The Lost Canadians: A Struggle for Citizenship Rights, Equality, and Identity

Publisher Marketing: When Vancouver-born Don Chapman was six years old, he was stripped of his Canadian citizenship, thanks to an arcane provision of the 1947 Canadian Citizenship Act. Years later, he was stunned to discover that he couldn't return to his homeland, and thus began his David and Goliath battle to change Canada's discriminatory citizenship laws. He's since become the voice for hundreds of thousands of others like himself, now collectively known as the Lost Canadians, whose ranks have included such Canadian icons as Romeo Dallaire, Guy Lombardo, Leslie Nielsen, Ricky Gervais, and Nobel Prize winners Willard Boyle and Saul Bellow. Children born on military bases overseas were affected, as were tens of thousands of Second World War brides and their children. Perhaps the most stunning of all: Canada doesn't recognize some living Second World War veterans as citizens. In riveting, hard-hitting prose, Chapman describes his fight to rectify this deep social injustice. He renders in heartbreaking detail the stories of Lost Canadians who've had their identities torn from them, thanks to labyrinthine legislation, bumbling bureaucracy, disinterested politicians, and a complacent media. After decades, Don's quest has restored citizenship to around one million people. DON CHAPMAN was born in Vancouver, B. C., but lost his Canadian citizenship as a six-year-old. He's been fighting the government ever since, becoming the face of the Canadian citizenship rights movement. He coined the phrase "Lost Canadians" that is now used widely to describe other Canadians in his position. He has testified several times before both the House and Senate, and has been interviewed by major media outlets around the world, including CBC television and radio, CTV, Maclean's, the National Post, the BBC, Le Monde, The Economist, Reader's Digest, the Wall Street Journal, and the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network. He's also spoken at various universities and organizations worldwide. Chapman is a United Airlines pilot, currently on leave. He blogs at www.lostcanadian.com." Contributor Bio:  Chapman, Don "The Ball That Changed The World" is written for a younger audience. Each two-page chapter concludes with questions that can be used by teachers or home-schooling parents to emphasize academic topics from English to geology, as well as personal development and ethics. Mr. Chapman is also the author of three published non-fiction books, "Mauna Ala: Hawaii's Royal Mausoleum,", "You Know You're In Hawaii When ..." and "Boys of Winter: the Story of the Hawaii Winter Baseball League." Between 2001 and 2005, he wrote six novels that were published in daily serialized form by the Honolulu Star-Bulletin under the general heading My Kind of Town. Mr. Chapman is editor-in-chief of a Honolulu publishing group that includes Hawaii's best-read newspaper, a glossy magazine division and a weekly paper with readership of more than half a million. In 2005, Mr. Chapman was one of six American journalists chosen for the first U. S.-Korea Journalists Exchange Fellowship, sponsored by the East-West Center and the Korea Press Foundation. Other U. S. journalists represented Newsday, National Public Radio in Washington D. C., Oprah Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle and a D. C. TV station. In Seoul he attened a baseball game between the Doosan Bears and Samsung Lions, one of the best baseball experiences of his lie. As a free-lance writer, Mr. Chapman has contributed to more than 30 publications. He previously worked as a daily columnist for the Honolulu Advertiser for 13 years, and before that as sports writer/columnist at the San Jose Mercury News and sports editor at the Pendleton East-Oregonian. Before studying journalism as a graduate student at the University of Oregon, he was a theology major as an undergrad and later spent one year in a seminary in St. Louis. His baseball background includes serving as a batboy for a minor league team (Salem Dodgers), lettering in high school and college, covering professional baseball for the San Jose Mercury News, and coaching youth leagues for eight years, including three state tournament teams. A resident of Hawaii since 1979, he is a native of Salem, Oregon.