Bøger udgivet af Douglas & McIntyre

Author and knitter Sylvia Olsen explores Canadäs history, landscape, economy and social issues on a cross-country knitting-themed road trip.

Accompanied by award-winning illustrator Bridget George's luminous artwork, this tradition-steeped story from renowned author Richard Wagamese meditates on the unifying powers of wisdom, kindness and respect with all the visionary clarity of our most essential legends. The unmistakable voice of revered Ojibway author Richard Wagamese returns with this moving tale, beautifully illustrated by original work from Anishinaabe artist Bridget George. The story unfolds in a "Long Ago Time" when animals of all kinds share a common language and gather to solemnly consider which of them should be their leader. After hearing boasts about the qualities of the candidates--Horse's fleetness, Buffalo's stamina, Cougar's patience, Wolverine's stealth--the conference decides to settle the matter with a race between the challengers around a foreboding mountaintop lake. And there will be one more contestant of the most unlikely sort: a small, charmingly humble rabbit named Waabooz, whose chances are considered slim by all. In the action that follows, described with the piercing clarity and richness of any great legend, Wagamese and George gracefully convey the limits of physical force and the quietly irresistible energies of humility, empathy and a loving attachment to the land. Unforgettable for its lyrical power and poignant message, The Animal People Choose a Leader is yet another example of the late author's unique gifts as a storyteller, and a welcome reminder of his honoured place in Canadian writing.

In an intensely revealing memoir written for his Canadian daughter, a man breaks a lifetime of silence about the traumas of his childhood in war-torn Vietnam and his years as a refugee in revolutionary Iran.Spanning decades and generations, this heartfelt memoir began over ten years ago as a series of letters from a worried father to his daughter. Anh Duong had witnessed countless menacing and terrible things as a child during the Vietnam War, and later as a refugee in Iran during the revolution of the late 1970s. But like many in the Vietnamese diaspora, he had remained silent about his experiences for years, believing that trauma was better left unspoken.When his daughter, Ashley Da-Lê Duong, became involved in the 2012 student protests over tuition hikes in Quebec, he felt compelled to speak. For years a deeply reserved and laconic man, he now allowed the floodgates of memory to open as he warned his child of the ways that earnest activism can descend into violence, just as he had seen in his youth in Vietnam and Iran.In precise prose, Dear Da-Lê moves along a taut narrative thread that begins with Duong’s birth in 1953 and ends with his arrival in Canada, frayed and broke, in 1980. With surprising moments of hope and tenderness amid brutal divisions, the author creates a coming-of-age story intertwined with the human costs of war and exile. Its revelations are sure to resonate not only with the generation born to refugees of the Vietnam War, but with anyone seeking to understand the lasting, often hidden torments of violent conflict and the healing that can take place in the act of telling.

Through extensive research and reporting, this boundary-crossing and highly readable survey of efforts to tackle climate change aims to replace our paralyzing fears with a restored sense of hope and determination. Climate change is a problem so enormous and complex--with threats so frightening in their implications--that many of us fend off confusion and hopelessness by simply turning away. There are jobs to do, children to raise, bills to pay. Meanwhile, with delayed action, missed targets and increasingly dire reports at the international level, a notion that the crisis is intractable continues to spread. And the proposed solutions can be just as daunting. They often involve jargon about gigatons of carbon and kilowatt-hours of electricity. In a deeply polarized political environment, any sense of the common purpose required to make these work seems to dissolve into denial or paralysis. With all this fear and conflict, the question must be asked: How do we find the tools and--equally important--the hope we need to tackle such a wickedly difficult issue? In Climate Hope, journalist David Geselbracht blends in-depth research, expert interviews and on-the-ground reporting in multiple countries, revealing remarkable efforts to identify the causes and impacts of climate change--and devise crucial ways to address them. Geselbracht brings the reader to the chaotic 2021 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, as well as to giant heating ducts below the city of Copenhagen and to wildfire-scorched landscapes in Western Canada, to name just a few sites. The scale of the challenge is clear in the range of fields he covers, from glaciology and climate science to law and diplomacy. But in drawing these approaches together, he shares stories of hope, awe and wonder that encourage us to confront this long-term, world-warping phenomenon with a renewed sense of purpose and possibility.

