Selecting Your Subject

Welcome to the Biography Unit! For the next few weeks, you will be reading a full-length biography or autobiography of a person of interest.

But before you settle on one, you need to shop around. Instead of just picking the first book you find, you are going to step into the role of a literary critic. You will investigate five different biography options, create a custom rating system, and produce a series of short-form, social-media style video reviews for each.

Finding a Story: Suggested Canadian Lives

While you can choose subjects from anywhere in the world, we strongly encourage you to include Canadian figures in your search. Exploring a Canadian life offers a unique opportunity to engage with local history, cultural diversity, and the complex narratives that shape our national identity.

Here are a few compelling Canadian subjects and books to consider adding to your list of options:

• Terry Fox (e.g., Terry by Douglas Coupland): A national icon of resilience and selflessness. Coupland’s biography uses family photos and memories to examine how a young athlete from Port Coquitlam became an enduring mythic symbol of Canadian identity.
• Viola Desmond (e.g., Viola Desmond: Her Life and Times by Graham Reynolds): Her act of defiance in a New Glasgow movie theater sparked a major civil rights movement in Canada. This biography places her personal life within the broader context of Black Canadian history and resistance.
• Ken Dryden (e.g., The Game by Ken Dryden): An autobiography/memoir that uses a single week in the life of a goalie to reflect on Canadian culture, the nature of celebrity, pressure, and the transition out of youth.
• Buffy Sainte-Marie (e.g., Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Authorized Biography by Andrea Warner): A pioneering Cree singer-songwriter, activist, and educator. Her life story offers a deep dive into the intersection of music, Indigenous rights, and corporate censorship.
• Chris Hadfield (e.g., An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth by Chris Hadfield): An autobiography detailing how a kid from a southern Ontario corn farm became the commander of the International Space Station, framing a life through the lens of extreme preparation, humility, and curiosity.
• Oscar Peterson (e.g., Oscar Peterson: The Will to Improvise by Gene Lees): A legendary jazz pianist from Montreal’s Little Burgundy neighborhood who rose to international fame. His biography explores the golden age of jazz, technical mastery, and the challenges faced by Black musicians in Canada and the United States.

Investigate Your Options

Your task is to preview 5 different biography/autobiography options and evaluate them using a rating system of your own creation. Use online reviews, YouTube/Social Media reviews, or Gemini suggetions to get a sense of what some books would be like.

Design Your Value System

You must define your own criteria for what makes a biography "good" or "suitable" for an Ontario Grade 12 student. You will rate books on a scale of 1 to 5 stars, but you get to make up your own values and explain what those scores represent.

Think about the "strategic" aspects of the writing. Don't just focus on whether the subject is famous. Think about how the book is constructed:

• Meta-Transparency: Does the biographer openly discuss their sources and acknowledge gaps in their research, or do they write like an all-knowing narrator?
• Narrative Framing: Does the author shape the subject's life into a dramatic, readable story, or does it feel like a dry list of dates and genealogy?
• Linguistic Complexity: Is the language and style of the text appropriately challenging for a Grade 12 university-bound student?
• Lived Perspective: Is it an autobiography (written by the subject) or an external biography? How does the author's relationship to the subject affect the representation of their life?

Declare a Winner

Choose the book with the highest score. You may need to revise your scoring system to rig the results: A small gimmick to engage people in the videos you will make in the next step is ok, but generally try to demonstrate that you're engaging seriously with the content.

Deliverable:

Snappy Social Media Reviews

For each of the 5 books you investigate, record a short, social-media style video review. Imagine you are posting this to TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts.

• The Hook: Start with a compelling quote, a surprising fact about the subject, etc.
• Speculative Review: Spend 30 seconds commenting on the things other people have said about the text and why you like that or not. Refer to your scoring system.
• Your Score: Give the book a rating from 1 to 5 based on your custom value system and explain why it earned that rating.

Deliverables: