A Family Without A Name

Jules Gabriel Verne was born in 1828, in Nantes, France. Jules' parents were of a seafaring tradition, one factor that influenced his writings. As a boy, Jules Verne ran off to be a cabin boy on a merchant ship, but he was caught and returned to his parents. In 1847 Jules was sent to study law in Paris. While there, however, his passion for theatre grew. Later in 1850, Jules Verne's first play was published. His father was outraged when he heard that Jules was not going to continue law, so he discontinued the money he was giving him to pay for his expenses in Paris. This forced Verne to make money by selling his stories. After spending many hours in Paris libraries studying geology, engineering, and astronomy, Jules Verne published his first novel "Five Weeks in a Balloon." Soon he started writing novels such as "Journey to the Center of the Earth," "From the Earth to the Moon," and "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea." For books filled with exotic places and great adventures, spend some time with Jules Verne.

How Do You Forgive a Parent Who Has Failed You? One summer, Melissa Cistaro’s mother stepped into her baby-blue Dodge Dart and drove away, leaving behind Melissa and her brothers. Rarely seeing their mother as they were growing up, they blamed themselves for her leaving, turning to each other for support and seeking out often destructive ways to cope with living without their mom. Decades later, with children of her own, Melissa finds herself in Olympia, Washington, as her mother is dying. She has just days to find out what happened that summer and to confront the unthinkable fear that a “leaving gene” might be lying dormant inside of her. She knew she came from a long line of mothers who left their children. But when Melissa stumbles across a folder titled “Letters Never Sent” tucked away in her mother’s filing cabinet, she begins to feel the wreckage of her mother’s painful journey, before and after she abandoned her family. Alternating between Melissa’s tumultuous coming-of-age and her mother’s final days, Without My Mother is a haunting yet ultimately uplifting story of one woman’s quest to discover how our parents’ choices impact our own and how we can survive those choices to forge our own paths.

“A distinctive and insightful perspective on being Muslim in the post-9/11 world.” — Charles Taylor Veteran Toronto Star editor Haroon Siddiqui, brown and Muslim, has spent a life on the media front lines, covering conflicts both global and local, and tracked rising xenophobia. Canada has no official culture. It follows that there's no standard way of being Canadian, beyond obeying the law. Toronto Star editor Haroon Siddiqui shows how Canada let him succeed on his own terms. Coming from India in 1967, he didn't do in Rome as some Romans expected him to. He refused to forget his past. He didn't change his name, didn't dilute his dignity, didn't compromise his conscience or his dissident views. Championed immigration and multiculturalism when that was not popular. Upbraided media colleagues for being white-centric, Orientalist. Pioneered cross-cultural journalism, bridging divided communities. Insisted it was un-Canadian to use free speech as a licence for hate speech. Opposed the limitless American war on terror, the invasion of Iraq, the long war on Afghanistan. Exposed how liberals could also be narrow-minded and nasty. Here he shares such journalistic forays into the corridors of power, war zones, and cultural minefields. He also takes the reader along his personal journey from British colonial India to the evolution of Canada as the only Western nation where skin colour is no longer a fault line.