Биографии и Мемуары
35106 кн.
Three hundred nautical miles from shore, I‘m cold and sick and afraid. I pray for reprieve. I long for solid ground. And I can‘t help but ask myself, What the hell was I thinking? When Sue Williams set sail for the North Atlantic, it wasn’t a mid-life crisis. She had no affinity for the sea. And she didn’t have an adventure-seeking bone in her body. [/b][/b] In the wake of a perfect storm of personal events, it suddenly became clear: her sons were adults now; they needed freedom to figure...
| Автор | Sue Williams |
In The Great Soul of Siberia, renowned tiger researcher Sooyong Park tracks three generations of Siberian tigers living in remote southeastern Russia. Reminiscent of the way Timothy Treadwell (the so-called Grizzly Man) immersed himself in the lives of bears, Park sets up underground bunkers to observe the tigers, living thrillingly close to these beautiful but dangerous apex predators. At the same time, he draws from twenty years of experience and research to focus on the Siberian...
| Автор | Sooyong Park |
From the moment Joni Mitchell's career began — with coffee-house bookings, serendipitous encounters with established stars, and a recording contract that gave her full creative control over her music — the woman from the Canadian wheat fields has eluded industry cliches. When her peers were focused on feminism, Mitchell was plumbing the depths of her own human condition. When arena rock was king, she turned to jazz. When all others hailed Bob Dylan as a musical messiah,...
| Автор | Katherine Monk |
“It all comes down to making the right life choices,” says the NHL’s legendary Reggie Leach, and this intimate biography lays bare the decisions that led him to become one of the best snipers in hockey history. Nicknamed the Riverton Rifle for his thrilling speed and deadly shooting skills, Leach overcame a childhood marked by poverty and racism to rise through the NHL, playing for the Stanley Cup-winning 1975 Philadelphia Flyers. Through Leach’s own...
| Автор | Reggie Leach |
The perfect keg. Filled with perfect beer. A symphony of flavors in the mouth. The right blend of sweet and bitter. The fluid in that keg represents a year’s work. Actually brewing it took a few weeks. But to make it truly the perfect keg, Ian Coutts had to go right back to fundamentals. This beer didn’t start with a beer-making kit, which is what most homebrewers use. And it didn’t rely on pre-roasted industrial malt, which is how commercial brewers big and small...
| Автор | Ian Coutts |
Pablo Picasso called Françoise Gilot “The Woman Who Says No.” Tiny, talented, and feisty, and an accomplished artist in her own right, Gilot left Picasso after a ten-year relationship, the only woman to escape his intense attentions unscathed. From 2012 to 2014, German journalist and author Malte Herwig dropped by her ateliers in Paris and New York to chat with her about life, love, and art. She shared trenchant observations, her sharp sense of humor, and over ninety...
| Автор | Malte Herwig |
At Trickle Creek in northern Alberta, Wiebo Ludwig thought he’d buffered his tiny religious community from civilization, but in 1990 civilization came calling. A Calgary oil company proposed to drill directly in view of the farm’s communal dining room. Ludwig wrote letters, petitioned, forced public hearings, and discovered the provincial regulator cared little about landowners. After the oil company accidentally vented raw sour gas, Ludwig’s wife miscarried....
| Автор | Andrew Nikiforuk |
From her first assignment in 1998 to explore an increase in the number of missing women to the harrowing 2002 interrogation of convicted serial killer Robert Pickton, Lori Shenher tells a story of massive police failure—failure of the police to use the information about Pickton available to them, failure to understand the dark world of drug addiction and sex work, and failure to save more women from their killer.Shenher explains how police unwillingness to believe the women were missing...
| Автор | Lori Shenher |
A chronicle of family love, unspeakable loss, and the power of healingGinny Dennehy was living the dream: a good marriage, two wonderful teenagers, a fulfilling career. Life in Whistler, B.C., seemed tailor-made for her outgoing, athletic family of four. But in 2001, the world turned upside down when her son, Kelty, committed suicide at the age of seventeen, hanging himself in the loft of their family home.Lost in a fog of grief, Ginny found the strength to go on. She poured her energy into the...
| Автор | Ginny Dennehy |
Charles Wilkins, then a university student, took a job as a gravedigger in a vast corporate cemetery in the east end of Toronto during the hazy summer of 1969. The bizarre-but-true events of that time-a midsummer gravediggers' strike, the unearthing of a victim of an unsolved murder, and a little illegal bone-shifting-play out among a Barnum-esque parade of mavericks and misfits in this macabre and hilarious memoir.Amid relentless gallows humor and the inevitable reminders of what it is,...
| Автор | Charles Wilkins L. |
On a sunny fall day in 1983, Patricia Van Tighem and her husband, Trevor Jang, were brutally attacked by a bear while hiking in the Canadian Rockies. Jang was severely hurt, but Van Tighem suffered even more serious, disfiguring injuries, and that she survived was a miracle.A gifted writer, Van Tighem crafted a vivid and startling account of the attack. But her recovery was just as disturbing. Her numerous reconstructive surgeries were painful; her facial disfigurement, including the loss of an...
| Автор | Patricia Van Tighem |
Some NHL goalies are great and others are intriguing, but a dozen of them are legends because they're both. In Between the Pipes, Randi Druzin profiles these athletes, revealing the traits that make each one unique.Gump Worsley defied the laws of biomechanics by being nimble despite having a cabbage-shaped body. He was also one of the funniest men ever to start in goal. Glenn Hall used to wrestle with a trainer in the dressing room before games and Jacques Plante refused to stay at a...
