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Pearleen Oliver: Canada's Black Crusader for Civil Rights
By Ronald Caplan. 2021
In a winning new book, Pearleen Oliver: Canada's Black Crusader for Civil Rights brings to life a compassionate and passionate…
African Nova Scotian, the story of her growth and activism — a book that shows how one woman's voice changed the course of Nova Scotia's history. Pearleen Oliver pushed open doors that blocked Black girls from nurses' training. She kicked Little Black Sambo out of public schools. She was spokesperson for Viola Desmond's appeal of her 1946 conviction for challenging racist customs. A founder of the Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, the Black United Front and the Black Cultural Centre, she was the first female moderator of the African United Baptist Association, and a founder of the AUBA Women's Institute. Editor Ronald Caplan weaves Pearleen's voice from her interviews and speeches. We experience Pearleen's awareness of injustice as she grew up in segregated New Glasgow schools. A married woman, we see her outrage re-kindled by a bewildered teenager at her door who was barred from nurses' training by her skin colour. Pearleen began to speak out before civic and religious and community groups, Boards of Trade, Rotary luncheons, B'nai B'rith and Baptist services and nuclear disarmament conferences. Newspapers carried her voice?a voice of reason and determination and common sense — across the province, and then across Canada. While raising five sons and carrying on the duties of a minister's wife, Pearleen mentored young girls and women in summer camps, church groups, continuing education, and women's groups. She was the organist in her churches, and she wrote histories of Black communities. In this eye-opening book Pearleen Oliver tells stories of activist journalist Carrie Best who published Nova Scotia's first Black newspaper, of successful businesswoman Viola Desmond who was sidetracked by petty racism, of Black soldiers who fought Nazi racism in the Second World War and then came home to racial discrimination in Canada. This book keeps alive a determined fighter for social justice who should not be forgotten. Pearleen Oliver demonstrated what one person, one voice, can do.Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report of the National Inquiry Into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG)
By National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. 2019
The National Inquiry’s Final Report reveals that persistent and deliberate human and Indigenous rights violations and abuses are the root…
cause behind Canada’s staggering rates of violence against Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people. The two volume report calls for transformative legal and social changes to resolve the crisis that has devastated Indigenous communities across the country.Driven: The Secret Lives of Taxi Drivers (Untold Lives)
By Marcello Di Cintio. 2021
In conversations with drivers ranging from veterans of foreign wars to Indigenous women protecting one another, Di Cintio explores the…
borderland of the North American taxi. “The taxi,” writes Marcello Di Cintio, “is a border.” Occupying the space between public and private, a cab brings together people who might otherwise never have met—yet most of us sit in the back and stare at our phones. Nowhere else do people occupy such intimate quarters and share so little. In a series of interviews with drivers, their backgrounds ranging from the Iraqi National Guard, to the Westboro Baptist Church, to an arranged marriage that left one woman stranded in a foreign country with nothing but a suitcase, Driven seeks out those missed conversations, revealing the unknown stories that surround us. Travelling across borders of all kinds, from battlefields and occupied lands to midnight fares and Tim Hortons parking lots, Di Cintio chronicles the many journeys each driver made merely for the privilege to turn on their rooflight. Yet these lives aren’t defined by tragedy or frustration but by ingenuity and generosity, hope and indomitable hard work. From night school and sixteen-hour shifts to schemes for athletic careers and the secret Shakespeare of Dylan’s lyrics, Di Cintio’s subjects share the passions and triumphs that drive them. Like the people encountered in its pages, Driven is an unexpected delight, and that most wondrous of all things: a book that will change the way you see the world around you. A paean to the power of personality and perseverance, it’s a compassionate and joyful tribute to the men and women who take us where we want to go.Tongues: On Longing and Belonging through Language
By Ayelet Tsabari, Eufemia Fantetti, Leonarda Carranza. 2021
In this collection of deeply personal essays, twenty-six writers explore their connection with language, accents, and vocabularies, and contend with…
