The old city of Toronto in the 1950s was a gray lady - "a good place to mind your own business," as Northrop Frye said. Built on the shore of Lake Ontario by generations of architects in a strange and challenging ravine-threaded landscape, the city is now the home of the Canadian National Tower, of an extraordinary subway system, of the Blue Jays and their SkyDome, of the Royal Ontario Museum, of Roy Thomson Music Hall. Today Toronto bristles with vitality, glitters with everything that architecture, planning, and cultural and intellectual life can give to a city. It has saved itself from the worst mistakes of urban planning, for its development over the past thirty years has been a tale of chance and fortuitous accident. Robert Fulford's graceful narrative, moving from one region of Toronto to another, paints a portrait of the city, its recent history, its urban planning, and its economic development. The chosen home of the great architectural and social critic Jane Jacobs (who has ha

Accidental City: The Transformation of Toronto

Politics & Social Sciences

FULFORD, Robert

Social Sciences

Houghton Mifflin,1996

In this strikingly original look at modern culture, Robert Fulford pursues an unusual subject across a bizarre landscape whose features include urban legends, The Birth of a Nation, Jack Nicholson, Ivanhoe, TV News, Vladimir Nabokov, sex scandals and gossip, and The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Fulford sees storytelling as the core of civilized life, the juncture where facts and feeling meet, the bundle in which we wrap truth, hope, and dread. Narrative, he says is how we explain, how we teach, how we entertain ourselves - and how we often do all three at once. He distils half a century of experience as a journalist and critic into an account of human lives shaping stories and stories shaping human lives, and he asserts with special passion "the value of those unruly and unaccredited forms of narrative that arise from conversation, in particular the stories, true and untrue, that we tell about ourselves and people we know."

The Triumph of Narrative (Mossey Lecture Series)

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Cbc Radio Canada

With photos by Steven Evans.Northrop Frye once called Toronto "a good place to mind your own business," and until the 1960s that was about the best that could be said for it. Toronto had no street life, no sidewalk cafes, no festivals, no downtown gathering place. It was a city of sober reticence."Accident," writes Robert Fulford "plays a role in the building of any city. It has played a major role in the transformation of Toronto." That transformation began with the opening in 1965 of the New City Hall and Nathan Phillips Square. Since then, Toronto has changed from a private city, seemingly without a collective identity, to a public one - a transformation that came about through the series of (mostly) happy accidents chronicled in this vastly entertaining urban tour.Fulford, who grew up beside Lake Ontario and has lived in Toronto all his life, writes brilliantly about the city’s architecture, its commercial development, its ravines, its monuments, its man-made underground, and its people - from Jane Jacobs, whose iconoclastic ideas on urban planning have had a profoundly positive effect on Toronto (where she ended up living mostly by accident), to Fred Gardiner, whose controversial expressway remains an eyesore decades after it was built.Even the most knowledgeable Torontonian will be informed and entertained by Fulford’s graceful erudition. Visitors will find the book an invaluable introduction to a city viewed by foreigners as a model of livable urbanity - and by many Canadians as the very symbol of smug self-satisfaction. Whatever your view of Toronto, it will be challenged and deepened by this original, insightful, and thoroughly engaging book.From the Hardcover edition.

History

Americas

Replica Books

A lively, strikingly original look at the prevalence and endurance of stories in our lives and our culture. When I hear a good story, I have an almost physical need to tell it. Of all the ways we communicate with one another the story has established itself as the most comfortable, the most versatile. In The Triumph of Narrative, celebrated journalist and critic Robert Fulford explores narrative in all of its forms–from conversation, gossip, and urban legends to journalism, literature, film and television. Fulford vividly illustrates how storytelling formed the core of civilized life, how stories shape us as much as we shape stories, and why the human appetite for narrative persists. Pursuing his subject across a landscape that includes The Birth of a Nation, Chinatown, television news, Twain, Hemingway and Nabokov, sex scandals, and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Fulford brilliantly elucidates the timeless elements of narrative and articulates the intimate connections between stories and how we live and view reality. During an era when mass media and mass leisure have enabled us to spend much more time absorbing stories than any of our ancestors could, The Triumph of Narrative is an incisive look at one of our most fundamental, irreplaceable needs.

The Triumph of Narrative: Storytelling in the Age of Mass Culture

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Broadway

House of Anansi Press

Full of photographs of the beauty of Canada.

Canada: a Celebration

Travel

Canada

Key Porter Books

ACCIDENTAL CITY - THE TRANSFORMATION OF TORONTO.

Arts & Photography

Architecture

MacFarlane Walter & Ross, (1995)

Canada: A Celebration

FIREFLY BOOKS + LTD (NY)

Robert Fulford and a selection of accomplished photographers take readers on a fascinating journey that illuminates Toronto's vibrant and ever-changing face. Readers will find in these pages both familiar, beloved sights and some of Toronto's best kept secrets. They will see that Toronto is as much a city of diverse neighborhoods as it is a center for art, culture, and learning. It is a place of festivals and celebrations, of architectural inspiration, and of countless parks and hundreds of dark, leafy ravines. It never stands still, promising to constantly surprise visitors and locals alike. 
Fulford's text, combined with his great love for the city and his vast knowledge of both historical and contemporary Toronto, is perfectly complemented by over 150 spectacular full-color photographs. Together, they capture the character of Toronto.

Toronto Discovered

Key Porter

Toronto Tapestry (Urban Tapestry Series) [Nov 01, 1997] Fulford, Robert; Oldfield, Megan and Byrne, Lesley Hyland

Toronto Tapestry (Urban Tapestry Series)

Oldfield, Megan

Byrne, Lesley Hyland

Photography & Video

Towery Pub

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