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Wrestling’s self-proclaimed “Living Legend” may never wear a championship belt again, but he’s definitely not down for the count. Adventures in Larryland! is the entertaining, often hilarious story of Larry Zbyszko’s remarkable ascent to wrestling notoriety.
Voted “Rookie of the Year” in 1974, Zbyszko enjoyed 30 glorious years as a top draw in the wild and wacky world of professional wrestling. Attendance records were shattered when he wrestled the original “Living Legend,” Bruno Sammartino, in 1980 and achieved victory by hitting his former mentor with a chair (a rarity at the time). With that match, Zbyszko stepped out from Sammartino’s shadow and was transformed from a baby-faced hero to one of the most hated wrestlers of his time. Afterwards, Zbyszko was careful to never miss a chance to remind the wrestling world that he had become the “New Living Legend.”
Later that decade, Zbyszko wrestled former Japanese Olympic wrestler, Masa Sieto, in front of 70,000-plus fans at Japan’s Tokyodome. In the late 1990s, he became a high-profile color commentator for the Atlanta based WCW, and would still put on his boots for special occasions. He’s credited with saving the TNT’s number one rated show, Monday Nitro, from the evil clutches of the “New World Order” and in 1998, Zbyszko’s appearance in back-to-back pay per views produced the two largest buy-rates that WCW had ever had.
In this elaborate agitprop theatrical collaboration, the internal contradictions and duplicitous double-speak of the “war on terror” are exposed as the propaganda vehicles for the neo-colonialism of the West that they are. “Ali Hakim” and “Ali Ababwa,” refugees from the imaginary country “Agraba,” attempt to seduce their audience into providing them with food, refuge, security, freedom and the material benefits of Western consumer society, failing miserably at every step. A hard-hitting presentation of a play-within-a-play assaults the audience as Youssef, Verdecchia and Chai do Shakespeare, Shaw and Swift one better with an endless string of buffooneries and absurdities derived from an inversion of the clichés defining the geo-politics of the Middle East at the beginning of the 21st century.
Informed by the research of Paul Krugman and Noam Chomsky, sent up by the post-modern cultural relativism of “Jean Paul Jacques Beauderrièredada,” this political satire is not for the faint of heart.
Cast of 4 men.
In the spring of 1651, a 15-year-old Parisian, Pierre-Esprit Radisson, lands in Trois-Rivières on the St. Lawrence River. Within weeks, the course of his life changes dramatically when Iroquois braves capture him. Canoeing across rivers and lakes and portaging over mountains, Radisson?s captors take him to distant lands where they first torture him, then adopt him as a brother. In this first tome of the adventures of North America?s most famous coureur des bois?an independent entrepreneurial woodsman?Radisson recounts his journey throughout North America and his adoption by the Iroquois. This book, which explores a continent?s history in an era of bravery and heroism, is the stuff of legend.
The next installment in the series, this book follows the young, 17th-century explorer Pierre-Esprit Radisson from North America to France and back, with plenty of excitement along the way
After spending two years with his new Iroquois family, Radisson escapes and sails across the Atlantic to Holland before boarding ship to head down the west coast of France. Using his wits and the skills picked up in the New World (present-day Canada), he makes his way up the Loire and arrives in Paris. But war for the succession of the king of France has razed the faubourg where he had lived with his family. So Radisson agrees to sign on with the Jesuits who are intent on evangelizing the New World. His return to the St. Lawrence Valley means assuming responsibility for his past, but also honoring his commitment to the. The New World is rife with challenge and conflict as cultures and economies collide. His mastery of the Mohawk language and knowledge of their culture make him a much-needed strategist and diplomat as plans are hatched to establish a new mission in the heart of Iroquois territory, which until recently was home to New France’s mortal enemy.
