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By Off, Carol2017., General, Random House Canada Call No: Bio O32a Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "The gripping story of a family's desperate attempts to escape Afghan warlords, Taliban oppression, and the persecutions of refugee life, in hopes that both their sons and their daughters could dare to dream of peace and opportunity. And behind the scenes, there are the unflagging efforts of one of Canada's most respected journalists, CBC Radio's Carol Off, working assiduously to help the family achieve freedom and a promising future. In 2002, Carol Off and a CBC TV crew encountered an Afghan man with a story to tell. Asad Aryubwal became key to their documentary on the terrible power of thuggish warlords who were working arm in arm with Americans and NATO troops. When Asad publicly exposed the deeds of one particular warlord, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, it set off a chain of events from which there was no turning back. Asad, his wife, Mobina, and their five children had to flee their home. Their only chance for a peaceful life was to emigrate - yet year after year of agonizing limbo would ensue as they were thwarted by a Byzantine international bureaucracy and the decidedly unwelcoming policies of Stephen Harper's government. One family's journey and fraught attempts to immigrate to a safe place, and what happens when a journalist becomes deeply involved with the people in her story and is unable to leave them behind. Carol Off is the host of CBC Radio's As It Happens, the network's flagship evening radio programme"--Provided by publisher.
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By Scully, Johnc2007., Fitzhenry & Whiteside Call No: 070.43 S437a Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library
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2005., Random House of Canada Call No: Bio P348p Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: The star of the film "Kandahar" recalls her childhood and the friendship that sustained her when the Russians invaded Kabul, imprisoning her father and turning the country into a battleground. A story of a land occupied and the resilience of its people.
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By Zolf, Larryc2010., Exile Editions Call No: Bio Z86d Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: In his memoir, Larry Zolf the most personal of journalists, the most astute of astute observers writes like he talks: an amazing combination of amiable anecdotes, one-liners, sharp-eyed historical reporting, open confession, and caustic puns.
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-- Matthew Halton, Canada's voice at war[2014], Adult, McClelland & Stewart Call No: Bio H197h Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "As senior war correspondent for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation during the Second World War, Matthew Halton reported from the front lines in Italy and Northwest Europe and became "the voice of Canada at war." His broadcasts chronicled the victories and losses of Canadian soldiers. He was born in Pincher Creek, Alberta, in 1904. A year after joining the Toronto Daily Star as a cub reporter, he was in Berlin writing about Adolf Hitler's seizure of power and, long before most other correspondents, wrote a prophetic series of warnings about the Nazi regime. For more than two decades, he witnessed first-hand the major political and military events of the era. He covered Europe's drift to disaster, including the breakdown of the League of Nations, the Spanish Civil War, the sellout to Fascism at Munich, and the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia. Along the way he interviewed Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Hermann Goering, Neville Chamberlain, Charles de Gaulle, Mahatma Gandhi, and dozens of others who shaped the history of the century. Former CBC correspondent David Halton, Matthew's son, also examines his father's often tumultuous personal life. He unravels the many paradoxes of his personality: the war correspondent who loathed bloodshed yet became addicted to the thrill of battle; the loner who thrived in good company; and, in some ways most puzzling of all, the womanizer with a deep and enduring love for his wife. A captivating portrait of one of Canada's most accomplished journalists"--Provided by publisher.
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2016., Adult, House of Anansi Press Call No: Bio D684f Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: Denise Donlon chronicles her early days at MuchMusic during a time when music videos became a medium that would change pop music and popular culture forever. She became the first female president of Sony Music Canada, where she navigated the crisis in the music industry with the rise of Napster and the new digital revolution. She then joined CBC English Radio as General Manager and Executive Director when the corporation absorbed funding cutbacks, leading to mass reductions in people and programming and leaving a shadow over the future of Canada's national public broadcaster. She shares colourful and entertaining stories of growing up tall, flat, and bullied in east Scarborough. A candid memoir of one woman's journey, navigating corporate culture with integrity, responsibility, and an irrepressible passion to be a force for good.
