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Buy Book Lovers Canada's Best Nonfiction From 2014 (Charles Taylor Prize Longlist Announced!) Originally Posted on Huffington Post: 12/17/2014 5:20 pm EST Updated: 12/18/2014 1:59 pm EST     It is almost Christmas, the stretch run that authors and publishers in Canada live for. As the clock ticks down book buying consumers push some book genre sales an amazing 280 per cent. The industry watchdog Booknet Canada explains the book buying frenzy as consumerism fueled by "desperation dollars." Former Booknet Canada CEO (and now president of Kobo) Michael Tamblyn once described it as the " 'What Do I Buy for Dad? Effect.' All categories see a meteoric rise during the December rush. Book buyers seem to save their trickiest recipients until the end (this week)!" Publishers plan for the Buy For Daddy Effect and release hundreds of n

Josef Karl Dietrich Josef Karl Dietrich When I worked in the PR department for Litton Systems Canada I often had to take military leaders on plant tours. They wanted to see the company's expertise in making navigation systems for commercial aircraft, war planes and cruise missiles. With a background in Journalism and zero understanding of anything to do with precision engineering, I soon memorized a mostly-true patter that I could deliver while walking backwards down the production lines. Of course, when dealing with people who actually knew something of what they were looking at, I was hopelessly over my head.  No one knew this more than the men and women who spent their working lives at LSL (what we called Litton Systems Canada). Some let me drown, others, like Joe Dietrich always threw me a lifeline - he was always willing to address our guests and explain in detail while Litton was the best. He did in English or in German  and he was always the hit of the tour.

. BIG NAMES. SRO EVENT. SPONSORED BY RBC TAYLOR PRIZE RBC Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction Spotlight: We Were Here First   with  Thomas King ,  Lee Maracle ,  Samual Watson  and  Waubgeshig Rice . "We weren't concerned because we never thought you (white people) would stay ..." laughed  First Nation's author Lee Maracle at  last night's RBC Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction Spotlight: We Were Here First.  Well-known CBC Host (not that one - it was CBC videographer Waubgeshig Rice) had asked Maracle and three other celebrated indigenous writers from Canada and Australia to comment on the evening's theme  - We Were Here First. The Friday evening book event was an integral part of the closing weekend of Harbourfront's International Festival of Authors.  The festival, now in its 35th year, brings the world's biggest names in literature to a number of Harbourfront stages  along Toronto's waterfront. The  Friday night panel had two fa

It has been a good year for the Massey Murder (http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/stephen-weir/charlotte-grays-true-toro_b_6004036.html#es_share_ended) Ottawa author Charlotte Gray   is the winner of the 2014 Toronto Book Award for her non-fiction book,   The Massey Murder: A Maid, Her Master and the Trial that Shocked a Country.  She is 40th author to capture Toronto's annual literature prize.  Gray $10,000 win was announced at last night's award ceremony, held at the downtown Toronto Reference Library.  "I offer my warm congratulations to  Charlotte Gray , who has drawn an unforgettable portrait of   Toronto's   social life at the beginning of the 20 th   century," said Acting City Librarian   Anne Bailey . "In telling the true story of   Carrie Davies , the maid who shot a  (famed)  Massey ,   Charlotte Gray   captures the class conflict and societal upheaval that marked our city's reinvention of itself at the onset of the Great War. As the author no