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Murdered Midas: a millionaire, his gold mine, and a strange death on an island paradise /
By Charlotte Gray. 2019
On an island paradise in 1943, Sir Harry Oakes, gold mining tycoon, philanthropist and "richest man in the Empire," was…
murdered. The news of his death surged across the English-speaking world, from London, the Imperial centre, to the remote Canadian mining town of Kirkland Lake, in the Northern Ontario bush. The murder became celebrated as "the crime of the century." The layers of mystery deepened as the involvement of Oakes' son-in-law, Count Alfred de Marigny, came quickly to be questioned, as did the odd machinations of the Governor of the Bahamas, the former King Edward VIII. Despite a sensational trial, no murderer was ever convicted. Rumours were unrelenting about Oakes' missing fortune, and fascination with the Oakes story has persisted for decades. Award-winning biographer and popular historian Charlotte Gray explores, for the first time, the life of the man behind the scandal, a man who was both reviled and admired - from his early, hardscrabble days of mining exploration, to his explosion of wealth, to his grandiose gestures of philanthropy. And Gray brings fresh eyes to the bungled investigation and shocking trial in the remote colonial island streets, proposing an overlooked suspect in this long cold case. 2019.Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson (Untold Lives Series)
By Mark Bourrie. 2019
NOMINATED FOR THE 2020 RBC TAYLOR PRIZE AS SEEN ON GLOBAL NEWS-TV'S THE MORNING SHOW Murderer. Salesman. Pirate. Adventurer. Cannibal.…
Co-founder of the Hudson's Bay Company. Known to some as the first European to explore the upper Mississippi, and widely as the namesake of ships and hotel chains, Pierre-Esprit Radisson is perhaps best described, writes Mark Bourrie, as “an eager hustler with no known scruples.” Kidnapped by Mohawk warriors at the age of fifteen, Radisson assimilated and was adopted by a powerful family, only to escape to New York City after less than a year. After being recaptured, he defected from a raiding party to the Dutch and crossed the Atlantic to Holland—thus beginning a lifetime of seized opportunities and frustrated ambitions. A guest among First Nations communities, French fur traders, and royal courts; witness to London’s Great Plague and Great Fire; and unwitting agent of the Jesuits’ corporate espionage, Radisson double-crossed the English, French, Dutch, and his adoptive Mohawk family alike, found himself marooned by pirates in Spain, and lived through shipwreck on the reefs of Venezuela. His most lasting venture as an Artic fur trader led to the founding of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which operates today, 350 years later, as North America’s oldest corporation. Sourced from Radisson’s journals, which are the best first-hand accounts of 17th century Canada, Bush Runner tells the extraordinary true story of this protean 17th-century figure, a man more trading partner than colonizer, a peddler of goods and not worldview—and with it offers a fresh perspective on the world in which he lived.Restoring Democracy in an Age of Populists and Pestilence
By Jonathan Manthorpe. 2020
“This global affairs veteran has carved out a solid, mature path, including for ‘flawed democracies’ like the U.S. We’d all…
be wise to follow.” — Vancouver SunFrom the author of the Globe and Mail bestseller, Claws of the Panda, comes a book quite literally for our times. Restoring Democracy in an Age of Populists and Pestilence is a thoughtful account of how we can save democracies from the despots and populists who provide easy answers to complicated situations, dumbing political discourse down to sandbox antics. Manthorpe argues that democracy is more resilient than it appears, and is capable of overcoming the attacks from within and without that have sapped its vigour since the end of the Cold War. He begins with a description of the events of 1989, one of the seminal years in modern history. This saw the end of the Cold War, and the apparent conclusive victory of democracy and its civic values. But the view of these changes as a triumph of democracy — as summed up in Francis Fukuyama’s essay "The End of History" — was short-lived. Russia, shorn of its Soviet empire, and the Chinese Communist Party, re-examining its survival after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, began devising ways to counter-attack the West’s triumphalism and these met with considerable success. Internal pressures and contradictions — wealth disparity being chief among them — threaten the survival of many democratic systems. Abandoned industrial workers turn to the repeated platitudes designed to appeal to those left behind without actually offering them the ways and means to catch up. Immigrants, refugees, and the reformist fixations of isolated liberal elites have provided ammunition for would-be despots. Adding to the pressures building on the political norms of our democracies, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought economic and social stand-still for which no country is prepared.Aloha Wanderwell: The Border-Smashing, Record-Setting Life of the World's Youngest Explorer
By Christian Fink-Jensen, Randolph Eustace-Walden. 2016
In 1922, a 15-year-old girl, fed up with life in a French convent school, answered an ad for a travelling…
