Pinawa Public Library
www.pinawapubliclibrary.com
The Biblio File
April 9, 2018
Best wishes to Audrey Miller who, after 19 years of service to the Pinawa Public Library, retired on Friday, April 6, 2018. Enjoy your family time, crafting and all of the other activities that retirement brings.
The last evening story time for the 2017-2018 school year will be on Tuesday, April 24, 2018 at 6:45. The theme will be “mythical creatures” and will include stories, rhymes, songs and a snack. Please join us for this fun evening!
Canada Reads is an annual “Survivor” competition for books, organized and broadcast by the CBC. Five celebrities champion five different books, each extolling the merits of one of the titles. The debate is broadcast over a series of 5 programs and at the end of each episode panelists vote one title “off the island.” At the end of the competition only one book remains and it is billed as the book that all of Canada should read. The publisher of the winning title donates a portion of all sale proceeds from the winning book to a charitable organization working in the field of literacy.
This year the winning book was Forgiveness: A Gift from my Grandparents by Mark Sakamoto. From the summary:
When the Second World War broke out, Ralph MacLean chose to escape his troubled life on the Magdalen Islands in eastern Canada and volunteer to serve his country overseas. Meanwhile, in Vancouver, Mitsue Sakamoto saw her family and her stable community torn apart after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
Like many young Canadian soldiers, Ralph was captured by the Japanese army. He would spend the war in prison camps, enduring pestilence, beatings and starvation, as well as a journey by hell ship to Japan to perform slave labour, while around him his friends and countrymen perished. Back in Canada, Mitsue and her family were expelled from their home by the government and forced to spend years eking out an existence in rural Alberta, working other people’s land for a dollar a day.
By the end of the war, Ralph emerged broken but a survivor. Mitsue, worn down by years of back-breaking labour, had to start all over again in Medicine Hat, Alberta. A generation later, at a high school dance, Ralph’s daughter and Mitsue’s son fell in love.
Although the war toyed with Ralph’s and Mitsue’s lives and threatened to erase their humanity, these two brave individuals somehow surmounted enormous transgressions and learned to forgive. Without this forgiveness, their grandson Mark Sakamoto would never have come to be.