Champagne and Meatballs
Adventures of a Canadian Communist
Bert Whyte’s fascinating memoir of life as an underground historical rogue who spent 40 years navigating left-wing politics and communism in Canada.
Negotiating the Numbered Treaties
An Intellectual and Political History of Alexander Morris
The story of the prairie treaties and Alexander Morris, a man who embraced a larger concept of nationhood and the role of First Nations in the expansion of Canada.
Kiss the kids for dad, Don’t forget to write
The Wartime Letters of George Timmins, 1916-18
The letters of Lance-Corporal George Timmins, who served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force on the Western Front, offer a rare glimpse into the life and relationships, at home and abroad, of an ordinary Canadian soldier.
Undelivered Letters to Hudson's Bay Company Men on the Northwest Coast of America, 1830-57
This collection of correspondence – letters sent to Hudson's Bay Company men by their families and loved ones but never delivered – offers a rare and human history of ordinary people, many of whom were the early settlers of the Pacific Northwest.
The Soldiers' General
Bert Hoffmeister at War
A complex, analytical yet accessible portrait of Bert Hoffmeister, who won more awards than any Canadian officer in the Second World War.
Don't Let the Sun Step Over You
When the Apache wars ended in the late nineteenth century, a harsh and harrowing time began for the Western Apache people. Living under the authority of nervous Indian agents, pitiless government-school officials, and menacing mounted police, they knew that resistance to American authority would be foolish. But some Apache families ...
Nobody's Son
Here's a story about a family that comes from Tijuana and settles into the 'hood, hoping for the American Dream.
. . . I'm not saying it's our story. I'm not saying it isn't. It might be yours. "How do you tell a story that cannot be told?" writes Luis Alberto Urrea in this potent memoir of a childhood divided. Born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and an Anglo mother from Staten Island, Urrea moved to San Diego when he was three. His childhood was a mix of opposites, a clash of cultures and languages. In prose that seethes with energy and crackles with dark humor, Urrea tells a story that is both troubling and wildly entertaining.
Urrea endured violence and fear in the black and Mexican barrio of his youth. But the true battlefield was inside his home, where his parents waged daily war over their son's ethnicity. "You are not a Mexican!" his mother once screamed at him. "Why can't you be called Louis instead of Luis?" He suffers disease and abuse and he learns brutal lessons about machismo. But there are gentler moments as well: a simple interlude with his father, sitting on the back of a bakery truck; witnessing the ultimate gesture of tenderness between the godparents who taught him the magical power of love.
"I am nobody's son. I am everybody's brother," writes Urrea. His story is unique, but it is not unlike thousands of other stories being played out across the United States, stories of other Americans who have waged warboth in the political arena and in their own homesto claim their own personal and cultural identity. It is a story of what it means to belong to a nation that is sometimes painfully multicultural, where even the language both separates and unites us. Brutally honest and deeply moving, Nobody's Son is a testament to the borders that divide us all.
The Vancouver Island Letters of Edmund Hope Verney
1862-65
This previously unknown collection of letters lets us experience colonial British Columbia through the eyes of a young British naval officer who spent three years on Vancouver Island commanding a Royal Navy gunboat during the Cariboo gold rush.
Ships and Memories
Merchant Seafarers in Canada's Age of Steam
An account of life on steamships, this book draws on the experiences of seafarers in peace and war and during the depression.