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Showing 41 - 60 of 1083790 items
By Kelly S. Thompson. 2019
At eighteen years old, Kelly Thompson enlisted in the Canadian Armed Forces. Despite growing up in a military family --…
she would, in fact, be a fourth-generation soldier -- she couldn't shake the feeling that she didn't belong. From the moment she arrives for basic training at a Quebec military base, a young woman more interested in writing than weaponry, she quickly realizes that her conception of what being a soldier means, forged from a desire to serve her country after the 9/11 attacks, isn't entirely accurate. A career as a female officer will involve navigating a masculinized culture and coming to grips with her burgeoning feminism. In this compulsively readable memoir, Thompson writes with wit and honesty about her own development as a woman and a soldier, unsparingly highlighting truths about her time in the military. In sharply crafted prose, she chronicles the frequent sexism and misogyny she encounters both in training and later in the workplace, and explores her own feelings of pride and loyalty to the Forces, and a family legacy of PTSD, all while searching for an artistic identity in a career that demands conformity. When she sustains a career-altering injury, Thompson fearlessly re-examines her identity as a soldier. 2019.By Harold Johnson. 2019
In early 2018, the failures of Canada's justice system were sharply and painfully revealed in the verdicts issued in the…
deaths of Colten Boushie and Tina Fontaine. The outrage and confusion that followed those verdicts inspired former Crown prosecutor and bestselling author Harold R. Johnson to make the case against Canada for its failure to fulfill its duty under Treaty to effectively deliver justice to Indigenous people, worsening the situation and ensuring long-term damage to Indigenous communities. In this direct, concise, and essential volume, Harold R. Johnson examines the justice system's failures to deliver "peace and good order" to Indigenous people. He explores the part that he understands himself to have played in that mismanagement, drawing on insights he has gained from the experience; insights into the roots and immediate effects of how the justice system has failed Indigenous people, in all the communities in which they live; and insights into the struggle for peace and good order for Indigenous people now. 2019.By Lori Lansens. 2019
Taking place over 48 hours in the year 2023, this is the story of Rory Ann Miller, on the run…
with her best friend because they are accused of bombing their posh Californian high school during an American Virtue Ball. There's a bounty on their heads, and a social media storm of trolls flying around them, not to mention a posse of law enforcement, attack helicopters and drones trying to track them down. Rory's mom, a social activist and lawyer, has been arrested and implicated in her daughter's "crimes" whereas her dad (who betrayed his wife and daughter in a nasty divorce) is cooperating with the authorities. The story exists in a universe of gated communities, born-again Christians, Probationary Citizens (once known as "Dreamers"), re-criminalized abortion and birth control, teenage virginity oaths and something called the Red Market, which is either a Conservative bogey-man created to further polarize the "base" or a criminal network making money from selling unwanted babies to whomever wants them and fetal tissue to cosmetics and drug companies. Rory is cynical and scared, furious and scathing, betrayed and looking for something or someone to trust. What she has to say about the dads and bosses and politicians lining up to keep women in their place, and about the ways women collaborate in their own undermining, is fierce, and funny, and sad, and true. 2019.By Cherie Dimaline. 2019
Broken-hearted Joan has been searching for her husband, Victor, for almost a year--ever since he went missing on the night…
they had their first serious argument. One terrible, hungover morning in a Walmart parking lot in a little town near Georgian Bay, she is drawn to a revival tent where the local Métis have been flocking to hear a charismatic preacher named Eugene Wolff. By the time she staggers into the tent, the service is over. But as she is about to leave, she hears an unmistakable voice. She turns, and there Victor is. The same face, the same eyes, the same hands. But his hair is short and he's wearing a suit and he doesn't recognize her at all. No, he insists, she's the one suffering a delusion: he's the Reverend Wolff and his only mission is to bring his people to Jesus. Except that, as Joan soon discovers, that's not all the enigmatic Wolff is doing. With only the help of Ajean, a foul-mouthed euchre shark with a knowledge of the old ways, and her odd, Johnny-Cash-loving, 12-year-old nephew Zeus, Joan has to find a way to remind the Reverend Wolff of who he really is. If he really is Victor. Her life, and the life of everyone she loves, depends upon it. 2019.By Naomi Klein. 2019
