Book publisher Howard White and author Ben Parfitt are guest at a special B.C. authors event at the Greater Victoria Public Library’s Central Branch on Thursday (March 12) .
Parfitt celebrates his wife and fellow author Alicia Priest’s first book, A Rock Fell on the Moon: Dad and the Great Yukon Silver Ore Heist.
Parfitt will speak about Priest’s book, her love of wilderness and her journey with ALS — the neurodegenerative disease that took her life last January.
A Rock Fell on the Moon is a memoir in which Priest conducts her own investigation into the infamous silver ore theft committed by her father, Gerald Priest, in the Yukon Territory in the 1960s.
The fallout of the crime shattered Priest’s idyllic Yukon upbringing and haunted her in the years prior to the publication of the book.
A Rock Fell on the Moon draws on letters, interviews, news stories and archived RCMP files and court documents to piece together the full story of her father’s mysterious crime.
Howard White will talk about and read from his father’s two memoirs, That Went by Fast: My First Hundred Years and Milk Spills and One-Log Loads: Memories of a Pioneer Truck Driver.
Born at the start of the First World War and maturing during the Great Depression, Frank White worked variously as a pioneer truck logger, camp owner, boat builder, home builder, excavating contractor, garage mechanic and waterworks operator, among other things.
Then in later life he married the sophisticated and well-connected New Yorker writer Edith Iglauer and started a totally different way of life consisting of opera, celebrity dinners and world travel.
His ironic observations on the differences between the two worlds make for fascinating and frequently hilarious reading.
Howard White is the publisher of Harbour Publishing and Douglas & McIntyre, both prominent B.C. publishing companies. He started editing the Raincoast Chronicles series in the early 1970s and his own books include A Hard Man to Beat, Spilsbury’s Coast, The Accidental Airline and Writing in the Rain.
White has been awarded the Order of B.C., the Order of Canada, the Canadian Historical Association’s Career Award for Regional History, the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour and the Jim Douglas Publisher of the Year Award.
The reading will take place in the Central meeting room, beginning at 7 p.m.. The event is free but pre-registration is requested. Register at gvpl.ca or call 250-940-4875 for more information.
