Catherine Gildiner, a psychologist based in Toronto, came out of nowhere with her first book, Too Close to the Falls - a memoir about her irrepressible childhood.

Now she's back with the second volume, After the Falls (Knopf Canada). Her family has moved to suburban Buffalo. It's the 1960s, and young Cathy is still acting inappropriately, almost burning down a doughnut shop and stealing lawn jockeys in support of civil rights.

In fact, the struggle for equal rights is one of the major themes of the book, especially once Gildiner goes to college in southern Ohio.

"I guess my family was unusual," Gildiner says. "They never said anything unusual about black people. I had never heard language like that until I went to Ohio. I was completely shocked.

"It became my fight."

Gildiner says her training as a clinical psychologist sharpened the experience of writing about her past.

"If people ask me if this is true, I don't know what to say. I had to remember why I did things. I actually had to remember what I felt. I want the reader to feel it like I felt it.

"How many memories do we have?" she asks. "A few hundred. It's selective. We're giving ourselves a backstory.

"It was harder to write than the last book," she adds. "That was a happy book. This was hard because I was a teenager. It's hard to hate a five year old but it's really easy to hate a teenager."

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One book sure to be under many trees this holiday season is 100 Photos that Changed Canada (HarperCollins). It's a co-production of The Beaver: Canada's Historical Magazine and Canada's National Historical Society, both based in Winnipeg. Mark Reid is the editor of The Beaver.

"One of the things we're trying to do is to get past stereotypes about history," Reid says. "This book is an attempt to remind people that we have a rich legacy of images worth celebrating and remembering."

Each of the photos - John and Yoko's bed-in for peace, Paul Henderson's winning goal, Terry Fox silhouetted by headlights - is supplemented by essays by luminaries such as Peter Mansbridge and Deborah Grey.

"I tried to find writers with personal connections to the photos," Reid says. "It's not just a nice book of photos and it's not just a history book. That's the difference between history and memory. Memory is all about emotion.

"When you see that photo of Terry Fox, it grips you to the core."