For more than twenty years, Naomi Klein has been the foremost chronicler of the economic war waged on both people…
and planet--and the champion of a sweeping environmental agenda with stability and justice at its center. In lucid dispatches from the frontlines--from the ghostly Great Barrier Reef, to the annual smoke-choked skies of the Pacific Northwest, to post-hurricane Puerto Rico, to a Vatican attempting an unprecedented "ecological conversion"--she has penned surging, indispensable lectures and essays for a wide public, with prescient, clarifying information about the future that awaits us and our children if we stick our heads in the sand. They show Klein at her most thoughtful, tracing the evolution of the climate crisis as the key issue of our time, not only as an immediate political challenge but as a spiritual and imaginative one too. Delving into topics ranging from the clash between ecological time and our culture of "perpetual now," to the soaring history of humans' ability to change rapidly in the face of grave threat, to rising white supremacy and fortressed borders as a form of "climate barbarism," this is a rousing call to action for a planet on the brink. Above all, she underscores how we can still rise to the existential challenge of the crisis if we are willing to transform our systems that are producing it, making clear how the battle for a greener world is indistinguishable from the fight for our lives. 2019.By Anosh Irani. 2019
In these stories we meet: a swimming instructor determined to reenact John Cheever's iconic short story "The Swimmer" in the…
pools of Mumbai; a famous chef who, overcome by a devastating childhood memory, melts down during an appearance on a New York talk show; a gangster's wife who is convinced she's found the reincarnation of a lost loved one in a penguin from the Mumbai zoo; an illegal immigrant in North Vancouver who is drawn into a pick-up cricket game that may decide his fate. These are just some of the extraordinary characters that animate this wildly imaginative collection of tales about people caught between two worlds: India and Canada. 2019.By Joanna Jolly. 2019
On August 17, 2014, the body of fifteen-year old runaway Tina Fontaine was found in Winnipeg's Red River, wrapped in…
a duvet and weighted down with rocks. Her story caused a national outcry. This book traces the events leading to her death and describes the search for her killer, led by a dogged police detective. 2019.By Anar Ali. 2019
As the heir to a successful business empire in Uganda, Mansoor Visram had everything a man could want: money, power,…
influence, a beautiful wife, and a baby son. But when Idi Amin's regime begins its crackdown on its South Asian population, Mansoor and his family are forced to flee, leaving behind everything. As refugees, they arrive in Canada, settling in Calgary, but the strain of what the family has been through begins to show. Years later, Mansoor's son, Ashif, is a rising star in a multinational firm. He has spent years distancing himself from his overbearing father but finds himself continuously drawn back to the family he left behind. Now, his father claims he has a plan for a dry cleaning franchise that will raise the Visrams back into their old position of prominence. But after so many failed attempts to succeed, one more pipe dream may be too many for the family to bear. 2019.By Kevin Donovan. 2019
Barry and Honey Sherman seemed to lead a charmed life, but the world was shocked in late 2017 when their…
bodies were found together in their elegant Toronto home. First described as murder-suicide, it was a grisly scene: the two were positioned side-by-side on the deck of their basement swimming pool, suspended from belts tied to a railing. The violent deaths of the founder of one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies and his wife--their net worth has been estimated at {dollar}4.6 billion--rocked the intersecting worlds of business, politics, and philanthropy. The Shermans were charity royalty, donating millions to hospitals and universities, and fixtures on the gala circuit where Honey, in particular, was beloved. But there was another side to the story. A strategic genius who built a large generic drug company -- Apotex Inc. -- Barry Sherman was a self-described workaholic, renowned risk-taker, and disruptor during his fifty-year career. Regarded as a generous friend by many, Sherman was also feared by others. He was criticized for stifling academic freedom and using the courts to win at all costs. Upset with building issues at his mansion, he sued and recouped millions from tradespeople. At the time of his death, Sherman had just won a decades-old legal case involving four cousins who wanted 20 percent of his fortune. Toronto Star investigative journalist Kevin Donovan chronicles the unsettling story from the beginning, interviewing family members, friends, and colleagues, and sheds new light on the Shermans' lives and the disturbing double murder. 2019.By Robyn Doolittle. 2019
