The Governor General's Non-fiction Winners

Field Marshal the Viscount Byng of Vimy did not fit into the conventional mould in the Army, as Governor-General of Canada or as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Few officers commanded more widespread affection from their troops, or knew them and treated them with such respect as he did. Beginning with dramatic reforms in dress and living conditions in his own regiment, the 10th Royal Hussars, Byng consistently watched over the welfare of his men. Following the desperate Ypres battles of 1914-15, he was sent to Gallipoli to revive a failing enterprise, but instead, in the face of Kitchener's and Churchill's opposition, he called for it to be abandoned. He then planned one of the most successful withdrawals in the history of war. Ever seeking ways to win, Byng led the Canadian Corps to the capture of Vimy Ridge, and the Third Army in the first major tank battle at Cambrai, and in 1918 he commanded the largest of Britain's field armies in the final victory campaign. As Governor-General of Canada, he became almost a Canadian nationalist and worked for the unity of the widespread provinces. He advocated the adoption of a Canadian flag and abandonment of the word "Empire". His conception of the role of the Crown in the constitutional crisis of 1926 has led to its position in the Commonwealth today. Finally, at the age of 66 and fighting a wasting illness, he was summoned to reform the Metropolitan Police, which in a remarkably short time he brought into the 20th century. This reissued biography won the Governor-General's Prize in Canada when it was first published.

Offers fresh insights into ten of Shakespeare's most popular plays, relating each of these works to others and discussing many of the central elements of Shakespearean drama

Winner of the Royal Society of Literature Award In The Russian Album, Michael Ignatieff chronicles five generations of his Russian family, beginning in 1815. Drawing on family diaries, on the contemplation of intriguing photographs in an old family album, and on stories passed down from father to son, he comes to terms with the meaning of his family's memories and histories. Focusing on his grandparents, Count Paul Ignatieff and Princess Natasha Mestchersky, he recreates their lives before, during, and after the Russian Revolution.

For this account of the life of Somerset Maugham the author was able to draw on several interviews with Alan Searle, Maugham's companion for 35 years as well as other information unavailable to previous biographers.

Book by Clarkson, Stephen; McCall, Christina

Book by Hunter, Robert and Robert Calihoo

Book by Siggins, Maggie

This thoughtful and provocative book, winner of Canada's prestigious Governor-General's award in 1994, challenges many conventional ideas about the complex and unique relationship between humans and the natural world. According to scholar John Livingston, the first domesticated animal was neither dog nor goat, but man. Humans cut themselves adrift from the natural world by becoming entirely dependent on ideas and technology. He believes we have abandoned our innate "wildness" - our intuitive and instinctual selves - to such an extent that we must depend entirely on our own technology to relate to the natural world. Thus the dependence into which we have grown has made us not merely the servants of our own technology, but one of its products. Livingston's theses also vigorously questions such widely held notions as that of "sustainable development" and the idea of "rights" for animals. . Powerful and uncompromising, Rogue Primate asks the disturbing question of what it really means to be a human living in a non-human world.

Who is the mystery that is Gwendolyn MacEwen? Acclaimed biographer Rosemary Sullivan poignantly uncovers the life of a searingly gifted but wounded poet, novelist and mystic, a writer who, after a spellbinding reading to a packed house in one of Toronto's largest halls, was proclaimed as "one of the last great bards."

Until now, Gwendolyn MacEwen has remained a little-understood figure in the annals of Canadian literature. Rosemary Sullivan paints a portrait that moves Gwendolyn MacEwen -- both as a woman and as an artist -- into her rightful place as one of our most significant cultural icons.

John Ralston Saul argues that while Fascism was defeated in World War II, its "corporatist" doctrines powerfully influence our own society today. Saul explores how these corporatist priorities have now become so woven into our social fabric that they threaten the practice of Western democracy. Our civic order, Saul argues, has been remade to serve the needs of business managers and technocrats. In turn, other parts of society have come to mimic this arrangement as they themselves fracture into competing interest groups and ethnic blocs, virtually eliminating the role of the citizen. This largely unseen social order has deep and vexing roots in Western thought. Saul examines how this structure is bolstered today by political and intellectual charlatans who misleadingly describe it as a "common sense" arrangement, rather than what it is: an insidious war of attrition against the individual as citizen and the delicate system of open dialogue and doubt that alone guarantees the future of democracy.

