by Maya Ombasic Mostarghia starts in the days surrounding the death of Ombasic’s father. Told that she can only recover his body from the hospital morgue if a religious authority prepares it for its final resting place, we bear witness to the callousness the author is met with when church after church after church refuses…
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by Frank McCourt Angela’s Ashes is McCourt’s famous memoir describing his staggering poverty growing up in Ireland in the 1930s. While this may at first glance sound similar to something I recently reviewed, I assure you this is a different thing entirely, both with regard to style and focus. McCourt chronicles a life of severe…
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by J. D. Vance Hillbilly Elegy is Vance’s memoir describing his uncommon escape from poverty in America’s Rust Belt to eventually graduate Yale Law School. The author takes us through his experiences to describe what he sees as drivers of poverty to help readers better understand why so many become trapped in the lower class,…
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by Anne Frank The Diary of a Young Girl is Frank’s personal diary kept during the two years spent in hiding in a small apartment in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam during WWII. Upon hearing the Dutch government was seeking out personal accounts of the conflict for later publication, she wrote and rewrote many passages with the intention…
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates When I originally heard about David Chariandy’s I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, it immediately brought Between the World and Me to mind. Of course, I hadn’t actually read Coates’ book yet at the time, but I nonetheless wondered whether Chariandy’s essays directed at his young daughter about the history of racism…
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by Farley Mowat Never Cry Wolf is presented as the true account of Mowat’s time in the Canadian subarctic in the late ’40s, sent as a government researcher in order to investigate the impacts wolves were having on declining caribou populations. However, I’m led to believe from parallel reading that “true” may be more than…
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by David Chariandy After a stranger asserted her right to butt in front of the brown-skinned Chariandy because she “was born here,” he had a difficult time explaining what happened to his then three year-old daughter. I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You is his attempt to do just that. Written as a letter to his…
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by Grant Matheson The Golden Boy is Matheson’s memoir about his personal experience with narcotic and alcohol addiction. It starts by relating the beginnings of the illness taking shape in the early 2000s, when he was a physician practising in Charlottetown, and how his life spiralled out of control as he sank deeper and deeper…
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by Payam Akhavan Akhavan was an Iranian immigrant to Canada in the late ’70s, and part of the religious minority that was soon to face the brunt of the hate and violence to come from the radical Iranian government that took charge after the revolution. He became a successful lawyer within the International Criminal Court…
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by Robert M. Pirsig I must say, this year in reading’s been an interesting one for me. I mean, it’s had its ups and downs––nowhere near as many books that I love, love, LOVED like last year, but not one but two where I had something akin to a religious experience while reading. The first…
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