For nearly two years, Globe and Mail reporter Robyn Doolittle investigated how Canadian police handle sexual assault cases. Her findings…
were shocking: across the country, in big cities and small towns, the system was dismissing a high number of allegations as "unfounded." A police officer would simply view the claim as baseless and no investigation would follow. Of the 26,500 reported cases of sexual assault in 2015, only 1,400 resulted in convictions. The response to Doolittle's groundbreaking Unfounded series was swift. Federal ministers immediately vowed to establish better oversight, training, and policies; Prime Minister Trudeau announced {dollar}100 million to combat gender-based violence; Statistics Canada began to collect and publish unfounded rates; and to date, about a third of the country's forces have pledged to review more than 10,000 sex-assault cases dating back to 2010. Had It Coming picks up where the Unfounded series left off. Doolittle brings a personal voice to what has been a turning point for most women: the #MeToo movement and its aftermath. The world is now increasingly aware of the pervasiveness of rape culture in which powerful men got away with sexual assault and harassment for years: from Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Bill O'Reilly, and Matt Lauer, to Charlie Rose and Jian Ghomeshi. But Doolittle looks beyond specific cases to the big picture. The issue of "consent" figures largely: not only is the public confused about what it means, but an astounding number of police officers and judges do not understand Canadian consent law. The brain's reaction to trauma and how it affects memory is also crucial to understanding victim statements. Surprisingly, Canada has the most progressive sexual assault laws in the developed world, yet the system is failing victims at every stage. 2019.By Mona Awad. 2019
Samantha Heather Mackey couldn't be more different from the other members of her master's program at New England's elite Warren…
University. A self-conscious scholarship student who prefers the company of her imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort--a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other "Bunny," and are often found entangled in a group hug so tight it seems their bodies might become permanently fused. But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies' exclusive monthly "Smut Salon," and finds herself drawn as if by magic to their front door--ditching her only friend, Ava, an audacious art school dropout, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into Bunny world, and starts to take part in the off-campus "Workshop" where they devise their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur, and her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies are brought into deadly collision. 2019.By John Grisham. 2019
In a small Florida town, a young lawyer, Keith Russo, is shot to death as he works late. A young…
black man, a former client, named Quincy Miller is charged and convicted. For 22 years, Miller maintains his innocence from inside prison. Finally, Guardian Ministries takes on Miller's case, but Cullen Post, the Episcopal minister in charge, gets more than he bargained for. Powerful people murdered Russo-- they do not want Miller exonerated, and will kill again without a second thought. Bestseller. 2019.By Rachel Cusk. 2019
The author's first collection of essays about motherhood, marriage, feminism, and art both offers new insights on the themes at…
the heart of her fiction and forges a startling critical voice on some of our most urgent personal, social, and artistic questions. 2019.By Malcolm Gladwell. 2019
In this thoughtful treatise spurred by the 2015 death of African-American academic Sandra Bland in jail after a traffic stop,…
New Yorker writer Gladwell aims to figure out the strategies people use to assess strangers-to "analyze, critique them, figure out where they came from, figure out how to fix them," in other words: to understand how to balance trust and safety. He uses a variety of examples from history and recent headlines to illustrate that people size up the motivations, emotions, and trustworthiness of those they don't know both wrongly and with misplaced confidence. Bestseller. 2019.By Ami McKay. 2019
The story of Ami McKay's connection to a genetic disorder called Lynch syndrome begins over seventy years before she was…
