NNELS Upgrade

Short-listed for the 2002 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction So you grow up as a member of the baby boom. You’re well-brought up, well-educated, and your parents have great expectations. And, yet, somehow, you just don’t feel you belong. Along the way, you find the right wrong boyfriends: the poet-husband, and bane of your mother’s existence, the married Japanese doctor.

On the last day of the Second World War, Frank and Russ fought each other. In the days after, they became friends. This is the remarkable tale of a long-forgotten letter. It was written from Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War to a Canadian in a peaceful Southern Ontario town. Both had been soldiers and had met on a German battlefield. The letter lay unseen for years and was found by the Canadian’s son long after the old soldier’s death.

Greenblatt transports listeners to the dawn of the Renaissance and chronicles the life of an intrepid book lover who rescued the Roman philosophical text On the Nature of Things from certain oblivion.