Wilder Penfield was one of Canada's greatest scientists, a man who combined skill as a surgeon with an insatiable curiosity about the inner workings of the human mind. Four times nominated for the Nobel Prize, Penfield was known around the world for his pioneering discoveries and daring surgical techniques.With access to diaries and private family papers, Penfield's grandson, Jefferson Lewis, has written a frank, courageous account of a fascinating and complex man.

Something Hidden: A Biography of Wilder Penfield (Goodread Biographies)

Biographies & Memoirs

Lewis, Jefferson

Professionals & Academics

Goodread Biography

Takeo Nakano immigrated to Canada from Japan in 1920, later marrying and starting a family in his adopted homeland. Takeo's passion was poetry, and he cultivated the exquisite form known as tanka. Then came the Second World War. In 1942, Takeo Nakano was one of thousands of Japanese men interned in labour camps in the British Columbia interior. Their only "crime" was their Japanese origins. Wrenched from his wife and daughter, placed in a labour camp and then an isolated internment camp in northern Ontario, Takeo wrote of his experiences, feelings and reflections with the sensitivity and perception of a poet. Within the Barbed Wire Fence is the touching account of the effects of one of Canada's greatest injustices on a single, sensitive soul.

Within the Barbed Wire Fence: A Japanese Man's Account of his Internment in Canada (Goodread Biographies)

History

Nakano, Takeo Ujo

Americas

The Patrick family is the greatest dynasty in Canada's national game, innovators who introduced the blue line, player numbers and the modern playoff system.The dynasty began in British Columbia where Joe Patrick made a fortune in lumber, gambling it all by starting up a spunky west coast professional hockey league with his sons Lester and Frank--in 1911! After selling the league to the NHL in 1926, Lester went on to become the first coach of the New York Rangers. His sons, Lynn and Muzz, were New York stars before becoming coaches themselves. In 1980, the Patrick dynasty continued as ex-NHL player Craig (son of Lynn) was appointed Rangers coach.Tracing the development of an influential hockey dynasty in great detail, The Patricks: Hockey's Royal Family offers a lively, colourful account of the game's exciting history.

The Patricks: Hockey's Royal Family (Goodread Biographies)

Whitehead, Eric

Hugh MacLennan is one of Canada's great writers. Five-time winner of the Governor General's Award, his work includes some of the best loved and most read Canadian novels of all time: Two Solitudes, The Watch That Ends the Night, Barometer Rising.In this widely praised biography, written with the full cooperation of MacLennan, Elspeth Cameron describes his early life in Nova Scotia, his complex relationships with his father and mother, and the many reverses until his first great success in 1941 with Barometer Rising. Cameron's critical assessment of his work, up to and including the dense, experimental Voices in Time, places MacLennan firmly among the first rank of 20th century Canadian nationalist intellectuals, along with Harold Innes, Donald Creighton and George Grant.Hugh MacLennan: A Writer's Life is a sympathetic and perceptive account that explores the many fascinating links between MacLennan's life and his writings.

Hugh MacLennan: A Writer's Life (Goodread Biographies)

Cameron, Elspeth

Arts & Literature

Ernie Lyall writes about the north like no one has written about it before: "The main reason I decided to do a book about my life...is that I finally got fed up with all the baloney in so many books written about the north." Born in Labrador, one of 19 children of a Scottish Hudson's Bay Company cooper, Lyall grew up in a north dominated by white traders. After adventures that took him around the Arctic and down the Labrador coast, Ernie settled in Fort Ross in the Arctic Islands. He married an Inuit woman, Nipisha, and immediately became part of her extended family. Ernie writes warmly about his Inuit friends and family, and about daily life in the Arctic and the remarkable transformation of the north that has occured in the last 40 years. An Arctic Man tells about life in the north as it is actually lived, by its native and non-native inhabitants alike; it offers a rare, privileged view of the peoples of the Canadian Arctic.

An Arctic Man: The classic account of sixty-five years in Canada's North

Lyall, Ernie

Historical

Doug Harvey was just twenty when he went to Britain to fly bombers night after night over Germany. Like hundreds of other young Canadians, he discovered love, sex, fighting, dying, booze and European living - all at once.In this compelling, lively book he remembers in viivd detail the joys and horrors of war in the air.

Boys, Bombs and Brussels Sprouts (Goodread Biographies)

Harvey, J. Douglas

Lucy Maud Montgomery is Canada's best-known writer of children's fiction. Anne of Green Gables-- in print, film, television, on stage--captures people's imaginations as easily now as it did when it burst upon the world in 1908. Lucy Maud Montgomery grew up in Prince Edward Island and she set her best-loved stories there. She worked briefly as a journalist, but family responsiblities shaped her life as a young single woman. At 36 she married a dour, often depressive Presbyterian minister and moved to Ontario. There she lived a life of contradictions--in private, the romantic, successful imaginative writer; in public the strict, dutiful minister's wife. Using diaries and letters Lucy Maud never intended to be made public, The Wheel of Things is a pioneering biography of one of Canada's most successful and important writers. Since its publication, the release of Montgomery's diaries and other work by scholarly writers have confirmed the life story that Mollie Gillen tells so well in this important and path-breaking biography.

The Wheel of Things: A Biography of Lucy Maud Montgomery (Goodread Biographies)

GILLEN, Mollie

When Raymond Massey was born, his family was at the pinnacle of Toronto society: the family mansion on Jarvis Street was busy with maids, grooms and other servants--at the age of five, Raymond was driven the two short blocks to school every morning by the family coachman.With an actor's gift of photographic memory, Raymond recalls this early life in brilliant detail--childish pranks, school at Upper Canada College, family outings in Muskoka and Atlantic City, trips to Europe. Nor does he neglect the grim realities of the age: the tragic, early death of his mother, the outbreak of the Great War. Recollection of his own experience of the Western Front--fighting in the trenches, suffering shellshock, ending up with the Canadian army in Siberia--are especially harrowing. After the war he travels to Oxford, back to Toronto--and suddenly decides to throw aside the family business to bcome an actor. "What name will you use?" asks his supercilious older brother, Vincent.When I Was Young offers a witty, urbane glimpse into the private life of Canada's upper class sixy years ago--when there was no family more establishment than the Masseys.

When I Was Young (Goodread Biographies)

Massey, Raymond

Humor & Entertainment

E. P. Taylor was one of the greatest and most successful business figures of the 20th century.After building an empire in the beer business in the '30s, Taylor went to Ottawa as one of the legendary "dollar-a-year men" during the Second World War. When the war ended, he turned his hand to putting together the biggest Canadian conglomerate of the time: the giant Argus Corporation. With his colleagues, Taylor controlled businesses worth hundred of millions of dollars--in groceries (Dominion Stores), farm machinery (Massey Harris), broadcasting (CFRB), building supplies, land development. For forty years, his name was synonymous with wealth and power in Canada. Written in collaboration with Taylor himself during his Bahamian retirement, E.P. Taylor is the fascinating story of the creation of one of Canada' greatest business empires.

E. P. Taylor (Goodread Biographies)

Rohmer, Richard

The Fighting Fisherman

Fraser, Raymond

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