Product Description
Melanie McGrath's critically acclaimed East End family memoir now in paperback.In this remarkable book, award-winning writer Melanie McGrath has given us a vivid and poignant memoir of the East End. McGrath spent years wondering about her East End roots. At the turn of the twenty-first century the places where her grandparents lived out their lives Poplar, East Ham and Silvertown -- are virtually unrecognisable; her grandparents, Jenny and Len Page, long since dead and already half forgotten.Silvertown teems with stories of life in the docks and pubs and dog tracks of the old East End where Melanie McGrath's grandparents scraped a living. Here are the bustling alleys and lanes of Poplar in 1914, where eleven year old Jenny watches the men go off to fight; the Moses sweatshop on the Mile End Waste; the London docks, then the largest port in the world; and Jenny having her teeth pulled out on her seventeenth birthday. Here too is the Cosy Cafe, opened full of hope by Jenny and Len -- later a home to their troubled marriage -- and an East End landscape which is altered forever by the closure of the docks and the disintegration of this close knit community.The places Melanie McGrath describes have largely vanished now. This evocative and deeply moving family memoir recreates the lost East End and the struggles of those who live there. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

A memorable East End portrait
This is the story of Ms. McGrath's grandparents, Jenny and Len, who lived in the East End of London in the early 1900's.The description of their life and surroundings are incredibly vivid.A true and moving record of life back then, with all its struggles.
It definitely is a remarkable and lovely book, and I was very moved at the end.

Beautiful and touching
Melanie has done a wonderful job of describing life in the old East End of London. Her characters and descriptions are rich and completely believable. I wanted more. My family is from the same area and lived through the same kinds of experiences so I speak from a rich history and from personal knowledge. I felt as though I knew those people. A lovely book.

Touching Memoir
Beautifully written account of life in the East End during the first half of the 20th century.If you have an interest in this part of the world - or an interest in seeing how the working poor somehow managed to carve out a life for themselves in the face of immense hardship and suffering - I would recommend this book.Depressing and uplifting at the same time. ... Read more

Product Description
In 1952, the Canadian government forcibly relocated three dozen Inuit from their flourishing home on the Hudson Bay to the barren, arctic landscape of Ellesmere Island, the most northerly landmass on the planet. Among this group was Josephie Flaherty, the unrecognized, half-Inuit son of filmmaker Robert Flaherty, director of Nanook of the North. In a narrative rich with human drama, Melanie McGrath follows three generations of the Flaherty family—Robert, Josephie, and Josephie's daughters—to bring this extraordinary tale of deception and harsh deprivation to life.


From the Trade Paperback edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

McGrath bears witness to a crime against the Inuit
Beautifully written, poignant and engaging, McGrath's book is at once horrifying and hopeful.Her descriptions of the Inuit relationship to place and their fierce will to survive, first, the harsh landscape they so love and, second, the idiocy, cruelty, racism, arrogance and "good intentions" of those whites they find themselves in contact with, are inspiring. (Although, at least in this reader, I was also both ashamed as a Canadian, and furious at the treatment these people received.)

This is the story of Robert Flaherty's famous film "Nanook of the North," and the child, Joseph, he fathered (but never recognized) while living among the Inuit.Thirty years after the film was released to mammoth acclaim, the Canadian government forcibly relocated three dozen Inuit, Joseph Flaherty and his family among them, from the east coast of Hudson Bay to a region of the high arctic 1,200 miles farther north.

Whereas the area they came from was rich in caribou, arctic foxes, whales,seals, pink saxifrage and heather, their destination was Ellesmere Island, an arid, desolate landscape of shale and ice virtually devoid of life, and certainly not the promised land of abundant game and spring flowers they had been promised. The most northerly landmass on the planet, Ellesmere is blanketed in darkness for four months of the year. There the exiles were left to live on their own with little government support and few provisions.

The reasons for the relocation were, in large part, political: Canada hoped the presence of Inuit on Ellesmere Island would discourage Greenland, Denmark or the United States from staking a claim to the island. It was also, though, intended to relieve pressure on the Hudson Bay Inuit population who, since their traditional way of life had been largely destroyed, were more and more dependent on the white individuals and institutions established there. The absurdly paternal whites believed it would be so much better for the Inuit if they returned to their traditional ways, without any thought at all for the survival-imperative generational knowledge of the land the Inuit would lose by relocation.

