National Network for Equitable Library Service

An updated edition of Herb Belcourt’s remarkable life story with a brand-new foreword by the author. The eldest of ten children, Belcourt grew up in a small log home near the Métis settlement of Lac Ste. Anne during the Depression. His father purchased furs from local First Nations and Métis trappers and, with arduous work, began a family fur trading business that survives to this day. When Belcourt left home at 15 to become a labourer in coal mines and sawmills, his father told him to save his money so he could work for himself.

The wildest, loveliest and least-travelled region of Alberta was R.M. Patterson’s home territory in the 1930s and ’40s. The Buffalo Head ranch was located in the foothills of the majestic Canadian Rockies. With the mountains as a backdrop, this dude ranch hosted visitors from around the world. Patterson bought it from its founder, a wild Italian named George Pocaterra, and explored the steep valleys and high mountain passes.

A vividly wrought memoir, Last Dance in Shediac is a collection of the author’s personal memories of her mother—celebrated Canadian artist Molly Lamb Bobak—and a tender meditation on life and death. Molly Lamb Bobak (1922–2014) was the first woman to travel overseas as an official Canadian war artist. She was also the daughter of famous Canadian artist Harold Mortimer-Lamb, whose contemporaries included Emily Carr, A.Y. Jackson, and Jack Shadbolt. In this homage to her artist mother, Anny Scoones rounds out her mother’s public profile by revealing personal stories.

Once available and appreciated only by researchers, these stories remained buried in the British Columbia Archives until 2007. Finally, readers are given a new glimpse into Emily Carr's life with this collection.. Carr began to write these stories in the last two years of her life. She wrote of the project: ... they are too small each to be taken singly, but each, complete in itself, serves to ornament life which would be a drab affair without the little things we do not even notice or think of at the time but which old age memory magnifies.

Success and promotion within Toronto's public transportation system come at a price. The shifts bring both physical and mental stress. The effects of these seep from work life into the social and personal lives of the operators. Parallel to this is the author's own personal story, a moving portrayal of a broken family home, abandoned teen dreams and a desperate need to be loved and appreciated. The author struggles with daily abuse from the public and his own demons, to the point of almost calling it quits.

Sarah & Abraham: The Search for Miracles and the Stuttering Poet is a stranger than fiction account of a woman's reach for miracles and her conflicted love for Montreal poet, Avi Boxer. It is a gripping tale of experiences that includes magic, sometimes black, by way of the captivating and devilish poet who played magician. The sacred and profane blurred in boundary, as did the very definition of morality, blessing and curse.

Geza Tatrallyay was born in Budapest, Hungary, and escaped with his family in 1956, immigrating to Canada. Geza worked as a host in the Ontario Pavilion at Expo '70, was selected as a Rhodes Scholar, attending Oxford University, and represented Canada as an epée fencer in the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal. He is the author of Twisted Reasons (Deux Voiliers), For the Children (Editions Dedicaces), and Cello's Tears (P.R.A. Publishing). Since 2004, he has been semi-retired, devoting his time to his family and his writing.

For 11 months Calvin White worked for Doctors Without Borders as a mental health specialist in the off-the-radar region of Karakalpakstan in western Uzbekistan. Unlike the higher profile emergency situations which draw that international humanitarian organization's attention, the milieu for White's mission was the quiet, slow death in an epidemic of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis. White takes the reader inside the daily heartbeat of humans we've never heard of but come to see as sharing the same pulse.

Textbooks describe cancer as a malignant tumour or growth, caused when cells multiply uncontrollably. Researchers give no mention to the consumption of healthy thoughts, and the birth of destructive, negative feelings. Cancer bursts into your consciousness, and like its concrete form, malignant thoughts multiply uncontrollably. In Hard Lumps, Nancy-Gail Burns corrals those thoughts and feelings and illustrates that in the end, good things can be found in just about anything.

A child survivor, a child of survivors and a grandchild of a survivor, Sidney Zoltak is all these things. His story about a family that struggled and endured, the generosity of those who saved them against all odds, and a vow never to forget is a remarkable journey through the Holocaust into a rich and full life. At eight, Sidney loses a middle class home and goes from the slow death of the ghetto into the terror of hiding in forests, barns and finally, a hole in the ground provided by a Polish family farm. But when war ends, there is no going back.