This richly detailed biography illustrates how a determined Canadian seeking justice created an enduring legacy. Through vigorous battles, Jim McRuer’s passion for justice was translated into laws that daily touch and protect the lives of millions today. James Chalmers McRuer was not easy to get along with or even much liked by many lawyers who dubbed him ’Vinegar Jim.’ Yet countless others saw him as heroic, inspirational, a man above and apart from his times. His resolute focus on justice changed the lives of married women with no property rights, children without legal protection, aboriginals caught in the whipsaw of traditional hunting practices and imposed game laws, and prisoners locked away and forgotten. Environmental degradation and those causing it, murderers, stock fraud artists and Cold War spies all came within the ambit of J. C. McRuer’s sharp legal mind and passion for justice. Upon turning 75, McRuer embarked on his most important work of all, becoming Canada’s greatest law reformer and remaining active into his 90s.

A Passion for Justice: How 'Vinegar Jim' McRuer Became Canada's Greatest Law Reformer

Biographies & Memoirs

Boyer, J. Patrick

Professionals & Academics

Blue Butterfly

Leonard Budgell saw the Canadian North like nobody else. He put his observations into words as few others ever could.
As a "Servant of the Bay" Budgell ran Hudson’s Bay Company trading posts for decades in isolated communities up the Labrador coast and across the Arctic. Living among aboriginal Canadians he witnessed episodes and heard stories that would never again be repeated - except he wrote them down. His pen memorably portrays everything from dancing northern lights and hunting practices of birds to astonishing human adventures and predicaments.
Northern ways intact for centuries changed with rifles and motorboats, radios and electric generators, new foods and different medicines. Most often, it was Budgell who bridged the aboriginal and southern cultures, building and operating remote radio stations at places like Hebron, taking an RCMP officer into a settlement where a choice had to be made between two different codes of law and behaviour in a murder case. In Arctic Twilight, Budgell chronicles, in an outpouring of letters to a much younger female friend, a traditional way of life that was changing forever.
Claudia Coutu Radmore, a teacher, writer, and artist, first met Len Budgell in Winnipeg when she was a fine arts student and he had retired from the Company. Their friendship grew stronger when he began writing remarkable letters after she returned to Queen’s University. Now edited and organized by her, this unique memoir is available to the public for the first time.

Arctic Twilight: Leonard Budgell and Canada's Changing North

Budgell, Leonard

Community & Culture

Celtic Woman explores with open honesty and engaging irony how cycles of personal discovery have connected international performing artist Treasa O’Driscoll to heaven and earthbut not the way you’d expect. This surprising memoir of an Irish woman attuned to poetic updrafts and spiritual downloads in the lives of real people, many of them celebrities in Ireland and North America she counts as personal friends, exudes her Celtic heritage on every page. Her encounters in life have been testing, tragic, romantic, and highly comic. O’Driscoll’s life entwines with musicians, poets, teachers, artists, actors, farmers, unexpected strangers and familiar drunkards. Their lives all become a single interwoven tapestry of common meaning connected at the level of the soul.

Celtic Woman: A Memoir of Life's Poetic Journey

O'Driscoll, Treasa

George Parkin was born the thirteenth child of an immigrant New Brunswick farmer and died a knight of the realm and perhaps the most famous Canadian in the world. Charismatic, charming, eloquent and dedicated, Parkin devoted his immense energy to two causes. As an orator and journalist, he worked to strengthen the bonds between the English-speaking peoples; as Principal of Upper Canada College and Founding Secretary of the Rhodes Scholarships he promoted a vision of education primarily as the formation of character, not the training of the intellect. This beautifully written and witty biography is a story of ideas lived through Parkin and those in his wide circle of influence with leaders of many countries. He was one of the first Canadians to see the development of globalization, and produced that famous map to demonstrate his vision, the British Empire all in red, Canada huge and dominating in the centre. His passionate opposition to free trade and eventual annexation by the United States mark him as an eloquent and prophetic visionary of Canada’s fate under NAFTA. Author William Christian’s own life in Parkin’s footsteps and rich sensitivity to Parkin’s story is on full display in this masterful biography. Political science professor at University of Guelph, well-known journalist and political commentator, Christian is an acknowledged authority on the intersection of philosophy, political life, communication theory and public purpose.

Parkin: Canada's Most Famous Forgotten Man

Christian, William

Historical

Solitary Courage is the story of a mother’s tough-love determination, her severely disabled daughter’s astonishing triumphs, and a documentary record of the political battles, organizational conflicts, and human struggles that citizens with disabilities face and fight every day of their lives. Mona Winberg became a pioneer of independent living, and emerged a leading advocate for citizens with mental and physical disabilities. Her courageous causes erupted from her deep reservoir of compassion and concern. Her unflinching challenges to the status quo expressed both optimism and realism about life and society. Her life is testament to the power of Solitary Courage. Between 1986 and 1999 she was the only newspaper columnist in North America regularly writing about disability issues. Through her award-winning column "Disabled Today" in Toronto’s Sunday Sun, Mona Winberg painstakingly built up a body of work of more than 600 articles chronicling front-line battles for equality. She was a realist, a wise person with a no-nonsense approach, kindly, but clear-eyed. Solitary Courage begins with the story of Mona Winberg’s life, followed by a representative selection of 156 of her columns organized into 20 thematic chapters, the best of Mona in her own words. The last part of the book reflects upon Mona Winberg’s legacy of lessons that still connect to programs and policies touching the lives of Canadians with disabilities today. The subjects are wide-ranging and engaging because Mona used personal examples of individuals with disabilities and news-making issues raised by their plight. She also reported on the street-level outcomes of government policies. This variety and approach to disability issues provides real education and genuine human interest, whatever a reader’s background or experience.