Adventures with Camera and Pen is a collection of tales from Anthony Dalton ‘s nomadic life as an adventurer and photo-journalist. The stories run the gamut from searching for Polar bears on the shores of Hudson Bay through mountain climbing in Western Canada to tracking Royal Bengal tigers in Bangladesh jungle. They depict Dalton’s often hilarious encounters with an eclectic variety of wildlife in the Canadian Arctic, the Falkland Islands and Namibia. He recounts his adventures at sea on tall-ships, and his fumbling attempts at fishing closer to home. As an expedition leader, he documents a difficult journey to remote salt mines in the Sahara north of Timbuktu with a CBC-TV film crew. With Dalton we are privy to conversations held in a rustic tea-house in Afghanistan, and we learn about the problems of travelling in Iran as the Shah began his fall from power. He takes his readers with him on a camel-buying expedition to desert locations in Oman and Saudi Arabia, and describes the difficulties involved in successfully smuggling a fellow Canadian out of Nigeria. In Morocco, Dalton wrestles with other people’s problems after a drug dominated dinner. This is a book for all those who yearn for far away places: the adventurers and the armchair travellers.
Award-winning poet Chris Pannell’s latest collection, Adventurize Your Summer!, is a wide-ranging look at travel, art and life. The author writes poems about the “Eastern Migrating Tourist,” and the indifference of the waters of the Nile, with many stops in between. Pannell gives equal time to great paintings and to the retired cab driver on dialysis; he is as adept writing about the Beach Boys as describing the cafés of Lisbon. Hopscotching through time and space, the poems in Adventurize Your Summer! are a study in humanity, filled with keen observation, touched with both sorrow and the wry observation that life is never what is promised in the marketing copy.
The sudden death of Margot Morris and her two young daughters in a house fire sends shock-waves through a small rural community. The Morris’ are a close-knit family, long associated with the mysterious arts of taxidermy and bee-keeping. Margot’s three surviving siblings, Teddy, Agatha and Sylvia are left to wonder if Margot’s death was an accident or murder, while the town is enveloped by speculation about this eccentric family whose close bonds are now being tested by tragedy.
When Jacob is called back to Advocate, he is not only returning home again, something he knows he cannot really do; he is going to face his dying grandmother and the people of the town who turned on one of their own.
Twenty years earlier, when his uncle David came home, it was to die. The response in Advocate was typical of most towns, large and small, in 1984: when his disease became known, Jacob, his grandmother, his mother, and his aunt, were shunned, turned out from school and their jobs, out of fear of an until-then unknown virus.
Like To Kill a Mockingbird, a novel beloved of one of the main characters, Advocate is elegiac, written by a first-rate author, about overcoming ignorance and prejudice. With wit and emotional depth, Greer describes the formation of one boy’s social conscience and takes us to a resolution that is truly satisfying.
Why is it so difficult to advocate for Palestine in Canada and what can we learn from the movement’s successes? This account of Palestine solidarity activism in Canada grapples with these questions through a wide-ranging exploration of the movement’s different actors, approaches and fields of engagement, along with its connections to different national and transnational struggles against racism, imperialism and colonialism. Led by a coalition of students, labour unions, church groups, left wing activists, progressive presses, human rights organizations, academic associations and Palestinian and Jewish community groups, Palestine solidarity activism is on the rise in Canada and Canadians are more aware of the issues than ever before. Palestine solidarity activists are also under siege as never before. The movement advocating for Palestinian rights is forced to contend with relentless political condemnation, media blackouts, administrative roadblocks, coordinated smear campaigns, individual threats, legal intimidation and institutional silencing. Through this book and the experiences of the contributing authors in it, many seasoned veterans of the movement, Advocating for Palestine in Canada offers an indispensable and often first-hand view into the complex social and historical forces at work in one of our era’s most urgent debates, and one which could determine the course of what it means to be Canadian going forward.
Ranging in form from elegy to satire to metaphysics to blues, Christopher Doda’s latest book, Aesthetics Lesson, is an exciting meditation on art and power. His poems investigate the Ôunnamed cities of light’ created by the artist, reflecting and dissecting how the creative impulse can lead to both solace and destruction. Centred around the title piece, a crown of self-generating glosas that examine the role of the artist in our mechanized and digitized society, Aesthetics Lesson offers a potent landscape not easily forgotten. Love and anger, rage and compassion burst and oscillate as Doda looks to the past and future to document Ôhalf-lives trembling on the lip of time.’ Doda’s gift is to challenge notions of progress and change and to take an unflinching look at the curious and dangerous metamorphosis of the human spirit.
