Collection of articles profiling athletes by noted Canadian sportswriter.

"Jack Austin served as a cabinet minister in both the Trudeau and Martin governments and represented British Columbia for over three decades in the Senate. In the 1970s, he served as federal deputy minister of Energy, Mines, and Resources (during the oil crisis), and then Principal Secretary to Trudeau Sr., who later became a travelling companion. Since 2008, he has been an honorary professor at UBC's Institute of Asian Research. His memoir, Unlikely insider, is more than a personal journey; it ruminates on some of the most pressing political issues animating Canadian public life: the move away from a colonial relationship with First Nations peoples, Canada-China relations, bilateral relations with the US, economic security, and the defense of domestic sovereignty. Inclusion, at both the regional and demographic levels, is an import theme recurring throughout the chapters."--

Text: English, German

Edith Anderson left America for Berlin in 1947 to join her German husband - an exile from the Nazis - who had returned to his homeland to build a new country from Hitler's ruins. Max Schroeder had been a surrealist poet/playwright in his bohemian twenties, but when Edith Anderson met him in New York at the height of World War II, he was a seasoned, forty-three-year-old political activist editing an anti-facist periodical in English and German. Edith, a struggling young writer from the East Bronx, worked first at the The Daily Worker, and then as one of the first "American railroad girls."

Index

Anshel Brusilow was born in 1928 and raised in Philadelphia by musical Russian Jewish parents in a neighborhood where practicing your instrument was as normal as hanging out the laundry. By the time he was sixteen he was appearing as soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra. He also met Pierre Monteux at sixteen, when Monteux accepted him into his summer conducting school. Under George Szell, Brusilow was associate concertmaster at the Cleveland Orchestra until Ormandy snatched him away to make him concertmaster in Philadelphia, where he remained from 1959 to 1966. Ormandy and Brusilow had a father-son relationship, but Brusilow could not resist conducting, to Ormandy's great displeasure. By the time he was forty, Brusilow had sold his violin and formed his own chamber orchestra in Philadelphia with more than a hundred performances per year. For three years he was conductor of the Dallas Symphony, until he went on to shape the orchestral programs at Southern Methodist University and the University of North Texas. Brusilow played with or conducted many top-tier classical musicians, and he has opinions about each and every one. He also made many recordings. Co-written with Robin Underdahl, his memoir is a fascinating and unique view of American classical music during an important era, as well as an inspiring story of a working-class immigrant child making good in a tough arena.

An autobiography of award-winner author Alison Pick.

Groundless is, at the same time, Vilém Flusser's autobiography and a singular title in the author's literary production as a thinker. Written in 1973, one year after his return to Europe, when the author was only fifty-three years old, this work addresses a variety of themes, beyond the experiences of the one who reports them. Through an experimental structure, Vilém Flusser presents to the readers a series of philosophical dialogues that he maintained with the people who marked him during his life in Brazil. Among them, Alex Bloch, Haroldo de Campos, João Guimarães Rosa, Milton Vargas, Dora Ferreira da Silva, Vicente Ferreira da Silva, Miguel Reale, Samson Flexor, and Mira Schendel. In a letter to Milton Vargas of 1973, Flusser writes: "To write a biography at 53 means 'to make biography', in the sense in which Hegel says that to write the history of philosophy means to make history and philosophy. ... to write a biography is not contemplation, but action ..." With this intention in mind, Vilém Flusser wrote a book where he explores how his past experiences, especially the experiences within the Brazilian reality, influenced him in the formation of his philosophical project. The particularity with which he describes this process in Portuguese makes it a work of great value in the field of philosophy and communication and deserves to be published in English translated from its original version in Portuguese. This edition differs from the posthumous German edition of 1993 in that it restores the structure of the text to the author's original manuscript. Groundless is a key text for the study and understanding of Vilém Flusser's work as a philosopher.

In 1972, Dr Moss Cass found himself minister responsible for Australia's first Department of Environment and Conservation in Gough Whitlam's newly elected Labor government. Long-haired, bearded, unapologetically a champion of progressive causes, Cass was to face an uphill battle. Even within his own avowedly reformist party, he fought against the odds to try to save Lake Pedder, Fraser Island and Kakadu. But Cass's legacy extended beyond environmental politics. As the Minister for Media he issued 12 'experimental' radio licences that laid the basis for today's thriving community radio sector. As the inaugural medical director of the Trade Union Clinic, he helped pioneer a new model of community health care. He advocated for the reform of abortion law and the decriminalisation of homosexuality. This political biography offers an insider's account of a tumultuous time in Australian politics. Cass's story provides a compelling pre-history to many of the key issues in progressive politics today: the environment, refugees, homosexual law reform, the media, and health care.It is also a story about the transformation of the Australian Labor Party: its 'greening' both in regard to environmental politics and its accommodation of new movements for social reform.