While searching for the origins of Canada's most famous fried dish, journalist Justin Giovannetti Lamothe finds a reflection not only of the country's intricate history, but also of his own neglected cultural roots. The recipe is deceptively simple--fried potatoes, cheese curds, gravy--but the story behind it is as rich and complex as Canada itself. Poutine is the closest thing we have to a national dish. As its popularity has spread across the country and beyond, it has become what the baguette is to France: a kind of national symbol, as immediately Canadian as the toque, beaver or hockey puck. Yet the odd, winding history of poutine has never been written--until now. Following lore about the dish's rise from the road-side chip wagons of rural Quebec, award-winning journalist Justin Giovannetti Lamothe tells a story that mirrors the growth of modern Canada and the shifting cultural gap between La Belle Province and its English-speaking neighbours. As the son of an anglophone mother and a francophone father, Giovannetti Lamothe is perfectly suited to the task: much of his childhood was spent on the outskirts of Trois-Rivières, a stone's throw from the region where--according to local lore--poutine was invented sometime in the 1950s or '60s. As he tracks poutine's origins and wanderings, he also reveals the evolving nature of his relationship to his father and, with this, to the Québécois heritage he once drifted away from. After reading the delectable Poutine, you'll never see--or taste--this humbly famous food in quite the same way again.

Bob McDonald, host of CBC Radio’s Quirks and Quarks, offers a personal and inspiring memoir of life-changing events in his early years through five decades in science journalism. Revered science reporter and radio host Bob McDonald has devoted his career to turning our attention away from everyday perspectives and outward to the vast, intricate wonders of our planet and universe. Now, in this revealing and captivating memoir, he looks within, offering an intimate view of the path that brought him from a blue-collar background to his long-standing role as Canada’s foremost explainer of all things scientific.It’s an engrossing and often jubilant story that allows McDonald to share powerful insights on overcoming fear of failure and tackling life-transforming challenges. Early on, he describes a childhood and youth plagued by difficulties in school that eventually convinced him to drop out of university. Yet, despite the academic obstacles, his love of science burned bright. Soon, through an innate stage sense and sheer enthusiasm, he landed a gig doing high-spirited demonstrations for the public at the Ontario Science Centre, which in turn led to self-produced TV spots.And as each hard-won, never-certain success built on the last, he arrived at the role that would make him a national figure: the witty, engaging, passionately curious host of the perennially popular CBC Radio show Quirks and Quarks, reporting from the frontiers of scientific exploration and rubbing elbows with such luminaries as Chris Hadfield, Buzz Aldrin and Stephen Hawking. Told with all of McDonald’s trademark pace and humour, Just Say Yes is bound to please, surprise and inspire his numerous fans in entirely new ways.

In response to right-wing extremism in the United States and around the world, Ken McGoogan offers lessons from history by looking back at the rise of authoritarianism and the collapse of European democracies in the lead-up to World War II.In Shadows of Tyranny, historian Ken McGoogan warns against the future by drawing on the past, setting the emergence of alt-right fascism in the US against what happened last century in Europe. Incorporating conventional history, political analysis, biographical sketches and literary criticism—referencing visionary works by Margaret Atwood, George Orwell, H.G. Wells, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Jack London, Sinclair Lewis and Philip Roth—Shadows of Tyranny honors those who defied dictatorship and exposed totalitarianism in all its guises.McGoogan traces the ways democracy succumbed to paranoia, polarization, scapegoating and demagoguery less than a hundred years ago in the days of Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini. Taking a biographical approach to history, he highlights the personal stories of those individuals who fought their way through the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. He looks at what the authors, journalists and poets of the day were writing, who was listening, and who wasn’t.The book tracks George Orwell, of course, but also journalists like Matthew Halton, Dorothy Thompson and Martha Gellhorn, philosophers like Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, and such multi-faceted figures as Winston Churchill, Andre Malraux, Norman Bethune and William Stephenson. It follows them from the obliviousness of the 1920s through the stunned awakening of the 1930s, and on into the nightmare horror of the 1940s. McGoogan spotlights heroes of the French Resistance, such as Josephine Baker and Marie Madeleine Fourcade, before shifting the focus to reveal startling similarities between those events of the past and the trajectory of American politics under leaders like McCarthy and Trump.Shadows of Tyranny aims to revive the words of Winston Churchill when he said, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Twentieth-century novels such as George Orwell’s 1984 and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale produced visions of future dystopia that rang with echoes of past tyrannies. Always implied was a warning that history’s worst chapters are never truly closed, and that we must not fail—as many of our forebears did—to recognize that the threat of totalitarianism cannot simply be wished away.

A novel based on the 1924 murder of Janet Smith in Vancouver--a city at the edge of the empire, still reeling from the Great War with a barely functioning police department and a thriving criminal class.

"An intimate portrait of the brilliant and controversial architect who put Canada on the world stage." Arthur Erickson, Canada's preeminent philosopher-architect, was renowned for his innovative approach to landscape, his genius for spatial composition and his epic vision of architecture for people. Erickson worked chiefly in concrete, which he called "the marble of our times," and wherever they appear, his buildings move the spirit with their poetic freshness and their mission to inspire. Erickson was also a controversial figure, more than once attracting the ire of his fellow architects, and leading a complicated personal life that resulted in a series of bankruptcies. In a fall from grace that recalls a Greek tragedy, Canada's great architect -- a handsome, elegant man who lived like a millionaire and counted among his close friends Pierre Trudeau and Elizabeth Taylor -- eventually became penniless. "Arthur Erickson" is both an intimate portrait of the man and a stirring account of how he made his buildings work.

A practical guide to self-care and community care, written for helpers—the caregivers, activists, community leaders, mental health and medical professionals who are the first to help others, but the last to seek help themselves.As an activist, community organizer and social worker, Farzana Doctor has preached self-care to hundreds of people struggling with burnout and exhaustion. But for years she couldn’t manage to take her own advice.Many other helpers she knew were the same: they knew the signs of burnout, and they understood the science of self-care. Maybe they’d taken workshops on vicarious trauma; maybe they’d even taught them. But still they struggled to escape the cycle of overwork, overwhelm and recovery. 52 Weeks to a Sweeter Life is a workbook that speaks directly to these people—and anyone who struggles to pause, set boundaries and centre their own needs.The workbook contains fifty-two lessons, one for each week of the year. Each week, readers will find a simple new idea and an experiment for trying it out, with deeper dives into the material provided, but every level of participation celebrated. Throughout, Doctor embraces both community care and self-care at the same time, showing readers the overlap between the two.Beautifully written, direct and insightful, this workbook is a gentle and practical guide to a more balanced life, written for those who need it most.

The open-and-shut case of the Fatal Flapper just won't stay closed in this thrilling and immersive 1920s-era murder mystery-the third instalment in the Raincoast Noir series.Gray brilliantly returns us to his wonderfully vivid, sinuously imagined Vancouver, this time six months before the Crash. Superb. -William Gibson, author of NeuromancerMiss Dora Decker doesn’t look like the sort of young woman capable of stabbing her employer, stockbroker Ralph M. Tucker, twenty-five times with her high-heeled shoe; yet, thanks to a slow news day, she has become internationally famous as the Fatal Flapper, and the police are only too happy to make the arrest.Meanwhile, Ed McCurdy, former muckraking journalist, has traded his typewriter for a career reading radio news as Mr. Good-Evening, Canada's first “radio personality.” As a celebrity he draws resentment and paranoia from far and near, and he worries that the next murder victim will be himself.Inspector Calvin Hook scours the wet, boozy streets of gritty 1920s Vancouver, piecing together a mystery that somehow connects Al Capone, Winston Churchill and Brother Osiris, the leader of a mystical cult on DeCourcy Island.Mr. Good-Evening joins The White Angel and Vile Spirits as the third in a trilogy Gray calls Raincoast Noir.