Solitary Courage: Mona Winberg and the Triumph over Disability

Winberg, Mona

Three to a Loaf is the First World War story of Rory Ferrall, a young Canadian officer of Anglo-German descent who, after being wounded and disfigured at Ypres, comes to the attention of British military intelligence. Ferrall’s German background is valuable to the war’s planners. Hundreds of German-Americans had returned to the Fatherland to fight for the Kaiser at the outbreak of war in August 1914 and the British captured one. Cleverly trained to impersonate the captured German-American officer, Ferrall is smuggled into wartime Germany to infiltrate the German General Staff and discover their top-secret plan to break the stalemate on the Western Front. A page-turning novel of war and espionage, Three to a Loaf is also a portrait of societies and individuals pushed to the breaking point, and in some cases, beyond. Michael Goodspeed artfully blends the tension of a thriller with period detail, the detached commentary of a nitty-gritty travelogue, and psychological understanding of a harried man facing soul-destroying ethical decisions.

Three to a Loaf: A Novel of the Great War

Literature & Fiction

Goodspeed, Michael J.

Genre Fiction

A moving historical tale and remarkable literary achievement, City Wolves is the story of Canada’s first woman veterinarian, Meg Wilkinson. Born in 1870 on a farm near Halifax, Meg’s childhood experience with wolves makes her determined to be a veterinarian. Supported by the seemingly eccentric Randolph Oliphant and inspired by the ancient Inuit who first turned wolves into sled dogs, Meg surpasses the horse doctors at vet college and becomes the notorious ’dog doctor of Halifax’ in the 1890s. After her unusual marriage ends abruptly in Boston, Meg travels to Vancouver and up to the Yukon, seeking the legendary sled dogs. Arriving at the beginning of the Klondike gold rush, she makes her way amidst Mounties, dance hall girls, Klondike Kings, mushers, priests and swindlers…all the mangy and magnificent people, dogs and spirits that populated raucous Dawson City. Observed through the restless spirit of Inuit Ike, this is lively, insightful, historical fiction, subtly revealing the wolf-like nature of humans and the human nature of wolves. Both earthy and reflective, City Wolves is an important story told with compassion, humour and unflinching realism. In this her fifth novel, Dorris Heffron has created a wide range of unforgettable characters and achieved a breadth of vision exploring the deep conflicts and interconnection of social beings in a way that is uniquely Canadian and profoundly universal.

City Wolves

Heffron, Dorris

Literary

A local library, passport to a larger world for its individual patrons, is also a democratic institution whose contribution to the strength of a community is out of all proportion to its size or membership. Several thousand Carnegie libraries were built a century ago when Andrew Carnegie, who had risen from poverty to become "the richest man in the world" vowed to donate all his money before he died and set about giving millions of people around the world the same "gift of reading" he had with access to a library as a factory working boy. Across the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and other corners of the English-speaking world, he created "the free republic" of libraries. This is the story of one of them. By tracing evolution of library service in the Canadian town of Bracebridge from 1874 to the present day within the broad sweep of larger cultural and economic patterns, Boyer’s engaging book provides a specific example of the universal transformation of books and information technologies and the libraries that house them from the 19th to 21st centuries. Most readers will find endearing and tantalizing parallels with their own library experience, wherever they live. Written to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Andrew Carnegie Library in Bracebridge in 2008, Boyer’s book is an inspired and engaging effort to show patterns and perils that probably hold true for most local libraries although some of the dramatic and comedic episodes here are surely unique. This story is so rich it could be a feature movie.

Local Library, Global Passport: The Evolution of a Carnegie Library

History

Americas

The fight to eliminate world poverty is being severely hampered by corrupt leaders in developing countries. According to the African Union, some $150 billion is lost every year to corruption in Africa. In China, it is estimated corruption diminishes the annual value of gross domestic product by 15%. The pattern repeats itself elsewhere. This bleak situation compounds the poverty problem even more because donor countries are justifiably reluctant to support jurisdictions whose leaders are known to be corrupt, ignoring their citizens’ needs while stealing and laundering public funds for private use. What development does occur in chronically corrupt nations is often poorly planned and environmentally unsustainable, since the private gain of corrupt politicians and officials takes precedence over the implementation of sound development strategies. Likewise, bureaucratic corruption also results in the compromising of worker and consumer safety after all, a bribe costs less than obeying the law. And it is the poor who really pay the true cost of corruption. The Poverty of Corrupt Nations is a straightforward, easy-to-read exposition of the nature and scope of global corruption and money laundering, explaining the impact of recent troubling corruption trends on the public-at-large and public policy makers. Specifically, Cullen examines the links between world poverty, corruption, terrorism, global migration patterns, and money laundering. Constructively, Cullen then outlines a practical 20-point program to increase transparency and accountability in governments and parliaments around the world and break this cycle of corruption and poverty.

The Poverty of Corrupt Nations

Business & Money

Cullen, Roy

International

Gerald Augustus Archambeau was born in Jamaica in 1933. Raised in Kingston by his three aunts, he was sent to Canada in 1947 to join his mother and stepfather in Montreal. He trained in the plumbing and steam-fitting trade, but at age eighteen decided to join the railway as a passenger car porter. He worked for Canadian Pacific and Canadian National until the 1960s, when declining passenger rail traffic and the ascendence of air travel caused him to switch to a career with a major Canadian airline in Toronto.  After his retirement from the airline, Gerald and his wife, Marion, settled in St. Catharines, Ontario.

A Struggle to Walk With Dignity: The True Story of a Jamaican-born Canadian

Archambeau, Gerald A.

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