An Unauthorized Biography of the World explores the practice of engaged oral history: the difficult, sometimes dangerous work of recovering fragments of human story that have gone missing from the official versions.

Michael Riordon has thirty years’ experience as a writer and broadcaster in the field. Readers will encounter a gallery of brave, passionate people who gather silenced voices and lost life stories. The canvas is broad, the stakes are high: the battles for First Nations lands in Canada; environmental justice in Chicago; genocide in Peru; homeless people organizing in Cleveland; September 11/01, and after, in New York City; gay survivors of electroshock in Britain; the struggle to preserve a people’s identity in Newfoundland; peasant resistance to a huge transnational gold mine in Turkey.

A Canadian writer and documentary-maker for almost four decades, Michael Riordon generates books and articles, audio, video and film documentaries, and plays for radio and stage. A primary goal of his work is to recover voices of people who have been silenced in the mainstream, written out of the official version.

Michael Riordon teaches writing, and has written four books of oral history: Our Way to Fight: Peace-Work Under Siege in Israel-Palestine, Eating Fire: Family Life on the Queer Side, An Unauthorized Biography of the World, and Out Our Way: Gay and Lesbian Life in Rural Canada. He lives near Picton, Ontario.

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“Perhaps it is only in an unauthorized biography of oral history that we can discover its true heart, history and purpose. This wonderful book was written by one who understands oral history from the inside — and masterfully reveals its mission to articulate history’s silences.”

Mary Marshall Clark, Director, Oral History Research Office, Columbia University, New York

“Michael Riordon’s book represents oral history at its passionate best. Readers will find hope and inspiration in the pioneering work of activist oral historians across North America and beyond. Their remarkable stories tell us how oral history is bringing people together on the margins. Make no mistake, this fascinating book is no dry academic history.”

Steven High, Assistant Professor, Oral History, Nipissing University

“Life is a rich choir of vibrant and varied voices. The silencing of these voices is crucial to the exploitation, degradation, and genocide that characterize the dominant culture. Michael Riordon does us all a great service by helping to amplify the voices of those so often silenced within this culture, and I thank him for this powerful contribution that will in help us remember and rejoin that choir.”

Derrick Jensen, author of A Language Older than Words