| Автор | Randi Druzin |
Part recovery narrative and part love story, interwoven with the latest research on the brain, Fallen describes the aftermath of a life-threatening brain and spinal cord injury.In 2008, Simon Paradis stepped backward on the scaffolding where he was doing construction work and fell two stories to the hard stone tile below. Landing on his back, head, and spine, he suffered a severe brain and spinal cord injury. Doctors warned his wife, Kara Stanley, that he probably would not survive, and that...
| Автор | Kara Stanley |
Psychotherapist Michael Pond is no stranger to the devastating consequences of alcoholism. He has helped hundreds of people conquer their addictions, but this knowledge did not prevent his own near-demise. In this riveting memoir, he recounts how he lost his practice, his home, and his family—all because of his drinking. After scores of visits to the ER, a tour of hellish recovery homes, a stint in intensive care for end-stage alcoholism, and jail, Pond devised his own personal plan for...
| Автор | Michael Pond |
For thirty years, Brian Brett shared his office and his life with Tuco, a remarkable parrot given to asking such questions as “Whaddya know?” and announcing “Party time!” when guests showed up at Brett’s farm. Although Brett bought Tuco on a whim as a pet, he gradually realizes the enormous obligation he has to the bird and learns that the parrot is a lot more complex than he thought. Simultaneously a biography of this singular bird and a history...
| Автор | Brian Brett |
In this marriage of memoir and manifesto, Elizabeth May reflects on her extraordinary life and the people and experiences that have formed her and informed her beliefs about democracy, climate change, and other crucial issues facing Canadians. The book traces her development from child activist who warned other children not to eat snow because it contained Strontium 90 to waitress and cook on Cape Breton Island to law student, lawyer, and environmentalist and finally to leader of the Green Party...
| Автор | Elizabeth May |
Kevin Chong has grand plans. He draws up a to-do list of major milestones that will give him the life he always wanted—and the life that will inspire awe and envy in his friends. Things like settling down and starting a family; learning a foreign language; getting a tattoo. But these grand plans go out the window when Chong makes an unconventional decision: he's going to buy a racehorse. Not the whole thing—he'll become part—owner of the horse. Just...
| Автор | Kevin Chong |
Take the Torch is a compelling memoir from one of BC’s most widely accomplished and animated politicians, Ian Waddell, QC. Waddell takes us on a journey through his life and career as a storefront lawyer, an NDP Member of Parliament, a Minister of Culture, a writer, a teacher, a film producer and more—delivering a smart, humorous, endearing and impossible-to-forget exploration of public life. Following up Donna Macdonald’s Surviving City Hall , Take the Torch is Nightwood’s second...
| Автор | Ian Waddell |
Anticipating fame and wealth, Captain John Voss set out from Victoria, BC, in 1901, seeking to claim the world record for the smallest vessel ever to circumnavigate the globe. For the journey, he procured an authentic dugout cedar canoe from an Indigenous village on the east coast of Vancouver Island. For three years Voss and the Tilikum , aided by a rotating cast of characters, visited Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Brazil and finally England, weathering heavy gales at sea and...
| Автор | John M. MacFarlane |
When the dust settled after the restructuring of the Canadian forest industry at the beginning of the 21st century and many of the major players such as MacMillan Bloedel, Doman Industries and Slocan Forest Products vanished into memory, one feisty player remained standing, stronger than ever: Terminal Forest Products. Remarkably, Terminal was privately owned by one man, a Sikh immigrant and former labourer named Asa Singh Johal. Who was he and how did he succeed so brilliantly in a field where...
| Автор | Jinder Oujla-Chalmers |
Up until the 1930s, Refuge Cove was one of the most remote places on the West Coast of Vancouver Island. Tucked into Clayoquot Sound, it sheltered boats from Pacific storms and its hot springs provided welcome relief for anyone waiting for bad weather to pass. In spite of its natural wonders, the cove was undeveloped and transiently populated. But everything changed in 1933, when supply boat operator Ivan Clarke saw a business opportunity. At the age of thirty, Clarke pre-empted land in Refuge...
| Автор | Michael Kaehn |
Of the settlers, prospectors, trappers, mountaineers and loggers who came to British Columbia’s remote Bute Inlet between the 1890s and the 1940s, few remained long. August Schnarr, however, trapped far up the Homathko and Southgate Rivers and logged the inlet shores from 1910 until the 1960s. An adventurous photographer, August strapped his Kodak camera to his suspenders and captured his mountain climbing, upriver treks and family homestead. His photo collection is a diary of fifty years of an...
| Автор | Judith Williams |
Sid Ryan has long been a major, widely recognized figure in Canada’s union movement. Ryan’s own story, from his childhood in Ireland to his experience as an immigrant, is told with rare insight and affection. The inside story of the unions’ confrontation with the Rae government over the Social Contract offers fresh insight into a tense historical moment. Ryan gives a shocking perspective regarding the relationships among unions and the politics practised by movement leaders. The concluding...
| Автор | Sid Ryan |
A therapist's story of complex trauma and her remarkable journey to recovery. When Connie Greshner was eight years old, her father walked into a bar in Ponoka, Alberta, and shot her mother. So began a young life defined by trauma. From Catholic boarding school in Kansas to the streets of the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver, Connie travelled in pursuit of acceptance and belonging. Grief, confusion, and shame manifested as depression, addiction, and promiscuity. Branded chronically suicidal...
| Автор | Connie Greshner |