Window Shopping for God is a memoir by your average people-pleasing, meaning-of-life-seeking, downward-facing-dog-posing stand-up comedian.Addiction, birth, death, Catholics, Buddhists, witches, therapists, family, friends, this book has it all...read about Deborah's search for a belief system, the meaning of life and good scones. —Colin Mochrie, star of Whose Line Is It Anyway?Comedian Deborah Kimmett has worshipped a lot of deities. She has danced with witches, whirled with Sufis and explored the Power of Now like there was no tomorrow. And she has always looked for signs.So in 2014, when a sidewalk preacher calls on her to repent, she believes she must right her relationship with her estranged brother. Over the next few months, they create a bond hastened along by his terminal cancer diagnosis—but as he dies, losing her sibling uses all her spiritual Air Miles, and she’s confronting her addictions again, with no God to call her own. With nothing left to give and no one left to fix, Kimmett knows she needs to find new meaning in life. But the old gods just don’t seem to be listening.Window Shopping for God is the story of Kimmett’s lifelong flip through the catalog of beliefs—from her teen years, when a near-death experience gave her a new, less Catholic perspective, to her struggles with addiction and mental health that led her in and out of faith—and her search, as a woman in her sixties, for meaning that could finally plant her on firmer ground. Unflinchingly honest and wildly funny, Kimmett’s writing takes us down the serpentine routes we travel in our search for certainty, and the more familiar paths that bring us back to ourselves.

Steve Burgess takes readers around the world as he ponders our right to roam.In this smart and sharply funny exploration of tourism, Steve Burgess poses the questions that all travelers should pause to consider: why do we travel and should we? In his quest for answers, he reviews studies and interviews experts from many facets of the tourism industry, all the while sharing observations from some of his most personally significant travels, from Rome to Kathmandu.So, is satisfying our own wanderlust worth the trouble it causes? Is the tourist guilty of the charges-from voyeurism to desecration-levelled against them by everyone from environmentalists to exhausted locals to superior-feeling fellow tourists who have traded in the tour bus for "authentic experiences"? While posing these ethical questions, Burgess recounts his own travel blunders and epiphanies. Readers will examine ecotourism in Antarctica, cultural voyeurism in Tana Toraja, the tourist versus the traveler in Palermo. Interspersed between chapters like "Guilt Trip" and "Err Bnb" is the story of a month Burgess spent in Japan-his first trip outside North America-and the whirlwind cross-cultural romance that brought him there; taking him on a journey around the country in search of wonder and maybe even love.Whether navigating love in Kanazawa or seeking belonging in Siena, Burgess's passion for travel shines through in these stories. Anyone with itchy feet will enjoy this humorous and contemplative book about one of the greatest joys in life-travel.

As Toronto marks the fiftieth year of its first gay rights march comes this celebration of those who march with pride.For the past fifteen years, Toronto photographer Angel Guerra has captured his city’s pride parade on a human scale. In these 120 photographs, which glimpse beyond the usual media coverage, Guerra zooms in from the glorious spectacle to the small scenes and single participants, shining a light on moments of joy, strength, ferocity, resilience and love.In 2024, Toronto will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the first Gay Pride March in 1974, when more than one hundred people gathered to march from Allan Gardens to Queen’s Park, calling on lawmakers to include sexual orientation in the Ontario Human Rights Code. In the book’s introduction, Lambda-awarding-winning writer Michael Rowe brings this history, and the challenges the gay community has faced since, into sharp focus.At a time when 2SLGBTQI+ rights are under renewed threat throughout the world, Guerra and Rowe’s work captures the power of a movement that contains multitudes.

"Hockey used to be Canada's game. What happened? A renowned sports expert details the sellout of a sport Canada once dominated to big-money U.S. corporatization and enumerates the effects, including declining amateur participation and audience size. Hockey is still Canada's most popular spectator sport. Yet, many fans question how organized hockey serves the country of its origin as they watch the NHL expand ever deeper into an indifferent American south, taking the best young Canadian talent and leaving major Canadian markets in Qéubec, the Maritimes and the Prairies in the cold. Minor hockey, once the pride of smaller communities, now serves as a brutal corporate feeder system for the NHL, treating underpaid teenagers like chattel, often shipping players as young as fourteen far away from their homes and families on short notice. Neil Longley contrasts the current state of the game with the way it was before the expansion era, when hockey teams were nurtured and supported at the community level, a system still practiced in much of Europe. In one of the most perceptive and authoritative analyses yet written on modern hockey history, Professor Longley finds no magic formula for putting heart and local pride back in Canada's game, but makes a strong case for placing today's corporate system 'in a more realistic, less-Disneyfied, less sanitized, context.'"--

Being in Being contains three masterpieces by legendary Haida mythteller Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighawaay. The shortest recounts the high points of the legend of his family. The second, Raven Travelling, is the longest and most complex version of the story of the Raven ever recorded on the Northwest Coast. The third is The Qquuna Cycle, a narrative poem of nearly 5,500 lines, one of the true masterpieces of North American literature.Robert Bringhurst’s eloquent and vivid translations of these works are supplemented by explanatory notes that supply the needed background information.

