Showing results by publisher "McGill-Queen’s University Press" in All Categories

Two Solitudes is the story of two peoples within one nation, each with its ideas of what a nation should be. Set in WWI-era Quebec, MacLennan focuses on two individuals whose love increases the prejudices that surround them until they discover that “love consists in this, that two solitudes protect, and touch and greet each other”.

George and Catherine Stewart share not only the burden of Catherine's heart disease, which could cause her death at any time, but the memory of Jerome Martell, her first husband and George's closest friend. Martel, a brilliant doctor passionately concerned with social justice, is presumed to have died in a Nazi prison camp. His sudden return to Montreal precipitates the central crisis of the novel.

In the autumn of 1915 Will Bird was working on a farm in Saskatchewan when the ghost of his brother Stephen, killed by German mines in France, appeared before him in uniform. Rattled, Bird rushed home to Nova Scotia and enlisted in the army to take his dead brother's place. And We Go On is a remarkable and harrowing memoir of his two years in the trenches of the Western Front, from October 1916 until the Armistice.

Before discovering native healing methods, Herb Nabigon could not imagine a life without alcohol. His powerful autobiography, The Hollow Tree, tells the story of his struggle to overcome addiction with the help of the spiritual teachings and brotherly love of his elders. Nabigon had spent much of his life wrestling with self-destructive impulses, feelings of inferiority and resentment, and alcohol abuse when Eddie Bellerose, an Elder, introduced him to the ancient Cree teachings.

The Precipice is the sweeping story of Lucy Cameron, a young woman who seems destined to live and die in small-town Ontario. Into this place of monotony and petty incidents, of spiteful gossip and rigid moralism, appears Stephen Lassiter. Stephen is a Princeton-educated engineer from a wealthy New York family and Lucy's antithesis. Despite the chasm of their differences, they fall in love, marry, and begin life together in New York during the distressing years of the Second World War. It is a life that will nearly break Lucy in heart and spirit.

Dan Ainslie, a brilliant doctor working with the miners of his native Cape Breton Island, is forty-two and deeply in love with his wife. Longing for the son he can never have, he comes to love the young Alan MacNeil, whose father deserted him and his mother several years before. Alan's father's return brings tragedy to those around him.

By addressing the perennial human issues at the heart of witchcraft - construction of enmity and intertwined fate - these narrative accounts also illuminate older witch beliefs revealed in witchcraft trial documents. Making Witches shows that in storytelling communities with a rich legacy of witch lore, witch tradition has endured well into the twentieth century.

In the 1930s, Chief William Berens shared with anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell a remarkable history of his life, as well as many personal and dream experiences that held special significance for him. Most of this material has never been published. Because the elderly chief wanted his visitor to understand the Ojibwe world, and because Hallowell was deeply interested in his subject matter and was such a good listener, Berens freely related his dreams and other stories about encounters with powerful beings.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, whaling vessels plied their trade in the waters off the Eastern Arctic of North America. This trade has, until now, been documented solely from the perspective of the whalers. Here, finally, is a rich view from from the perspective of the Inuit, who welcomed the whalers and served on their crews.

In Voices from Hudson Bay Cree elders recall the daily lives and experiences of the men and women who lived and worked at the Hudson’s Bay Company post at York Factory in Manitoba. Their stories, their memories of family, community, and daily life, define their past and provide insights into a way of life that has largely disappeared in northern Canada. The era the elders describe, from the end of World War I to the closing of York Factory in 1957, saw dramatic changes—both positive and negative—to Indigenous life in the North.

As he travels through the North, Wilson gets beneath the political surface to portray both the tragedy and comedy of everyday life in the Protestant and Catholic communities. Aware of the polarized image that each side has of the other, he emphasizes the importance of finding common ground and of asserting the middle against the extremes. Just as traditional Irish music is characterized by ornamentations and elaborations on a melodic theme, Ireland, a Bicycle, and a Tin Whistle is full of variations and wanderings on the theme of the trip itself.

In this unique and exhilarating autobiography, Allan Jones - Canada’s first blind diplomat - vividly describes how an untreatable eye disease slowly decimated his visual world, most challengingly during his postings in Tokyo and New Delhi, and how he discovered and took to heart the revelatory Indian philosophy that changed his life.

In the 1980s, the Bureaucracy eliminated all knowledge of the past in the wake of a nuclear holocaust. In 2030, André Gervais discovers two metal boxes containing manuscripts, diaries, and other personal papers that have somehow survived and asks an old man, John Wellfleet, to use these documents to discover the past. In doing so, Wellfleet learns the truth about two relatives.

Before Betty Friedan coined the term feminine mystique, The Torontonians told a classic feminist story of suburban ennui and existential self-discovery, tracing a detailed portrait of femininity in the 1950s through the eyes of its perceptive and thoughtful heroine. The book is also a unique contemporary meditation on community and social ties from a time when Canada's major cities were just beginning to spread out into suburban sprawl.

In Flora!, co-authored by Geoffrey Stevens, the politician and humanitarian Flora Isabel MacDonald tells her amazing journey, from her childhood in Cape Breton through her years in backroom politics and elected office, ending with her exceptional humanitarian work in war-torn Afghanistan and other developing countries.

At once moving and lyrical, The Accidental Indies is a tale in which we join Christopher Columbus on a fantastical voyage through western seas and Western imagination. Robert Finley imagines, sings, charts, and paints the story of Columbus' problematic 1492 expedition to the Caribbean, creating a world that is as vivid and compelling as the explorer's own voyage to the misnamed "Indies".

Alan Ainslie is an able and dedicated man high in the government. Daniel Ainslie, his son, is a member of an explosive movement impelled by the naive rebelliousness of the New Left. Hugh MacLennan weaves a complex and story of two generations in conflict. Originally published in 1967, Return of the Sphinx is something of a sequel to the more optimistic Two Solitudes and reflects MacLennan's disenchantment with the world in general and the apparently intractable French-English debate in Canada.

Tyendinaga Tales is a collection of previously unrecorded Mohawk folktales gathered from residents of the Tyendinaga Indian Reserve near Bellville, Ontario. The folktales are told infrequently on the reserve and are in danger of disappearing completely.

Tales for an Unknown City is a vibrant selection of almost fifty stories from among the many told at One Thousand and One Friday Nights of Storytelling, a weekly open gathering in Toronto begun by Dan Yashinsky in 1978 and still going strong. There are tales from Canada and many other parts of the world, each followed by a brief word from the teller, giving us the flavour of the “Friday Nights.”

Donald Savoie a grandi dans un petit village acadien et est devenu un auteur et un universitaire accompli. Ses livres ont eu un effet profond sur les politiques publiques du Canada et sur l'administration du pays. Moi, je suis de Bouctouche n'est pas seulement l'histoire de Savoie lui-même, mais aussi une histoire qui porte sur le Canada, le peuple acadien et l'évolution du Canada français.