Click on the thumbnails to find out which non-fiction titles made an impact in 2013.
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- It sounds cliché, but Toronto poet Priscila Uppal's early life is the stuff of cinema: her mother fled to Brazil, abandoning her family months after eight-year-old Priscila's father suffered an accident that left him a quadriplegic. Twenty years later, a chance online encounter reunites Priscila with her film-obsessed mother in South America. (Spoiler alert: the meeting does not go well.) <br /> <p>An analysis of several films (including <i>Blade Runner</i> and <i>Mommie Dearest</i>) provides the book's structural framework and some occasional levity, but it's Uppal's careful, precise writing that elevates <i>Projection</i> from a typical family memoir. It's no surprise the book was nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award for Non-fiction and the Hilary Weston Prize for Non-fiction. <br /> </p><p>As Stacey May Fowles writes in her review: Uppal is an impeccable writer, deftly infusing complex scenes and emotions with power and weight. </p>
- <A HREF="http://www.quillandquire.com/reviews/review.cfm?review_id=8175">Projection: Encounters with My Runaway Mother by Priscila Uppal (Dundurn Press)</A>
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- 99007
- What a delight to engage with such a well-designed, thoughtful tribute to one of Canada's most important contemporary artists, Newfoundland painter and printmaker Christopher Pratt. Published in association with the Art Gallery of Sudbury, curator and writer Tom Smart distills decades of his personal and professional relationship with Pratt, covering everything from the painter's early influences and fascination with pre-Confederation Newfoundland to his affiliation with the school of Atlantic magic realism alongside Tom Forrestall and the late Alex Colville. <br /> <p>Firefly Books designer Linda Gustafson's airy layout and full-page colour spreads give Pratt's meticulous paintings and sketches enough space for close study and quiet contemplation. Smart doesn't overdo the text, either, wisely turning ample space over to 140 of Pratt's works, which feel luxurious and complete. </p>
- Christopher Pratt: Six Decades by Tom Smart (Firefly Books)
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- 99006
- A childhood in rural Alberta could not have prepared journalist Amanda Lindhout for the hell she and her former partner, photographer Nigel Brennan, faced during 15 months of captivity in Somalia. The experience would be sufficient to break most people; for Lindhout, it apparently had the opposite effect. <br /> <p>With co-writer Sara Corbett, Lindhout has produced one of the most potent, searing memoirs in recent memory: a story of brutality, rape, and degradation that also testifies to the author's astounding strength of character. In her starred review, Emily Donaldson writes, Somewhat remarkably, Lindhout has managed to forgive her captors, and considers the dire circumstances faced by millions of Somalis “ including her torturers “ to be the story's real tragedy. <br /> </p><p>Harrowing and heartbreaking, <i>A House in the Sky</i> is not an easy book to read, but in its clarity and bravery, it stands as one of the most powerful literary experiences of the year.</p>
- <A HREF="http://www.quillandquire.com/reviews/review.cfm?review_id=8160">A House in the Sky by Amanda Lindhout & Sara Corbett (Scribner/Simon & Schuster)</A>
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- 99005
- If history is a dream from which we are trying to awaken, then the history of Canada's treatment of its native population must qualify as a waking nightmare. In a year that saw Joseph Boyden recast our founding myths in postmodern, morally relative terms, University of Regina professor James Daschuk takes a much angrier tone in his blistering account of the depredations wrought by disease and famine in the years before and immediately following Confederation.<br /> <p>Daschuk retells the sad story of smallpox, tuberculosis, and famine among the plains natives, conditions exacerbated by the importation of European alcohol and a virtual monopoly on fur trading by the Hudson's Bay Company. But the most damning aspect of this hugely damning treatise is its exposure of how the official policies of John A. Macdonald's Conservative government simultaneously betrayed treaty obligations by essentially enforcing starvation on prairie natives, and created the conditions that resulted in the reservation system.<br /> </p><p><i>Clearing the Plains</i> is a highly readable, scorching indictment of official Canadian policies, the repercussions of which are still being felt today. One of the most infuriating books of the year, it is also one of the most important.</p>
- <A HREF="http://www.quillandquire.com/reviews/review.cfm?review_id=8153">Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life by James Daschuk (University of Regina Press)</A>
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