Two fishermen find a whale trapped in their net; neither of them can swim so they must trust the whale to support them while they put away the net and get back to the boat. . . In the wilderness of the Peace River, a man performs delicate surgery on his sick comrade, without anaesthetic, and with only the assistance of a doctor's voice on the radiotelephone. . .

These and 70 other striking anecdotes are collected in this extraordinary volume, published in support of the Canada-India Village Aid Society. There are contributions from fifteen Canadian luminaries, among them Timothy Findley, Toni Onley, Margaret Atwood and P.K. Page, and from scores of ordinary Canadians.

George Woodcock (1912-1995) is one of Canada's best-known and most prolific authors. He was born in Winnipeg and educated in England, where he socialized with some of the century's most prominent writers and intellectuals including Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Herbert Read and T.S. Eliot. He returned to Canada in 1949 and taught at the University of British Columbia for many years. In 1959, he founded the journal Canadian Literature. His contribtution to Canadian culture is immeasurable; he either wrote or edited over one-hundred books including The Crystal Spirit, his Governor-Genral's award-winning biography of Orwell; Gabriel Dumont, another bestselling biography; and Anarchism a guide to the political philosophy which continues to be read around the world. His wide range of writing includes literary criticism, poetry, travel writing, plays, social history, biography, politics and essays.

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