Tuesday, May 8 @ 7:30pm
Innis Town Hall (2 Sussex Ave.)
FREE

Sleeping Buddha is an evocative family memoir and unique portrait of Afghanistan from a young, Afghan-born Canadian journalist Hamida Ghafour, whose family fled the Soviet invasion in 1981 and settled in Canada where she grew up.

In 2003 she returned as a journalist for the Globe and Mail and the London Daily Telegraph to cover the post-Taliban era. She finds a place utterly changed from the world which her parents raised her to believe in. Changed, even, from the world of her grandmother, an early Afghan feminist.

All around her is the West’s first post-9/11 experiment in building an Islamic democracy. But the people she meets reveal a different kind of nation building: her cousin’s determined parliamentary campaign, the beautician without borders who teaches women a new kind of independence; the archaeologist digging for his nation’s lost civilization in the form of a giant, sleeping Buddha.

As she participates in her country’s present, its elusive past and her family’s own story come vividly together. But only when she is standing by her grandmother’s grave — after a heavily escorted Chinook trip to the wildest corner of the land — does she start to find her own place in it all.

Monday, April 9 @ 7:30pm
Hart House, Library (7 Hart House Cir.)
FREE

Join us for an evening of reading, discussion, and an amazing slide show.

In June, 2004, Colin Angus left Vancouver on his bicycle. Nearly two years later, he rolled back in, looking like a castaway, and having completed the first human-powered circumnavigation of the globe.

Angus cycled, skied, and rowed a route that took him to Alaska, across the Bering Sea and the Siberian winter, across Europe from Moscow to Portugal, then across the Atlantic to Costa Rica–a 156-day rowing odyssey. From there it was a short 8,300 kilometre ride back to Vancouver. Along the way he burned through 4,000 chocolate bars, 72 inner tubes, 250 kgs of freeze-dried foods, 31 dorado fish (caught from the sea), 2 offshore rowboats, 4 bicycles, 80 kgs of clothing. And he showed the world that if he can travel 43,000 kilometres without polluting the planet, then the rest of us can get off our butts, and clean up our own acts.

“We lay in the rowboat cabin as the seas swelled and the sky boiled like a devil’s cauldron. Slanting yellow sun beams cut between black squalls, and corrugated cirrus clouds interlaced the remaining areas of blue. Huge anvil heads roiled and billowed, like slow-moving atomic explosions. Flashes of lightning illuminated the IMAX screen of the horizon. Such energy and volatility would have been breathtakingly beautiful, if we had been watching from nearly anywhere else, and if it weren’t for the fact that it was all just a prelude to a killer storm.

It was hard to believe that yet another tropical cyclone was heading our way. We had chosen the worst hurricane season in recorded history to make our five-month, 10,000 km unsupported rowboat crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. Now, two months into our voyage, it looked very likely our expedition might come to an abrupt end.

Our voyage across the Atlantic was only a part of a much larger expedition: an attempt to complete the first human-powered circumnavigation of the planet. So far we had trekked, skied, cycled, canoed, and rowed non-stop across three continents and were half-way across our second ocean. Now, as I huddled in the dog-house sized cabin with my fiancée waiting for the Hurricane Epsilon to reach us, I cursed myself for ever believing I could achieve such an impossible quest.”

—From Beyond the Horizon

Colin Angus has co-produced three documentaries for National Geographic and has written for Cruising World, The Globe and Mail, and Readers Digest, among others. When not in the field Colin shares his adventures with the public through presentations and speaking engagements. He lives on Vancouver Island with his fiancée, and is currently preparing for his next adventure. (more…)

Tuesday, April 17 @ 7:30pm
Innis Town Hall (2 Sussex Ave.)
FREE
For more information call (416) 640-5836.

In 1982, sixteen-year-old Marina Nemat was arrested on false charges by Iranian Revolutionary Guards and tortured in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. At a time when most teenaged girls are choosing their prom dresses, Nemat was having her feet beaten by men with cables and listening to gunshots as her friends were being executed. She was condemned to die, but survived because one of the guards, whose family was well-connected to the Khomeini regime, pleaded for her life. But the price Ali exacted was high: Nemat, a fervent Christian, would have to convert to Islam and marry him.

Soon Nemat found herself being welcomed lovingly into the family of her husband and captor. She learned that Ali was not the monster his actions suggested; that although he was an interrogator in an evil regime, he was also a beloved son and brother who truly believed his unwilling wife would come to love him.

Marina Nemat’s nightmare ended when members of a rival political faction assassinated Ali. She was returned to prison but, ironically, it was Ali’s family who eventually secured her release. She rejoined her own family but was further traumatized by their reluctance to acknowledge her ordeal. She found solace with the young man who had waited for her; they married and emigrated to Canada.

An extraordinary tale of faith and survival, Prisoner of Tehran is a testament to the power of love in the face of evil and injustice.

Arrested at age sixteen in Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran, Marina Nemat was imprisoned in Teheran’s notorious Evin prison for two years. She emigrated to Canada in 1991 and lives with her husband and two sons near Toronto.