The results were predictable, although apparently no one did.

Forty years after the first families left Ungava for Ellesmere, the Canadian government held hearings to investigate the relocation program. At its conclusion, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples called the relocation "one of the worst human rights violations in the history of Canada." The country was shocked by the abuse and arrogance of its leaders, who eventually made financial reparations of 10 million Canadian dollars to the survivors and their families. But the government has yet to apologize.

A highly recommended book.

Enlightening Tale of Nanook of the North
This is the other side of the most-acclaimed documentary of all time, Robert Flaherty's "Nanook of the North."Learn how Flaherty fathered a son there and abandoned him to the fate of the Canadian government and their cruel treatment of the Inuit (which mirrors that of the US with American Indians). McGrath is a brilliant writer whose vast knowledge of the subject extends from the Inuit language to knowing how sled dogs react to different climates, to the every custom of the Inuit people. The book is a page turner, not a tract, however, and on every page the Arctic lives.

Riveting, important, and timely
For anyone who imagines, as I did before reading this book, that the forced relocation of indigenous people in North America was something that happened historically--but not now, not in our lifetimes--The Long Exile is an important wake-up call. The Inuit whose story McGrath tells here were finally allowed the option to leave their involuntary imprisonment on their "reservation" (my term, not hers or theirs) in the most inhospitable lands on Planet Earth other than Antarctica, in ... wait for it ... 1993.

Yes, 1993.

Beautifully and simply written, this essential chapter of North American history wasn't in any history book I'd ever read. McGrath reveals this history primarily through tracing a single family's experiences. That family, tellingly, includes the all-but-forgotten son of a famous white documentary maker, left behind in the Arctic before his birth to an equally forgotten Inuit mother. The family, along with six others, was forcibly moved from their native homeland to a location so near the North Pole as to be almost uninhabitable--but the white Canadians who wanted to strengthen their country's claim to their northernmost shores naively (and wrongly) insisted that the Inuit could thrive anywhere.

That action, taken in the early 1950's, wasn't even partially remedied until the 1993 hearings in which the voices of the Inuit involved were finally heard. And, although Canada has set up a fund to provide for the people it harmed through this ill-conceived action, the nation has yet to issue a formal apology for the misery and death they caused.

The story is heart-wrenching, but I'm very glad to have read it. It seems an important story to know, somehow, despite my certainty that it's not going to be included in any forthcoming history books, either. Since her writing's excellent, the descriptions vivid, the characters well-drawn, and the action continuous, McGrath's telling makes for good reading, too.

Visit your library and pick it up. You won't regret the time spent in the far North, learning a thing or two from the Inuit there.

Wow. Powerful and hard to put down.
Detailed, yet very readable account of the forcible exile of several Inuit families to the far North. Conditions were execrable, and the overbearing ignorance and paternalism of the white Canadians lasted for years. Not until the 1990s was justice finally done, but too late for many. Hard to put down.

A must read
I just finished this book which I took out of the library new book shelf without any prior knowledge of it.It is a wonderfully told story, both of Robert Flaherty, and of the Inuit. I had not known about Flaherty although I have quite a bit of connection to Upper Michigan where he grew up.The amount of research Ms McGrath has put into this work is very impressive.Now we just need more books like this about other so-called aboriginal peoples. ... Read more

Product Description
McGrath's book is about the first generation of people to take the information age for granted. First published in 1997, it explores the dreams, ambitions, aesthetics and assumptions of all the children growing up in the digital age. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

the realisation of tomorrow
Melanie is lucky enough to travel to Iceland, London, Pragueand Sillicon Valley, meeting bedroom musicians, label runners, hackers and programmers to uncover the internet world as it stood in 1998, and fortunately she brings us along, recreating the wonder of each culture the amazing people and oddities of their lives, and showing us how their real-world landscape ties into their online world, and even picking up a few of the bumps and scrapes of internet-love along the way.

During all this Melanie is on a personal mission to get herself online and internet-savvy. I thought this would be awful and self indulgent but in fact it's quite endearing and reminiscent of most of our own experiences as we figured out how to make the net fit into our lives.

The net, and net relationships are slowly becoming commonplace in real life and fiction, it is becoming more and more acceptable to talk about net-friends as "real" ones, Melanies book is a forerunner in this area, where William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition" is one of the more recent examples of this.

