Footprints

Series · 20

books · 1994-2017

By Mary Frances Coady, Donald J. Savoie, Norman B. Keevil, and more

Books in series

Blatant Injustice

The Story of a Jewish Refugee from Nazi Germany Imprisoned in Britain and Canada During World War II

2005

After escaping from Nazi Germany with his family, Igersheimer was completing his medical studies when he was caught in the panic that led to the internment of 30,000 German and Italian citizens living in Britain. They were placed behind barbed wire and treated as enemies. Many of the Jewish refugees were then sent to prisons in Canada, but the internees did not let the authorities crush their creativity or desire for an education: they started a free university, mounted plays, and wrote musicals. Laced with black humour, Blatant Injustice is a story of resilience and determination.

Margaret Macdonald

Imperial Daughter (Footprints Series)

2005

During an era of separate spheres for men and women, Margaret Macdonald used her nurse's training to gain access to the military and a life of work, travel, and adventure. In 1906, she was one of the first two nurses to receive a permanent appointment to the Canadian Army Medical Corps. She became matron-in-chief of Canada's overseas nursing service during World War I with the rank of major - the first such appointment for a woman in the British Empire. Macdonald also served as a nurse in the military during the Spanish-American and Boer Wars and in Panama during the construction of the canal. Margaret Macdonald traces the life and work of this extraordinary woman from rural Nova Scotia whose sense of duty and ambition found an outlet in the imperialism of Great Britain and the US. Susan Mann weaves the threads of character, ideology, and opportunity into a vivid portrait of Macdonald and her impact on the professionalization of military nursing.

My Life at the Bar and Beyond (Footprints Series)

2005

From the 1980 referendum to the Oka crisis, Alex Paterson played a critical role in the defining events of Quebec's recent history. "My Life at the Bar and Beyond" offers a candid look at his remarkable life and career. A litigation lawyer for fifty years, Paterson describes his most notorious cases, including his defence of Dr Ewen Cameron against claims by patients that they had been brainwashed in experiments funded by the CIA. He offers behind-the-scenes views of the fight against Bill 101, campaigning for the No Committee in the 1980 Quebec referendum, and the stand-off at Oka between Mohawks and the provincial police.Paterson also charts his involvement in establishing the Montreal University Health Centre and the plan to create English and French 'super hospitals' as well as directing the expansion of Bishop's University during his time as chancellor. Paterson is a polished raconteur and his revealing memoir includes tantalizing anecdotes about how a simple joke convinced Charles Bronfman to fund the Institute for the Study of Canada at McGill University and the infamous cow that urinated on Boris Yeltzin during a tour of MacDonald College.

The Teeth of Time

Remembering Pierre Elliott Trudeau (Footprints Series)

2006

Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Ramsay Cook were friends for nearly four decades. A passion for the intellectual life drew them together but their friendship focused more on politics once Trudeau became prime minister. In "The Teeth of Time" Cook reflects on his relationship with Trudeau and the tensions created when one friend achieves political power and the other struggles to find the balance among his roles as detached scholar and teacher, involved citizen, and personal friend. Trudeau, the most intellectual of Canadian prime ministers, turned to Cook, an illustrious historian and a speech-writer during the 1968 election campaign, for his trusted views.Cook's revealing memoir also traces how public affairs and the central political themes of Trudeau's reign - nationalism, federalism, and constitutional reform - continued to drive their relationship after Trudeau's resignation in 1984. "The Teeth of Time": is taken from "The New Faces" by W.B. Yeats, a poem that is a declaration of abiding Where we wrought that shall break the teeth of Time ...Our shadows rove the garden gravel still, The living seem more shadowy than they. In a friendship that bridged the world of politics and the intellectual world of academia, what Cook and Trudeau wrought will outlast the teeth of time.

Red Travellers

Jeanne Corbin & Her Comrades (Footprints Series)

1999

Corbin's "red itinerary" began when she joined the Young Communist League in Edmonton. She later held party posts across the country through her involvement with The Worker in Toronto, a French communist paper in Montreal, the Workers' Cooperative in Timmins, and a lumbermen's strike in Abitibi - where she was jailed for taking part in a protest. She died of tuberculosis in London, Ontario, in 1944.

