Quill and Quire

Preview

« Back to
Quillblog

Spring preview 2015: memoirs and culture

spring-38TRAVEL TO THAILAND

Jeffrey Alford, best known as the co-author of six international-travel cookbooks with Naomi Duguid, goes solo with Chicken in the Mango Tree: Food and Life in a Thai-Khmer Village (Douglas & McIntyre). Through personal stories, recipes, and descriptions of cultural and ecological traditions, Alford chronicles a year living in a rural village, where the locally sourced food is vastly different from the typical pad Thai takeout.

PERSONAL EDUCATION

spring-42Nobel Peace Prize nominee Sheila Watt-Cloutier’s survival tale, The Right to Be Cold (Allen Lane Canada), chronicles her life from a traditional Inuk community to the international political stage, while arguing that climate change is a global human rights  issue.


Before passing away in September, Winnipeg writer and Turnstone Press founder Wayne Tefs completed Dead Man on a Bike, which chronicles his relationship to cycling and its positive impact on his mental and physical health while receiving cancer treatment.


Retired fisher and trapper Joseph A. Merasty, with help from Saskatoon author David Carpenter, courageously recalls the details of his experiences as a young boy at St. Therese Residential School in Sturgeon Landing, Saskatchewan, in The Education of Augie Merasty (University of Regina Press).


In Shameless: The Fight for Adoption Disclosure and the Search for My Son (Between the Lines), former MPP Marilyn Churley recounts her journey from a young woman in rugged Labrador to a secretly pregnant woman in Ottawa’s 1960s counter-culture scene to a present-day adoption activist.


Sixty years after his arrest and deportation, Viennese Holocaust survivor Paul Schaffer recalls his teenage life and beyond in The Veiled Sun: From Auschwitz to New Beginnings (Véhicule Press), translated by Vivian Felsen.


Forget all you know about dogsledding before reading professional musher David Olesen’s Kinds of Winter: Four Solo Journeys by Dogteam in Canada’s Northwest Territories (Wilfrid Laurier University), which follows four years of winter travel from his remote homestead.


Tomson Highway adapts his Kreisel Memorial Lecture in A Tale of Monstrous Extravagance: Imagining Multilingualism (University of Alberta Press), a humourous tour through the languages and communities that have shaped the playwright, novelist, and musician as a person.


spring-43Folklorist (and daughter of novelist Jane) Emily Urquhart was inspired by the birth of her daughter, Sadie, to write Beyond the Pale: Folklore, Family and the Mystery of our Hidden Genes (HarperCollins Canada), a blend of memoir, travelogue, and reportage that explores cultural and historical views of albinism.

Q&Q’s spring preview covers books published between Jan. 1 and June 30, 2015 • All information (titles, prices, publication dates, etc.) was supplied by publishers and may have been tentative at Q&Q’s press time • Titles that have been listed in previous previews do not appear here

By

January 26th, 2015

12:51 pm

Category: Preview

Tagged with: Spring Preview, Spring Preview 2015