National Network for Equitable Library Service

What force of will and circumstance drove a woman from a comfortable life painting china tea services to one of hardship and loneliness in the battle zones of France and Belgium following the Great War? For western Canadian artist Mary Riter Hamilton (1868-1954), art was her life’s passion. Her tale is one of tragedy and adventure, from homestead beginnings, to genteel drawing rooms in Winnipeg, Victoria and Vancouver, to Berlin and Parisian art schools, to Vimy and Ypres, and finally to illness and poverty in old age.

A quixotic figure, Vasile Avramenko (1895-1981) used folk culture and modern media in a life-long crusade to promote Ukraine’s struggle for independence to North American audiences. From his base in New York City, he built a network of folk dance schools and produced musical spectacles to help Ukrainian immigrants sustain their identity. His feature-length Ukrainian language films made in the 1930s with Hollywood director Edgar G. Ulmer, the “king of ethnic and B movies,” were shown throughout North America. Orest T.

À la fois témoin et acteur des grandes transformations socio-identitaires qui ont marqué l'Ontario français depuis la fin des années 1960, Gaétan Gervais est aussi connu à titre de créateur du drapeau franco-ontarien en 1975. Les divers lieux d'enracinement de sa pensée sont étudiés depuis le Sudbury français des années 1940 et 1950, en passant par le contexte de mutations culturelles, politiques et historiographiques des décennies d'après-guerre.

Sans masque fait la chronique des expériences exceptionnelles de Truda Rosenberg, une jeune Juive qui a vécu pendant la Seconde Guerre Mondiale. La seule survivante de sa famille, Rosenberg témoigne l'adversité et la cruauté humaine endurée par des millions de Juifs à travers l'Europe.

Gypsies, faith-healers, moonshiners, and snake handlers weave through Drema's childhood in 1940s Appalachia after her father is killed in the coal mines, her mother goes off to work as a Rosie the Riveter, and she is left in the care of devout Pentecostal grandparents. What follows is a spitfire of a memoir that reads like a novel with intrigue, sweeping emotion, and indisputable charm.

Since Tudor times Richard III has been painted as the "black legend," the murderous uncle-however, the truth is much more complicated and interesting. Richard III is accused of murdering his nephews, the "Princes in the Tower," in order to usurp the throne of England, but this book tells a different story. Rather than looking at all the killings Richard III did not commit, this account focuses on the one judicial murder for which we know that he was responsible.

Queen Victoria and Albert, the Prince Consort, had nine children who, despite their very different characters remained a close-knit family. Inevitably, as they married into European royal families their loyalties were divided and their lives dominated by political controversy. This is not only the story of their lives in terms of world impact, but also of personal achievements in their own right, individual contributions to public life in Britain and overseas, and as the children of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort.

Of all the celebrities who served their country during World War II-and they were legion-Jimmy Stewart was unique. Jimmy Stewart, Bomber Pilot chronicles his long journey to become a bomber pilot in combat.

In The Golden Fleece, Tom Carhart describes how he and five of his classmates from the U.S. Military Academy stole the billy goat mascot from their rival, the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, just before the biggest game of the year. The caper is interwoven with an insider's narrative about the private lives of six West Point cadets in the early 1960s, who, against all odds, hurled their last hurrah of triumph to America before flying off to fight the war in Vietnam.

Khalil Rafati went to Los Angeles in the 1990s and had it all. He was working with Hollywood movie stars and legendary rock musicians, but it wasn't long before he found his way into the dark underbelly of the City of Angels. When he hit rock bottom-addicted to heroin and cocaine, overtaken by paranoia and psychosis, written off by his friends and family-he grabbed a shovel and kept digging. At thirty-three, Khalil was 109 pounds, a convicted felon, high school dropout, and homeless junkie living on the infamous Skid Row in downtown L.A.