The Greater Glory

Thirty-Seven Years with the Jesuits (Footprints Series)

2007

Stephen Casey was twenty-one when he entered the Jesuit Order in Canada in 1947. His striving for Christian perfection led to depression and eventually to a complete breakdown. After thirty-seven years as a Jesuit he left the priesthood. The Greater Glory is a candid memoir about a way of life that, after fifteen hundred years, is disappearing, Casey offers a vivid and incisive portrayal of the seminary, especially the training for novices - the physical and spiritual discipline, the asceticism, the anxieties that surrounded the socialization of young seminarians, the struggles that their chosen careers held for them. Casey not only reveals the condition of Catholicism in Canada in the twentieth century but, in a voice that is honest without being bitter or vindictive, shows how one man transcended his painful experiences to find peace.

Doctor to the North

Thirty Years Treating Heart Disease Among the Inuit

2008

For several weeks a year, over three decades, he worked as a consulting cardiologist in the Canadian North, a first-hand witness to rapidly changing disease patterns among the Inuit as a Western lifestyle became more prevalent. Through the stories of some of his Inuit patients, Burgess presents a broad spectrum of heart diseases and discusses how they can be prevented.

#10

In the Eye of the Wind

A Travel Memoir of Prewar Japan (Footprints Series)

2009

Yokohama, a quiet fishing village when Commodore Matthew Perry arrived with his gunboat diplomacy in the mid-1800s, was quickly transformed into a bustling port for international trade. The change brought affluent foreigners to the city but also mobilized Japanese nationalist hostilities. It was in this setting that Ron and Martin Baenninger's Canadian mother and Swiss father met in 1933. Relying on Ron's early memories, their mother's diary, and the acute memory of their father, who lived to be over one hundred, the Baenningers recount the initial years of their parents' marriage and provide glimpses into relations between Japan and the West from the turn of the century to the onset of the Second World War. In their earliest years together the young couple enjoyed a rich social life, travelling freely between Canada, Switzerland, and Japan, although aware of the political turmoil slowing unfolding around them. The outbreak of the war between Japan and the United States and allied powers brought their privileged lifestyle to an end. In August 1942 they escaped internment with their young son aboard the Kamakura Maru - one of the many exchange ships assigned to bring foreign nationals home and the last evacuation vessel from Japan - and negotiated their way through war-torn areas to reach Canada four months later. In the Eye of the Wind - both a deeply personal account of one family and a unique perspective on the politically turbulent atmosphere of pre-war Japan - will interest anyone seeking to learn more about a tumultuous period in an extraordinary place.

#11

Moi, je suis de Bouctouche [I'm from Bouctouche, Me]

Les racines bien ancrées [Roots Matter]

1994

Donald Savoie a grandi dans un petit village acadien et est devenu un auteur et un universitaire accompli. Ses livres ont eu un effet profond sur les politiques publiques du Canada et sur l'administration du pays. Moi, je suis de Bouctouche n'est pas seulement l'histoire de Savoie lui-même, mais aussi une histoire qui porte sur le Canada, le peuple acadien et l'évolution du Canada français. Please This audiobook is in French.

#13

Crises and Compassion

From Russia to the Golden Gate (Footprints Series)

2011

Letiche, now in his nineties, provides an intriguing look at the changes that have occurred during his lifetime. Following his Kiev childhood and formative years in Depression-era Montreal, he completed a doctorate at the University of Chicago and took up a Rockefeller fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City. As a technical advisor to the Economic Commission for Africa he conducted trade talks with both gifted and corrupt heads of state in sub-Saharan Africa, and later shared a working White House dinner with an infamous American president. His half-century-long teaching career at Berkeley included a front row seat for the Free Speech Movement and the most documented student revolt in popular history. Told with humour, insight, and humility, Crises and Compassion moves nimbly among weighty events and meaningful personal history, showing how "civility in intellectual exchange" came to be the guiding principle of a life of monumental experiences.

#14

In the Eye of the China Storm

A Life Between East and West

2011

Born in Vancouver in 1920 to immigrant parents, Lin became a passionate advocate for China while attending university in the United States. With the establishment of the People's Republic, and growing Cold War sentiment, Lin abandoned his doctoral studies, moving to China with his wife and two young sons. He spent the next fifteen years participating in the country's revolutionary transformation. In 1964, concerned by the political climate under Mao and determined to bridge the growing divide between China and the West, Lin returned to Canada with his family and was appointed head of McGill University's Centre for East Asian Studies. Throughout his distinguished career, Lin was sought after as an authority on China. His commitment to building bridges between China and the West contributed to the establishment of diplomatic relations between Canada and China in 1970, to US President Richard Nixon's visit to China in 1972, and to the creation of numerous cultural, academic, and trade exchanges. In the Eye of the China Storm is the story of Paul Lin's life and of his efforts - as a scholar, teacher, business consultant, and community leader - to overcome the mutual suspicion that distanced China from the West. A proud patriot, he was devastated by the Chinese government's violent suppression of student protestors at Tiananmen Square in June 1989, but never lost faith in the Chinese people, nor hope for China's bright future.

