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By the Ghost Light: Wars, Memory, and Families
By R. H. Thomson. 2023
From one of Canada’s most beloved performing artists comes an audacious work of non-fiction that explores the stories that shape…
us and the reach that the past can have across generations.Growing up north of Toronto, R.H. Thomson’s imagination was captured by romantic notions of war. He spent his days playing with toy soldiers on the carpet of his grandmother’s house, recreating the Battle of Britain with model planes in his bedroom, or sitting at the local theatre watching World War II B movies—ones that offered a very clear perspective on who were the heroes and who the villains; which side were the victors and which the vanquished. Yet Thomson’s childhood was also shaped by the spirits of real-life warriors in his family, their fates a brutal and more complicated reminder of the true human cost of war. Eight of Robert’s great uncles—George, Joe, Jack, Harold, Arthur, Warren, Wildy, and Fred—fought in the First World War, while his great Aunt Margaret served as a wartime surgical nurse in Europe. Five of the great uncles—George, Joe, Fred, Wildy, and Warren—were killed in battle while two others—Jack and Harold—would return home greatly diminished, spending the rest of their lives in and out of sanitariums, their lungs scarred by disease and poison gas. Throughout their lives, the great uncles, as well as great aunts and cousins, were faithful letter writers, their correspondence offering profound insights into their experiences on the front lines to their loved ones back home, a somber record of the sacrifice the family paid. In By the Ghost Light, R.H. Thomson offers an extraordinary look at his family’s history while providing a powerful examination of how we understand war and its aftermath. Using his family letters as a starting point, Thomson roams through a century of folly, touching on areas of military history, art, literature, and science, to express the tragic human cost of war behind the order and calm of ceremonial parades, memorials, and monuments. In an urgent call for new ways to acknowledge the dead, R.H. has created "The World Remembers," an ambitious international project to individually name each of the millions killed in the First World War. Epic in its scope and incredibly intimate in its exploration of lives touched by the tragedy of war, By the Ghost Light is a truly original book that will challenge the way we approach our history.
Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast
By John Vaillant. 2023
From the award-winning, bestselling author of The Golden Spruce and The Tiger comes a stunning account of a colossal wildfire,…
and a panoramic exploration of the rapidly changing relationship between fire and humankind.In May 2016, Fort McMurray, the hub of Canada's petroleum industry and America's biggest foreign supplier, was overrun by wildfire. The multi-billion-dollar disaster melted vehicles, turned entire neighborhoods into firebombs, and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon. Through the lens of this apocalyptic conflagration—the wildfire equivalent of Hurricane Katrina—John Vaillant warns that this was not a unique event but a shocking preview of what we must prepare for in a hotter, more flammable world. For hundreds of millennia, fire has been a partner in our evolution, shaping culture, civilization, and, very likely, our brains. Fire has enabled us to cook our food, defend and heat our homes, and power the machines that drive our titanic economy. Yet this volatile energy source has always threatened to elude our control, and in our new age of intensifying climate change, we are seeing its destructive power unleashed in previously unimaginable ways. With masterly prose and a cinematic eye, Vaillant takes us on a riveting journey through the intertwined histories of North America's oil industry and the birth of climate science, to the unprecedented devastation wrought by modern forest fires, and into lives forever changed by these disasters. John Vaillant's urgent work is a book for—and from—our new century of fire, which has only just begun.
Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession, and the Future of Our Seas
By Karen Pinchin. 2023
The marvelous tale of one fish, the fisherman who first caught her, and how our insatiable appetite for bluefin tuna…
turned a cottage industry into a massive global dilemma.In 2004, an enigmatic charter captain named Al Anderson caught and tagged one Atlantic bluefin tuna off New England's coast. Fourteen years later that same fish—dubbed Amelia for her ocean-spanning journeys—was caught again, this time in a Mediterranean fish trap. Over his fishing career, Al marked more than sixty thousand fish with plastic tags, an obsession that made him nearly as many enemies as it did friends. His quest landed him in the crossfire of an ongoing fight between a booming bluefin tuna industry and desperate conservation efforts, a conflict that is once again heating up as overfishing and climate change threaten the fish's fate.Kings of Their Own Ocean is an urgent investigation that combines science, business, crime, and environmental justice. Through Karen Pinchin's exclusive interviews and access, interdisciplinary approach, and mesmerizing storytelling, readers join her on boats and docks as she visits tuna hot spots and scientists from Portugal to Japan, New Jersey to Nova Scotia, and glimpse, as Pinchin does, rays of dazzling hope for the future of our oceans.
