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General non-fiction, Canadian history, History
Human-narrated audio
Stephen R. Bown continues to revitalize Canadian history with this thrilling account of the engineering triumph that created a nation.In…
The Company, his bestselling work of revisionist history, Stephen Bown told the dramatic, adventurous and bloody tale of Canada's origins in the fur trade. With Dominion he continues the nation's creation story with an equally gripping and eye-opening account of the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway.In the late 19th century, demand for fur was in sharp decline. This could have spelled economic disaster for the venerable Hudson's Bay Company. But an idea emerged in political and business circles in Ottawa and Montreal to connect the disparate British colonies into a single entity that would stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific. With over 3,000 kilometers of track, much of it driven through wildly inhospitable terrain, the CPR would be the longest railway in the world and the most difficult to build. Its construction was the defining event of its era and a catalyst for powerful global forces.The times were marked by greed, hubris, blatant empire building, oppression, corruption and theft. They were good for some, hard for most, disastrous for others. The CPR enabled a new country, but it came at a terrible price.In recent years Canadian history has been given a rude awakening from the comforts of its myths. In Dominion, Stephen Bown again widens our view of the past to include the adventures and hardships of explorers and surveyors, the resistance of Indigenous peoples, and the terrific and horrific work of many thousands of labourers. His vivid portrayal of the powerful forces that were molding the world in the late 19th century provides a revelatory new picture of modern Canada's creation as an independent state.
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Law and crime biography, European travel and geography, True crime
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
One of the most remarkable true-crime narratives of the twenty-first century: the story of the world&’s most prolific art thief,…
Stéphane Breitwieser. • &“The Art Thief, like its title character, has confidence, élan, and a great sense of timing."—The New Yorker "Enthralling." —The Wall Street JournalIn this spellbinding portrait of obsession and flawed genius, the best-selling author of The Stranger in the Woods brings us into Breitwieser&’s strange world—unlike most thieves, he never stole for money, keeping all his treasures in a single room where he could admire them.For centuries, works of art have been stolen in countless ways from all over the world, but no one has been quite as successful at it as the master thief Stéphane Breitwieser. Carrying out more than two hundred heists over nearly eight years—in museums and cathedrals all over Europe—Breitwieser, along with his girlfriend who worked as his lookout, stole more than three hundred objects, until it all fell apart in spectacular fashion.In The Art Thief, Michael Finkel brings us into Breitwieser&’s strange and fascinating world. Unlike most thieves, Breitwieser never stole for money. Instead, he displayed all his treasures in a pair of secret rooms where he could admire them to his heart&’s content. Possessed of a remarkable athleticism and an innate ability to circumvent practically any security system, Breitwieser managed to pull off a breathtaking number of audacious thefts. Yet these strange talents bred a growing disregard for risk and an addict&’s need to score, leading Breitwieser to ignore his girlfriend&’s pleas to stop—until one final act of hubris brought everything crashing down.This is a riveting story of art, crime, love, and an insatiable hunger to possess beauty at any cost.