Ronsdale Press: 131 books

In this unusual Holocaust memoir, Rhodea Shandler gives a woman's view of life under the Nazis in Holland. She begins by describing her early life in a closely knit Jewish family in northern Holland. There was anti-Semitism, she explains, but it was of a low level, and the Jews with their strong ties...

This third and final volume in the Craft Perception and Practice series features 21 essays and critical commentaries by acclaimed Canadian practitioners, educators and curators, demonstrating the range of critical thought about craft as presented in symposiums, exhibition catalogues and art journals....

For his third volume about BC literary history, Alan Twigg traces the writings of David Thompson, Alexander Mackenzie, Simon Fraser and thirty of their peers, mainly Scotsmen, who founded and managed more than fifty forts west of the Rockies prior to 1850. After the failure of Alexander Mackenzie...

When a young black man named Seraphim “Joe” Fortes arrived in Vancouver in 1885, with little to his name, no one could have possibly suspected that one hundred years later he would be voted “Citizen of the Century.” Our Friend Joe is the first biography of the West Indian sailor who became...

This profoundly honest Holocaust memoir describes the transformation of everyday anti-Semitism into the Holocaust nightmare. Central to the story are the years Mielnicki spent in the camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buna, Mittelbau-Dora and Belsen. Mielnicki's account is a harrowing yet powerfully redeeming human drama. Includes over 30 black and white photos and maps.

The names Cook and Quadra ring a bell for most of us, as do Bering and Vancouver, but how much do we know about the Greek-born navigator, Juan de Fuca or the Machiavelli of the maritime fur trade, John Meares? British Columbia's earliest authors and explorers are skilfully introduced, for the first...

This Holocaust memoir crosses generations. In I Have My Mother’s Eyes, Barbara Ruth Bluman chronicles her mother’s dramatic journey from Nazi-occupied Poland to western British Columbia, where her legacy lives on. Bluman sets an urgent and intimate tone as she follows Zosia Hoffenberg from her...

In his 2015 Garnett Sedgewick lecture, award-winning poet and literary critic Stephen Burt discusses the relation of poetry to time, space and place. He examines the widespread and popular view of contemporary critics who claim that modern lyric poetry is supposed to have a speaking self who resides...

“All the world is a narrow bridge,” states Rabbi Nachman of Bresnov. “The important thing is not to be afraid at all.” These poems, Barbara Pelman’s third collection, explore bridges both real and metaphoric: the bridge connecting Denmark to Sweden where her family lives; the bridges she...

To some extent, everyone plays with language and uses it as a form of recreation as well as a means of communication. Recognizing that the creation of true wit is a subjective endeavour, Richler suggests that the commission of language wit occurs not only wittingly, but also unwittingly and sometimes...

This stunning collection will break your heart and put it back together again, as Pamela Porter unravels a long-held family secret in a moving personal search for redemption, face to face with the question of her own identity. As she says, “It was this way when Rome was burning, / and was not so...

“What is a stroke?” This is the question that plagues Ron Smith as he emerges from the carpet bombing of his brain. The Defiant Mind: Living Inside a Stroke is a first-person account of a massive ischemic stroke to the brain stem. Smith takes the reader inside the experience and shows how recuperation...

Time touches everything, and in doing so changes everything. The Arrow of Time examines the challenges, transformations and surprises wrought by change, and celebrates the ways we attempt to measure our lives against this invisible force. From John Constable’s home at East Bergholt to the shattered...

In 1939 the botanist Vladimir Krajina joined the Czech Resistance and quickly became one of its leaders. Incredible escapes from the Gestapo followed while some 20,000 radio messages were sent by his group to London, among them those about the pending invasion of the Balkans and of the Soviet Union....