Search:

Life. love. beauty / by Allen, Keegan,1989-; Allen, Keegan,1989-Photographs.;
"Keegan Allen is the international breakout star of ABC Family's hit television series, Pretty Little Liars. A gifted photographer and writer--and a dazzling film, television, and stage actor now counting millions of fans across the globe--Keegan Allen brings tremendous talent and energy to his first publishing project. Keegan tells a unique story with his photographs. On one hand, the book is a beautifully candid view into the glamour and timelessness of Hollywood, a mysterious yet wildly alluring place. One the other hand, it is a blissfully unassuming portrait of ordinary life-- the unknown young woman gazing dreamily from the balcony of her hotel room, or the old woman who walks the same street every morning in her pink bathrobe, just to stop and talk to a passerby. Through his own stunning photography and captivating prose and poetry, life.love.beauty chronicles the author's life growing up just off the Sunset Strip, coming into his own as a young aspiring actor, looking for love and understanding, negotiating the seductions and disappointments of Hollywood, landing a plum role in a hit television series, encountering and embracing his fans, traveling the globe to promote his work, and striving to stay connected to his closest friends and loved ones"--Provided by publisher.
Subjects: Allen, Keegan, 1989-; Portrait photography;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

Hope Blooms : plant a seed, harvest a dream / by Wade, Mamadou,1997-author.;
"There is an old saying that it takes a village to raise a child, but Jessie Jollymore has experienced through the youth of Hope Blooms, an inner city initiative she founded that engages at-risk youth, that sometimes it takes the children to raise the village. A dietitian who worked in inner city health for 15 years, Jollymore witnessed the challenges people face every day with food security, isolation, discrimination, and poverty. An idea bloomed of creating sustainable, youth-driven micro-economies: growing local food systems, growing social enterprises, and mentoring youth to become leaders of change. This led to over 50 youth ages 6 to 18 leading the way in growing over 3,000 pounds of organic produce yearly for their community, building innovative outdoor classrooms, and building a successful Fresh Herb Dressing social enterprise, with 100% of proceeds going toward growing food, and scholarships for youth. In this inspiring, vibrant book, the youth behind Hope Blooms tell the story of the social enterprise they built from the soil up, the struggles of "creating something from nothing," successfully navigating the world of business, and ultimately building resilience and leaving behind a legacy. Includes youth's words of wisdom, stories, and poetry, and over 75 colour photos."--
Subjects: Recipes.; Mentoring; New business enterprises; Problem youth; Produce trade; Social entrepreneurship;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

My road from Damascus : a memoir / by Saeed, Jamal,1959-author.; Cobham, Catherine,translator.;
"Jamal Saeed arrived as a refugee in Canada in 2016. In his native Syria, as a young man, his writing pushed both social and political norms. For this reason, as well as his opposition to the regimes of the al-Assads, he was imprisoned on three occasions for a total of 12 years. In each instance, he was held without formal charge and without judicial process. My Road from Damascus not only tells the story of Saeed's severe years in Syria's most notorious military prisons but also his life during the country's dramatic changes. Saeed chronicles modern Syria from the 1950s right up to his escape to Canada in 2016, recounting its descent from a country of potential to a pawn of cynical and corrupt powers. It paints a picture of village life, his rebellion as a young Marxist and evolution into a free thinker, living in hiding as a teenager for 30 months while being hunted by the secret police, his youthful love affairs, how he survived his brutal prison years, his final release, and his family's harrowing escape to Canada. While many prison memoirs focus on the cruelty of incarceration, My Road from Damascus offers a tapestry of Saeed's whole life. It looks squarely at brutality, but also at beauty and poetry, hope and love."-- Provided by publisher.
Subjects: Biographies.; Autobiographies.; Saeed, Jamal, 1959-; Authors, Canadian; Political refugees; Political refugees;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