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-- Hello! I want to die, please fix me.2019., Adult, Random House Canada Call No: Bio P214h Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "Frank, eye-opening, heartbreaking and disarmingly funny, Anna Mehler Paperny is a fabulous, vibrant new voice. In her galvanizing memoir-meets-exposé, writing with riveting vitality and intelligence about surviving suicide and the ways we try to talk about and treat depression, she has discovered what eludes many: a way to reach out to us to talk about one of the increasingly concerning medical issues today. An energetic tour-de-force of empathy and desire for understanding, Hello! I Want to Die, Please Fix Me is compelling reading, as well as essential for anyone curious to understand how it feels to be depressed, or whose life, family or friends has been touched by depression. Anna Mehler Paperny is a young journalist from Toronto--a smart, passionate reporter who has contributed to the Toronto Star, Global News, The Globe and Mail, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and just about every major news outlet you can think of. In her early-twenties, while thriving in her dream job, enjoying warm familial support and a strong social network of friends and colleagues, Anna found herself trapped by feelings of failure and despair. In September 2011, she made her first attempt to kill herself by ingesting a deadly mix of sleeping pills and antifreeze, landing her in the ICU followed by weeks of enforced detention in two different big-city psych wards. This was Anna's entry point into the labyrinthine psychiatric care system--one that is nominally responsible for providing the best reasonable care to millions of Canadians suffering from severe, life-threatening mental illness. Her first stay in the psych ward--at times horrifying, other times boring, hilarious and absurd--was just the beginning of a long recovery and a journey towards understanding, first-hand, the myriad ways our systems and medical practitioners treat--and fail to treat--a disease that afflicts a full fifth of the population. While trying to be a good patient, Anna cannot help but turn her intrepid journalist's eye on the world around her--in the psych ward, as an outpatient, as a survivor enduring the gruelling ordeal of facing concerned family, friends and co-workers; of finding the right meds, the right therapist; of staying insured and employed. Anna's personal account of life in the shadow of self-obliteration explores in searing detail her individual experience of depression, close encounters with fatal self-harm, and the trials and errors of treatment. It is at the same time an illuminating, profound, and utterly original analysis of how we approach mental illness in North America; the novel hypotheses specialists are putting forward to tackle it; and the truth about how primitive our methods of healing sick brains still are."--Provided by publisher.
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c2013., Scribner Call No: Bio L742c Edition: 1st Scribner hardcover ed. Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: The dramatic and redemptive memoir of a woman whose curiosity led her to the worldœs most beautiful and remote places, its most imperiled and perilous countries, and then into fifteen months of harrowing captivityan exquisitely written story of courage, resilience, and graceAs a child, Amanda Lindhout escaped a violent household by paging through issues of National Geographic and imagining herself in its exotic locales. At the age of nineteen, working as a cocktail waitress in Calgary, Alberta, she began saving her tips so she could travel the globe. Aspiring to understand the world and live a significant life, she backpacked through Latin America, Laos, Bangladesh, and India, and emboldened by each adventure, went on to Sudan, Syria, and Pakistan. In war-ridden Afghanistan and Iraq she carved out a fledgling career as a television reporter. And then, in August 2008, she traveled to Somaliathe most dangerous place on earth.· On her fourth day, she was abducted by a group of masked men along a dusty road.Held hostage for 460 days, Amanda converts to Islam as a survival tactic, receives wife lessons· from one of her captors, and risks a daring escape. Moved between a series of abandoned houses in the desert, she survives on memoryevery lush detail of the world she experienced in her life before captivityand on strategy, fortitude, and hope. When she is most desperate, she visits a house in the sky, high above the woman kept in chains, in the dark, being tortured.Vivid and suspenseful, as artfully written as the finest novel, A House in the Sky is the searingly intimate story of an intrepid young woman and her search for compassion in the face of unimaginable adversity.
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2018., General, Alfred A. Knopf Canada Call No: Bio H314l Availability:1 of 1 At Your Library Summary Note: "A transcendent memoir about travelling wildly out of bounds on the fabled Silk Road. As a teenager, Kate Harris realized that the career she most craved, that of a generalist explorer, equal parts swashbuckler and metaphysician, with a flair for basic science and endless slogging, had gone extinct. From what she could tell of the world from small-town Ontario, the likes of Marco Polo and Magellan had mapped the whole earth. So she looked beyond this planet, vowing to become a scientist and go to Mars. Well along this path, Harris set off by bicycle down a short section of the fabled Silk Road with her childhood friend Mel Yule. This trip was just a simulacrum of exploration, she thought, not the thing itself, a little adventure to pass the time until she could launch for outer space. But somewhere in between sneaking illegally across Tibet, studying the history of science and exploration at Oxford, and staring down a microscope for a doctorate at MIT, she realized that an explorer, in any day and age, is by definition the kind of person who refuses to live between the lines. Forget charting maps, naming peaks, leaving footprints on another planet: what she yearned for was the feeling of soaring completely out of bounds. And where she'd felt that most intensely was on a bicycle, on a bygone trading route. So Harris quit the laboratory and hit the Silk Road again with Yule, this time determined to bike it from beginning to end. A travel account at once exuberant and meditative, wry and rapturous, and above all full of hope, exploring the nature of limits and the wildness of the self that, like our planet, can never be fully mapped. Weaving adventure and deep reflection with the history of science and exploration, the author celebrates our connection as humans to the natural world, and ultimately to each other, a belonging that transcends any fences or stories that may divide us. Journalist Kate Harris lives in a log cabin in Altin, British Columbia"--Provided by publisher.