the ways these can be used as both bridge and weapon. Some explore the way power and privilege affect language learning, especially the shame and exclusion often felt by non-native English speakers in a white, settler, colonial nation. Some confront the pain of losing a mother tongue or an ancestral language along with the loss of community and highlight the empowerment that comes with reclamation. Others celebrate the joys of learning a new language and the power of connection. All underscore how language can offer both transformation and collective healing. Tongues: On Longing and Belonging through Language is a vital anthology that opens a compelling dialogue about language diversity and probes the importance of language in our identity and the ways in which it shapes us. With contributions by: Kamal Al-Solaylee, Jenny Heijun Wills, Karen McBride, Melissa Bull, Leonarda Carranza, Adam Pottle, Kai Cheng Thom, Sigal Samuel, Rebecca Fisseha, Hege Anita Jakobsen Lepri, Logan Broeckaert, Taslim Jaffer, Ashley Hynd, Jagtar Kaur Atwal, Téa Mutonji, Rowan McCandless, Sahar Golshan, Camila Justino, Amanda Leduc, Ayelet Tsabari, Carrianne Leung, Janet Hong, Danny Ramadan, Sadiqa de Meijer, Jónína Kirton, and Eufemia Fantetti.Made-Up: A True Story of Beauty Culture under Late Capitalism
By Daphne B., Alex Manley. 2021
A nuanced, feminist, and deeply personal take on beauty culture and YouTube consumerism, in the tradition of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets…
As Daphné B. obsessively watches YouTube makeup tutorials and haunts Sephora’s website, she’s increasingly troubled by the ways in which this obsession contradicts her anti-capitalist and intersectional feminist politics. In this poetic treatise, she rejects the false binaries of traditional beauty standards and delves into the celebrities and influencers, from Kylie to Grimes, and the poets and philosophers, from Anne Boyer to Audre Lorde, who have shaped the reflection she sees in the mirror. At once confessional and essayistic, Made-Up is a meditation on the makeup that colours, that obscures, that highlights who we are and who we wish we could be. The original French-language edition was a cult hit in Quebec. Translated by Alex Manley—like Daphné, a Montreal poet and essayist—the book’s English-language text crackles with life, retaining the flair and verve of the original, and ensuring that a book on beauty is no less beautiful than its subject matter. “The most radical book of 2020 talks about makeup. Radical in the intransigence with which Daphne B hunts down the parts of her imagination that capitalism has phagocytized. Radical also in its rejection of false binaries (the authentic and the fake, the futile and the essential) through the lens of which such a subject is generally considered. With the help of a heady combination of pop cultural criticism and autobiography, a poet scrutinizes her contradictions. They are also ours.” —Dominic Tardif, Le Devoir “[Made-Up] is a delight. I read it in one go. And when, out of necessity, I had to put it down, it was with regret and with the feeling that I was giving up what could save me from a catastrophe.” —Laurence Fournier, Lettres Québécoises, five stars "Made-Up is a radiant, shimmering blend of memoir and cultural criticism that uses beauty culture as an entry point to interrogating the ugly contradictions of late capitalism. In short, urgent chapters laced with humor and wide-ranging references, Daphné B. plumbs the depths of a rich topic that’s typically dismissed as shallow. I imagine her writing it in eye pencil, using makeup to tell the story of her life, as so many women do." —Amy Berkowitz, author of Tender Points "A companion through the thicket of late stage capitalism, a lucid and poetic mirror for anyone whose image exists on a screen." —Rachel Kauder Nalebuff "Made-Up is anything but—committed to the grit of our current realities, Daphné B directs her piercing eye on capitalism in an intimate portrayal of what it means to love, and how to paint ourselves in the process. Alex Manley has gifted English audiences with a nuanced translation of a critical feminist text, exploring love and make-up as a transformative social tool." —Sruti Islam "The book will leave you both laughing in recognition and wincing at the reality of the beauty world’s impact on our collective psyche." —Chatelaine d"[Made-Up] examines the intersection of beauty culture and consumer culture... Aided by the work of writers like Anne Carson, Anne Boyer, Amanda Hess, and Arabelle Sicardi... B. makes sharp observations about the ideologies behind both beauty [...] and consumerism." —Bitch Media "Made-Up: A True Story of Beauty Culture under Late Capitalism is well worth reading." —Literary Review of Canada "[Made-Up], newly translated by writer/poet Alex Manley from its original French, puts an iAlfabet / alphabet : a memoir of a first language
By Sadiqa De Meijer. 2020
