The story of the Cambridge Spy Ring, or the Magnifivent Five as they were dubbed by the media, continues to be of interest, long after the Cold War ended. How did this group of young, wealthy, Cambridge University students fall into the clutches of the Soviet Union during the 1930s? The reality is that Burgess,... Continue Reading →
Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys
Everyone’s familiar with the fate of the Titanic, but very few have heard of the wreck of the Wilhelm Gustloff, the greatest maritime disaster ever in terms of lives lost on a single vessel. As the Red Army advanced through Prussia in 1945, the desperate Germans planned a naval evacuation of refugees and personnel across... Continue Reading →
Flight of Dreams by Ariel Lawhon
This tale takes us to the final days of the doomed last flight of the Hindenburg. Lawhon used the actual ship’s manifest to create the characters and the life aboard the airship and carefully weaves a story that is part historical fiction and part mystery. To this day, no one actually knows for sure... Continue Reading →
Dance of the Banished by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch
Part action novel, part history, part love story – Dance of the Banished is a book which will linger in the reader’s mind. Zeynep and Ali are young Alevi Kurds in Anatolia, Turkey who are dreaming of a future together. Ali leaves his fiancée when he gets passage to Canada and Zeynep’s world is thrown... Continue Reading →
The Wars by Timothy Findley
The Wars by Timothy Findley Thunder Bay Public Library (TBPL) is leading a major cultural partnership project to commemorate the centennial of World War One. TBPL is also a partner in the City of the Poppy initiative to mark Thunder Bay’s unique role as the city where the poppy was first adopted as a symbol... Continue Reading →
In Flanders Fields, 100 Years: Writing on War, Loss and Remembrance, edited by Amanda Betts
The Great War produced some wonderful poetry; it's strange that an event so so ugly could create such beauty. There was something about men under shell fire and stretched to their very limits which made them pick up a pen and compose amazing prose and verse. Rupert Brooke's The Soldier romanticizes war with its opening lines 'If I should die... Continue Reading →
Line of Fire: Diary of an Unknown Soldier (August, September 1914) by Barroux, translated from the French by Sarah Ardizzone
This book’s origins are quite remarkable. It began when a French artist named Barroux noticed some garbage being thrown out on a Paris street and stopped because he saw some old magazines and had been looking for some to cut up for a project. Among the debris he also found a medal and an old... Continue Reading →
Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie
This is no Days of Our Lives, sand through the hourglass, kind of book where you can skip massive chunks and still be ahead of what’s going on. Allow your mind to drift off to contemplate what you’re having for supper or the blue fluff in your belly button, and you’re finished. This is a... Continue Reading →
The Beauty of Humanity Movement, by Camilla Gibb
What a fabulous book! This is a story about food, religion and love, which makes it sound an awful lot like Eat, Pray, Love, but thank goodness the similarity ends there: no shallow, rich chick in this one. Old Man Hung is the pivotal character for the story: the ninth son of a poor rural... Continue Reading →
Peter Straub and the Goods
In need of a really good suspenseful piece of fiction, well then I have the books for you. Peter Straub stories are indeed suspenseful mysteries, but I should add that a majority are also downright terrifying. The first Straub book I had read was Koko which was amazing. What I didn’t know at the time... Continue Reading →
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