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. The two women exchanged more than two hundred letters that reflected their lively interest in literature, theology, and politics, and explored ideas about identity, belonging, and home in the context of cross-cultural challenges. Two decades later, with Geeske increasingly beset by Alzheimer’s disease, Kathleen returned to the letters, where she rediscovered the evocative image of a tiny, bright meadow bird perched precariously on a blade of elephant grass. That image – of simultaneous tension, fragility, power, and resilience – sustained her over the years that she used the letters as memory prompts in a larger strategy to keep her intellectually gifted mother alive.Deftly woven of excerpts from their correspondence, conversations, journal entries, and email updates, Bird-Bent Grass is a complex and moving exploration of memory, illness, and immigration; friendship, conflict, resilience, and forgiveness; cross-cultural communication, the ethics of international development, and letter-writing as a technology of intimacy. Throughout, it reflects on the imperative and fleeting business of being alive and loving others while they’re ours to hold.

A high-flying, action-packed tale for readers of all ages about the adventurous life of a Canadian icon. William Avery Bishop survived more than 170 air battles during World War I and was given official credit for shooting down seventy-two German aircraft. Experts on aerial warfare acknowledge that his relentless air fighting techniques and skills as a brilliant individualist and marksman were unique and his record unsurpassed. He was the first man in British military history to receive the Victoria Cross, the Distinguished Service Order, and the Military Cross in one ceremony. This remarkably objective biography, written by Bishop's son, is a warm-hearted, entertaining, and often surprisingly outspoken account of the escapades and heroics of a man of great courage. Eddie Rickenbacker one said, "Richthofen usually waited for enemies to fly into his territory; Bishop was the raider, always seeking the enemy wherever he could be found ... I think he's the only man I ever met who was incapable of fear." Throughout his life Billy Bishop was something of an eccentric – a man of ebullient high spirits and feverish enthusiasm. As a boy in Owen Sound, Ontario, though, he had no aptitude for learning. His three years at the Royal Military College were disastrous – an epic of rules broken and discipline scorned. He often admitted that his special method of landing wrecked more planes than he shot down. In the days when fliers could rightly think themselves heroes for just having the courage to go up in the rickety plans, Billy Bishop won the respect of comrades and enemies alike. He was one of the new breed of warriors who met the deadly challenge of air combat and made the airplane a decisive military weapon.

When Billie Holiday stepped into Columbia's studios in November 1933, it marked the beginning of what is arguably the most remarkable and influential career in 'twentieth-century popular music. Her voice weathered countless shifts in public taste, and new reincarnations of her continue to arrive, most recently in the form of singers like Amy Winehouse and Adele. Most of the writing on Holiday has focused on the tragic details of her life- her prostitution at the age of fourteen, her heroin addiction and alcoholism, her series of abusive relationships- or tried to correct the many fabrications of her autobiography. But now, Billie Holiday stays close to the music, to her performance style, and to the self she created and put into print, on record and on stage. Drawing on a vast amount of new material that has surfaced in the last decade, critically acclaimed jazz writer John Szwed considers how her life inflected her art, her influences, her uncanny voice and rhythmic genius, a number of her signature songs, and her legacy.

With a number-one album in multiple countries and over 53-million Instagram followers, Billie Eilish is a global star. She has collaborated with Justin Bieber and Khalid, headlined at Glastonbury and Coachella, and has appeared in Calvin Klein ad campaigns. In a short career, she has become an icon to Generation Z. Billie grew up in a close-knit family-her brother Finneas still writes and produces her songs-in Highland Park, a suburb of LA. Home-schooled and encouraged to express herself, she was a promising dancer until musical success came literally overnight in 2015. Ocean Eyes, a song uploaded to SoundCloud for her dance tutor, received a thousand plays in twenty-four hours. The thirteen-year-old's ethereal singing voice was intoxicating and the track went viral.But she was no one-hit-wonder; over the next year, Billie and Finneas produced a series of eclectic but equally bewitching tracks, such as Bellyache, Idontwannabeyouanymore, and My Boy, resulting in the Don't Smile at Me EP which broke the top twenty in over a dozen countries. Her new fans discovered an artist who, undaunted and even emboldened by her youth, had something to say about independence, veganism, mental health, body image, love, and the maelstrom of teenage life.This book follows her journey from singing in her bedroom to performing at massive arenas around the globe. It reveals the story behind the hits and explores what makes Billie Eilish the most extraordinary teenage star in the world.

2016 Ontario Historical Society Donald Grant Creighton Award — Winner A National Post Bestseller • The Hill Times: Best Books of 2016 • 2016 Speaker's Book Award — Shortlisted The first authorized biography of Bill Davis, the enigmatic Ontario premier who carried on a Tory dynasty, but was also a crucial Trudeau supporter. A biography of one of Ontario’s most important premiers, who, despite having been out of public life for more than thirty years, is remembered fondly by many as the father of the community college system, TVO, OISE, and was indispensable in repatriating the Canadian Constitution with an accompanying Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Before he became premier, Davis was perhaps the most important education minister in Ontario history, responsible for the creation of the community college system and TVOntario. As premier, he went on to lead Ontario through buoyant and recessionary economic times, leaving a legacy Ontarians continue to enjoy. Now 87, Davis still lives on Main Street in his beloved Brampton.

This is the story of an ordinary man who became an extraordinary hero. After he enlisted in the army's arduous new Airborne division, Dick Winters's natural combat leadership helped him rise through the ranks, but he was never far from his men. Decades later, Stephen E. Ambrose's Band of Brothers made him famous around the world.

The remarkable true story of the rise and fall of one of North America's most influential yet unknown publisher and aspirational politician. When George McCullagh bought The Globe and The Mail and Empire and merged them into the Globe and Mail, today still one of Canada's preeminent daily newspapers, the 31-year-old high school dropout had already made millions on the stock market after the Crash of 1929 and the construction of his glamorous suburban Toronto estate was just the beginning of the meteoric rise of a man widely expected to one day serve as the country's prime minister. But the self-made McCullagh had a dark side. Dogged by the bipolar disorder that destroyed his political ambitions and eventually killed him, the man who would be minister was all but written out of history, erased from the archives of his own newspaper, a loss so significant that journalist Robert Fulford has called McCullagh's biography "one of the great unwritten books in Canadian history"--until now. In Big Men Fear Me, award-winning journalist and historian Mark Bourrie tells the remarkable story of McCullagh's inspirational rise and devastating fall.

Veteran radio and television personality John Gallagher’s salacious, voracious, and dangerously delicious memoirs of a life lived on the edge in the midst of some of the world’s biggest celebrities. Long-time sportscaster John Gallagher has had close to four decades of hosting some of the top-rated radio and TV shows in Canada and, while he was at it, doing enough drugs to wipe out a small village. Along the way there was plenty of drinking, cavorting, and gallivanting with some of the coolest, biggest, and baddest sports stars and Hollywood celebs around. In Big League Babble On, John spares no one, not even himself. Read about his nights boozing with the likes of Tony Curtis, Stevie Nicks, Colin Farrell, and Leafs head coach Pat Burns. Find out how partying with Gallagher saved Mark Wahlberg’s life. Or how he once came a little too close to Princess Di. And the time Muhammad Ali stole John’s Penthouse magazine … for the articles. Gallagher is a pop culture Cuisinart and a walking — but mostly talking — sports almanac. From hot tubbing with Wendel Clark to his friendship and falling-out with Robbie Alomar, Gallagher has met (and often partied with) all of the greats. This book is your backstage pass.