#15

Georges and Pauline Vanier

Portrait of a Couple

2011

Georges and Pauline Vanier follows their lives and travels across the world - from Canadian military life to the League of Nations, from the inner circles of British government to their harrowing escape from Nazi-occupied France - detailing their disappointments and triumphs during social and political turbulence. With insight and sympathy, Mary Frances Coady tells their dramatic personal story. Revealing their remarkably vibrant personalities, she details the couple's support of the French resistance as well as Georges Vanier's pleas for the Canadian government to accept refugees fleeing Hitler's horrors and his effort to broaden immigration policy. She also recounts the importance of their religious convictions, their controversial standing among Quebecers, and their early advocacy of official bilingualism. An invigorating and well-told tale of their lasting legacies, Georges and Pauline Vanier is the definitive account of the enduring contributions the Vaniers made to the world and to their country.

#16

Blitzkrieg and Jitterbugs

College Life in Wartime, 1939-1942 (Footprints Series)

2012

Elizabeth Hillman enrolled at McGill University the week World War II began. As a freshman writing for the McGill Daily, she covered torchlight football parades and dances at the Ritz Carleton hotel while elsewhere the paper reported U-boats torpedoing convoys and war planes plummeting into the British channel. Blitzkrieg and Jitterbugs draws on her journal entries, articles from the Daily, and headlines from the Montreal Gazette to paint a vivid picture of day-to-day life on campus, alongside the civilian wartime experience in Canada. Part memoir, part history, the book touches on important feminist issues of the day, provides historical detail on both McGill University and Canada's participation in World War II, and is punctuated with candid glimpses into both the social and intellectual aspects of university life during a three-year tenure at McGill. Charmingly written with subtle ironies, Blitzkrieg and Jitterbugs includes photos collected from scrapbooks, albums, and the McGill archives to vividly highlight aspects of wartime life as experienced far from the battlefields.

#18

Course in Baluchi

2014

Expect Miracles is the personal and professional story of a leader in the worlds of business and culture. David Culver narrates his journey from his upbringing in Montreal's Golden Square Mile, through his studies at McGill and Harvard, his army service during the Second World War, to his impressive rise at Alcan to become chairman and chief executive officer of one of Canada's leading multinational corporations. The memoir provides an inside look into the management of a global company with roots deeply planted in Quebec and offers pragmatic advice on how to grow talent, foster technology, and handle adversity in a far-flung organization. Anecdotes of meeting the likes of Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger, and Jawaharlal Nehru, reveal the experiences of a strong corporate leader who continued to live a Montreal life, while never losing his interest in discovering the world. A man of many interests and talents, Culver reflects on his long love affair with architecture - and his efforts to restore and preserve Montreal's heritage by creating Maison Alcan - and how music and sport helped shape his life. Expect Miracles is evidence of Culver's positive outlook and belief that the most extraordinary things can happen when you least expect them.

#20

Building Bridges

2015

A pediatrician, provincial politician, and pioneer of interfaith dialogue, Victor Goldbloom (b. 1923) has led a rich and varied life. Deeply committed to social issues, his dedication to reconciliating French and English, federalists and sovereignists, Christians and Jews, and his understanding of public health, the environment, and minority communities are unparalleled. Born in Montreal, Goldbloom received his medical degree from McGill University in 1945. A practising pediatrician for many years, he entered public life in 1962 as a governor of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Quebec and in 1966 was elected to the Quebec Legislature. In 1970 he became the first member of Quebec’s Jewish community to serve in the provincial cabinet, under Premier Robert Bourassa. A minister of the National Assembly until 1979, Goldbloom served as Quebec’s first environment minister, and later as municipal affairs minister and minister responsible for the Olympics Installations Board. In the early 1990s he became Canada’s Commissioner of Official Languages. In Building Bridges - a collection of personal anecdotes, media coverage of his impressive career, and transcriptions of two historic speeches - Goldbloom recounts the details of his remarkable life and lifelong commitment to Quebec and to Canada.

