Kathy Dobson Bundle

Our March bundle features Kathy Dobson’s two searing memoirs With a Closed Fist: Growing up in Canada’s Toughest Neighbourhood and Punching and Kicking: Leaving Canada’s Toughest Neighbourhood for $30 plus $6 flat rate shipping in Canada. These books recount the challenges of growing up in, and eventually leaving, Point Saint Charles, once an industrial working-class neighbourhood, now in the throes of gentrification.

Praise for Kathy Dobson’s books:

“Dobson has enormous talent, and we all must be thankful that she did beat the odds and find her way through the maze of deprivation and violence to speak her truths in such a creative and telling book.” – Pat Capponi, Globe and Mail

“It reads like fiction… younger Kathy’s voice is strikingly believable: candid, scornful, funny” – Anna Leventhal, Montreal Review of Books

“Kathy Dobson vividly gives us a surprisingly clear glimpse through a child’s eyes of what it is like to live in poverty. Her language rings true as it portrays lives of people struggling every day and night with the physical, economic, emotional and political assaults of poverty and its constant humiliations. This is a rare insider expose.” – Linda Savory Gordon, Assoc. Professor, Dept. of Community Development and Social Work, Algoma University

“This is as authentic a description, language and all, of life in the Point during the 60s and 70s as it is possible to get. Poverty, hunger, love, abuse, ingenuity, survival, intelligence, language wars— they are all there; fierce optimism and laugh-out-loud humour carry the story along. That is the way it was. I know , I was there.” – Nicolas Steinmetz, MD

“In a place between the profound and the profane, lives a raw, unapologetic, and funny voice of Kathy Dobson. In an honest and harrowing account of poverty, she tells a powerful story of resilience of a girl turned woman.” – Merlyna Lim, Canada Research Chair, Carleton University