Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Forget-Me-Not: Reading the Riot Act
Michael Barnholden’s Reading the Riot Act (Anvil Press) re-approaches historical riots from scratch: attempting to unearth causes previously buried by media spin through interviews with participants and observers both. His examination shows not only a Canada that riots more frequently than we think, but one that does so for more just reasons than losing a hockey…
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This Week in Lit Events: January 23-29th
This week there are just heaps of readings: whether it’s fiction or poetry you’re after, there’s events on both coasts in Halifax, Vancouver, and Victoria (plus some in Toronto!).Are you hosting an event featuring an author whose titles are available on All Lit Up? Send the event details, including author, book, date, time, and address to hello@alllitup.ca to be…
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Forget-Me-Not: Dancing in Red Shoes Will Kill You
We don’t need to look too far into Canada’s past to find misogyny on brute display with the 1989 Montreal Massacre among the worst of them. Donna Decker’s debut novel Dancing in Red Shoes Wil Kill You (Inanna Publications) follows the imagined lives of young women leading up to that tragic day when fourteen female engineering…
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In Review: The Week of January 16th
If you’re participating in the Women’s March or watching from afar and need a lit break, you’ve come to the right place. Apropos of certain events, we went angst-y this week with our book recommendations. Get those and more, below.
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Forget-Me-Not: Health Care and Politics
Everyone has an opinion on the Canadian health care system, but David Levine, author of Health Care and Politics: An Insider’s View on Managing and Sustaining Health Care in Canada (Véhicule Press) really knows the political and the personal ins and outs of the system. With 40 years of experience under his belt, he dissects…
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Forget-Me-Not: Letters from Beauly
The eponymous letters in Melynda Jarratt’s Letters from Beauly (Goose Lane Editions) were discovered in her family home’s attic. They detailed Jarratt’s grandfather Pat’s time in the Canadian Forestry Corps in Scotland during the Second World War, where he served as a cook. This book is more than a collection of letters, though: Jarratt weaves them together…
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Forget-Me-Not: The Red Files
It couldn’t be more essential to magnify today’s historical footnote: the residential school system and Sixties Scoop. Lisa Bird-Wilson’s poetry collection The Red Files (Nightwood Editions) reflects on the experiences of residential school victims and their families to offer us a deeper understanding of their stories, as much as it looks at the larger political…
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Forget-Me-Not: The Factory Voice
Jeanette Lynes’ Giller-nominated The Factory Voice (Coteau Books) follows women working in an aeronautics factory during the Second World War, but don’t let that make you think you’re traipsing through the past reading this book. With sexist attitudes towards women going away to nowhere fast and slim job prospects to those who work hard for them ringing…
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This Week in Lit Events: January 16-22nd
Literary events across the country are heating up (unlike the temperature)! This week we have listings from Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, and Abbotsford: check out what’s happening in your area.Are you hosting an event featuring an author whose titles are available on All Lit Up? Send the event details, including author, book, date, time, and address…
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Forget-Me-Not: Oil and Water
Today’s Forget-Me-Not tells the unbelievable true story of Lanier Phillips, the sole survivor of the 1942 USS Truxton shipwreck off the Burin Peninsula. Not your typical race-relation story, Oil and Water (Playwrights Canada Press) explores what it was like for Lanier to be the first black man to be seen in St. Lawrence, Newfoundland, and…
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In Review: The Week of January 9th
It’s the time of year when the snow has lost a little bit of its charm, but hey, it’s not all grim when there are loads of new books out there to keep us sufficiently distracted. Find out what we’re reading this week, and what we’re doing to celebrate #Canada150!
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Forget-Me-Not: The Lil’wat World of Charlie Mack
We couldn’t think of a better book to exemplify what Forget-Me-Not is trying to do: in the “glory days” of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, publisher Talonbooks released The Lil’wat World of Charlie Mack, a collection of stories told by Lil’wat Elder Charlie Mack and a series of interviews conducted between him and anthropologists Dorothy Kennedy and…
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Forget-Me-Not: A Sudden Sun
“We are great preservers of both history and legend in Newfoundland and Labrador” = truer words ne’er spoken, and we’re thrilled to have one such fantastic preservation for today’s Forget-Me-Not. The historical novel A Sudden Sun by Trudy Morgan-Cole (Breakwater Books) follows a mother and daughter in Newfoundland first immediately after 1892’s Great Fire, then at…
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Forget-Me-Not: Great Fortune Dream
Gold wasn’t the only thing rushing Chinese citizens into Canada in 1858. In the aftermath of the Opium Wars, Chinese people fled to British Columbia to escape political unrest and poverty in their homeland. Great Fortune Dream: The Struggles and Triumphs of Chinese Settlers in Canada, 1858 – 1966by Ding Guo & David Chuenyan Lai (Caitlin…
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Forget-Me-Not: The Seven Oaks Reader
The 1816 Battle of Seven Oaks proved a clash of all things going on in pre-Confederation Canada – namely Indigenous land-rights versus settler claims and corporate greed (in the form of the Hudson’s Bay Company versus the Northwest Company) – and would set the groundwork for the Métis quest for self-determination. Myrna Kostash has compiled…
Got any book recommendations?