Message in a Bottle: Ocean Dispatches from a Seabird Biologist
By Holly Hogan. 2023
From the heart of the Labrador Current to the furthest reaches of our global oceans, Message in a Bottle conjures…
an exquisite diversity of marine life and warns of a central threat to its survival: ocean plastic.The dovekie is a stocky seabird the size of a child’s heart that spends its winters on the coast of Newfoundland, thriving in one of the toughest climates on Earth. The polar bear is an apex predator, designed to persevere in the Arctic's extreme conditions. The North Atlantic right whale outweighs the humpback by more than twenty tons and feeds on enormous quantities of tiny plankton in northeastern waters before migrating south for the winter.In Message in a Bottle, wildlife biologist and writer Holly Hogan brings to life the wonder of these creatures and many other birds, fish and marine mammals she has encountered in her thiry years of ocean travel. On these voyages, Hogan has noticed a troubling pattern: the constant presence of plastic, in the form of adrift fishing gear ("ghost gear"), garbage and micro-plastics that create an invisible but pervasive smog in our oceans and threaten even the most seemingly resilient forms of sea life.Bringing together nature, science and adventure writing, Hogan shines a light on our plastic-addicted lifestyle, offering an eyewitness account of its devastating effects on the marine environment—and highlighting international efforts to combat it. With lyrical prose and a reverential eye for the majesty and fragility of our natural world, Message in a Bottle is a clarion call to protect global oceans and the life they sustain, including our own.
Doppelganger: A trip into the mirror world
By Naomi Klein. 2023
From the award-winning, bestselling author of No Logo , The Shock Doctrine , and This Changes Everything , a revelatory…
analysis of the collapsed meanings, blurred identities, and uncertain realities of the mirror world. "If ever a book was necessary, it’s this one." —Bill McKibben "Thoughtful and honest . . . Incisive . . . Klein moves her reader toward the truer grounds of solidarity in these times." —Judith Butler Over the past twenty-five years, Naomi Klein has charted and documented our politics and culture with a series of trenchant bestselling books laying bare the effects of branding, austerity, and climate profiteering on our societies and souls. With Doppelganger , Klein takes a more personal turn, braiding together elements of tragicomic memoir, chilling political reportage, and cobweb-clearing cultural analysis, as she dives deep into what she calls the Mirror World—our destabilized present rife with doubles and confusion, where far right movements playact solidarity with the working class, AI-generated content blurs the line between genuine and spurious, New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers further scramble our familiar political allegiances, and so many of us project our own carefully curated digital doubles out into the social media sphere. Klein begins this richly nuanced intellectual adventure story by grappling with her own doppelganger—a fellow author and public intellectual whose views are antithetical to Klein’s own, but whose name and public persona are sufficiently similar that many people have confused the two over the years. From there, she turns her gaze both inward to our psychic landscapes—drawing on the work of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, to name a few—and outward, to our intersecting economic, environmental, medical, and political crises. Ultimately seeking to escape the Mirror World and chart a path beyond confusion and despair, Klein delivers a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now
By the Ghost Light: Wars, Memory, and Families
By R. H. Thomson. 2023
From one of Canada&’s most beloved performing artists comes an audacious work of non-fiction that explores the stories that shape…