alfabet / alphabet is the record of Sadiqa de Meijer's transition from speaking Dutch to English. Exploring questions of identity,…
landscape, family, and translation, the essays navigate the shifting cultural currents of language by using an eclectic approach to storytelling. As such, fellow linguistic migrants to anglophone Canada will recognize elements of their experience in alfabet / alphabet, while lifelong English speakers will perceive their mother tongue in a new lightThis Strange Visible Air: Essays on Aging and the Writing Life
By Sharon Butala. 2021
A collection of essays on women and aging from Canadian legend Sharon Butala "What I didn't have a clue about…
was that I was soon to be old, or what being old would mean to my dreams and desires. While dreading old age with every fibre, I was at the same time in full denial that it would ever happen to me, and so, was shocked down to the soles of my feet when it did." In this incisive collection, Sharon Butala reflects on the ways her life has changed as she's grown old. She knows that society fails the elderly massively, and so she tackles ageism and loneliness, friendship and companionship. She writes with pointed wit and acerbic humour about dinner parties and health challenges and forgetfulness and complicated family relationships and the pandemic -- and lettuce. And she tells her story with the tremendous skill and beauty of a writer who has masterfully honed her craft over the course of her storied four-decade career. Butala gives us a book to be cherished -- an elegant and expansive look at the complexities and desires of aging and the aged, standing in stark contrast to the stereotyped, simplistic portrayals of the elderly in our culture. This Strange Visible Air is a true gift.Care Of: Letters, Connections, and Cures
By Ivan Coyote. 2021
Beloved storyteller Ivan Coyote returns with their most intimate and moving book yet. Writer and performer Ivan Coyote has spent…
decades on the road, telling stories around the world. For years, Ivan has kept a file of the most special communications received from readers and audience members—letters, Facebook messages, emails, soggy handwritten notes tucked under the windshield wiper of their truck after a gig. Then came Spring, 2020, and, like artists everywhere, Coyote was grounded by the pandemic, all their planned events cancelled. The energy of a live audience, a performer’s lifeblood, was suddenly gone. But with this loss came an opportunity for a different kind of connection. Those letters that had long piled up could finally begin to be answered. Care Of combines the most powerful of these letters with Ivan’s responses, creating a body of correspondence of startling intimacy, breathtaking beauty, and heartbreaking honesty and openness. Taken together, they become an affirming and joyous reflection on many of the themes central to Coyote’s celebrated work—compassion and empathy, family fragility, non-binary and Trans identity, and the unending beauty of simply being alive, a giant love letter to the idea of human connection, and the power of truly listening to each other.A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré
By John Le Carré. 2022
An archive of letters written by the late John le Carré, giving readers access to the intimate thoughts of one…
of the greatest writers of our time.The never-before-seen correspondence of John le Carré, one of the most important novelists of our generation, are collected in this beautiful volume. During his lifetime, le Carré wrote numerous letters to writers, spies, politicians, artists, actors, and public figures. This collection is a treasure trove, revealing the late author's humour, generosity, and wit—a side of him many readers have not previously seen.Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004-2021
By Margaret Atwood. 2022
NATIONAL BESTSELLERFrom cultural icon Margaret Atwood comes a brilliant collection of essays--funny, erudite, endlessly curious, uncannily prescient--which seek answers to…
Burning Questions such as:Why do people everywhere, in all cultures, tell stories?How much of yourself can you give away without evaporating?How can we live on our planet?Is it true? And is it fair?What do zombies have to do with authoritarianism?In over fifty pieces Atwood aims her prodigious intellect and impish humour at the world, and reports back to us on what she finds. This roller-coaster period brought the end of history, a financial crash, the rise of Trump, and a pandemic. From debt to tech, the climate crisis to freedom; from when to dispense advice to the young (answer: only when asked) to how to define granola, we have no better guide to the many and varied mysteries of our universe.A guide to understanding the Indian Act and its impact on generations of Indigenous Peoples, as well as an examination…
