Title search results
Showing 101 - 120 of 6824 items
Tar sands: dirty oil and the future of a continent
By Andrew Nikiforuk. 2008
Canada has one third of the world's oil source; it comes from the bitumen in the oil sands of Alberta.…
Advancements in technology and frenzied development have created the world's largest energy project in Fort McMurray, where the sticky bitumen is extracted from the earth. Providing almost 20 percent of America's fuel, much of this dirty oil is being processed in refineries in the Midwest, but Nikiforuk believes the project is polluting the air, poisoning the water, and destroying boreal forest, and argues for change. Some strong language. c2008.Summer (Seasons. #4.)
By Karl Ove Knausgaard, Ingvild Burkey. 2018
The conclusion to one of the most extraordinary and original literary projects in recent years, "Summer" once again intersperses short…
vividly descriptive essays with emotionally raw diary entries addressed directly to Knausgaard's newborn daughter. Writing more expansively and, if it is possible, even more intimately and unguardedly than in the previous three volumes, he mines with new depth his difficult memories of his childhood and fraught relationship with his own father. Documenting his family's life in rural Sweden and reflecting on a characteristically eclectic array of subjects--mosquitoes, barbeques, cynicism, and skin, to name just a few--he braids the various threads of the previous volumes into a moving conclusion. Knausgaard writes for his daughter, striving to make ready and give meaning to a world at once indifferent and achingly beautiful. In his hands, the overwhelming joys and insoluble pains of family and parenthood come alive with uncommon feeling. Sequel to "Spring". 2018.Tango on the Main
By Joe Fiorito. 1997
A collection of newspaper essays by Montrealer Joe Fiorito, who won the 1996 National Newspaper Award for these columns. You'll…
meet Milo who is seven and having the lousiest day of his life, Jackie of the Ritz, chambermaid to the stars, and Nantha, single father, man about town, as well as many others. 1997.Tales of the Amazon: how the Munduruku Indians live
By Jane Springer, Daniel Munduruku. 2000
The first part of the book tells the story of a young Amazon Munduruku boy, Kaxi, raised to be a…
shaman. In the second part, the author describes how he came to the city of Sao Paulo as a young man, and experienced culture shock and racism. The last part provides information about the Munduruku and other Amazon people and their ways of living. Grades 2-4. 2000, 1996. Uniform title: Histórias de índio.Tales the elders told: Ojibway legends
By Basil Johnston. 1981
These legends, which include "Why birds go south in winter" and "The first butterflies", are an integral part of the…
spiritual and cultural heritage of the Ojibway people. For all ages.T. rex and the crater of doom
By Walter Alvarez. 1997
A geologist recalls the first scientific proposals of the theory that a large asteroid or comet had collided with Earth…
sixty-five million years ago, causing the extinction of the dinosaurs. Describes the vehement debate that followed, the accumulation of evidence, and the discovery of a crater beneath the Yucatan peninsula that appears to substantiate the impact claim. c1997.Talk, talk, talk
By Jay Ingram. 1992
Ingram explores the world of speech, from the first words on earth to the complex wizardry of the brain. He…
discusses the physiology, including the theory that speech is encoded in our genes, and the dynamics of conversation. 1992.Survival: a thematic guide to Canadian literature
By Margaret Atwood. 1972
Originally published in 1972, Atwood's book redefined what made this country's literature unique in a landscape dominated by its British…
and American counterparts. She describes the struggle of local writers to survive this dominance, eventually asserting that there is a distinct Canadian literature, with its own preoccupations, themes, and ideas specific to its history, geopolitics, and landscape. Some descriptions of sex and violence. 2004, c1972.Suddenly they heard footsteps: storytelling for the twenty-first century
By Dan Yashinsky. 2004
The art of storytelling is very much alive in today's world. Yashinsky has lived with storytelling all his life, first…
listening to storytellers and then becoming one himself. It's the traveler who stops to hear the voice of the dusty little mouse on the road who is rewarded with the treasure. 2004.Superquake!: why earthquakes occur and when the big one will hit southern California
By David Ritchie. 1988
Stuff: the things the world is made of
By Ivan Amato. 1997
Amato traces the use of stuff--raw materials--in the development of products from prehistoric to modern times. He relates the evolution…
of the field of materials science to the human ability to manipulate smaller and smaller building blocks of matter. He theorizes that "smart" materials, under research in the 1990s, signal the beginning of a new technological era. c1997.Supergiants!: the biggest dinosaurs
By David Peters, Don Lessem. 1997
Lessem explains that the "biggest" dinosaurs weighed the most. They were plant-eating dinosaurs,the sauropods. He details how dinosaur bones have…
been discovered and what scientists have learned from them. He concludes with a description of the Argentinosaurus, officially named in 1993, which may prove to be the biggest dinosaur ever. Grades 3-6. c1997.Silicon city: San Francisco in the long shadow of the valley (ITK audio)
