You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Becoming My Mother’s Daughter: A Story of Survival and Renewal tells the story of three generations of a Jewish Hungarian family whose fate has been inextricably bound up with the turbulent history of Europe, from the First World War through the Holocaust and the communist takeover after World War II, to the family’s dramatic escape and emmigration to Canada. The emotional centre and narrative voice of the story belong to Eva, an artist, dreamer, and writer trying to work through her complex and deep relationship with her mother, whose portrait she cannot paint until she completes her journey through memory. The core of the book is Eva’s riveting recollection of the last months of Worl...
Annotation A critical inquiry into women's use of the memoir, a form that has often been dismissed as less significant than autobiography, less professional than the novel, and less intellectual than the essay. Buss (aka Margaret Clarke; English, U. of Calgary) argues that the memoir "bridges the typical strategies of historical and literary discourses in order to establish necessary connections between the private and the public, the personal and political ... The memoir is increasingly used (by women) to interrogate the private individual's relationship to a history and/or a culture from which she finds her experience of her self and her life excluded." Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).
Not the Whole Story is a compilation of sixteen stories narrated by single mothers in their own way and about their own lives. Each story is unique, but the same issues appear again and again. Abuse, parenting as single mothers, challenges in the labour market, mental health and addictions issues, a scarcity of quality childcare, immigration and status vulnerability, struggles with custody, and poverty—these factors, combined with a lack of support, contribute to their continued struggles. The themes that recur across stories illustrate that the issues the women face are not just about individual struggle; they demonstrate that major issues in Canada’s social system have been neglected i...
The Canadian Prairie has long been represented as a timeless and unchanging location, defined by settlement and landscape. Now, a new generation of writers and historians challenge that perception and argue, instead, that it is a region with an evolving culture and history. This collection of ten essays explores a more contemporary prairie identity, and reconfigures "the prairie" as a construct that is non-linear and diverse, responding to the impact of geographical, historical, and political currents. These writers explore the connections between document and imagination, between history and culture, and between geography and time.The subjects of the essays range widely: the non-linear stru...
Why does it seem as if everyone is writing memoirs, and particularly women? The current popularity of memoir verifies the common belief that we each have a story to tell. And we do...especially women. Memoirs are not only representations of women’s personal lives but also of their desire to repossess important parts of our culture, in which women’s stories have not mattered. Beginning with her own motivations for writing memoirs, Helen M. Buss examines the many kinds of memoir written by contemporary women: memoirs about growing up, memoirs about traumatic events, about relationships, about work. In writing memoirs, these women publicly assert that their lives have mattered. They reshape...
Scratching River braids the voices of mother, brother, sister, ancestor, and river to create a story about environmental, personal, and collective healing. This memoir revolves around a search for home for the author’s older brother, who is both autistic and schizophrenic, and an unexpected emotional journey that led to acceptance, understanding and, ultimately, reconciliation. Michelle Porter brings together the oral history of a Métis ancestor, studies of river morphology, and news clippings about abuse her older brother endured at a rural Alberta group home to tell a tale about love, survival, and hope. This book is a voice in your ear, urging you to explore your own braided histories and relationships.
I Have a Story to Tell You is about Eastern European Jewish immigrants living in Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg in the early twentieth century. The stories encompass their travels and travails on leaving home and their struggles in the sweatshops and factories of the garment industry in Canada. Basing her work on extensive interviews, Seemah Berson recreates these immigrants’ stories about their lives in the Old Country and the hardship of finding work in Canada, and she tells how many of these newcomers ended up in the needle trades. Revealing a fervent sense of socialist ideology acquired in the crucible of the Russian Revolution, the stories tell of the influence of Jewish culture and traditions, of personal–and organized–fights against exploitation, and of struggles to establish unions for better working conditions. This book is a wonderful resource for teachers of Canadian, Jewish, and social history, as well as auto/biography and cultural studies. The simplicity of the language, transcribed from oral reports, makes this work accessible to anyone who enjoys a good story.
Canadian composer John Beckwith recounts his early days in Victoria, his studies in Toronto with Alberto Guerrero, his first compositions, and his later studies in Paris with the renowned Nadia Boulanger, of whom he offers a comprehensive personal view. In the memoir’s central chapters Beckwith describes his activities as a writer, university teacher, scholar, and administrator. Then, turning to his creative output, he considers his compositions for instrumental music, his four operas, choral music, and music for voice. A final chapter touches on his personal and family life and his travel adventures. For over sixty years John Beckwith has participated in national musical initiatives in mu...
Auto/biography in Canada: Critical Directions widens the field of auto/biography studies with its sophisticated multidisciplinary perspectives on the theory, criticism, and practice of self, community, and representation. Rather than considering autobiography and biography as discrete genres with definable properties, and rather than focusing on critical approaches, the essays explore auto/biography as a discourse about identity and representation in the context of numerous disciplinary shifts. Auto/biography in Canada looks at how life narratives are made in Canada . Originating from literary studies, history, and social work, the essays in this collection cover topics that range from queer...
This is the first collection of critical essays on the works of Dominican American author Julia Alvarez. A prolific writer of nearly two dozen books of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and children's literature, Alvarez has garnered numerous international accolades, including the impressive F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. She was one of only ten poets invited to write for President Obama's inauguration in 2009, and her In the Time of the Butterflies was selected as a National Endowment for the Arts "Big Read," putting her in the company of Mark Twain, Zora Neale Hurston, and Harper Lee. Yet, despite Alvarez's commercial success and flourishing critic...