National Network for Equitable Library Service

On a May morning in 1939, eighteen-year-old Velma Demerson and her lover were having breakfast when two police officers arrived to take her away. Her crime was loving a Chinese man, a "crime" that was compounded by her pregnancy and subsequent mixed-race child. Sentenced to a home for wayward girls, Demerson was then transferred (along with forty-six other girls) to Torontos Mercer Reformatory for Females. The girls were locked in their cells for twelve hours a day and required to work in the on-site laundry and factory. They also endured suspect medical examinations.

"163256 : A Memoir of Resistance is Michael Englishman's story of courage, resourcefulness, and moral fibre as a Dutch Jew during World War II and its aftermath, from the Nazi occupation of Holland in 1940, through his incarceration in numerous death and labour camps, to his eventual liberation by Allied soldiers in 1945 and his emigration to Canada.

“It is Easter Sunday, April 1945, early in the morning, maybe just dawn. We stand still, like frozen grey statues. Us. Seven hundred and thirty women, wrapped in wet, grey, threadbare blankets, standing in the rain. Our blankets hang over our heads, drape down to the soil.

Appel: A Canadian in the French Foreign Legion is the first-hand account of the author's six years as a professional soldier during the 1990s, and his experience in the Legion's elite Group Commando Parachutistes (GCP). Joel Struthers recounts the dangers and demands of military life, from the rigours of recruitment and operational training in the rugged mountains of France, to face-to-face combat in the grasslands of some of Africa's most troubled nations.

Bird-Bent Grass chronicles an extraordinary mother–daughter relationship that spans distance, time, and, eventually, debilitating illness. Personal, familial, and political narratives unfold through the letters that Geeske Venema-de Jong and her daughter Kathleen exchanged during the late 1980s and through their weekly conversations, which started after Geeske was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease twenty years later.In 1986, Kathleen accepted a three-year teaching assignment in Uganda, after a devastating civil war, and Geeske promised to be her daughter’s most faithful correspondent.

Author Sonja Boon's heritage is complicated. Although she has lived in Canada for more than thirty years, she was born in the UK to a Surinamese mother and a Dutch father. Boon's family history spans five continents: Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, South America, and North America. Despite her complex and multi-layered background, she has often omitted her full heritage, replying "I'm Dutch-Canadian" to anyone who asks about her identity. An invitation to join a family tree project inspired a journey to the heart of the histories that have shaped her identity.

"It's the life story of the eminent Canadian author Timothy Findley (1930-2002), who was instrumental in the development of Canadian literature of the 1970s and 80s. Author Sherrill Grace provides insight into Findley's life and struggles through an exploration of his private journals and his relationships with family, his beloved partner, Bill Whitehead, and his friends.

"Mnidoo Bemaasing Bemaadiziwin is a twenty-five year research and community based book. It brings forward Indigenous thought, history, and acts of resistance as viewed through the survivors of residential school who through certain aspects of their young lives were able to persevere, and share their life experiences, teaching us about them, and their understanding of their own resiliency. Through their voices, we hear how they found strength within their own life force energy, or mnidoo bemaasing bemaadiziwin, and survived and thrived in spite of aggressive assimilation.

"The book contains two works in English translation (the original Innu appears en face throughout), and these deal with topics such as loss of hunting territory, the residential school system, and police brutality."--

For six years, Whitney Dafoe was confined to a bedroom in the back of his parents' home, unable to walk, to eat, to speak. This book tells the story of one father's desperate hunt for the insidious illness that stole his son away.