born and long before scientists discovered DNA. In 1895 her great-great aunt, Pauline Gross, a seamstress in Ann Arbor, Michigan, confided to a pathology professor at the local university that she expected to die young, like so many others in her family. Rather than dismiss her fears, the pathologist chose to enlist Pauline in the careful tracking of those in her family tree who had died of cancer. Pauline's premonition proved true--she died at 46--but because of her efforts, her family (who the pathologist dubbed 'Family G') would become the longest and most detailed cancer genealogy ever studied in the world. A century after Pauline's confession, researchers would identify the genetic mutation responsible for the family's woes. Now known as Lynch syndrome, the genetic condition predisposes its carriers to several types of cancer, including colorectal, endometrial, ovarian and pancreatic. In 2001, as a young mother with two sons and a keen interest in survival, Ami McKay was among the first to be tested for Lynch syndrome. She had a feeling she'd test positive: her mother's side of the family was riddled with early deaths and her own mother was being treated for the disease. When the test proved her fears true, she began living in "an unsettling state between wellness and cancer," and she's been there ever since. 2019.By M. G. Vassanji. 2019
Munir Khan, a recent widower from Toronto, on a whim decides to visit Delhi, his ancestral city. Born in Kenya,…
he has lost all family connections, and has never visited India before. While he's sitting in the bar of the club where he is staying, an attractive woman takes a chair at his table to await her husband. A sparring match ensues. The two are from different worlds: Munir is a westernized agnostic of Muslim origin, ignorant about India; Mohini, a modern Hindu woman and daughter of "Partition" refugees, whose family bears resentment towards Muslims. She's religiously traditional, but also a liberal and provocative newspaper columnist--and utterly witty and charming. Against her better judgement, Mohini agrees to show Munir around Delhi. As they explore the thriving markets and historical buildings of Delhi, an inexplicable attraction begins. What follows is a passionate love affair--uncontrollable yet impossible. This is a period of rising Hindu nationalism in modern India that at times manifests itself in vigilante violence. Constantly lurking at Munir's club is the menacing presence of a group of arch conservatives, self-styled protectors of Hindu women and cows. To them Munir Khan is simply a Muslim "love-jihadi" who has led the pride of Hindu womanhood, Mohini Singh, astray. Munir and Mohini must contend with the cost of their passion. 2019.By Leïla Slimani. 2019
She wants only one thing: to be wanted. Adèle appears to have the perfect life: She is a successful journalist…
in Paris who lives in a beautiful apartment with her surgeon husband and their young son. But underneath the surface, she is bored--and consumed by an insatiable need for sex. Driven less by pleasure than compulsion, Adèle organizes her day around her extramarital affairs, arriving late to work and lying to her husband about where she's been, until she becomes ensnared in a trap of her own making. 2019.By Richard Wagamese. 2019
One Drum draws from the foundational teachings of Ojibway tradition, the Grandfather Teachings. Focusing specifically on the lessons of humility,…
respect and courage, the volume contains simple ceremonies that anyone anywhere can do, alone or in a group, to foster harmony and connection. Wagamese believed that there is a shaman in each of us, and we are all teachers and in the world of the spirit there is no right way or wrong way. Writing of neglect, abuse and loss of identity, Wagamese recalled living on the street, going to jail, drinking too much, feeling rootless and afraid, and then the feeling of hope he gained from connecting with the spiritual ways of his people. He expressed the belief that ceremony has the power to unify and to heal for people of all backgrounds. 2019.By Gwen Benaway. 2018
In her third collection of poetry, Holy Wild, Gwen Benaway explores the complexities of being an Indigenous trans women in…
expansive lyric poems. She holds up the Indigenous trans body as a site of struggle, liberation, and beauty. A confessional poet, Benaway narrates her sexual and romantic intimacies with partners as well as her work to navigate the daily burden of transphobia and violence. She examines the intersections of Indigenous and trans experience through autobiographical poems and continues to speak to the legacy of abuse, violence, and colonial erasure that defines Canada. Her sparse lines, interwoven with English and Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe), illustrate the wonder and power of Indigenous trans womanhood in motion. Holy Wild is not an easy book, as Benaway refuses to give any simple answers, but it is a profoundly vibrant and beautiful work filled with a transcendent grace.By Maureen Jennings. 2019
July 1936 and Toronto is under a record-breaking heat wave. Charlotte Frayne is the junior associate in a two-person private…
investigation firm, owned by T. Gilmore. Two events set the book's plot in motion: an anti-Semitic hate letter is delivered to Gilmore, who up to now has not acknowledged his religion, and Hilliard Taylor, a veteran of the First World War requests the firm's assistance in uncovering what he believes is systematic embezzlement of the Paradise Café, which he owns and operates with three other men, all of whom were prisoners of war. The two events, although seemingly completely unrelated, come together in this story. 2019.