The weight of sand : my 450 days held hostage in the Sahara / by Blais, Edith,1984-author.; Grubisic, Katia,translator.; translation of:Blais, Edith,1984-Sablier.English.;
"An evocative, earth-shattering memoir about one woman's kidnapping and 450 days of captivity at the hands of terrorists-and her stunning escape to freedom. In January 2019, news outlets reported that a young Canadian woman and her Italian companion were presumed kidnapped while traveling in Africa's Sahel region, a haven for Islamic terrorists. Little was known about the pair's fate until they reappeared in Mali more than one year later, having apparently escaped their captors. Now, in The Weight of Sand, Edith Blais describes her harrowing hostage experience for the first time-and reveals that writing poetry in secret helped save her life. Edith recounts the prolonged terror of her months as a hostage, enduring violent sandstorms, constant relocations, grueling hunger strikes, extreme isolation, and the unpredictability of her captors. She also shares the luminous poems she wrote in secret with a borrowed pen, which became a lifeline of creativity and one of the few possessions she smuggled out in her escape, strapped to her leg under her clothes. A compelling descent into a strange, brutal universe, The Weight of Sand is ultimately a life-affirming book-a celebration of resilience by a woman who refused to have her humanity stripped away from her."--
Subjects: Biographies.; Autobiographies.; Blais, Edith, 1984-; Blais, Edith, 1984-; Hostages; Hostages; Kidnapping victims; Kidnapping victims; Terrorism;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

Split tooth / by Tagaq, Tanya1975-author.;
"From the internationally acclaimed Inuit throat singer who has dazzled and enthralled the world with music it had never heard before, a fierce, tender, heartbreaking story unlike anything you've ever read. Fact can be as strange as fiction. It can also be as dark, as violent, as rapturous. In the end, there may be no difference between them. A girl grows up in Nunavut in the 1970s. She knows joy, and friendship, and parents' love. She knows boredom, and listlessness, and bullying. She knows the tedium of the everyday world, and the raw, amoral power of the ice and sky, the seductive energy of the animal world. She knows the ravages of alcohol, and violence at the hands of those she should be able to trust. She sees the spirits that surround her, and the immense power that dwarfs all of us. When she becomes pregnant, she must navigate all this. Veering back and forth between the grittiest features of a small arctic town, the electrifying proximity of the world of animals, and ravishing world of myth, Tanya Tagaq explores a world where the distinctions between good and evil, animal and human, victim and transgressor, real and imagined lose their meaning, but the guiding power of love remains. Haunting, brooding, exhilarating, and tender all at once, Tagaq moves effortlessly between fiction and memoir, myth and reality, poetry and prose, and conjures a world and a heroine readers will never forget."--
Subjects: Psychological fiction.; Spirits;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

Sea wife / by Gaige, Amity,1972-author.;
Juliet is failing to juggle motherhood and her stalled-out dissertation on confessional poetry when her husband, Michael, informs her that he wants to leave his job and buy a sailboat. With their two kids--Sybil, age seven, and George, age two--Juliet and Michael set off for Panama, where their forty-four foot sailboat awaits them. The initial result is transformative; the marriage is given a gust of energy, Juliet emerges from her depression, and the children quickly embrace the joys of being feral children at sea. Despite the stresses of being novice sailors, the family learns to crew the boat together on the ever-changing sea. The vast horizons and isolated islands offer Juliet and Michael reprieve - until they are tested by the unforeseen. Sea Wife is told in gripping dual perspectives: Juliet's first person narration, after the journey, as she struggles to come to terms with the life-changing events that unfolded at sea, and Michael's captain's log, which provides a riveting, slow-motion account of these same inexorable events, a dialogue that reveals the fault lines created by personal history and political divisions. Sea Wife is a transporting novel about marriage, family and love in a time of unprecedented turmoil. It is unforgettable in its power and astonishingly perceptive in its portrayal of optimism, disillusionment, and survival.
Subjects: Domestic fiction.; Sea fiction.; Ocean travel; Families; Sailing;
Available copies: 0 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

The teacher of Auschwitz : a novel / by Holden, Wendy,1961-author.;
Includes bibliographical references."From the bestselling author of Born Survivors, a novel inspired by the powerful true story of a man who risked everything to protect children in Auschwitz. Fredy built a wall against suffering in their hearts ... Amid the brutality of the Holocaust, one bright spot shone inside the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz. In the shadows of the smokestacks was a wooden hut where children sang, staged plays, wrote poetry, and learned about the world. Within those four walls, brightly adorned with hand-painted cartoons, the youngest prisoners were kept vermin-free, received better food, and were even taught to imagine having full stomachs and a day without fear. Their guiding light was a twenty-seven-year-old gay, Jewish athlete: Fredy Hirsch. Being a teacher in a brutal concentration camp was no mean feat. Forced to beg senior SS officers for better provisions, Fredy risked his life every day to protect his beloved children from mortal danger. But time was running out for Fredy and the hundreds in his care. Could this kind, compassionate, and brave man find a way to teach them the one lesson they really needed to know: how to survive? The Teacher of Auschwitz shines a light on a truly remarkable individual and tells the inspiring story of how he fought to protect innocence and hope amid depravity and despair"--
Subjects: Historical fiction.; Biographical fiction.; Novels.; Hirsch, Fredy, 1916-1944; Auschwitz (Concentration camp); Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945); World War, 1939-1945;
Available copies: 0 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

