SSP:Local Hamilton Recommended Reading List

[astroblaster]

i've copied what we've listed so far into the first post. let me know if i missed anything

[astroblaster]

also, I know I have some more at home.. hopefully tonight I'll have a chance to go through them and add to the list

[MsMe]

A lot of good books on our city.

[astroblaster]

the full text of Growing Up Absurd is online:

http://www.archive.org/stream/growin...08mbp_djvu.txt

Here's the relavant quote:

I often ask, "What do you want to work at? If you have the chance. When you get out of school, college, the service, etc."

Some answer right off and tell their definite plans and projects, highly approved by Papa. I'm pleased for them* but it's a bit boring, because they are such squares.

Quite a few will, with prompting, come out with astounding stereotyped, conceited fantasies, such as becoming a movie actor when they are "discovered" "like Marlon Brando, but in my own way."

Very rarely somebody will, maybe defiantly and defensively, maybe diffidently but proudly, make you know that he knows very well what he is going to do; it is something great; and he is indeed already doing it, which is the real test.

The usual answer, perhaps the normal answer, is "I don't know," meaning, "I'm looking; I haven't found the right thing; it's discouraging but not hopeless."

But the terrible answer is, "Nothing." The young man doesn't want to do anything.

I remember talking to half a dozen young fellows at Van Wagner's Beach outside of Hamilton, Ontario; and all of them had this one thing to say: "Nothing." They didn't believe that what to work at was the kind of thing one wanted. They rather expected that two or three of them would work for the electric company in town, but they couldn't care less, I turned away from the conversation abruptly because of the uncontrollable burning tears in my eyes and constriction in my chest. Not feeling sorry for them, but tears of frank dismay for the waste of our humanity (they were nice kids). And it is out of that incident that many years later I am writing this book.

[thistleclub]

Not a flattering springboard, true, but at least the author's experience of the city was the catalyst for the book.

By Design: The Role of the Engineer in the History of the Hamilton-Burlington Area
By Jerry Disher, P.Eng., and Ted Smith, Ph.D. // Published by the Hamilton Engineering Institute.
A hardcover, heavy duty look at 220 years of the city’s technology and engineering history. Loaded with photos and maps, both historical and contemporary.

[thistleclub]

Some photo books...

The Dundas Valley: Visions of Beauty
By Richard and Eleanor Kosydar (Tiercereon Press)

Greater Hamilton: From The Heart
By Mark Zelinski (From The Heart Publishing)

The Niagara Escarpment: A Photographic Journey from Niagara Falls to Tobermory
by Sandy Bell , Vic MacBournie and John MacRae (Lorimer)


A little nature...

Birds of Hamilton and Surrounding Area
By Robert Curry (Hamilton Naturalists' Club)


Some sports...

Hamilton's Hockey Tigers
By David Wesley & Sam Wesley; Foreword by Don Cherry (Lorimer)


And some true crime...

Torso
By Marjorie Freeman Campbell (Macmillan, 1974)

King of the Mob: Rocco Perri and the Women Who Ran His Rackets
By James Dubro with Robin F. Rowland (Penguin 1987)

Mob Mistress
By James Dubro (Macmillan 1988)

The Enforcer: Johnny Pops Papalia, A Life and Death in the Mafia
By Adrian Humphreys (Harper Collins, 1999)

Rocco Perri: The Story of Canada's Most Notorious Bootlegger
By Antonio Nicaso (John Wiley & Sons, 2004)

Fallen Angel: The Unlikely Rise of Walter Stadnick and the Canadian Hells Angels
By Jerry Langton (John Wiley & Sons, 2006)

[Atticus]

Good stuff..Check out Craft Capitalism-Craftworkers and Early Industrialization in Hamilton, Ontario 1840-1872 by Robert Kristofferson to discover the fascinating history of our now shrinking industrial base. Also, David Macfarlane's(former Globe and Mail Arts Columnist) the Danger Tree, while focused primarily on Newfoundland, has some good parts about growing up in southwest Hamilton with interesting passages on Locke St. in the 60's...

[MsMe]

I have a signed copy of this book.

Birds of Hamilton and Surrounding Area
By Robert Curry (Hamilton Naturalists' Club)

And I have the newer book of Torso by Brian Valee

[hmagazine]

History + Heritage has a bunch of great local books to buy and browse.

Also - Mixed Media has more copies of Pardon my Lunchbucket (softcover) for sale again.