us and the reach that the past can have across generations.Growing up north of Toronto, R.H. Thomson&’s imagination was captured by romantic notions of war. He spent his days playing with toy soldiers on the carpet of his grandmother&’s house, recreating the Battle of Britain with model planes in his bedroom, or sitting at the local theatre watching World War II B movies—ones that offered a very clear perspective on who were the heroes and who the villains; which side were the victors and which the vanquished. Yet Thomson&’s childhood was also shaped by the spirits of real-life warriors in his family, their fates a brutal and more complicated reminder of the true human cost of war. Eight of Robert&’s great uncles—George, Joe, Jack, Harold, Arthur, Warren, Wildy, and Fred—fought in the First World War, while his great Aunt Margaret served as a wartime surgical nurse in Europe. Five of the great uncles—George, Joe, Fred, Wildy, and Warren—were killed in battle while two others—Jack and Harold—would return home greatly diminished, spending the rest of their lives in and out of sanitariums, their lungs scarred by disease and poison gas. Throughout their lives, the great uncles, as well as great aunts and cousins, were faithful letter writers, their correspondence offering profound insights into their experiences on the front lines to their loved ones back home, a somber record of the sacrifice the family paid. In By the Ghost Light, R.H. Thomson offers an extraordinary look at his family&’s history while providing a powerful examination of how we understand war and its aftermath. Using his family letters as a starting point, Thomson roams through a century of folly, touching on areas of military history, art, literature, and science, to express the tragic human cost of war behind the order and calm of ceremonial parades, memorials, and monuments. In an urgent call for new ways to acknowledge the dead, R.H. has created &“The World Remembers,&” an ambitious international project to individually name each of the millions killed in the First World War. Epic in its scope and incredibly intimate in its exploration of lives touched by the tragedy of war, By the Ghost Light is a truly original book that will challenge the way we approach our history.
Kings of Their Own Ocean: Tuna, Obsession, and the Future of Our Seas
By Karen Pinchin. 2023
The marvelous tale of one fish, the fisherman who first caught her, and how our insatiable appetite for bluefin tuna…
turned a cottage industry into a massive global dilemma.In 2004, an enigmatic charter captain named Al Anderson caught and tagged one Atlantic bluefin tuna off New England's coast. Fourteen years later that same fish—dubbed Amelia for her ocean-spanning journeys—was caught again, this time in a Mediterranean fish trap. Over his fishing career, Al marked more than sixty thousand fish with plastic tags, an obsession that made him nearly as many enemies as it did friends. His quest landed him in the crossfire of an ongoing fight between a booming bluefin tuna industry and desperate conservation efforts, a conflict that is once again heating up as overfishing and climate change threaten the fish's fate.Kings of Their Own Ocean is an urgent investigation that combines science, business, crime, and environmental justice. Through Karen Pinchin's exclusive interviews and access, interdisciplinary approach, and mesmerizing storytelling, readers join her on boats and docks as she visits tuna hot spots and scientists from Portugal to Japan, New Jersey to Nova Scotia, and glimpse, as Pinchin does, rays of dazzling hope for the future of our oceans.
Message in a Bottle: Ocean Dispatches from a Seabird Biologist
By Holly Hogan. 2023
From the heart of the Labrador Current to the furthest reaches of our global oceans, Message in a Bottle conjures…
an exquisite diversity of marine life and warns of a central threat to its survival: ocean plastic.The dovekie is a stocky seabird the size of a child&’s heart that spends its winters on the coast of Newfoundland, thriving in one of the toughest climates on Earth. The polar bear is an apex predator, designed to persevere in the Arctic's extreme conditions. The North Atlantic right whale outweighs the humpback by more than twenty tons and feeds on enormous quantities of tiny plankton in northeastern waters before migrating south for the winter. In Message in a Bottle, wildlife biologist and writer Holly Hogan brings to extraordinary life the wonder and resilience of these creatures and many other birds, fish and marine mammals she has encountered in sea voyages from the Arctic to the Antarctic oceans. However, in her travels she has noticed a troubling pattern: the constant presence of plastic, in the form of adrift fishing gear ("ghost gear"), garbage and micro-plastics which form an invisible but pervasive smog in our oceans and threaten even the most seemingly resilient forms of sea life.Bringing together nature, science and adventure writing, Hogan shines a light on our plastic-addicted lifestyle and offers a compelling, eyewitness account of its devastating effects on the marine environment—70% of our planet. With lyrical prose and a reverential eye for the majesty and fragility of our natural world, Message in a Bottle is a clarion call to protect global oceans and the life they sustain, including our own.