"Both charming and powerful, this memoir unfolds the story of a young girl born in Iran who eventually triumphs over sexism and abuse to become a successful woman and mother in Canada. The book opens with a dramatic account of a terrible accident that leaves a young child with burn scars all over her chest. This scarring has a profound effect on the girl's life. Yet, despite this accident, the narrator's childhood is rich and blessed in many ways....

Parry Sound, at the mouth of the Seguin River on Georgian Bay, traces its history back to William Beatty Jr. and the purchase of timber rights. From the heyday of lumbering, through mining ventures, the period of Prohibition, the arrival of the railway and the impact of the Great Wars, the unfolding years are all accompanied by an intriguing mixture of colourful personalities, politics and scandal. The story of this growing community has a richness...

Courage under Fire. Self-Sacrifice. Battles that Changed America. American history is full of men and women who have acted courageously when their families, communities and country needed them most. Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt discovered they both loved telling the stories of these outstanding individuals who helped make America. They pared down their favorite stories to 26 and gave them as a gift to the young people of America in 1895. The...

The four texts gathered in this volume are among the most memorable and influential slave narratives published in the 19th century. Introductions to each narrative provide biographical and historical information as well as explanatory notes.

"Nearly a thousand Yukoners, a quarter of the population, enlisted before the end of the Great War. They were lawyers, bankers, piano tuners, dockworkers and miners who became soldiers, nurses and snipers; brave men and women who traded the isolated beauty of the north for the muddy, crowded horror of the battlefields. Those who stayed home were no less important to the war's outcome--by March of 1916, the Dawson Daily News estimated that Yukoners...

In December 1885, under the watchful eye of Mark Twain, the publishing firm of Charles L. Webster and Company released the first volume of the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. With a second volume published in March 1886, Grant’s memoirs became a popular sensation. Seeking to capitalize on Grant’s success and interest in earlier reminiscences by Joseph E. Johnston, William T. Sherman, and Richard Taylor, other Civil War generals...

While president of Aetna Life from 1879 to 1922, Morgan Bulkeley served four terms as mayor of Hartford, two terms as Connecticut's governor, and one term as a United States senator. His friends and business and political acquaintances were a who's who of the Gilded Age: Samuel Clemens, J. P. Morgan, Samuel and Elizabeth Colt, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, Albert Spalding, General Sherman, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Katherine

...

"Marianne Faithfull has been an actress and model as well as a musician who has released more than a dozen albums over five decades. She first entered the public sphere in 1964 with the song "As Tears Go By," which also was recorded by the Rolling Stones, and she is still best known to some people as Mick Jagger's girlfriend of the late 60s. As her autobiographies attest, Faithfull was involved with the Stones for years -- as both "muse" and co-writer...

A woman from Northern Ontario is buried; her earthly papers reveal a mystery. Veteran Canadian journalist Jim Poling took on the most important assignment of his career: Just who was his mother? Why did she take a lifelong secret to her grave? In his search for clues throughout his childhood years in Northern Ontario, the author goes to Chapleau, the railway town where the people he believed were his ancestors played out their roles in building the...

"A Mystery of Mysteries is a biography of Edgar Allan Poe that examines the renowned author's life through the prism of his mysterious death and its many possible causes. It is a moment shrouded in horror and mystery. Edgar Allan Poe died on October 7, 1849, at just forty, in a painful, utterly bizarre manner that would not have been out of place in one of his own tales of terror. What was the cause of his untimely death, and what happened to him...