Best non-fiction book picks
Truth and consequences
It began with a small act of defiance: A young man throws paint-filled eggs at a portrait.
What made this act revolutionary is that it took place in the spring of 1989 in Tiananmen Square, and the portrait was of Mao Zedong—a portrait, as Denise Chong reveals in her gripping new book, Egg on Mao (Random House Canada, $33), with the status of a religious icon, annually repainted and refurbished. Thus when Lu Decheng and two of his friends—idealistic peasants from a northern Chinese province—hurled the eggs, they earned themselves notoriety and long prison sentences.
Chong is the Ottawa-based author of bestsellers The Concubine's Children and The Girl in the Picture. In Egg on Mao, she tells the deeply moving, true story of this bright boy from a poor family with deep roots in China's Communist Party, his love of family, his denunciation as a traitor and his battle with "re-education" and depression in prison. "The young calf has no fear of the tiger," says his adored Grandmother Lu of the young man, a mere bus mechanic, who grew increasingly affronted by the brutality and corruption of the regime.
Mining private pasts
The memoir Poet Lorna Crozier's lyrical, wistful Small Beneath The Sky
Scene-stealer Crozier, as valedictorian, must dance the first waltz (like a bride) at graduation, with her unreliable, alcoholic father.
The memoir Psychologist Catherine Gildiner's revelatory tale (After the Falls
Scene-stealer When Gildiner and her dad set out one day to buy a hot dog and come home with a blue Impala 409 convertible, she comes to realize, at 17, that her beloved father has lost his mind.