of how Indigenous Peoples can return to self-government, self-determination, and self-reliance. Bestseller. Winner of the 2019 Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award. 2018.Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous Life in Canada
By Michelle Good. 2023
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLERA bold, provocative collection of essays exploring the historical and contemporary Indigenous experience in Canada.With authority and insight,…
Truth Telling examines a wide range of Indigenous issues framed by Michelle Good’s personal experience and knowledge.From racism, broken treaties, and cultural pillaging, to the value of Indigenous lives and the importance of Indigenous literature, this collection reveals facts about Indigenous life in Canada that are both devastating and enlightening. Truth Telling also demonstrates the myths underlying Canadian history and the human cost of colonialism, showing how it continues to underpin modern social institutions in Canada.Passionate and uncompromising, Michelle Good affirms that meaningful and substantive reconciliation hinges on recognition of Indigenous self-determination, the return of lands, and a just redistribution of the wealth that has been taken from those lands without regard for Indigenous peoples.Truth Telling is essential reading for those looking to acknowledge the past and understand the way forward.Ordinary Wonder Tales
By Emily Urquhart. 2022
A journalist and folklorist explores the truths that underlie the stories we imagine—and reveals the magic in the everyday. “I’ve…
always felt that the term fairy tale doesn’t quite capture the essence of these stories,” writes Emily Urquhart. “I prefer the term wonder tale, which is Irish in origin, for its suggestion of awe coupled with narrative. In a way, this is most of our stories.” In this startlingly original essay collection, Urquhart reveals the truths that underlie our imaginings: what we see in our heads when we read, how the sight of a ghost can heal, how the entrance to the underworld can be glimpsed in an oil painting or a winter storm—or the onset of a loved one’s dementia. In essays on death and dying, pregnancy and prenatal genetics, radioactivity, chimeras, cottagers, and plague, Ordinary Wonder Tales reveals the essential truth: if you let yourself look closely, there is magic in the everyday.Final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Volume one, Summary: honouring the truth, reconciling for the future (Mcgill-queen's Indigenous And Northern Studies #83)
By Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. 2015
The Final Report of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its six-year investigation of the residential school system for Aboriginal…
youth and the legacy of these schools. This report, the summary volume, includes the history of residential schools, the legacy of that school system, and the full text of the Commission's 94 recommendations for action to address that legacy. This report lays bare a part of Canada's history that until recently was little-known to most non-Aboriginal Canadians. The Commission discusses the logic of the colonization of Canada's territories, and why and how policy and practice developed to end the existence of distinct societies of Aboriginal peoples. Using brief excerpts from the powerful testimony heard from Survivors, this report documents the residential school system which forced children into institutions where they were forbidden to speak their language, required to discard their clothing in favour of institutional wear, given inadequate food, housed in inferior and fire-prone buildings, required to work when they should have been studying, and subjected to emotional, psychological and often physical abuse. In this setting, cruel punishments were all too common, as was sexual abuse. More than 30,000 Survivors have been compensated financially by the Government of Canada for their experiences in residential schools, but the legacy of this experience is ongoing today. This report explains the links to high rates of Aboriginal children being taken from their families, abuse of drugs and alcohol, and high rates of suicide. The report documents the drastic decline in the presence of Aboriginal languages, even as Survivors and others work to maintain their distinctive cultures, traditions, and governance. The report offers 94 calls to action on the part of governments, churches, public institutions and non-Aboriginal Canadians as a path to meaningful reconciliation of Canada today with Aboriginal citizens.Trailer park shakes
By Justene Dion-Glowa. 2022
The poems in Trailer Park Shakes are direct and vernacular, rooted in community—a working-class Métis voice rarely heard from. These…