In Æther Catherine Graham has created a luminous homage to family, cancer and the strange windings of truth. Swimming through time and space, Graham introduces her mother, her father and herself and the cancers that pull them apart and bring them together. Multiple stories unfold of pain and loss, hidden tragedy, forgiveness and growth. With an otherworldly delicacy Graham stitches it all together to create a book-length lyric essay of lingering and profound beauty.
Winner, City of Victoria Butler Book Prize
Finalist, Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction
Nominated for the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction
Afflictions & Departures is a collection of first-person experiential essays. However, this is not the realm of traditional memoir – in addition to incidents and feelings recaptured from memory, Sonik seeks out connections between the microcosm of the daily events of her childhood and adolescence, and the social, historical, and scientific trends of the time.
Afflictions & Departures begins by considering the turbulent and changing nature of the world in the late 1950s and early 1960s – the world in which the author was conceived and born. Like many couples of that era, Madeline Sonik’s parents focused on shared social and economic ambitions at the expense of authentic personal feeling. These ambitions would erode and, by the 1970s, completely collapse.
These essays are as incisive as they are moving, and leave the reader with a sense of history as it was lived, not as it is codified in countless textbooks.
Praise for Afflictions & Departures:
“Startlingly original, Madeline Sonik’s moving story of her childhood defies all our expectations of memoir. She captures crystalline moments of childhood memory and links them in a daisy-chain with corresponding events of the tumultuous societal change taking place outside her home. It is North America in the 1960s and 70s and her letter-perfect, child’s-eye view of the world brings back that time with such intensity that the reader can almost smell and taste it. Droll, tragic, and absolutely compelling, Afflictions and Departures is a visceral portrayal of a family imploding.” (Jury, Charles Taylor Prize for literary non-fiction)
“Her memory is dustless, capacious, uncanny. With a storyteller’s skill and a poet’s depth of vision, she recreates her childhood with one eye on her family and the other on the larger world. Significant cultural markers sit side-by-side with the small, painful intensities of her childhood. This memoir is crammed with pathos, yet is written with a light touch. I adore the narrator who never falls into self-pity or narcissism. The clarity of her vision makes the prose gleam and transforms autobiography into art.” (Lorna Crozier, author of Small Beneath the Sky)
“From the patchwork craziness of a sixties and seventies suburban childhood, Madeline Sonik has fashioned a singular coming-of-age story in which the age itself assumes a starring role. Sharply observed, hilarious, and heartbreaking, Afflictions & Departures is a wise, tender, and beautifully written book.” (Susan Olding, author of Pathologies: a life in essays)
Afloat, John Reibetanz’s eighth collection of poetry, focuses on water in many manifestations. The centerpiece, a sequence on the Three Gorges Dam and its cultural and environmental implications, brings ancient Chinese sources (Meng Chiao and the painter Dong Yuan) together with modern ones (Edward Burtynsky’s photographs and violent video games) to create an elegy that is moving and meditative.
Although water is everywhere present as a subject, it is song that provides the motivating power, the vehicle of longing that animates the book. “We thirst for song”Ñthe closing words of the Lament for the Gorges sequenceÑcould really serve as the book’s epigraph. This is poetry exercising its full range of possible functions (to observe, to enquire, to elegize, to imagine, to think, to commemorate, to yearn and to feel), all in the service of that “thirst for song.”
Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English sets out to make the best critical and scholarly work in the field readily available. The series publishes the work of scholars and critics who have traced the coming-into-prominence of a vibrant theatrical community in English Canada.
Truth spoken plainly and powerfully is difficult to dismiss and impossible to ignore. Edited with purpose by Greg Frankson, AfriCANthology: Perspectives of Black Canadian Poets brings together some of Canada’s most influential dub, page, and spoken word poetic voices and gives them space to speak freely about their personal journeys in piercing verse and unapologetic prose. Just as individual experiences of Blackness are diverse across Canada, each contributor recounts aspects of navigating their unique personal, professional, and artistic paths in Black skin with fearless candour and audacious forthrightness. Unforgettable in its charged emotional potency and stirring in its unrelenting urgency, AfriCANthology: Perspectives of Black Canadian Poets is a stunning tour de force by a celebrated gathering of truthtellers that demands we comprehensively reassess the present and reimagine the future of Blackness in Canada.