In the Fall of 1900, a young American anthropologist named John Swanton arrived in the Haida country, on the Northwest Coast of North America, intending to learn everything he could about Haida mythology. He spent the next ten months phonetically transcribing several thousand pages of myths, stories, histories and songs in the Haida language. Swanton met a number of fine mythtellers during his year in the Haida country. Each had his own style and his own repertoire. Two of them—a blind man in his fifties by the name of Ghandl, and a septuagenarian named Skaay—were artists of extraordinary stature, revered in their own communities and admired ever since by the few specialists aware of their great legacy.Nine Visits to the Mythworld includes all the finest works of one of these master mythtellers. In November 1900, when Ghandl dictated these nine stories, the Haida world lay in near ruins. Wave upon wave of smallpox and other diseases, rapacious commercial exploitation by fur traders, whalers and miners, and relentless missionization by the church had taken a huge toll on Haida culture. Yet in the blind poet’s mind, the great tradition lived, and in his voice it comes alive. Robert Bringhurst’s eloquent and vivid translations of these works are supplemented by explanatory notes that supply the needed background information.

"A personal look at the stunning and diverse collection of one of Canada's most significant patrons of the arts."--

Bestselling chronicler of village life Dan Needles (author of the Wingfield Farm stage plays) leads an insightful and laugh-out-loud tour through the quirks and customs of today’s Canadian small town.Modern literature has not been kind to village life. For almost two centuries, small towns have been portrayed as backward, insular places needing to be escaped. But anthropologists tell us that the human species has spent more than 100,00 years living in villages of 100 to 150 people. This is where the oldest part of our brain, the limbic system, grew and adapted to become a very sophisticated instrument for reading other people’s emotions and figuring out how we might cooperate to find food, shelter and protection. By comparison, the frontal cortex, which helps us do our taxes, drive a car and download cat videos, is a very recent aftermarket addition, like a sunroof. And it is the village where almost half the world’s population still chooses to live.Finding Larkspur takes a walk through the Canadian village of the twenty-first century, observing customs and traditions that endure despite the best efforts of Twitter, Facebook and Amazon. The author looks at the buildings and organizations left over from the old rural community, why they were built in the first place and how they have adapted to the modern day. The post office, the general store, the church, the school and the service club all remain standing, but they operate quite differently than they did for our ancestors. Drawing from his experience working in rural communities across Canada and in other countries, Needles reveals how a national conversation may be driven by urban voices but the national character is often very much a product of its small towns and back roads.

"Arctic historian Ken McGoogan approaches the legacy of nineteenth-century explorer Sir John Franklin from a contemporary perspective and offers a surprising new explanation of an enduring Northern mystery. Two of Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin's expeditions were monumental failures--the last one leading to more than a hundred deaths, including his own. Yet many still see the Royal Navy man as a heroic figure who sacrificed himself to discovering the Northwest Passage. This book, McGoogan's sixth about Arctic exploration, challenges that vision. It rejects old orthodoxies, incorporates the latest discoveries, and interweaves two main narratives. The first treats the Royal Navy's Arctic Overland Expedition of 1819, a harbinger-misadventure during which Franklin rejected the advice of Dene and Metis leaders and lost eleven of his twenty-one men to exhaustion, starvation, and murder. The second discovers a startling new answer to that greatest of Arctic mysteries: what was the root cause of the catastrophe that engulfed Franklin's last expedition? The well-preserved wrecks of Erebus and Terror--located in 2014 and 2016--promise to yield more clues about what cost the lives of the expedition members, some of whom were reduced to cannibalism. Contemporary researchers, rejecting theories of lead poisoning and botulism, continue to seek conclusive evidence both underwater and on land. Drawing on his own research and Inuit oral accounts, McGoogan teases out many intriguing aspects of Franklin's expeditions, including the explorer's lethal hubris in ignoring the expert advice of the Dene leader Akaitcho. Franklin disappeared into the Arctic in 1845, yet people remain fascinated with his final doomed voyage: what happened? McGoogan will captivate readers with his first-hand account of traveling to relevant locations, visiting the graves of dead sailors, and experiencing the Arctic--one of the most dramatic and challenging landscapes on the planet."--

