Memoir & Biography

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This Is Not My Life: A Memoir of Love, Prison, and Other Complications

I once managed a local museum where, occasionally, individuals charged with misdemeanours would work off their community service hours. One of them, call her “Wanda,” was an intelligent and capable single mother. She and I ... Read More »

February 17, 2016 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

By Chance Alone

By Max Eisen

For the better part of 30 years, Holocaust survivor Max Eisen has been on a mission to educate people through volunteer speaking engagements. Sharing his first-hand experiences of the year he was incarcerated in Nazi ... Read More »

February 1, 2016 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

Memory Serves: Oratories

By Lee Maracle

Lee Maracle’s most recent book is a collection of oratories delivered and performed by the author over a 20-year period. In indigenous culture, oratories are speeches given to transmit knowledge and values preserved through generations. Maracle’s ... Read More »

January 6, 2016 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

Alone Against the North: An Expedition into the Unknown

By Adam Shoalts

In his recent biography of Roald Amundsen, The Last Viking, Stephen R. Bown describes the Norwegian explorer’s awareness of living at a time when the window for achieving greatness in an expeditionary context was closing. ... Read More »

December 14, 2015 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography, Science, Technology & Environment

★ Sixty: A Diary of My Sixty-first Year

By Ian Brown

At 50, we can indulge the fiction that we are still middle-aged. By 60, that’s impossible, unless delusion prevails. Toronto writer Ian Brown is the opposite of delusional as he records the events of his ... Read More »

November 12, 2015 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

Unflinching: The Making of a Canadian Sniper

By Jody Mitic

In 2007, at the age of 30, former soldier Jody Mitic lost both his feet after stepping on a Taliban land mine in Afghanistan. He gave his body – and very nearly his life – ... Read More »

November 10, 2015 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

A Celtic Temperament: Robertson Davies as Diarist

By Jennifer Surridge (ed.); Ramsay Derry (ed.)

Robertson Davies kept multiple diaries simultaneously. There was a sometimes cryptic private one, and a “big” one that was both narrative and contemplative. Then there were separate ones concerning his life in the theatre, his ... Read More »

November 9, 2015 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

Road Trip Rwanda: A Journey into the New Heart of Africa

By Will Ferguson

The 1994 Rwandan genocide was a particularly gruesome affair, even by 20th century standards of mass extermination. The Hutu-led government orchestrated the slaughter of as many as a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus, with most ... Read More »

October 29, 2015 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

A Life with Words: A Writer’s Memoir

By Richard B. Wright

Richard B. Wright’s eloquent memoir of his life as a novelist and teacher is written in the third-person singular. This gives it a big advantage. By referring to himself as “he” rather than “I,” the ... Read More »

October 15, 2015 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography

Tuco: The Parrot, the Others, and a Scattershot World

By Brian Brett

The pet memoir is an unfairly maligned genre, a fact only emphasized by the reactions I received when I said I was really enjoying a book about a man and his parrot. We tend to ... Read More »

October 1, 2015 | Filed under: Memoir & Biography