David Adams Richards explores man's relationship with nature: whether fishing salmon on the Miramichi, hunting moose or deer, losing your way in the woods, or sneaking away from a bear. This book is about hunters and fishermen, about history and memory. Richards weaves together the tales that have informed his life as a fisherman. He has learned his skill from the guides and the poachers, the sports and the city slickers who have all fished the Miramichi. He learns about perseverance and respecting nature, and he reflects on the changes that the modern world has brought to the great river. Lines on the Water abounds with lore and wisdom, humor, and most of all, passion. -- Publisher's description.

Winner, Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction A brilliant and disturbing look at the most crucial ecological issue of the new century – now thoroughly revised and updated Water – where it is, who owns it, how much we’ll need, and how to make sure we’ll have it – is quickly emerging as one of the most important ecological issues of the new century. First published in 1999, Water, Marq de Villiers’s brilliant look at the condition of water resources around the world, won a Governor General’s Award and earned glowing praise from such respected figures as Maurice Strong, now of the Earth Council (“timely, authoritative, and eminently readable”). In compelling and lucid prose, de Villiers describes the grim situations in arid regions – in the southwestern United States, southern Africa, Mexico, Egypt, Israel, India, and Asia – and makes it clear just how serious the ramifications can be. He outlines how water is being manipulated by technology, used as a political bargaining chip, or imperilled by ignorance – and what this could mean to us in the future, how it could shape the way we live. We must act now, says de Villiers. And although our choices are conservation, technological invention, or violence, he sees hope in the fact that we still have choices. This new edition – completely updated – of what has become a standard book on a crucial subject makes for vitally important reading.

"In this memoir, Nega Mezlekia recalls in vivid detail his boyhood in the arid city of Jijiga, Ethiopia, and his bold journey to manhood during the 1970s and 1980s, his country's most turbulent period.". "Mezlekia traces his personal evolution from child to soldier. We meet Wondwossen, his best friend and collaborator in mischief; Mr. Alula, their embattled teacher; Mr. Tadesse, full-time school director and part-time poacher; Ms. Yetaferu, the Orthodox Christian boarder who manages to find a saint to worship each day of the year and thus to avoid gainful employment; and Yeneta, the local priest who is privy to the languages of heaven and hell.". "Notes from the Hyena's Belly teems with the smells, sights, and sounds of life in the Horn of Africa - its violent, ingenious people and its underworld of screeching monkeys, lions, and hyenas. Part autobiography and part social history, this is an unforgettable portrait of a world where the boundaries of credulity are challenged daily. Out of this rich, sundrenched land where modern corruption rides ancient custom like a predator, Mezlekia crafts a world elegant in its aridity, extreme in its absurdity, and vast in its ironies."--BOOK JACKET.

American’s landscape is undergoing a profound transformation as demand grows for a different kind of American Dream--smaller homes on smaller lots, multifamily options, and walkable neighborhoods. This trend presents a tremendous opportunity to reinvent our urban and suburban areas. But in a time of fiscal austerity, how do we finance redevelopment needs? In Foundations of Real Estate Development Finance: A Guide for Public-Private Partnerships, urban scholar Arthur C. Nelson argues that efficient redevelopment depends on the ability to leverage resources through partnerships. Public-private partnerships are increasingly important in reducing the complexity and lowering the risk of redevelopment projects. Although planners are in integral part of creating these partneships, their training does generally not include real-estate finacing, which presents challenges and imbalances in public-private partnership. This is the first primer on financing urban redevelopment written for practicing planners and public administrators. In easy-to-understand language, it will inform readers of the natural cycle of urban development, explain how to overcome barriers to efficient redevelopment, what it takes for the private sector to justify its redevelopment investments, and the role of public and nonprofit sectors to leverage private sector redevelopment where the market does not generate sufficient rates of return. This is a must read for practicing planners and planning students, economic development officials, public administrators, and others who need to understand how to leverage public and non-profit resources to leverage private funds for redevelopment.

