The essays in North of Everything examine the state of Canadian film during a period of critical change. Their focus ranges from the conventional cinema to the avant garde, NFB documentaries to DIY videotapes. This comprehensive volume presents essays on established and emerging filmmakers and includes discussions of Canadian film institutions, history, and policy.

London Fictions is a book about London, real and imagined. Two dozen contemporary writers, from Cathi Unsworth to Courttia Newland, reflect on some of the novelists and the novels that have helped define the modern city, from George Gissing to Zadie Smith, Hangover Square to Brick Lane. It is a book about East End boys and West End girls, bed-sit land and dockland, the homeless and the homesick, immigrants and emigrants. All human life is here high-minded Hampstead and boozy Fitzrovia, the Jewish East End, intellectual Bloomsbury and Chinese Limehouse, Black London, Asian London, Irish London, Gay London...

'Endlessly fascinating. . . White is such a brilliant historian' Mail on Sunday Lasting for six long years, the Blitz transformed life in the capital beyond recognition, marking a time of almost constant anxiety, disruption, deprivation and sacrifice for Londoners. With the capital the nation's frontline during the Second World War, by its end, 30,000 inhabitants had lost their lives. While much has been written about 'the Myth of the Blitz', its riveting social history has often been overlooked. Unearthing what it was actually like for those living through those tempestuous years, Jerry White paints a fascinating portrait of the daily lives of ordinary Londoners, telling the story through their own voices. 'As a history of the capital in wartime, it is probably unsurpassable' Sunday Telegraph 'An impressive history of the capital at war. . . White, an accomplished chronicler of London's history, tells it with brio and a confident mastery of the sources' Literary Review

Jerry White's London in the Nineteenth Century is the richest and most absorbing account of the city's greatest century by its leading expert. London in the nineteenth century was the greatest city mankind had ever seen. Its growth was stupendous. Its wealth was dazzling. Its horrors shocked the world. This was the London of Blake, Thackeray and Mayhew, of Nash, Faraday and Disraeli. Most of all it was the London of Dickens. As William Blake put it, London was 'a Human awful wonder of God'. In Jerry White's dazzling history we witness the city's unparalleled metamorphosis over the course of the century through the daily lives of its inhabitants. We see how Londoners worked, played, and adapted to the demands of the metropolis during this century of dizzying change. The result is a panorama teeming with life.

From the 1880s to the Second World War, Campbell Road, Finsbury Park (known as Campbell Bunk), had a notorious reputation for violence, for breeding thieves and prostitutes, and for an enthusiastic disregard for law and order. It was the object of reform by church, magistrates, local authorities, and social scientists, who left many traces of their attempts to improve what became known as 'the worst street in North London'. Jerry White offers insight into the realities of life in a 'slum' community, showing how it changed over a 90-year period. Using extensive oral history to describe in detail the years between the wars, White reveals the complex tensions between the new world opening up and the street's traditional culture of economic individualism, crime, street theatre, and domestic violence.

Often overlooked and overshadowed by its North American cousin, Canadian cinema has nevertheless produced some mesmerising films and directors, including Atom Egoyan, Robert Lepage and Denys Arcand. "The Cinema of Canada" contains 24 essays, each on a different film and divides itself into three distinct categories: English-Canadian cinema; Qu?bec cinema; Aboriginal cinema. In so doing, it provides a fascinating historical account of the development of film and documentary traditions across the diverse national and regional communities in Canada. Among the many important films discussed are "Le D?clin de l'empire am?ricain" (1988), "I've Heard the Mermaids Singing" (1988), "Exotica" (1994), "Le Confessionale" (1995) and "Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner" (2001).

London has the greatest literary tradition of any city in the world. Its roll call of storytellers includes cultural giants like Shakespeare, Defoe, and Dickens, and an innumerable host of writers of all sorts who sought to capture the essence of the place.
Acclaimed historian Jerry White has collected some twenty-six stories to illustrate the extraordinary diversity of both London life and writing over the past four centuries, from Shakespeare's day to the present. These are stories of fact and fiction and occasionally something in between, some from well-known voices and others practically unknown. Here are dramatic views of such iconic events as the plague, the Great Fire of London, and the Blitz, but also William Thackeray's account of going to see a man hanged, Thomas De Quincey's friendship with a teenaged prostitute, and Doris Lessing's defense of the Underground. This literary London encompasses the famous Baker Street residence of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and the bombed-out moonscape of Elizabeth Bowen's wartime streets, Charles Dicken's treacherous River Thames and Frederick Treves's tragic Elephant Man. Graham Greene, Jean Rhys, Muriel Spark, and Hanif Kureishi are among the many great writers who give us their varied Londons here, revealing a city of boundless wealth and ragged squalor, of moving tragedy and riotous joy.
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