#21

Call Me Giambattista

A Personal and Political Journey

2015

What draws a person to the political life? In Call Me Giambattista, John Ciaccia recounts his immigration to Canada from Italy as a small child in 1937 to his retirement from the National Assembly of Quebec in 1998. After studying at McGill University's Faculty of Law, practising in a Montreal law firm, and shifting gears to work as a federal civil servant, a phone call in 1973 from Premier Robert Bourassa launched Ciaccia's twenty-five-year career in Quebec politics. As a member federalist politician from an Italian background, Ciaccia faced many challenges. When first elected, he negotiated the James Bay Agreement with the Cree and the Inuit, and later, as Quebec's minister of Native Affairs, he was a key negotiator in the Oka crisis of 1990. Over the course of his career he held four cabinet posts, including International Affairs, and he ended his political career as the longest-serving member of the National Assembly. Ciaccia details all of these events and more, and explains his relationships with leading figures such as Robert Bourassa, Claude Ryan, Pierre Trudeau, René Lévesque, and Jacques Parizeau. Revealing his approach to politics, Ciaccia describes the lessons he learned from his career, and underscores the importance of acting according to one's convictions. An intriguing memoir of an Italian immigrant who came to hold key roles in the Quebec government, Call Me Giambattista tells the story of a political leader and the choices he made during a seminal period in Quebec history.

#22

Smitten by Giraffe

My Life as a Citizen Scientist

2016

When Anne Innis saw her first giraffe at the age of three, she was smitten. She knew she had to learn more about this marvelous animal. Twenty years later, now a trained zoologist, she set off alone to Africa to study the behaviour of giraffe in the wild. Subsequently, Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey would be driven by a similar devotion to study the behaviour of wild apes. In Smitten by Giraffe, the noted feminist reflects on her scientific work as well as the leading role she has played in numerous activist campaigns. On returning home to Canada, Anne married physicist Ian Dagg, had three children, published a number of scientific papers, taught at several local universities, and in 1967 earned her PhD in biology at the University of Waterloo. Dagg was continually frustrated in her efforts to secure a position as a tenured professor despite her many publications and exemplary teaching record. Finally she opted instead to pursue her research as an independent ?citizen scientist,? while working part-time as an academic advisor. Dagg would spend many years fighting against the marginalization of women in the arts and sciences. Boldly documenting widespread sexism in universities while also discussing Dagg?s involvement with important zoological topics such as homosexuality, infanticide, sociobiology, and taxonomy, Smitten by Giraffe offers an inside perspective on the workings of scientific research and debate, the history of academia, and the rise of second-wave feminism.

#23

The Oil Has Not Run Dry

The Story of My Theological Pathway

2016

Born to a Jewish mother and Protestant father in 1923 Berlin, Gregory Baum devoted his career to a humanistic approach to Catholicism. In The Oil Has Not Run Dry, Baum shares recollections about his lifelong commitment to theology, his atypical views, and his evolving understanding of the Catholic Church’s message. Baum reflects on his groundbreaking work with the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) and how it helped to open the Church to a new understanding of outsiders - one that advocated cooperation with world religions in support of peace and justice and respected secular philosophies committed to truth and social solidarity. Later embracing Latin American liberation theology, he became a leading thinker of the Catholic Left in Canada, adopting radical positions that initially earned support from Canadian bishops in the 1970s. Diverging from official Catholic doctrines regarding women and sexual ethics, Baum eventually left the priesthood, but continued to teach theology and remained active in the Church. The Oil Has Not Run Dry also discusses the contrast between Catholicism in Quebec and English-speaking North America, and the ways in which Baum sees Quebec's culture as more marked by social solidarity. This significant difference has inspired his own writings, which present the original development of Catholic thought in Quebec to an English-speaking readership.

#24

My Peerless Story

It Starts with the Collar

2017

In 1951, Alvin Cramer Segal, at the age of eighteen and without a formal education, started working in the factory of his stepfather’s company in Montreal. Today he is the chairman and chief executive officer of the largest supplier of men’s fine-tailored clothing in North America, and is considered an outstanding business and community leader, at the forefront of policy-making in Canada’s apparel industry, with commitments to philanthropic efforts that echo his business accomplishments. In My Peerless Story, Segal recounts how he learned business from the collar down and from the ground up, transforming a family-owned business into one that would eventually come to licence labels such as Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, and Michael Kors. Sharing anecdotes and personal experiences, Segal describes the history of garment manufacturing in Montreal and his intuitive strategies to leverage growth by improving fabrics, and adapting to innovative changes in the industry, eventually becoming the main inventory source of designer label suits to major department stores. Written from the heart, not as a handbook but rather as the story of a well-suited business career, My Peerless Story nonetheless includes relevant business lessons for the aspiring and inspired.