At Trickle Creek in northern Alberta, Wiebo Ludwig thought he’d buffered his tiny religious community from civilization, but in 1990 civilization came calling. A Calgary oil company proposed to drill directly in view of the farm’s communal dining room. Ludwig wrote letters, petitioned, forced public hearings, and discovered the provincial regulator cared little about landowners. After the oil company accidentally vented raw sour gas, Ludwig’s wife miscarried. Hostilities against the oil company began with nails on the roads, sabotaged well sites, and road blockades. They culminated in death threats, shootings, and bombings. The RCMP recruited a Ludwig acolyte as an informant, and in an attempt to establish the man’s credibility the police themselves blew up an equipment shack. Ludwig was charged with 19 counts of mischief, vandalism, and possession of explosives, and he was later convicted on five charges. This taut work of nonfiction, first published in 2002, won both a Governor General’s Award and the Arthur Ellis Award for True Crime Writing. With the escalation of oil and gas extraction over the past decade, the unsettling questions Saboteurs raises about individual rights, corporate power, police methods, and government accountability are more relevant than ever.

A landmark work of narrative history, Paris 1919 is the first full-scale treatment of the Peace Conference in more than twenty-five years. It offers a scintillating view of those dramatic and fateful days when much of the modern world was sketched out, when countries were created—Iraq, Yugoslavia, Israel—whose troubles haunt us still. Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize • Winner of the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize • Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize Between January and July 1919, after “the war to end all wars,” men and women from around the world converged on Paris to shape the peace. Center stage, for the first time in history, was an American president, Woodrow Wilson, who with his Fourteen Points seemed to promise to so many people the fulfillment of their dreams. Stern, intransigent, impatient when it came to security concerns and wildly idealistic in his dream of a League of Nations that would resolve all future conflict peacefully, Wilson is only one of the larger-than-life characters who fill the pages of this extraordinary book. David Lloyd George, the gregarious and wily British prime minister, brought Winston Churchill and John Maynard Keynes. Lawrence of Arabia joined the Arab delegation. Ho Chi Minh, a kitchen assistant at the Ritz, submitted a petition for an independent Vietnam. For six months, Paris was effectively the center of the world as the peacemakers carved up bankrupt empires and created new countries. This book brings to life the personalities, ideals, and prejudices of the men who shaped the settlement. They pushed Russia to the sidelines, alienated China, and dismissed the Arabs. They struggled with the problems of Kosovo, of the Kurds, and of a homeland for the Jews. The peacemakers, so it has been said, failed dismally; above all they failed to prevent another war. Margaret MacMillan argues that they have unfairly been made the scapegoats for the mistakes of those who came later. She refutes received ideas about the path from Versailles to World War II and debunks the widely accepted notion that reparations imposed on the Germans were in large part responsible for the Second World War. Praise for Paris 1919 “It’s easy to get into a war, but ending it is a more arduous matter. It was never more so than in 1919, at the Paris Conference. . . . This is an enthralling book: detailed, fair, unfailingly lively. Professor MacMillan has that essential quality of the historian, a narrative gift.” —Allan Massie, The Daily Telegraph (London)

A Canadian general and former United Nations peacekeeper shares his harrowing eyewitness account of the genocide in Rwanda, revealing how he and his men managed to rescue thousands of people despite the orgy of bloodletting that was erupting all around them. Reprint

Traces the political, religious, and scientific factors that contributed to the seemingly inexplicable decision of logger-turned-activist Grant Hadwin to destroy the world's only giant golden spruce tree.

Chronicles the origins of Impressionism against the backdrop of the artistic and cultural events of the nineteenth century as exemplified in the work of two artists--Ernest Meissonier and Edouard Manet.