Away from the dead / by Bergen, David,1957-author.;
Includes bibliographical references."Away from the Dead is set in the chaotic times of the Russian revolution, and traces the lives of various characters connected through love and family and loyalty. The novel follows the lives of a bookseller south of Kiev who deserts the army and writes poetry to his lover back home; an adopted Mennonite/Ukrainian peasant who runs with the anarchists only to discover that love and the planting of crops is preferable to killing; and in which a Mennonite estate owner steals a young mother's child. Bookseller Julius Lehn is drawn by his first wife into the patriarchal world of a Mennonite colony beside the Dnieper River, where he learns that pacifists can be as vicious as those who fight. After his wife dies, he gains affection for Inna, who has been cast away from her adopted family's estate, and is the sister of Sablin, the peasant who fights with the anarchists and discovers that violence is the domain of both the rich and the poor. By late 1919, Lehn's bookshop in Ekaterinoslav (modern day Dnipro) has been destroyed, and he has returned to be with Inna, whose child is gone, and with the colony under attack. The anarchists, the Bolsheviks, the Whites -- all come and go, each claiming freedom and justice. In a violent world with no end, Sablin and Lehn and Inna choose love, hoping that one can, against all odds, turn away from the dead"--
Subjects: Historical fiction.; Novels.; Anarchists; Booksellers and bookselling; Bookstore owners; Mennonites; War victims;
Available copies: 2 / Total copies: 2
unAPI

A history of my brief body : a memoir / by Belcourt, Billy-Ray,author.;
Includes bibliographical references."A profound meditation on queerness and indigeneity from the youngest ever winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize. Billy-Ray Belcourt begins A History of My Brief Body with a letter to his nohkom, his grandmother. "In the world-to-come," he writes, "everyone is loved by an NDN woman like you whose soft voice reminds us that we can stop running now." What follows is a charting of the distance between the world he was born into and the world he wants--a book as beautiful as it is devastating. Reflecting on his personal history, Belcourt maps his "un-Canadian and otherworldly" desire to love at all costs. We're taken to his birthplace in Joussard, in northern Alberta, where he and his twin brother come to exemplify opposites: hard and soft, masculine and feminine. To his high school graduation, where a hug from his father teaches him how to hold and be held. To a hotel room in Edmonton, where destroying the photographic evidence of his adolescence is an act of self-abolition and of making himself anew. Blending memoir and essay, and with a poet's delight in language, A History of My Brief Body is both a grappling with a legacy of trauma and a record of the joy that flourishes in spite of it."--
Subjects: Biographies.; Autobiographies.; Essays.; Belcourt, Billy-Ray.; Belcourt, Billy-Ray; Gay men; Sexual minorities; Indigenous peoples; Poets, Canadian (English);
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI

Unsolaced : along the way to all that is / by Ehrlich, Gretel,author.;
"From one of our most intrepid and eloquent adventurers of the natural world: an account of her search for home--experiences traveling in Greenland, the North Pole, the Channel Islands of California, Japan; of herding animals in Wyoming and Montana, and her embrace of the balance between the ordinary and celestial. In The Solace of Open Spaces, Gretel Ehrlich announced her aspiration as a writer to assign the physical qualities of the earth--weather, light and wind--to our contemporary age. In Unsolaced, thirty-five years later, Ehrlich shows us how these forces have shaped her experience and her understanding as she recalls the split-end strands of friendships spliced to new loves, houses built and lived in, conversations that shifted outlooks, as she tries to catch a glimpse of herself and the places she has sought as an anchor for her spirit. Ehrlich's quest is not for the comfort of permanence, but for transience, the need to be unsettled--to find stillness in the disquiet of engagement, to find in the landscapes of earth, ice, climate, genetic mayhem, and shifting canvas of memory--the possibility of longing. Ehrlich's voice is a unique amalgam of poetry and science, her attention held fast by the vegetation and animals she cares for, the lyric exaltation of insight that gives both her and her readers an intimation of a greater whole"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Autobiographies.; Ehrlich, Gretel; Ehrlich, Gretel; Authors, American;
Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1
unAPI