In the Skin of a Lion
by Michael Ondaatje
Toronto was built by immigrant workers. This is their story.
For you if
you want to understand what cities are actually built on and by whom
⚡ Choose Your Route ⚡
Not sold directly on this site. Support indie bookstores with a new copy, or go sustainable with a used one.
Buy New on Bookshop.orgSupports independent bookstores
— OR —
Find Used on Better World BooksSecondhand & sustainable
$19 MSRP
Reference price shown. Other editions may be available.
Toronto in the 1920s and 30s, built by immigrant workers — Finnish loggers, Greek construction workers, Italian tilers — whose names appear in no official history. Patrick Lewis moves through this world looking for a missing millionaire and finding instead the invisible labor that made a city. Ondaatje writes in prose so precise it reads like poetry. A dispatch about the city as a collective achievement that the official history attributes to the men who financed it rather than the men who built it.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Canada • North America
- Voice
- Written by a Canadian author
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
The Corporation(2003)
dir. Mark Achbar & Jennifer Abbott
The 150-year rise of a legal 'person' with no soul.
A wide-ranging examination of the modern corporation as a legal 'person' — tracing its rise, its psychology, and the reformers and whistleblowers pushing back against it.
Why it’s here: Corporations gained the legal rights of a person a century and a half ago and never picked up the responsibilities that come with personhood. Chomsky, Klein, and even sympathetic CEOs get equal time here, and the argument holds up without needing to shout.
Flip the lens
Same country. Now hear it from the other side.