[astroblaster]

Originally Posted by hmagazine

Also - Mixed Media has more copies of Pardon my Lunchbucket (softcover) for sale again.

I bought my copy from you

I should also mention these three:

So Few are Awesome
A Golden Knife in My Back
Life in the 20th Century

All written and hand-bound by Hamilton Renaissance Man Mike Long

[thistleclub]

Some more great non-fiction for political junkies:

The Life: The Seductive Call of Politics
By Steve Paikin (Viking Canada, 2001)

The Dark Side: The Personal Price of a Political Life
By Steve Paikin (Viking Canada, 2003)

Above the Law
By Paul Palango (McClelland & Stewart, 1994)

The Last Guardians: The Crisis In The RCMP - And Canada
By Paul Palango (McClelland & Stewart, 1998)

Dispersing the Fog: Inside the Secret World of Ottawa and the RCMP
By Paul Palango (Key Porter, 2008)

Nobody's Baby: A Survival Guide to Politics
By Sheila Copps (Deneau & Greenberg, 1985)

Worth Fighting For
By Sheila Copps (McClelland & Stewart, 2004)

Go to School, You're a Little Black Boy
By The Honourable Lincoln M. Alexander (Dundurn Press, 2006)

[thistleclub]

On the artier end of things...

The Point of the Graver
By Wesley W. Bates (Porcupine's Quill, 1994)

Chewing On Tinfoil
By Joe Ollmann (Insomniac Press, 2002)

Hamilton Sketchbooks
By David Collier (Drawn & Quarterly, 2002)

Falling Into Place
By John Terpstra (Gaspereau Press, 2002)

[thistleclub]

Chedoke: More Than a Sanatorium
By Ralph Wilson (Little Brick House/Hamilton Health Sciences, 2006)

[astroblaster]

how about novels that are set in Hamilton? I've never read one.

I think there were a few referenced in Hamilton: An Illustrated History.


also for the list:

If Ponies Rode Men: The Journeys of Robert Land 1777-1791 James Elliott

[thistleclub]

Originally Posted by astroblaster

how about novels that are set in Hamilton? I've never read one.

Novels/short stories set in Hamilton...

The Rouge Murders (Jasper Press, 1996)
Sap (Insomniac Press, 2004)
By John Swan

Fresh Meat (Rush Hour Revisions, 1997)
By Matthew Firth

Catalogue Raisonne
By Mike Barnes (Biblioasis, 2005)

To Be Continued... Volume 1 (ECW, 2005)
To Be Continued... Volume 2 (ECW, 2006)
To Be Continued... Volume 3 (ECW, 2007)
By Gordon j.h. Leenders

[thistleclub]

Another bunch of local-based novels I'm looking for is Peter Lloyd's Avatars trilogy (The Fugue/Ahriman/The Mind's Eye).

[emge]

I just got a copy of Pardon My Lunch Bucket (a family member spotted one in a thrift store and thought they'd pick it up )

I've only briefly leafed through it thus far. It's quite the mix.. history, pictures... and the future vision of life "in the year 2000!" ... like the faraway burbs we'd all jet out on our skybuses and monorails to before coming into the city for our three-day workweek

[ryan_mcgreal]

Pardon Lunch Bucket reflects precisely where postwar urban planning went horribly awry in the author's breathless description of what is now the Jackson Square miasma:

[Hamilton is] cutting away the rot of the Victorian age [with] the 26-story Stelco Tower, rising 330 feet, a four-storey banking pavilion, an enclosed shopping concourse, a two-acre landscaped plaza, two movie theatres with a total of 1,200 seats and underground parking for more than 250 cars... followed by ... a major shopping centre, an addition to the shopping concourse, a 24-storey office tower, a 400-500-room hotel, a department store extension, five apartment towers with 800 units, more underground parking and an enlarged plaza.

Added to that will be the city's $10,000,000 theatre-auditorium ... a trade-convention centre, new art gallery, new main library and new farmers' market. Pedestrians will cross over major streets on elevated walkways, high above the noise and fumes of traffic while most of the projects will be interconnected by underground and concourse level walkways. [emphasis added] (David Proulx, Pardon My Lunch Bucket, Corporation of the City of Hamilton, 1971)

[omro]

Originally Posted by emge

I just got a copy of Pardon My Lunch Bucket (a family member spotted one in a thrift store and thought they'd pick it up )

I saw it in the bookworm store in Westdale today, almost bought it. Bought Vanished Hamilton and a few others instead.