#26

Never Rest on Your Ores

Building a Mining Company, One Stone at a Time (Footprints Series)

2017

A century ago, a prospector discovered gold at Ontario’s Kirkland Lake and a son was born to British immigrants in Saskatchewan. The boy – Norman Bell Keevil – went on to become a renowned scientist, teacher, and prospector, discovering a small but high-grade copper mine in Ontario. Parlaying that into control of the Kirkland Lake gold mine fifty years later, he formed the fledgling mining company Teck Corporation. In Never Rest on Your Ores, Keevil’s son Norman, also a geoscientist, recounts how over the next fifty years, a growing team of like-minded engineers and entrepreneurs built Canada’s largest diversified mining company. In candid detail he tells the story of a company and its makers, of the discovery and creation of mines, of the mechanics of industry financing, and of the role that mergers and acquisitions play in a volatile environment. Along the way he meets fascinating captains of industry and politicians not only in Canada, but in the United States and around the world. Finding an ore body – rock that holds valuable metals and minerals – and promoting its development in order to finance and create a mine, most often in hard-to-access wilderness, is complicated work, comparable to locating and extracting a needle in a very messy haystack. Underlying this history is a constant need to replenish the ore, and this need drives the people involved. A detailed and revealing history of a company that he helped to grow and lead for many years, Norman Keevil’s Never Rest on Your Ores is both entertaining and instructive, a rare insider’s account of an industry that has been crucial to the building of this country.

Authors

Elizabeth Hillman Waterston

Author · 1 book

Elizabeth Hillman Waterston was inducted into the Order of Canada in 2019. She is also a Member of the Order of Ontario and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She received these honors for her pioneering work in the fields of Canadian, children’s, women’s, and historical Canadian travel literature. These awards also recognized her far-reaching mentorship of fellow writers. She taught at the universities of Concordia and Western before moving to the University of Guelph where she is now Professor Emerita. Dr. Waterston fuses scholarly analysis with her personal memories as student, teacher, and inveterate reader and writer in her recent non-fiction: Blitzkrieg and Jitterbugs, Rapt in Plaid: Canadian Literature and Scottish Tradition, and Magic Island: The Fictions of L.M. Montgomery.

Spécialiste de l’histoire des femmes et de l’histoire du mouvement ouvrier au Québec, Andrée Lévesque a été professeure titulaire à l’Université McGill. Elle a fait paraître plusieurs ouvrages, dont la biographie Éva Circé-Côté, libre-penseuse, 1871-1949 (2010), Scènes de la vie en rouge: l’époque de Jeanne Corbin, 1906-1944 (1999) et dirigé le collectif Madeleine Parent, militante (2003), tous à l’enseigne des Éditions du remue-ménage.

Gregory Baum

Author · 3 books

Gerhard Albert Baum (1923–2017), better known as Gregory Baum, was a German-born Canadian priest and theologian in the Roman Catholic Church. He became known in North America and Europe in the 1960s for his work on ecumenism, interfaith dialogue, and the relationship between the Catholic Church and Jews. In the later 1960s, he went to the New School for Social Theory in New York and became a sociologist, which led to his work on creating a dialogue between classical sociology (Marx, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Toennies, Weber, etc.) and Christian theology. In the 1970s, he welcomed the insights of the Theology of Liberation that came from Latin America and other societies. He also became interested in the work of Karl Mannheim and developed a program of ideology critique that he hoped would eliminate the ideological elements in religion, especially those elements that preached contempt for others and allowed Christians to remain unmoved by the suffering of the victims of social injustice and structural violence. In the 1980s and 1990s, Baum continued his study into ideology critique by integrating the work of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. He connected the Frankfurt School's concept of "the end of innocent critique" with the Catholic Church's "preferential option for the poor". Both concepts extended his interest in ideology critique. Since Baum has always been interested in social ethics, he also studied the work of Karl Polanyi, with whom he sympathized greatly.

Susan Mann is a historian, member of the Order of Canada, president emeritus of York University, author of A Dream of Nation: A Social and Intellectual History of Quebec, and editor of The War Diary of Clare Gass, 1915-1918.

Canadian Anne Innis Dagg has loved giraffes her whole life. She pioneered a study of their behaviour for a year in Africa in the 1950s, and has written many scientific papers and four books about them. Her ground-breaking early research and lifelong commitment to giraffe conservation make her one of the worlds leading giraffe experts and a true friend to giraffes everywhere. She lives in Waterloo, Ontario.

John Ciaccia

Author · 1 book