Anna Porter
Kasztner’s Train: The True Story of Rezso Kasztner, Unknown Hero of the Holocaust
Douglas & McIntyre

Rezso Kasztner was a hero, cool politician, proud Zionist, romantic lover, and a man who, though his efforts to save Hungarian Jews had intimate dealings with the Nazi regime. In 1944, he met with Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Holocaust, in Budapest. With the Final Solution at its terrible apex and tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews being sent to Auschwitz every month, the two men agreed to allow, for a ransom, 1,684 Jews to leave for Switzerland by train. Through other maneuverings Kasztner may have saved another 40,000. Following the war Kasztner would find himself embroiled in the moral dilemmas surrounding issues of resistance and collaboration. Judged by an Israeli court for having “sold his soul to the devil,” he would not be exonerated until after his death, by murder in Israel in 1957.

Born in World War II Budapest, Anna Porter and her mother left Hungary in 1956 to escape the increasing Soviet presence. She was, until recently, the publisher of Key Porter Books and remains one of Canada’s most respected publishing professionals. She is the author of three crime novels, including The Bookfair Murders, which was made into a television movie, and a memoir. Kasztner’s Train was a finalist for this year’s Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction. Anna lives in Toronto.

Kasztner’s Train is compelling, disturbing, and intensely relevant for our contingent times. The story of Rezso Kasztner, a man who literally paid the Nazis for the lives of thousands of Hungarian Jews in the last days of World War II, asks difficult and often unanswerable questions. Anna Porter’s narrative is a chilling but redemptive tale about how bargaining for justice can shadow the burden of truth. Eloquent and disquieting, this intricately researched account of the web of politics, legality, and love in a time of world upheaval is suspenseful but urgent. When every choice is an impossible choice, what moral choice can make a difference?

--2007 Nereus Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize Jury
(Greg Gatenby, John Metcalf, and Aritha Van Herk)

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Katherine Ashenburg
The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History
Random House Canada

For the first-century Roman, being clean meant a public two-hour soak in baths of various temperatures, a scraping of the body with a miniature rake, and a final application of oil. For the seventeenth-century aristocratic Frenchman, it meant changing his shirt once a day, using perfume to obliterate both his own aroma and everyone else’s, but never immersing himself in – horrors! – water. By the early 1900s, an extraordinary idea took hold in North America – that frequent bathing, perhaps even a daily bath, was advisable. Searching for clean and dirty in plague-ridden streets, medieval steam baths, castles and tenements, and in bathrooms of every description, Ashenburg reveals the bizarre prescriptions of history’s doctors as well as the hygienic peccadilloes of kings, mistresses, monks and ordinary citizens, and guides us through the twists and turns to our own understanding of clean, which is no more rational than the rest.

Katherine Ashenburg has worked as an academic, a CBC Radio producer, and the Arts and Books editor of the Globe and Mail. She has written about travel for the New York Times and architecture for Toronto Life magazine. Her books include Going to Town: Architectural Walking Tours of Southern Ontario Towns and The Mourner’s Dance: What We Do When People Die, which was a finalist for this prize in 2002. She lives in Toronto.

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Tim Bowling
The Lost Coast: Salmon, Memory and the Death of Wild Culture
Nightwood Editions

Raised in a gillnetting family in Ladner, British Columbia, on the banks of the Fraser River, Tim Bowling was a fisherman until the mid-1990s. A twenty minute drive from Vancouver, Ladner is no longer the fishing and farming town of the 1960s. It has become the home to commuters and retirees and witnessed the destruction of a once thriving salmon culture. Who caused, and continues to hasten, this diminishment, asks Bowling, asking hard questions of politicians, fisherman, fish farmers, industrialists, and the three million people of Greater Vancouver. Bowling feels the loss of the West Coast’s salmon culture deeply – this is a betrayal of his birthright and a decimation of his children’s heritage. The Lost Coast is an impassioned lament for the home Bowling once knew and for the river and creatures that continue to haunt his imagination.

Tim Bowling has published seven poetry collections, won the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for poetry and Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry and is a two-time finalist the Governor General’s Literary Award. He is also the author of three novels, including The Bone Sharps. Bowling is the recipient of the Petra Kenney International Poetry Prize, the National Poetry Award, and the Orillia International Poetry Prize. A native of the West Coast, he now lives in Edmonton.

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Barry Gough
Fortune’s A River: The Collision of Empire’s in Northwest America
Harbour Publishing

By the closing years of the 18th century, the stage was set for a major international confrontation over the Northwest Coast. Imperial Russia was firmly established in Alaska, Spain was extending its trade routes north from Mexico, Captain James Cook had claimed Northwest America for Great Britain, and Captain Robert Gray had claimed the Columbia River region for the United States. In the end the battle would be carried on by private enterprise and individuals of vision. Alexander Mackenzie established an overland route to the coast and with his partners Simon Fraser and David Thompson, set up a network of fur trading forts south to Oregon. US president Thomas Jefferson countered by sending out the Lewis and Clark expedition to strengthen American claims and an American entrepreneur, John Jacob Astor, established a lonely US outpost at Astoria, Oregon. Gough examines each of the players in this territorial drama, bringing them fully to life and vividly recounting their hardships and struggles.

Barry Gough was founding director of Canadian Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Fellow of Kings College London, and Life Member of the Association of Canadian Studies. Author of ten previous books, he has been called the “foremost expositor of BC nautical history.” He lives in Victoria, British Columbia, with his wife.

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Douglas Hunter
God’s Mercies: Rivalry, Betrayal and the Dream of Discovery
Doubleday Canada

Samuel de Champlain of France and Englishman Henry Hudson were rival explorers in a race to describe and exploit the northern half of North America and, not least, to find a profitable passage to the Orient. For Hudson, the dream of discovery proved fatal. A mutiny in the summer of 1611 saw Hudson, his teenage son John, and seven other crew members cast adrift in James Bay in an open boat. They were never heard from again. Two years later, Champlain journeyed up the Ottawa River into uncharted territory, an expedition undertaken because of extraordinary testimony from a young informant with an incredible story: He had visited the Northern Sea. What’s more, he had seen an English youth, the sole survivor of a shipwreck, held captive by the Nebicerini people as a gift for Champlain. To rescue both the English youth and his own career, Champlain set out to collect him.

Douglas Hunter has written widely on business, history, the environment, and sport. His previous books include War Games , Molson: The Birth of a Business Empire, Yzerman: The Making of a Champion and The Bubble and the Bear: How Nortel Burst the Canadian Dream, which won a National Business Book Award. He lives at the southern end of Georgian Bay, Ontario.

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