If you're into cyberpunk, or hacking or just delving into the social history of computing this book is for you. Not a heavy read, it takes a journalistic and personal approach that is full of amazing revelations about our world and the internet, even the most net-savvy like me will find alot of interest here. ... Read more

Product Description
Alone and seeking answers, McGrath found herself on a journey through the southwestern desert states in search of an American Dream of the spirit. From encounters with channelers, UFOlogists, and conspiracy theorists to investigations of alien abductees, tree huggers, angels, and immortals, McGrath's chronicle represents nothing less that the spiritual anatomy of a culture coming apart at the seams.Amazon.com Review
A 30-year-old British woman travels around the southwesternUnited States, the focal point of the New Age movement and a desertlandscape where "someone you can rely upon to have an opinion aboutsoap opera or McDonald's turns out to have seen angels in her backyardand the man who sells you a cup of coffee thinks himself areincarnation of Nefertiti."McGrath struggles to maintain a sense ofironic amusement as she encounters an assortment of eccentric folks,from a pudgy, sexually confused "angel" to a "convergence" of peoplewho have achieved immortality--or claim to, at any rate--by decidingthat they don't feel like dying. American readers may find somedifficulty warming up to McGrath's British prose style, but the humorand insight in Motel Nirvana are well worth theeffort. --Ron Hogan ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

An inspiring-enlightening witty journey through the living d
The book seems to capture the wild aspects of the american fronteer through the eyes and imaginatively ingenious mind of melanie.Not only does she seem to find the life onthe desert intent with desire andthwartinng with perspiring energy(which for me, I found myself travelingwith her and even tasting her rootbeer).Her journey brought me back to myown spiritual journey through the southwest some time ago, which is why forme, I fell in deep amor with this complex and somewhat transparent realm,the realm of the desert that I do so desire with obsession.If anyone istruely in need of a spiritual awakening, the desert of the southwest iswhere you need to be, but dont forget this book!It's essential.

A British woman's journey through the Southwest
I found McGrath's memoir to be a trenchant and often hilarious memoir not only of her wonderfully scruffy journey through the Southwest, but a gentle, well-written metaphor for her own quest for the chimaera we call inner peace.The first few chapters had me guffawing at the incredibly crazy cast of characters she meets in Sedona, Santa Fe, and other new age hot spots.Believe me, writing this from the Bay Area, she's not so far off.Despite these peoples' desperate and very funny quests for nirvana, McGrath treats them as signs of the fin de siecle, signs of America's greater social malaise viewed through her own kind lens.Her book is one of the 'nicest' I've read in a while (not to mention funniest).If you're looking for fuzzy, new age enlightenment in this book, look elsewhere.If you're looking for sardonic clarity, it's here.Remarkably well-written.Why is it American's don't write this well?

new agers debunked
Once Melanie McGrath finishes her lengthy tome (i.e., the first two chapters) on the New Agers, this book takes off. Her insights into things like the Biosphere, Navajo culture, Route 66, and other things "southwestern" are first-rate. The best part is she manages to pull it all together in the second-last chapter (the last one is more like an epilogue on what she learned from her time in the "enlightened desert") by showing how the Indians have such contempt for New Agers who appropriate Indian culture to justify their looniness. One angry Indian sums it up best: "Our political agenda and the New Age agenda have totally different paths. We don't want their help." All in all a worthy look at an area of the States that is quirkily unique. ... Read more

Product Description
Nothing on the tundra rotted ...The whole history of human settlement lay exposed there, under that big northern sky. There was nowhere here for bones to hide. On Craig Island, a vast landscape of ice north of the Arctic Circle, three travellers are hunting duck. Among them is expert Inuit hunter and guide, Edie Kiglatuk; a woman born of this harsh, beautiful terrain. The two men are tourists, experiencing Arctic life in the raw, but when one of the men is shot dead in mysterious circumstances, the local Council of Elders in the tiny settlement of Autisaq is keen to dismiss it as an accident. Then two adventurers arrive in Autisaq hoping to search for the remains of the legendary Victorian explorer Sir James Fairfax. The men hire Edie - whose ancestor Welatok guided Fairfax - along with Edie's stepson Joe, and two parties set off in different directions. Four days later, Joe returns to Autisaq frostbitten, hypothermic and disoriented, to report his man missing. And when things take an even darker turn, Edie finds herself heartbroken, and facing the greatest challenge of her life... ... Read more