Max Wallace

Max Wallace
Born	Maxwell Wallace United States
Occupation	Writer, filmmaker human rights activist
Language	English
Nationality	Canadian
Citizenship	Canadian
Education	University
Period	present
Genre	non-fiction

Max Wallace is a Canadian journalist and historian specializing in the Holocaust, human rights in sport, and popular culture. He is also an award-winning filmmaker, and long-time human rights activist.

Literary works

The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh and the Rise of the Third Reich

This work, about the Nazi sympathies of two American icons, received a cover endorsement by two-time Pulitzer-prize winning historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr..

Who Killed Kurt Cobain?

As a former music journalist, Wallace coauthored the international bestseller Who Killed Kurt Cobain? with Ian Halperin in 1998, (described as a "judicious presentation of explosive material" by The New Yorker).

Love and Death: The Murder of Kurt Cobain

Published in 2004, Wallace wrote Love and Death: The Murder of Kurt Cobain with Halperin, which reached the New York Times bestseller list.

Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight: Cassius Clay vs. the United States of America

Written in 2000, this book covers Muhammad Ali's long battle against the US government over his stand against the Vietnam War. Ali wrote the foreword. In 2013, the book was adapted into a movie directed by two-time Oscar nominee Stephen Frears, starring Danny Glover, Christopher Plummer and Frank Langella. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 23, 2013.

Film

Wallace is also a documentary filmmaker whose first film, Too Colorful for the League, about the history of racism in hockey for CBC TV, was nominated for a Gemini Award. Wallace has also contributed to the BBC and the Sunday New York Times. His second film, Schmelvis, had a US theatrical release and played in more than 75 film festivals around the world. In the 1990s, Wallace co-founded both the Ottawa Folk Festival and the Ottawa International Busker Festival when employed as station manager for CKCU-FM, Canada's largest community radio station.

Holocaust Historian

Wallace is a former Executive Director of the Anne and Max Bailey Centre for Holocaust studies in Montreal, Canada. In the 1990s, he worked for several years with Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation, recording the video testimonies of Holocaust survivors. For more than a decade, he has been researching Holocaust-era rescue operations and negotiations with high level Nazis during the waning days of World War 2 to prevent the annihilation of the remaining Jews of Europe.

Activism

Wallace was a prominent activist in the anti-Apartheid and peace movements and has worked with two Nobel Peace Prize winners on international human rights causes, and with Ralph Nader founding the Quebec Public Interest Research Group in the 1980s. He is currently active in issues around food security, affordable housing, and environmental education. He continues to promote the International Victory Gardens Network ("Plant a Victory Garden, help win the war against hunger") that he started in 2001, helping to bring urban agriculture and food security to marginalized and socially isolated communities throughout the world in the spirit of the World War II victory gardens which helped the Allies win the war. In 2009, he won the David Suzuki Foundation's "David Suzuki Digs My Garden" contest for best organic ornamental garden in Canada. He is also Parliamentary Liaison of the Drop the Fee Campaign, aiming to eliminate the Refugee Processing Fee that serves as a barrier to countless immigrants and refugees in Canada.

Published works

• The American Axis: Ford, Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich (St. Martin's Press, 2003)
• Who Killed Kurt Cobain? with Ian Halperin in 1998
• Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight: Cassius Clay vs. the United States of America (M. Evans & Co., 2000)
• Love & Death: The Murder of Kurt Cobain with Ian Halperin (Simon & Schuster, 2004)

Awards

• 1985: Shared the Rolling Stone Magazine Award for Investigative Journalism.

External links

• Max Wallace at IMDb