Jerry White's London in the Twentieth Century, Winner of the Wolfson Prize, is a masterful account of the city's most tumultuous century by its leading expert. In 1901 no other city matched London in size, wealth and grandeur. Yet it was also a city where poverty and disease were rife. For its inhabitants, such contradictions and diversity were the defining experience of the next century of dazzling change. In the worlds of work and popular culture, politics and crime, through war, immigration and sexual revolution, Jerry White's richly detailed and captivating history shows how the city shaped their lives and how it in turn was shaped by them.

Jerry White's London in the Eighteenth Century is an unrivalled, panoramic account of the city's dramatic century of rebirth by its leading expert. London in the eighteenth century had risen from the ashes. The city and its people had been brought to the brink by the Great Fire of 1666. But the century that followed was a period of vigorous expansion, of scientific and artistic genius, of blossoming reason, civility, elegance and manners. It was also an age of extremes: of starving poverty and exquisite fashion, of joy and despair, of sentiment and cruelty. In Jerry White's acclaimed history of London's magnificent and boisterous rebirth we witness the astonishing drama of daily life in the midst of this burgeoning city.

The loss of a loved one, a painful divorce, or a serious physical injury - we must all, at one point, face tragedy - unavoidable moments that divide our lives into 'before' and 'after'. How do we muscle our way through tough times and emerge stronger, wiser - even grateful for our struggle? In 1984, author Jerry White lost his leg and almost his life in a tragic accident. As co-founder of Survivors Corps, White has interviewed thousands of victims of tragedy. With this book, he shares what he has learned. White outlines his successful five-step program for coping with life's worst, and for turning tragedy into triumph. And then in their own words, his survivor friends and colleagues share their stories. It's a group that includes the well known, like Lance Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, and the late Princess Diana, and also everyday survivors. Through their stories and the author's words, the book takes you step by step through the process of not only surviving tragedy and victimhood, but going on to thrive.

For Londoners of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, debt was a part of everyday life. But when your creditors lost their patience, you might be thrown into one of the capital's most notorious jails: the Marshalsea Debtors' Prison. In Mansions of Misery, acclaimed chronicler of the capital Jerry White introduces us to the Marshalsea's unfortunate prisoners - rich and poor; men and women; spongers, fraudsters and innocents. We get to know the trumpeter John Grano who wined and dined with the prison governor and continued to compose music whilst other prisoners were tortured and starved to death. We meet the bare-knuckle fighter known as the Bold Smuggler, who fell on hard times after being beaten by the Chelsea Snob. And then there's Joshua Reeve Lowe, who saved Queen Victoria from assassination in Hyde Park in 1820, but whose heroism couldn't save him from the Marshalsea. Told through these extraordinary lives, Mansions of Misery gives us a fascinating and unforgettable cross-section of London life from the early 1700s to the 1840s.

Revisioning Europe is among the few existing English-language discussions of the films made by British novelist John Berger and Swiss film director Alain Tanner. It brings to light a political cinema that was unsentimental about the possibilities of revolutionary struggle and unsparing in its critique of the European left, and at the same time optimistic about the ability of radicalism - and radical art - to transform the world. Jerry White argues that Berger and Tanner's work is preoccupied with ideas that were both central to the Enlightenment and at the same time characteristically Swiss. Translations of previously unpublished essays by both John Berger and Alain Tanner are included as appendices.

A key figure in the Toronto New Wave of the 1980s, Peter Mettler is one of the most intriguing and audacious filmmakers in English Canada, known not only for his work as a director but also as a cinematographer and editor. His films are distinguished by an innovative approach to the medium, regardless of genre, bridging the gap between experimental, narrative, personal essay, and documentary. All of his work is visually stunning, particularly the two films he is best known for: Picture of Light and Gambling, Gods and LSD. Mettler is also an accomplished photographer and a pioneer in multimedia work. His live visual mixing performances are groundbreaking and legendary, and he has long been considered a leader in this field.

In Peter Mettler, Jerry White focuses on Mettler s career as a director, emphasizing the global nature of his films. White also discusses Mettler s groundbreaking explorations in the field of visual mixing and his work as a still photographer and cinematographer. The book is richly illustrated with examples of Mettler s work."