secretary. Tall, blonde, and swaggering with confidence, she might have passed for twenty. She also knew what she wanted: to become the first female to drive around the world. Her name was Aloha Wanderwell. Aloha's mission was foolhardy in the extreme. Drivable roads were scarce and cars were alien to much of the world. The Wanderwell Expedition created a specially modified Model T Ford for the journey that featured gun scabbards and a sloped back that could fold out to become a darkroom. All that remained was for Aloha to learn how to drive. Aloha became known around the globe. She was photographed in front of the Eiffel Tower, parked on the back of the Sphinx, firing mortars in China, and smiling at a tickertape parade in Detroit. By the age of 25, she had become a pilot, a film star, an ambassador for world peace, and the centrepiece of one of the biggest unsolved murder mysteries in California history. Her story defied belief, but it was true. Every bit of it. Except for her name. The American Aloha Wanderwell was, in reality, the Canadian Idris Hall. Drawing upon Aloha's diaries and travel logs, as well as films, photographs, newspaper accounts, and previously classified government documents, Aloha Wanderwell reveals the astonishing story of one of the greatest — and most outrageous — explorers of the 1920s.The Whisper on the Night Wind: The True History of a Wilderness Legend
By Adam Shoalts. 2021
NATIONAL BESTSELLERSpellbinding adventure from Canada's most beloved modern-day explorer.Traverspine is not a place you will find on most maps. A…
century ago, it stood near the foothills of the remote Mealy Mountains in central Labrador. Today it is an abandoned ghost town, almost all trace of it swallowed up by dark spruce woods that cloak millions of acres.In the early 1900s, this isolated little settlement was the scene of an extraordinary haunting by large creatures none could identify. Strange tracks were found in the woods. Unearthly cries were heard in the night. Sled dogs went missing. Children reported being stalked by a terrifying grinning animal. Families slept with cabin doors barred and axes and guns at their bedsides.Tales of things that "go bump in the night" are part of the folklore of the wilderness, told and retold around countless campfires down through the ages. Most are easily dismissed by skeptics. But what happened at Traverspine a hundred years ago was different. The eye-witness accounts were detailed, and those who reported them included no less than three medical doctors and a wildlife biologist.Something really did emerge from the wilderness to haunt the little settlement of Traverspine. Adam Shoalts, decorated modern-day explorer and an expert on wilderness folklore, picks up the trail from a century ago and sets off into the Labrador wild to investigate the tale. It is a spine-tingling adventure, straight from a land steeped in legends and lore, where Vikings wandered a thousand years ago and wolves and bears still roam free.In delving into the dark corners of Canada's wild, The Whisper on the Night Wind combines folklore, history, and adventure into a fascinating saga of exploration.On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times
By Michael Ignatieff. 2021
Timely and profound philosophical meditations on how great figures in history, literature, music, and art searched for solace while facing…
tragedies and crises, from the internationally renowned historian of ideas and Booker Prize-finalist Michael Ignatieff.When someone we love dies, when we suffer loss or defeat, when catastrophe strikes--war, famine, pandemic--we go in search of consolation. Once the province of priests and philosophers, the language of consolation has largely vanished from our modern vocabulary, and the places where it was offered, houses of religion, are often empty. Rejecting the solace of ancient religious texts, humanity since the sixteenth century has increasingly placed its faith in science, ideology, and the therapeutic.How do we console each other and ourselves in an age of unbelief? In a series of lapidary meditations on writers, artists, musicians, and their works--from the books of Job and Psalms to Albert Camus, Anna Akhmatova, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and Primo Levi--esteemed writer and historian Michael Ignatieff shows how men and women in extremity have looked to each other across time to recover hope and resilience. Recreating the moments when great figures found the courage to confront their fate and the determination to continue unafraid, On Consolation takes those stories into the present, movingly contending that we can revive these traditions of consolation to meet the anguish and uncertainties of our precarious twenty-first century.Cool! offre chaque mois des entrevues exclusives avec les stars favorites des ados, des chroniques cinéma ainsi que des suggestions…
de disques pour qu'ils soient au courant de toutes les dernières nouveautés. Le magazine Cool! propose aussi des pages mode-beauté, qui présentent les tendances les plus hot pour les jeunes, ainsi que de nombreux dossiers psycho pour répondre à toutes leurs questions. Pour les lecteurs d’école secondaire et plus.Cool! offre chaque mois des entrevues exclusives avec les stars favorites des ados, des chroniques cinéma ainsi que des suggestions…
