova Scotia, has just had his first glimpse of a gorgeous yearling at the Lexington Yearling Sale--and his heart skips a beat. He takes another look. Even this young, the bay stallion has size and 'presence.' Against all odds, and with limited funds, MacGrath makes a successful bid for the colt.