"A raw and riveting coming-of-age story about the wild love of teenage friendships and the casual oppression of 1990s rape culture. Emelia Symington-Fedy grew up with her girl gang on the railroad tracks of a small town in British Columbia. Unsupervised and wild, the girls explored the power and shortcomings of "best" friendships and their growing sexuality. Two decades later an eighteen-year-old girl is murdered on Halloween on the same tracks, and Emelia returns to her hometown to stay with her mother, who is fearful of a murderer at large. While the media narrows its focus on how the girl dared be alone on the tracks, Symington-Fedy slowly comes to terms with the mistreatment of her own teenage body. Giving a bold and often darkly humorous first-hand account of nineties rape culture and the sexual coercion that still permeates girlhood, Symington-Fedy holds her hometown close and accountable and exposes the subtle ways that misogyny shows up daily. Award-winning poet and author Aislinn Hunter describes Skid Dogs as a "riveting, raucous and tender look at growing up a girl in a boy's world. [...] Beautifully written and bravely told, this book is the Stand By Me for girls that's been far too long in coming.""--

The powerful story of a mother’s struggle to save her son from addiction—and the strength and hope for change that she found in her grief.When the author’s son, Tristan, began experimenting with drugs at the age of fourteen, Kathy Wagner told herself it was just a phase. But by the time he was fifteen, she had to face the gravity of Tristan’s addiction. Unable to get him treatment without his consent, she did everything else that she could to try to save her child, from sending him to China to study kung fu with Shaolin monks, to signing him up for culinary school, to paying for his drugs in an attempt to keep him safe.When Tristan finally began his recovery journey, six years later, Wagner was unexpectedly thrown onto her own recovery path. Learning from other parents of children struggling with addiction, she began, for the first time, to live for herself. But soon her oldest daughter needed help for her own addictions, and Tristan struggled with relapse, eventually dying by accidental fentanyl overdose.After Tristan’s death, Wagner struggled to find herself without him and travelled the world to be alone with her pain. But she soon realized that to truly heal, she needed to come home to her family, and herself, in all their messy wonder. Told with compassion and insight, Here With You is a story about how addiction tore a family apart and how they came back together through shared love and a deep commitment to learning a better way. Timely and honest, it will resonate with those struggling with substance abuse, their families and anyone who wants to better understand the impact of the current drug toxicity crisis.

A quirky, thrilling, darkly-funny page-turner that explores the fuzzy lines between sanity and insanity, magic and reality, love and duty.It’s 1969 and eight-year-old Elizabeth and her mother Margaret make a daring escape from their hard life in a factory town in Ontario’s cheese belt. Stealing a school bus and slipping across the US border, they believe they are destined for greatness—and when Elizabeth discovers she can tell the fortunes of the desperate in roadside diners, she knows she’s found their ticket to a better life in California. But when strangers appear with the promises of utopia, Margaret drifts into the deranged world of a doomsday cult, and young Elizabeth has no choice but to follow, watching as her mother slips further into a life of apocalyptic fervor. Thrilling, sharp, gutting, and uplifting, Once Upon an Effing Time is a story of 1970s counterculture, shifting realities, the unpredictable behavior of love, and the struggle to leave the past behind.

First published to coincide with the centennial of the National Parks Service, this unique collection by a single photographer has been updated in this second edition to include information on all sixty-three US National Parks.

