Category: Biographies & Memoirs

Private Power, Public Purpose: Adventures in Business, Politics, and the Arts by Thomas d’Aquino
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 15.7 MB
Overview: A remarkable memoir by the man at the apex of Canadian power for over fifty years, Private Power, Public Purpose is the ultimate insider’s history in the worlds of politics, business, and philanthropy.

Private Power, Public Purpose is an ambitious and sweeping first-hand account of the past 50 years of Canadian economic history, told from the front lines…. A highly rewarding read.

Stephen Poloz, former Governor of the Bank of Canada and author of The Next Age of Uncertainty

In this monumental memoir, Thomas d’Aquino offers personal insights on four decades of bold leadership at the apex of power. A transforming force in redefining the role of business and the shaping of responsible capitalism, Canada’s private sector leader in advancing the free trade agreement with the United States, valiant defender of national unity, and passionate environmentalist, he has been at the centre of every major policy debate that has influenced contemporary Canada.
Genre: Non-Fiction > Biographies & Memoirs

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The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer by David Leavitt
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 582KB
Overview: The story of Alan Turing, the persecuted genius who helped break the Enigma code and create the modern computer.

To solve one of the great mathematical problems of his day, Alan Turing proposed an imaginary programmable calculating machine. But the idea of actually producing a ‘thinking machine’ did not crystallise until he and his brilliant Bletchley Park colleagues built devices to crack the Nazis’ Enigma code, thus ensuring the Allied victory in the Second World War. In so doing, Turing became a champion of artificial intelligence, formulating the famous (and still unbeaten) Turing test that challenges our ideas of human consciousness.

But Turing’s work was cut short when, as an openly gay man in a time when homosexuality was illegal in Britain, he was apprehended by the authorities and sentenced to a ‘treatment’ that amounted to chemical castration. Ultimately, it lead to his suicide, and it wasn’t until 2013, after many years of campaigning, that he received a posthumous royal pardon.

With a novelist’s sensitivity, David Leavitt portrays Turing in all his humanity – his eccentricities, his brilliance, his fatal candour – while elegantly explaining his work and its implications.
Genre: Non-Fiction > Biographies & Memoirs

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We Should Not Be Friends: The Story of a Friendship by Will Schwalbe
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 900 KB
Overview: A warm, funny, irresistible book that follows an improbable and life-changing college friendship over the course of forty years—from the best-selling author of The End of Your Life Book Club

A “searching, tender, insightful, and wise memoir…Reading this beautifully written and generous book, you will find yourself thinking of your own friendships” —Dani Shapiro, author of Signal Fires

By the time Will Schwalbe was a junior at college, he had already met everyone he cared to know: the theater people, writers, visual artists and comp lit majors, and various other quirky characters including the handful of students who shared his own major, Latin and Greek. He also knew exactly who he wanted to avoid: the jocks. The jocks wore baseball caps and moved in packs, filling boisterous tables in the dining hall, and on the whole seemed to be another species entirely, one Will might encounter only at his own peril.
Genre: Non-Fiction > Biographies & Memoirs

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A Stone Is Most Precious Where it Belongs: A Memoir of Uyghur Exile, Hope, and Survival by Gulchehra Hoja
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 31 MB
Overview: This extraordinary memoir shares an insight into the lives of the Uyghurs, a people and culture being systematically destroyed by China—and a woman who gave up everything to help her people.

In February 2018, twenty-four members of Gulchehra Hoja’s family disappeared overnight. Her crime – and thus that of her family – was her award-winning investigations on the plight of her people, the Uyghurs, whose existence and culture is being systematically destroyed by the Chinese government.

A Stone is Most Precious Where it Belongs is Gulchehra’s stunning memoir, taking us into the everyday world of life under Chinese rule in East Turkestan (more formally as the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China), from her idyllic childhood to its modern nightmare. The grandchild of a renowned musician and the daughter of an esteemed archaeologist, Gulchehra grew up with her people’s culture and history running through her veins. She showed her gifts early on as a dancer, actress, and storyteller, putting her on a path to success as a major television star. Slowly though, she began to understand what China was doing to her people, as well as her own complicity as a journalist. As her rising fame and growing political awakening coincided, she made it her mission to expose the crimes Beijing is committing in the far reaches of its nation, no matter the cost.
Genre: Non-Fiction > Biographies & Memoirs

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Sink by Joseph Earl Thomas
Requirements: .ePUB readers, 495 KB | Retail
Overview: "A brilliant and brilliantly different" (Kiese Laymon), wrenching and redemptive coming-of-age memoir about the difficulty of growing up in a hazardous home and the glory of finding salvation in geek culture.

Stranded within an ever-shifting family’s desperate but volatile attempts to love, saddled with a mercurial mother mired in crack addiction, and demeaned daily for his perceived weakness, Joseph Earl Thomas grew up feeling he was under constant threat. Roaches fell from the ceiling, colonizing bowls of noodles and cereal boxes. Fists and palms pounded down at school and at home, leaving welts that ached long after they disappeared. An inescapable hunger gnawed at his frequently empty stomach, and requests for food were often met with indifference if not open hostility. Deemed too unlike the other boys to ever gain the acceptance he so desperately desired, he began to escape into fantasy and virtual worlds, wells of happiness in a childhood assailed on all sides.

In a series of exacting and fierce vignettes, Thomas guides readers through the unceasing cruelty that defined his circumstances, laying bare the depths of his loneliness and illuminating the vital reprieve geek culture offered him. With remarkable tenderness and devastating clarity, he explores how lessons of toxic masculinity were drilled into his body and the way the cycle of violence permeated the very fabric of his environment. Even in the depths of isolation, there were unexpected moments of joy carved out, from summers where he was freed from the injurious structures of his surroundings to the first glimpses of kinship he caught on his journey to becoming a Pokémon master. SINK follows Thomas’s coming-of-age towards an understanding of what it means to lose the desire to fit in—with his immediate peers, turbulent family, or the world—and how good it feels to build community, love, and salvation on your own terms.
Genre: Non-fiction > Biographies / Memoirs

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