By Cary McClelland. 2018
The tech boom of our time is changing San Francisco at warp speed. Famously home to artists and activists, and…
known as the birthplace of the Beats, the Black Panthers, and the LGBTQ movement, the Bay Area has been transformed by Silicon Valley. But the richer the region gets, the more unequal and less diverse it becomes, and the cracks in the city's facade begin to show. Inspired by Studs Terkel's classic works of oral history, writer and filmmaker Cary McClelland has spent several years interviewing people at the epicenter of the Bay Area's rapid change: tech innovators, venture capitalists, coders, homeless advocates, pawn brokers, prosecutors and public defenders, tattoo artists, and tour guides. Silicon City masterfully weaves together their voices and unforgettable stories to create a dynamic portrait of a beloved city and a cautionary tale for the entire country. 2018.Stowaways
By Ariel Gordon. 2014
In a series of smart and funny poems, 'Stowaways' careens between life as we-know-it on the Canadian prairies and the…
frayed yet familiar edges of what-if. What if a beluga from Churchill hooked up with a Gore-Texed tourist? What if knowing Morse Code would save your bacon during the zombie apocalypse? Half survival guide, half invasive species list, these are poems that stick to your socks. Winner of the 2015 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry. 2014.Strange ghosts: essays
By Darren Greer. 2006
From baseball to Picasso, Oscar Wilde to Tennessee Williams, post-modernism to American foreign policy, these essays are a mix of…
polemic, politics, memoir, travelogue, and literary theory. Greer relates how his mother's obsession with baseball is overshadowed by her distaste for the American invasion of Iraq, and in some travel essays, he recounts being in India during the height of the Pakistan nuclear crisis, his conversations with monks in Cambodia, and his spiritual revelations in Venice. Some strong language. Some descriptions of sex. Some descriptions of violence. c2006.Silvija: poems
By Sandra Ridley. 2016
In a sequence of five feverish elegies, Ridley combines narrative lyric and experimental verse styles to manifest dark themes related…
to love and loss: the traumas of psychological suffering (isolation and confinement), physical abuse (by parent and partner), terminal illness (brain tumour and heart attack), revelation, resolution, and healing. With a blend of fervour and sangfroid, these serial poems accrue into a book-length testament to a grief both personal and human, leaving readers with the redemptive grace that comes from poetry's ability to wrestle chaos into meaning. Because of its overarching themes and serial form, "Silvija" is best read cover-to-cover, analogous to a work of fiction, rather than a book of individual or occasional poems. 2016.Sequence
By A. F Moritz. 2015
In "Sequence", the reader accompanies the poet step after step through a haunting and mercurial world that shimmers like sun…
on sand. Alternating moments of spare clarity with deep narrative flashes, the poem wanders the borders of the self, pursuing the eternal moment through imagined landscapes and the lush world waiting outside the writer's window. This is poetry of intense observation, finely tuned to a pattern that is sustained with breaks and returns, alive with eros and a hunger for Breton's "convulsive beauty." 2015.Strange new worlds: the search for alien planets and life beyond our solar system
By Ray Jayawardhana. 2011
After millennia of musings and a century of false claims, astronomers have found hundreds of planets around other stars since…
1995, and at the crux of the astronomers’ pursuit is one basic question: Is our solar system, with planets in circular orbits, gas giants in the outer realm and at least one warm, wet, rocky world teeming with life, the exception or the norm? Astronomers expect to find alien earths by the dozens within the next three years, and to look for signs of life before this decade is out. If they succeed, the ramifications for all areas of human thought and endeavour - from religion and philosophy to art and biology - are profound, if not revolutionary. c2011.Shadows in the sun: Travels To Landscapes Of Spirit And Desire
By Wade Davis. 1992
The diversity of humankind and the relationship to landscape, from the high Arctic and the northern forests to the swamps…
of the Orinoco, is hunted, gathered and appreciated here by Davis. He recounts a dozen journeys, some in search of ethnobotanicals; others for spiritual and poetic influences. 1992.Sit how you want
By Robin Richardson. 2018
Plane crashes and automobile mishaps are the backdrop for female narrators who grapple with terror, anxiety, and powerlessness: "When I…
say I'm fine I mean the sky has opened / like an old wound under scurvy." In their grim wit, sinister straight talk, and sometimes violent bawdiness, Richardson's poems work as counter-charms against the lingering trauma of abusive relationships, both familial and romantic. The book embodies a belief in poetry as an instrument of change, a tool for transforming pain into exuberant verbal energy: "It is the thrill of ruination / makes us innovate." Winner of the 2019 Trillium Book Award for Poetry. 2018.