On June 6, 1944 the greatest armada in history stood off Normandy and the largest amphibious invasion ever began as 107,000 men aboard 6,000 ships pressed toward the coast. Among this number were 18,000 Canadians, who were to land on a five-mile long stretch of rocky ledges fronted by a wide expanse of sand. Code named Juno Beach. Here, sheltered inside concrete bunkers and deep trenches, hundreds of German soldiers waited to strike the first assault wave with some ninety 88-millimetre guns, fifty mortars, and four hundred machine guns. A four-foot-high sea wall ran across the breadth of the beach and extending from it into the surf itself were ranks of tangled barbed wire, tank and vessel obstacles, and a maze of mines.Of the five Allied forces landing that day, they were scheduled to be the last to reach the sand. Juno was also the most exposed beach, their day's objectives eleven miles inland were farther away than any others, and the opposition awaiting them was believed greater than that facing any other force. At battle's end one out of every six Canadians in the invasion force was either dead or wounded. Yet their grip on Juno Beach was firm.

"A brilliant and timely exploration of the power of stories and songs--from both the distant past and today's news--counters despair and disillusionment with hope and possibility. Stories are our first and last survival strategy. For tens of thousands of years, they have told humanity what we know and what we don't know, what to wonder about and what to watch out for. We draw comfort from our great myths, and from the storytelling of our contemporaries (including members of our families). Storytelling holds us together. And sometimes it keeps us apart. From the stories we tell children, to literary works, to pop music, stories take many forms and give shape and substance to things we believe, perpetuating ideals and identities and provoke controversy and conflict. They include explanations of the origin and purpose of things, of causes and effects and sequences of events, and of our relationships to the forces that surround us. They also shape the institutions we establish, the ways in which we constitute ourselves as communities, and the covenants we enter into with secular as well as spiritual powers. Stories that celebrate growth and development and "civilized" progress can be a hazard when we use them to destroy Indigenous homelands and heritages and the environment. Stories can also provide a form of resistance to the overpowering realities of the everyday, empowering our imaginations to create a sense of possibility. It is within storytelling, and by understanding how stories work, that we can find a way to bring sympathy and judgment back into the centre of our conversations about what we can--and what we must--do. Stories and songs, ours and those of others, can help us. They can save us."--

"English/Canadian indie musician Tamara Williamson offers an unbridled account of a life in the world of horses. From her first clever little bay pony, Stroller, to brilliant ribbon-winning Fletcher, Tamara Williamson recalls the many significant horses in her life, grappling with what it means to be horse-obsessed and what drives this desire to connect with horses. As Williamson discovers, during the tumultuous years of relationships with people and horses, these complicated equine creatures reflect back to us our best and worst selves. Woven throughout the stories of individual horses in Williamson's life is her own story of a creative, chaotic, challenging and adventurous life. Raised by an eccentric family, with a distant mother who disappeared into alcoholism and a charismatic father who left one sunny morning with a younger woman, Williamson struggles with dyslexia and a sense of increasing detachment. Horses, and the exacting sport of dressage, provide her with opportunities to connect, sometimes imperfectly. Her drive for accomplishment in equestrian sports, whether as a trainer or a rider, is regularly at odds with the fear that lingers from a traumatic childhood riding accident. While reckoning with the financial and psychological expense of training and competition, and with the multitude of industries that benefit from horses, Williamson never loses sight of the enormous burden of responsibility she feels toward horses and the respect she has for their individual characters, memories and instincts. On the surface, Mirror Horse is a book about horses--but beyond the bridles and braided manes, Williamson crafts a complex story about courage, family, and the unexpected places where we find a reflection of our souls: As a rider you can confuse yourself with being the teacher, but horses are constantly showing us something important. They are holding up a mirror."--

The rich and famous are converging on the iconic Savoy Hotel in swinging ¿60s London¿including a famous Broadway producer with anger issues, a demanding Indian raja, and a gorgeous film star with certain kinky predilections. All is as it should be¿until the murder of a showgirl threatens to scandalize the hotel.The list of suspects includes Priscilla Tempest, the trouble-prone Canadian head of the Savoy press office. Clearing her name would be easy enough, if only she hadn¿t spent the night of the murder with a certain beguiling Canadian prime minister. Blackmailed by a Scotland Yard detective, wooed by a notorious gangster and hounded by the press, Priscilla must use wit and resourcefulness to survive the treacherous upper echelons of London society and find a killer. This is the thrilling sequel to Death at the Savoy¿ described by Publishers Weekly as ¿light, frothy¿perfect escapist fare.¿