As his bride, Lucie, was about to be "sold down the river" to the slave markets of New Orleans in 1831, young Thornton Blackburn planned a daring escape from Louisville. Discovered by slave catchers in Michigan, they were slated to return to Kentucky in chains, until the black community rallied to their cause in the Blackburn Riot of 1833. The couple was spirited across the river to Canada, but Michigan's governor demanded their extradition. The Blackburn case was the first serious legal dispute between Canada and the United States regarding the Underground Railroad, and set precedents for all future fugitive-slave cases. The Blackburns settled in Toronto and founded the city's first taxi business. Working with prominent abolitionists, Thornton and Lucie made their home a haven for runaways. The Blackburns died in the 1890s, and a chance archaeological discovery in a downtown Toronto school yard brought their story to light.--From publisher description.

Long before she made her first trip to Afghanistan as an embedded reporter for The Globe and Mail, Christie Blatchford was already one of Canada’s most respected and eagerly read journalists. Her vivid prose, her unmistakable voice, her ability to connect emotionally with her subjects and readers, her hard-won and hard-nosed skills as a reporter–these had already established her as a household name. But with her many reports from Afghanistan, and in dozens of interviews with the returned members of the 1st Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry and others back at home, she found the subject she was born to tackle. Her reporting of the conflict and her deeply empathetic observations of the men and women who wear the maple leaf are words for the ages, fit to stand alongside the nation’s best writing on war. It is a testament to Christie Blatchford’s skills and integrity that along with the admiration of her readers, she won the respect and trust of the soldiers. They share breathtakingly honest accounts of their desire to serve, their willingness to confront fear and danger in the battlefield, their loyalty towards each other and the heartbreak occasioned by the loss of one of their own. Grounded in insights gained over the course of three trips to Afghanistan in 2006, and drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews not only with the servicemen and -women with whom she shared so much, but with their commanders and family members as well, Christie Blatchford creates a detailed, complex and deeply affecting picture of military life in the twenty-first century.

From inside front cover: Part travelogue and description, part history and meditation, and above all a quest for a lost homeland, *A Place Within* begins with diary entries from Vassanji's very first wide-eyed trip to India in 1993, then moves on to accounts from his subsequent and obsessive revisits. An intimate chronicle filled with fantastic stories and unforgettable characters, [it] is rich with images of bustling city streets and contrasting Indian landscapes, from the southern tip of India to the Himalayan foothills, from the Bay of Bengal to the Arabian Sea. Here, too, are the amazing histories of Delhi, Shimla, Gujarat, and Kerala, and of Vassanji's own family, members of an ancient sect that draws on both Hunduism and Islam.

Lakes define not only Canada's landscape but the national imagination. Blending writing on nature, travel, and science, award-winning journalist Allan Casey systematically explores how the country's history and culture originates at the lakeshore. Lakeland describes a series of interconnected journeys by the author, punctuated by the seasons and the personalities he meets along the way including aboriginal fishery managers, fruit growers, boat captains, cottagers, and scientists. Together they form an evocative portrait of these beloved bodies of water and what they mean, from sapphire tarns a.

Foran's book is IT: the definitive, detailed, intimate portrait of Mordecai Richler, the lion of Canadian literature, and the turbulent, changing times that nurtured him. It is also an extraordinary love story that lasted half a century. The first major biography with access to family letters and archives. Mordecai Richler was an outsized and outrageous novelist whose life reads like fiction. Mordecai Richler won multiple Governor General's Literary Awards, the Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, among others, as well as many awards for his children's books. He also wrote Oscar-nominated screenplays. His influence was larger than life in Canada and abroad. In Mordecai, award-winning novelist and journalist Charlie Foran brings to the page the richness of Mordecai's life as young bohemian, irreverent writer, passionate and controversial Canadian, loyal friend and deeply romantic lover. He explores Mordecai's distraught childhood, and gives us the "portrait of a marriage" -- the lifelong love affair with Florence, with Mordecai as beloved father of five. The portrait is alive and intimate -- warts and all.

Tells the complete story of the creation of The Last Supper mural: the adversities suffered by the artist during its execution; the experimental techniques he employed; the models for Christ and the Apostles that he used; and the numerous personalities involved -- everyone from the Leonardo's young assistants to Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan who commissioned the work.