Literary
A Bear in War
Teddy's World War I odyssey takes him from a farm in Quebec to the front lines of France, and finally to his present home in the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.In 1915, 37-year-old Lawrence Browning Rogers enlisted in the Fifth Canadian Mounted Rifles, leaving behind his wife, two children, and their farm in East Farnham, Quebec. Over the next two a …
A Name for Himself
"Twelve months in any place, my friend, is quite a weary while And seems more like a century when lived on Sable Isle ..."
So wrote Thomas Raddall at the age of eighteen, not dreaming that many years later Sable Island -- that "hell on earth" -- would provide a romantic background for one of his greatest novels, The Nymph and the Lamp.
Traumatized b …
Auld Lang Syne
Because of his humble beginnings and his whole-hearted affection for Scotland and her common folk, Robert Burns was able to record and compose poems and songs that speak to people from every walk of life. He was, and still is, one of Scotland's best-loved sons.
Two centuries after his death and in the true spirit of auld lang syne, literally old lo …
Believing in Books
Have you ever read a book that you couldn't put down? Has that book taken you to other countries, to other centuries? Have you found yourself brimming with excitement, exclaiming to all who will listen, "Read this book!" This biography is the story of a child who took her love of childrens' books and found a way to share it with the world as she gr …
Born to Write
What were famous authors like as kids?
Our childhood experiences shape us into the adults we become. Born to Write tells the stories of how six extraordinary children transformed early struggles into spellbinding bedtime reading for kids around the world.
To ease the pain of being ostracized by her classmates, Madeleine L'Engle escaped to an invented …
Excerpt
Echoes of Childhood
If you love reading books, you know what it is like to lose yourself in a story. Your bedroom drops away and you're in the world of the book, side by side with the hero or heroine. Your ticket to those other worlds depends on the strength of your imagination and the power of the words you're reading. The best writers scoop you up and take you on a ride that ends only on the last page of the book.
To create this kind of magic, a writer needs a very special kind of imagination. Most children haven't yet learned to put limits on their daydreams; they can easily imagine flying, or skipping through time, or enjoying magical powers. Children who grow up to be writers have something extra. Along with a vivid imagination, they often have a driving need to create an imaginary world that's an improvement on the one they live in. Nearly all of the writers in this book had to endure hardships in their childhoods -- parents who died or abandoned them, isolation and bullying at school, or simply a lack of friends or grown-ups who understood and loved them. But somehow these children found the time and space to create their own secret worlds, which were much more intense and satisfying than their everyday lives.
And when they grew up, instead of forgetting what it felt like to be a child, they remembered, and put it into their books. Fragments of their childhood selves echo through their writing: the intriguing attic tunnel in C. S. Lewis's The Magician's Nephew, Meg's itchy feeling of never fitting in at school in Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, the ghostly clock in L. M. Montgomery's The Story Girl.
What happens to people makes them who they are. This book tells the stories of how six extraordinary children transformed their childhood struggles into spellbinding bedtime reading for kids everywhere.