poems, while dreamlike and playful, bear unflinching witness to the workings of injustice—how violence is channeled through institutions and refracted intimately between people, becoming intertwined with the full range of human experience, including care and love. Trailer Park Shakes is a book that seems to want to hold everything—an entire cross-section of lived experience—written by a poet whose courage, attention, and capacity to trace contradiction inspire trust in her words' embrace. Dion-Glowa's poems are quietly philosophical, with a heartfelt, self-possessed politic. "Dion-Glowa's voice crackles with frank, startling insight." — Sachiko Murakami, author of Render "A collection that should and will rattle your cage and shine a light where it is needed." — John Brady McDonald, author of KitotamBlood
By Tyler Pennock. 2022
Blood follows a Two-Spirit Indigenous person as they navigate urbanity, queerness, and a kaleidoscope of dreams, memory, and kinship. Conceived…
in the same world as their acclaimed debut, Bones , Tyler Pennock's Blood centres around a protagonist who at first has difficulty knowing the difference between connection and pain, and we move with them as they explore what it means to want. Pennock weaves longing, intimacy, and Anishinaabe relationalities to recentre and rethink their speaker's relationship to the living—never forgetting non-human kin. This book is a look at how deep history is represented in the everyday; it also tries to answer how one person can challenge the impacts of that history. It is a reminder that Indigenous people carry the impacts of colonial history and wrestle with them constantly. Blood explores the relationships between spring and winter, ice and water, static things and things beginning to move, and what emerges in the thaw. "A music as sensitive as it is revelatory." — Canisia Lubrin, author of The DyzgraphxstFrom Left to Right: Saskatchewan's Political and Economic Transformation
By Dale Eisler. 2021
An in-depth look at the political landscape of Saskatchewan from its leftist roots to its shift in recent years to…
the right of centre.One of the most underreported stories in Canadian politics has been the political and economic transformation of Saskatchewan. The province that was the birthplace of the CCF-NDP and democratic socialism in North America has, over the last fifty years, undergone fundamental change that has altered its identity. It is now seen as the bastion of the centre-right Saskatchewan Party, which has become one of the most dominant provincial political parties in Canada.The story of that transformation, in which the once powerful NDP has been relegated to the political margins, reaches far beyond the province itself and reflects national and global events that have shaped the province over the course of the last half century. Modern Saskatchewan politics have been less about ideology and more about the influence of issues and events since the late 1960s and the lure of populist leaders who speak to an identity rooted in the province’s history.Consistent with Saskatchewan’s history, From Left to Right presents a blend of populism, a deeply embedded spirit of independence and personal initiative, coupled with communitarian values and the constant search for a better future.Big Men Fear Me
By Mark Bourrie. 2022
The remarkable true story of the rise and fall of one of North America's most influential media moguls. When George…
McCullagh bought The Globe and The Mail and Empire and merged them into the Globe and Mail, the charismatic 31-year-old high school dropout had already made millions on the stock market. It was just the beginning of the meteoric rise of a man widely expected to one day be prime minister of Canada. But the charismatic McCullagh had a dark side. Dogged by the bipolar disorder that destroyed his political ambitions and eventually killed him, he was all but written out of history. It was a loss so significant that journalist Robert Fulford has called McCullagh’s biography "one of the great unwritten books in Canadian history"—until now. In Big Men Fear Me, award-winning historian Mark Bourrie tells the remarkable story of McCullagh’s inspirational rise and devastating fall, and with it sheds new light on the resurgence of populist politics, challenges to collective action, and attacks on the free press that characterize our own tumultuous era.See It, Dream It, Do It: How 25 people just like you found their dream jobs
By Colleen Nelson, Kathie MacIsaac. 2023
From award-winning author Colleen Nelson, and literacy advocate Kathie MacIsaac, twenty-five profiles present a plethora of jobs, and people, making…
it easier than ever for young people to see their dreams and to live their dreams!Letters with Smokie: Blindness and More-than-Human Relations
By Rod Michalko, Dan Goodley. 2023
Letters with Smokie captures an epistolic exchange between Dan Goodley and Rod Michalko, or rather, Rod Michalko's late guide dog,…
Smokie. A lively exploration of human-animal relationships and disability as disruption, disturbance, and art, the book offers a refreshing re-evaluation of cultural misunderstandings of disability.