de disques pour qu'ils soient au courant de toutes les dernières nouveautés. Le magazine Cool! propose aussi des pages mode-beauté, qui présentent les tendances les plus hot pour les jeunes, ainsi que de nombreux dossiers psycho pour répondre à toutes leurs questions. Pour les lecteurs d’école secondaire et plus.Cool! offre chaque mois des entrevues exclusives avec les stars favorites des ados, des chroniques cinéma ainsi que des suggestions…
de disques pour qu'ils soient au courant de toutes les dernières nouveautés. Le magazine Cool! propose aussi des pages mode-beauté, qui présentent les tendances les plus hot pour les jeunes, ainsi que de nombreux dossiers psycho pour répondre à toutes leurs questions. Pour les lecteurs d’école secondaire et plus.Cool! offre chaque mois des entrevues exclusives avec les stars favorites des ados, des chroniques cinéma ainsi que des suggestions…
de disques pour qu'ils soient au courant de toutes les dernières nouveautés. Le magazine Cool! propose aussi des pages mode-beauté, qui présentent les tendances les plus hot pour les jeunes, ainsi que de nombreux dossiers psycho pour répondre à toutes leurs questions. Pour les lecteurs d’école secondaire et plus.Cool! offre chaque mois des entrevues exclusives avec les stars favorites des ados, des chroniques cinéma ainsi que des suggestions…
de disques pour qu'ils soient au courant de toutes les dernières nouveautés. Le magazine Cool! propose aussi des pages mode-beauté, qui présentent les tendances les plus hot pour les jeunes, ainsi que de nombreux dossiers psycho pour répondre à toutes leurs questions. Pour les lecteurs d’école secondaire et plus.Cool! offre chaque mois des entrevues exclusives avec les stars favorites des ados, des chroniques cinéma ainsi que des suggestions…
de disques pour qu'ils soient au courant de toutes les dernières nouveautés. Le magazine Cool! propose aussi des pages mode-beauté, qui présentent les tendances les plus hot pour les jeunes, ainsi que de nombreux dossiers psycho pour répondre à toutes leurs questions. Pour les lecteurs d’école secondaire et plus.Cool! offre chaque mois des entrevues exclusives avec les stars favorites des ados, des chroniques cinéma ainsi que des suggestions…
de disques pour qu'ils soient au courant de toutes les dernières nouveautés. Le magazine Cool! propose aussi des pages mode-beauté, qui présentent les tendances les plus hot pour les jeunes, ainsi que de nombreux dossiers psycho pour répondre à toutes leurs questions. Pour les lecteurs d’école secondaire et plus.Cool! offre chaque mois des entrevues exclusives avec les stars favorites des ados, des chroniques cinéma ainsi que des suggestions…
de disques pour qu'ils soient au courant de toutes les dernières nouveautés. Le magazine Cool! propose aussi des pages mode-beauté, qui présentent les tendances les plus hot pour les jeunes, ainsi que de nombreux dossiers psycho pour répondre à toutes leurs questions. Pour les lecteurs d’école secondaire et plus.Cool! offre chaque mois des entrevues exclusives avec les stars favorites des ados, des chroniques cinéma ainsi que des suggestions…
de disques pour qu'ils soient au courant de toutes les dernières nouveautés. Le magazine Cool! propose aussi des pages mode-beauté, qui présentent les tendances les plus hot pour les jeunes, ainsi que de nombreux dossiers psycho pour répondre à toutes leurs questions. Pour les lecteurs d’école secondaire et plus.Cool! offre chaque mois des entrevues exclusives avec les stars favorites des ados, des chroniques cinéma ainsi que des suggestions…
de disques pour qu'ils soient au courant de toutes les dernières nouveautés. Le magazine Cool! propose aussi des pages mode-beauté, qui présentent les tendances les plus hot pour les jeunes, ainsi que de nombreux dossiers psycho pour répondre à toutes leurs questions. Pour les lecteurs d’école secondaire et plus.Cool! offre chaque mois des entrevues exclusives avec les stars favorites des ados, des chroniques cinéma ainsi que des suggestions…
de disques pour qu'ils soient au courant de toutes les dernières nouveautés. Le magazine Cool! propose aussi des pages mode-beauté, qui présentent les tendances les plus hot pour les jeunes, ainsi que de nombreux dossiers psycho pour répondre à toutes leurs questions. Pour les lecteurs d’école secondaire et plus.Cool! offre chaque mois des entrevues exclusives avec les stars favorites des ados, des chroniques cinéma ainsi que des suggestions…
de disques pour qu'ils soient au courant de toutes les dernières nouveautés. Le magazine Cool! propose aussi des pages mode-beauté, qui présentent les tendances les plus hot pour les jeunes, ainsi que de nombreux dossiers psycho pour répondre à toutes leurs questions. Pour les lecteurs d’école secondaire et plus.Cool! offre chaque mois des entrevues exclusives avec les stars favorites des ados, des chroniques cinéma ainsi que des suggestions…
de disques pour qu'ils soient au courant de toutes les dernières nouveautés. Le magazine Cool! propose aussi des pages mode-beauté, qui présentent les tendances les plus hot pour les jeunes, ainsi que de nombreux dossiers psycho pour répondre à toutes leurs questions. Pour les lecteurs d’école secondaire et plus.Cool! offre chaque mois des entrevues exclusives avec les stars favorites des ados, des chroniques cinéma ainsi que des suggestions…
de disques pour qu'ils soient au courant de toutes les dernières nouveautés. Le magazine Cool! propose aussi des pages mode-beauté, qui présentent les tendances les plus hot pour les jeunes, ainsi que de nombreux dossiers psycho pour répondre à toutes leurs questions. Pour les lecteurs d’école secondaire et plus.