Books and Beyond

We don’t often think about feminism and the Industrial Revolution in the same breath, but Elizabeth Gillan Muir, Arts’56, has uncovered more than 400 stories of women who made impressive contributions to Toronto’s growth – from songwriters and innkeepers to reformers and even the owner of a brickyard. Ms. Muir chronicles these stories in An Unrecognized Contribution: Women and Their Work in 19th-Century Toronto, from Dundurn Press. As Rick Mercer said in a recent review, “In these pages lie a hundred movies waiting to be made.”

Stewart Goodings, Arts’62, draws on years of international experience, particularly in Russia and Ukraine, to tell an uplifting tale of friendship amid political violence. My Friend, My Enemy, released in late 2022 through FriesenPress, is the story of two girls, one Russian, one Chechen, who reunite as adults decades after the Russia-Chechnya war. By this time, both women’s lives have been altered by the war, and their reunion forces them to confront their secrets and test the limits of their friendship.

Heather Patterson, Artsci’01, Meds’05, had always used photography to help relieve the stress from her demanding job as a Calgary emergency physician. When COVID-19 struck, she took out her camera again, this time to document the heroic efforts of her co-workers and the patients they were labouring to save. Those photographs became an unofficial record of the pandemic and graced the pages of the Calgary Herald, Maclean’s, and the Queen’s Alumni Review. They are now available in Shadows and Light: A Physician’s Lens on COVID, a compassionate chronicle of the work of some of Canada’s unsung healthcare heroes. From Goose Lane Editions.

As Canada’s population grows older, we must face the fact that our cities and neighbourhoods weren’t designed for healthy aging. In Aging People, Aging Places, Dr. Samantha Biglieri, Artsci’13, Professor Maxwell Hartt, Professor Emeritus Dr. Mark Rosenberg, and former postdoctoral fellow Dr. Sarah Nelson bring reflections from researchers, practitioners, and ordinary older Canadians together to look at the implications of aging in Canada and how we can turn our communities into healthier places to grow old. Now available from Policy Press.

Twenty years ago, while researching a history of the Princess of Wales’ Own Regiment, Brig.- Gen. (Retired) William J. Patterson, Arts’53, MA’57, stumbled on a box of old military medals and letters, still in their original envelopes. The box belonged to Lt.-Col. Francis Edward Wootton, a First World War veteran who went on to lead the Royal Canadian Engineers during the Second World War. Wootton’s Wars, Gen. Patterson’s 10th book, tells Lt.-Col. Wootton’s story. The self-published biography is available exclusively at Novel Idea in Kingston. 

For the last 35 years, Pastor Jeeva Sam, MDiv’82, and his wife, Sulojana, have been counselling couples on the brink of divorce and teaching them to rebuild their marriages on a solid spiritual foundation. The Sams share their secrets in The Unbreakable Marriage: How to Stand in Unity and Withstand Adversity, a self-published guide for pastors, parishioners, and couples at all stages of their marriages.

Even the most diehard hockey fan would be hard-pressed to remember the Coca-Cola Bottlers’ Cup, an epic series of four exhibition games between two terrible National Hockey League teams held in Japan in the spring of 1976. Steve Currier, Artsci’02, a hockey historian and fan of the obscure, chronicles the mostly forgotten series in his second book, When the NHL Invaded Japan: The Washington Capitals, the Kansas City Scouts, and the Coca-Cola Bottlers’ Cup, 1975–76, available now from McFarland Press.

While Linda Dawn Brown-Thomson, Meds’77, worked as a family physician and pediatrician, she spent her spare time writing stories and musicals for children. Now retired, Dr. Brown-Thomson has just released her first children’s book. Finding Us tells the story of a lonely boy who sets off on an adventure with two new friends and discovers the family and acceptance he’d always been looking for. Published by Friesen Press, this hopeful tale blending humour and fantasy is aimed at kids aged seven and eight.

In her 2020 debut novel, Rebecca Jaremko Bromwich, Law’01, LLM’02, introduced Enid Alger Kimble, a former lawyer and stay-at-home mom whose carefully crafted life belies a complicated past and an uncertain future. In Ruin, Bromwich’s 2022 sequel from Demeter Press, Enid is back, and her life is once again in disarray as she contends with midlife, divorce, single parenthood, and COVID-19.

Not long after graduation, Neil B. Dukas, Artsci’83, hitchhiked across the length of Africa, filling three journals with the tales of his travels and “self-inflicted near-death experiences.” Almost 40 years later, those journals became the inspiration for Dukas’s memoir of his life-defining adventure. Sometime in Africa was released in May 2022 by Kaladar Books in San Francisco and is available on Amazon.

Eleonore Schönmaier, Artsci’85, NSc’86, mixes intimate reflection with highly charged political and environmental issues to create the surreal feeling that winds its way through her fourth poetry collection, Field Guide to the Lost Flower of Crete, released in 2021 by McGill-Queen’s University Press. Schönmaier is also celebrating the release of the German translation of an older collection, Wavelengths of Your Song. Wellenlängen deines Liedes was released in Germany in time for the Frankfurt Book Fair last fall.

Longtime sports reporter Jean (Bangay) Mills, Artsci’78, MA’80, honed her craft as a student, working as sports director at CFRC radio and writing for the Queen’s Journal’s sports section before spending a decade on the media bench for Curling Canada. Mills draws on those experiences in her third young adult novel, published in November 2021 by Red Deer Press. The Legend tells the story of a teenaged hockey player who finds a job as a radio sports reporter while recovering from an injury.

How does a cynical, addicted university dropout find faith, purpose, and a fulfilling career as a United Church of Canada minister? Rev. Dr. Gordon Postill, Arts’71, tells the story of his unlikely transformation in Called! A Longshot’s Story, his deeply personal memoir, self-published through FriesenPress in late 2021. While his story is candid and revealing, he says he is sharing it “to convey some hope and compassion to those readers who are desperately longing for a second chance.”

A year after graduating from Queen’s Engineering, Alan Mallory, Sc’07, and three of his family members made history when they became the first family to scale Mount Everest together. Mallory, who now works as a speaker and performance coach, uses this and other mountain-climbing adventures as a metaphor for self-discovery in Summits of Self: The Seven Peaks of Personal Growth. The book weaves stories of Mallory’s exploits with practical strategies for understanding motivation, improving mental health, finding balance, and living with purpose.

Bahamian track star Pauline Davis is probably best known as the winner of the Caribbean’s first individual Olympic gold medal in sprinting – a medal she received in 2009, nine years after running the race. Writing under the pseudonym T.R. Todd, Jeff Todd, Artsci’04, tells the story of Davis’s rise from poverty to Olympic glory, and the doping scandal that resulted in her unlikely gold medal. Running Sideways: The Olympic Champion who Made Track and Field History was released by Rowman & Littlefield in February.

After publishing her memoir in 2009, Lorrie Potvin, Ed’03, realized her story wasn’t quite finished. Horses in the Sand, her second memoir, is coming this spring from Inanna Publications. With this short story collection, Potvin details the milestone events in her life and the ways they impacted her evolving identity: coming out to her family, meeting her birth father and his family, and discovering her Métis ancestry and the community and sense of belonging that came with it.