With A Closed Fist: Growing Up In Canada's Toughest Neighbourhood

The author describes her childhood of the 1960s and 1970s growing up in Point St. Charles, then an industrial slum in Montreal. She offers a glimpse into the culture of extreme poverty in a neighbourhood then described as the "toughest in Canada". When student social workers and medical students from McGill University invaded the Point in the 1970s, the author and her five sisters witnessed their mother transform from a defeated welfare recipient to an angry, confrontational community organizer who joined in the fight against a city that turned a blind eye on some of its most vulnerable citizens. The author documents a time of great social change in Montreal and reveals the workings of an educational system trying to deal with disadvantaged children.

Montreal

Véhicule Press

2011

en