George Fetherling

Christopher Martin

Until now, there has been no single source for the life stories of assassins in various eras and cultures: the infamous ones and the surprisingly forgotten, the ideologues and the zealots, the sociopaths and the mercenary killers. A Biographical Dictionary of the World's Assassins fills this gap for the benefit of the true-crime fans, the historian, the student and the general reader alike. We all know the names Lee Harvey Oswald and John Wilkes Booth. But who assassinated the Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, igniting the First World War? What wealthy aristocrat killed Rasputin and lived on until 1967? How many different people attempted to assassinate Hitler - or Queen Victoria? Which modern world leader holds the record for escaping assassins' plots - and, more to the point, who were the plotters? How have assassins in Japan, say, differed from those in the United States? What assassins have been produced by such famously peace-loving societies as Canada and Australia? to browse or to read from cover to cover, whether as a refreshingly new take on history and politics or as a psychological portrait of the assassin personality. It is much more than a ready-reference, and has no political subtext. Rather, it is a collection of biographical stories, a few well-known but most obscure, dealing with individual assassins from the ancient world to the present day. Researched with care and told with style and insight, A Biographical Dictionary of the World's Assassins is a complete chronicle of some of the most influential crimes in history.

A Biographical Dictionary of the World's Assassins

Selected from thousands of pages of the daily journals of George Fetherling - the inexhaustible novelist, poet, and cultural commentator - The Writing Life reveals an astute and candid observer of his contemporaries as well as himself. Hundreds of figures in the arts and public life crisscross the pages of Fetherling's journals, from Margaret Atwood and Marshall McLuhan, to Gwendolyn MacEwen and Conrad Black. The book begins in mid-1970s Toronto, a time of cultural ferment, and carries on to Vancouver and a new century. A captivating and intimate narrative, The Writing Life provides a compelling portrait of the last three decades of Canadian cultural life. From the book: Tuesday 4 February 1992 / Toronto Early this morning the latest in a series of strange phone calls from Edmund Carpenter in New York to discuss successive versions of his Canadian Notes & Queries piece on Marshall McLuhan. He falls to reminiscing and at one point says: "Marshall always reminded me of that passage in Boswell in which Boswell says that if you chanced to take shelter from a rain storm for a few minutes in Dr Johnson's company, you would come away convinced that you had just met the smartest man in the world. Marshall was like that too. Of course, if you spent an hour with Marshall, well, that was something quite different."

Journals, 1975-2005

The Writing Life

Carl Sandburg

No descriptive material is available for this title.

A Poet in the Silent Era, 1920-1927

Carl Sandburg at the Movies

Douglas Fetherling

This great champion of Canadian literature was in his late thirties when he arrived from Britain - and in his mid-forties when he finally settled for good in his beloved Vancouver. Until now, readers could only infer Woodcock's motivation for reinventing himself through immigration, to the extent of virtually giving himself a new personality befitting his new environment.

A Life of George Woodcock

The Gentle Anarchist

Among the hordes of starry-eyed 'argonauts' who flocked to the California gold rush of 1849 was an Australian named Edward Hargraves. He left America empty-handed, only to find gold in his own backyard. The result was the great Australian rush of the 1850s, which also attracted participants from around the world. A South African named P.J. Marais was one of them. Marais too returned home in defeat - only to set in motion the diamond and gold rushes that transformed southern Africa. And so it went. Most previous historians of the gold rushes have tended to view them as acts of spontaneous nationalism. Each country likes to see its own gold rush as the one that either shaped those that followed or epitomized all the rest. In The Gold Crusades: A Social History of Gold Rushes, 1849-1929, Douglas Fetherling takes a different approach. Fetherling argues that the gold rushes in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa shared the same causes and results, the same characters and characteristics. He posits that they were in fact a single discontinuous event, an expression of the British imperial experience and nineteenth-century liberalism. He does so with dash and style and with a sharp eye for the telling anecdote, the out-of-the-way document, and the bold connection between seemingly unrelated disciplines. Originally published by Macmillan of Canada, 1988.

A Social History of Gold Rushes, 1849-1929

The Gold Crusades

The compelling, tragic and often bizarre life stories of history's famous and infamous assassins, now collected in one comprehensive, easy-to-use volume. The names are well-known, but how much do you know about the inner lives of John Hinckley Jr., who shot Ronald Reagan in a misguided attempt to impress actress Jodie Foster, or Mark David Chapman, who, after shooting John Lennon, sat down on the sidewalk to continue reading The Catcher in the Rye? And what about the world's not-so-famous assassins? Find out what happened when Carlito Dimahilig attacked Imelda Marcos with a bolo knife (and how one of her many famous pairs of shoes came into play!), or why Max Hödel could be considered one of the least successful assassins in history. With breadth of study and a keen eye for detail, George Fetherling has compiled a fascinating and very readable compendium -- the first of its kind -- of more than 200 biographies of assassins from all periods and countries, for the scholar and general reader alike. Fetherling also provides an overview of the history of assassination, outlines the five psychological types of assassins and gives a run-down of the most useful literature in the field. Ideal for students, historians, history buffs, psychologists and readers interested in biography and true crime, this book is a must have window into the lives of those who have drastically shaped the history of our world.

The Book of Assassins

At a turning point in his life, George Fetherling embarked on an adventure to sail round the world on one of the last of the tramp freighters. The four-month voyage carried him 30,000 nautical miles from Europe via the Panama Canal to the South Pacific and back by way of Singapore, Indonesia, the Indian Ocean, and Suez. Written with dash, colour, and droll humour, Fetherling’s narrative is peopled by a rich cast of characters, from the Foreign Legionnaires of French Polynesia to the raskol gangs of Papua New Guinea. The author captures the reality of life aboard a working cargo ship – the boredom, the seclusion, the differences of nationality and culture that isolation and cramped quarters seem to exaggerate. But the routine of loneliness or tranquility is punctuated by moments of near-panic – shipboard fires, furniture-smashing storms, even a brush with pirates in the Straits of Malacca.

George Fetherling

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