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Author Gord Deval is the grand "old guy" of sport fishing in Canada. Few anglers can match him when it comes to his familiarity with trout and fly fishing. Internationally known, he holds countless bait and fly casting records. Canadian and North American champion, he has represented Canada 32 times in North American and World competitions. Memories of Magical Waters contains a richness of fishing lore related to Deval's experiences on numerous streams, rivers and lakes in Ontario and Quebec.

In 1927, Mazo de la Roche was an impoverished writer in Toronto when she won a $10,000 prize from the American magazine Atlantic Monthly for her novel Jalna. The book became an immediate bestseller. In 1929, the sequel Whiteoaks also went to the top of bestseller lists. Mazo went on to publish 16 novels in the popular series about a Canadian family named Whiteoak, living in a house called Jalna. Her success allowed her to travel the world and to live in a mansion near Windsor Castle.

During his 18-year reign as premier of Quebec, Maurice Duplessis dominated the province and shaped it to his image. A brilliant orator and a scathing wit, Duplessis exercised complete control over his caucus and the Cabinet. If he couldn’t get a vote, he bought it. Politics was the fuel that drove his life. He died on the job.

Mary Janeway, born in Scotland in 1887, came to Canada as a "home child" at a very young age. Separated from her brothers and sisters, the "tiny" Mary was sent as a domestic to a farm near Innerkip, Ontario. This is Mary’s story – a recreation of her life set in Victorian rural Ontario, from the time of the tragedy that split her family to her eventual escape from a life of drudgery.

Communications theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) predicted the effects of electronic media on modern culture as early as 1964. McLuhan published several breakthrough books and coined terms like "hot" and "cool" media, "the global village," and "the medium is the message."

Robert Boyer was a consummate Canadian, whose long career can be measured by words. An author, journalist, researcher, editor, printer, and public speaker, Boyer’s professional life began at the age of 19 when he became a newspaper editor, and continued through the publication of his twelfth book at the age of 88. He was also a church organist, a member of the Ontario Legislature for seventeen years, and the first vice-chairman of Ontario Hydro. A Canadian Shield Book Published by Dundurn in partnership with Canadian Shield Communications Corporation.

Canadian surgeon Lucille Teasdale and her husband founded Lacor Hospital in northern Uganda in 1961. For 35 years the two doctors treated such contagious diseases as malaria, TB, and AIDS, and Teasdale performed thousands of operations under difficult conditions. They lived through civil war, hostage takings, and epidemics. Teasdale received the highest humanitarian awards from the U.N. for her lifes work in Africa.

Louis Riel devoted his life to the Metis cause. A fiery activist, he struggled against injustice as he saw it. He was a pioneer in the field of Aboriginal rights and land claims but was branded an outlaw in his own time. In 1885, he was executed for treason. In 1992, the House of Commons declared Riel a founder of Manitoba. November 16 is now designated Louis Riel Day in Canada.

I was only six when I suspected my skin might be the wrong colour… Born female on the wrong side of the tracks, Eve Mills Nash, with the help of co-author Kenneth J. Harvey, tells a hard-hitting tale of a lifelong fascination with men of a darker hue. From early childhood, Nash knew it was "something to do with what was inside the bottles" that encouraged the groping male fingers that casually abused her during her parents’ drunken parties. She soon discovered that the wine remnants in the revellers’ discarded cups would numb her pain.

John Grierson, founder of both the British documentary film movement and the National Film Board of Canada, was one of the twentieth century’s most influential personalities in film culture. He gave the word "documentary" to the English language.