A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah
Wednesday, April 18, 2007 at 7:30pm
St. Barnabas Anglican Church, 361 Danforth Ave.
St. Barnabas Anglican Church, 361 Danforth Ave.
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, is a riveting memoir, destined to become an international best-seller, which recounts a remarkable story of war, survival and redemption–the first ever written by a former child soldier.
It is estimated that in the more than fifty violent conflicts going on worldwide, there are some 300,000 child soldiers.
Ishmael Beah used to be one of them.
In A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah, now in his mid-twenties, tells how, at the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels in his homeland of Sierra Leone and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he’d been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. This is a rare and mesmerizing account, told with real literary force and heartbreaking honesty.
Ishmael Beah was born in Sierra Leone, West Africa. He spent three years as a boy soldier before he was rehabilitated. He came to the United States at 17 and now lives in New York City. He is a member of Human Rights Watch Children’s Division Advisory Committee and has spoken before the United Nations on several occasions.
You can visit War Child Canada.
Whatever Happened to Old Toronto?
Thursday, March 15, 2007 FREE
Hart House, Debates Room (7 Hart House Circle), 7pm
in partnership
with
presents…
Join us for a panel discussion with Sally Gibson, Michael Redhill, and John Lorinc with moderator Barry Callaghan.
The Reading Series and Grand Design explores how space design, human behaviour and culture interact and foster new relationships between people and their environments, and welcome you to celebrate the current architectural renaissance in Toronto, with our evening of discussion.
Sally Gibson is the author of Inside Toronto: Urban Interiors 1880s to 1920s. It is the first book to investigate the complex, interior life of a single city — the ordinary and extraordinary places where Torontonians lived, worked, shopped, and performed the rituals of daily life. Sally is also the author of one previous book, More Than an Island: A History of Toronto Island, which the late Jane Jacobs called “…city history at its best.” After working as a professional archivist with the City of Toronto Archives for about eight years, Sally became a heritage consultant and is now working as Manager of Heritage Services at the Distillery District.
John Lorinc is an award winning Toronto journalist who specializes in urban affairs, politics, education, culture and business. Lorinc has contributed to numerous Canadian publications since the late 1980s, including The Globe and Mail, The National Post, Canadian Business, ROB Magazine, Quill & Quire, CA Magazine, Saturday Night, Spacing, The Walrus and Readers Digest Canada. Between 1995 and 2005, he was Toronto Life’s urban politics columnist. Lorinc is the author of The New City, a compelling vision of how to make Canada’s metropolitan centres sustainable, livable, and competitive in a world dominated by powerful mega-cities, as well as, Opportunity Knocks: The Truth About Canada’s Franchise Industry (Prentice Hall Canada, 1995), a work of investigative business journalism that was shortlisted for the 1995 National Business Book Awards. He is also a contributor to uTOpia: Towards a New Toronto (Coach House, 2005), a collection of essays on what works about Canada’s largest city.
Barry Callaghan was the winner of the inaugural W.O. Mitchell Award for a body of work, and has won the CBC Fiction Prize, the Foundation for the Advancement of Canadian Letters Prize for Fiction, the Pushcart Prize, and many others. His memoir Barrelhouse Kings was shortlisted for the Trillium Award, and he won the City of Toronto Award for The
Black Queen Stories. His short stories have been featured in many anthologies such as the Oxford Book of Canadian Short Fiction, edited by Margaret Atwood. Callaghan’s fiction has been translated into Spanish, Croatian, French, Swedish, Serbian and Italian. He lives in Toronto with his partner, the artist Claire Weisman Wilks. Barry Callaghan’s new work of fiction, a volume of short stories entitled Between Trains, will be published in May 2007 by McArthur & Company.
Michael Redhill is the publisher and one of the editors of Brick, a literary magazine, and the author of Consolation, a haunting novel about the traces of history layered in our lives, and how time alters the contours of even the things we hold most certain. Michael is also the author of Martin Sloane, a finalist for the Giller prize, and the short story collection Fidelity. He has written four poetry collections, including Asphodel, published in 1997, and Light-Crossing, published in 2001. His most recent works for the theatre are Goodness and Building Jerusalem, winner of a Dora Award.
Tom Harpur interviewed by Mary Wiens
Wednesday, April 4, 2007 @ 7pm
Hart House, Great Hall (7 Hart House Cir.)
Hart House, Great Hall (7 Hart House Cir.)
Join us for an evening with Tom Harpur interviewed by CBC Metro Morning’s Mary Wiens.
Following the extraordinary and ongoing success of his 2004 book The Pagan Christ, scholar and author Tom Harpur was deluged with reader requests to go more deeply into the mythological, allegorical approach to the story of Jesus he took in that bestselling book. In Water Into Wine, Harpur sets out the powerful and transforming message that emerges when the Gospels are finally read as they were originally intended to be and as they were understood by the first Christians, such as Origen and Clement. Seen in their true mythological and symbolical meaning, the stories in the drama of Jesus’s life come alive in a totally fresh way–not as the account of a single, distant god-man working strange miracles like Superman or some fictional magician, but as a description of the evolution of the soul in every one of us. The theme of the Gospels parallels exactly the theme of the Old Testament, as well as every ancient sacred text, which is that a spark of the divine spirit incarnates in each and every human being. Tom Harpur shows how “the old, old story” is at the heart of every religion and how it is really our own personal story too. Water Into Wine is a tour de force written by a skilled and learned communicator that should excite and nourish every true seeker after spiritual fulfillment. As well, it has the enormous potential for furthering the goal of global understanding and peace.
Tom Harpur, columnist for the Toronto Star, Rhodes scholar, and former Anglican priest and professor of Greek and New Testament at the University of Toronto, is an internationally renowned writer on religious and ethical issues. He is the author of nine bestselling books, including For Christ’s Sake, The Pagan Christ and Would You Believe? He has hosted numerous radio and television programs, including Life after Death, a ten-part series based on his bestselling book of the same name, and a twelve-part television series based on his bestseller The Uncommon Touch: An Investigation of Spiritual Healing.
Mary Wiens is a producer for CBC Radio One in Toronto. Her work can be heard on Metro Morning.
