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Showing 1 - 20 of 66 items
By Pierre Briant, Leili Anvar, Pierre Blanchet. 2012
" L'Iran actuel éclipse une civilisation millénaire, l'une des plus anciennes et des plus brillantes du Proche-Orient, l'Empire perse, dont…
le Shah Reza Pahlavi faisait encore un modèle dans les années 1970 : les Empires perses. Ce livre est l'occasion d'interroger les continuités et les ruptures d'un Orient qui ne vit pas uniquement au rythme de la religion chiite. Jadis, en effet, les Perses étaient considérés comme les Barbares par excellence et les Grecs, comme les Romains, les ont combattus en les regardant tels des sauvages gouvernés par des despotes. Pourtant, la culture perse s'est montrée d'une rare richesse et d'une grande tolérance. N'est-ce pas là que le monde juif puisa une partie de ses traditions et de ses coutumes ? N'est-ce pas aussi dans l'Empire perse que trouvaient refuge les bannis des cités grecques ?Quand le pays de Zarathoustra se convertit à l'islam, cet Orient change en profondeur. Il prend les allures d'un concurrent d'un genre nouveau pour le monde occidental, qui le regarde aujourd'hui avec une terrible angoisse, celle de voir une théocratie se doter de l'arme nucléaire. " -- 4e de couv.By Trevor Greene, Debbie Greene. 2012
2006. Trevor Greene, a journalist and a reservist in the Canadian Army, was at a meeting with village elders in…
Afghanistan when a teenage boy under the influence of the Taliban swung an axe into his skull. After years of rehabilitation, setbacks and crises, Trevor learned to talk and move again, with the love and support of his fiancée Debbie. Their story is told in two voices: Trevor’s, up until the attack that changed their lives; and Debbie’s, as she works tirelessly to rehabilitate the man she loves. Some descriptions of sex, explicit descriptions of violence and explicit strong language. c2012.By Bernard Brizay. 2008
Pour les Chinois, comme pour les Occidentaux, jamais capitale n'a autant mérité le statut de ville mythique. Résidence du Fils…
du Ciel, capitale administrative, culturelle et religieuse du plus vieux, du plus peuplé et du plus grand empire au monde, Pékin et la Cité pourpre interdite où vivait l'empereur, entouré de ses concubines et de ses eunuques, fait toujours fantasmer. Le palais impérial est resté pendant cinq cents ans le centre sacré de l'Empire, le siège du gouvernement, où s'est écrite la grande histoire, celle de la Chine. Et la petite histoire, car la Cité interdite fut aussi le lieu privilégié d'intrigues, de drames et de crimes. 2008.By Michel Renouard. 2012
" Derrière le héros mythique, joué par Peter O'Toole dans le célèbre film de David Lean, se cache un personnage…
complexe, non exempt de zones d'ombre. Archéologue et agent de renseignement, homme d'action et auteur des Sept Piliers de la sagesse, Thomas Edward Lawrence (1888 - 1935) se disait à moitié poète, se voulait intouchable, et mourut prématurément dans un accident de moto. Ce livre retrace la vie et les aventures de l'insaisissable Lawrence d'Arabie, dont Winston Churchill affirmait qu'il était un des êtres les plus extraordinaires de son temps. " -- 4e de couv.By Abu Bakr al Rabeeah, Winnie Yeung. 2018
Tells the story of Abu Bakr al Rabeeah, a young boy whose family moved from Iraq to Syria just before…
the start of the Syrian civil war. It recounts what it was like living in Syria during this time -- the normal things like video games, sleepovers, and family jarringly juxtaposed with car bombings, massacres, and the constant threat of what could happen next. In 2014 the family finally found safety in immigrating to Edmonton, Canada, and the book also recounts both the gratefulness and the loneliness of the family's immigration experience. 2018.By Christie Blatchford. 2007
Blatchford has covered the conflict in Afghanistan as an embedded reporter, and provides observations of military life in the twenty-first…
century. The troops share their accounts of their desire to serve, their willingness to confront fear and danger on the battlefield, their loyalty towards each other and the heartbreak occasioned by the loss of one of their own. Descriptions of sex, explicit descriptions of violence and some strong language. Winner of the 2008 Governor General's Award for Non-fiction. 2007.By Barth Hoogstraten. 2001
Hoogstraten was a Dutch medical student in 1942 when the Nazis wanted him to sign a loyalty decree to the…
occupying forces. He refused to do so and went into hiding, taking shelter with Ann and Bets Frank, two blind middle-aged music teachers. Some descriptions of sex, descriptions of violence, some strong language. 2001.By Ruth Martin, Bettina Stangneth. 2014
A total re-assessment of the life of Adolf Eichmann that reveals his activities and notoriety amongst a global network of…
National Socialists following the collapse of the Third Reich, and permanently challenges Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil.” Smuggled out of Europe after the collapse of Germany, Eichmann managed to live a peaceful and active exile in Argentina for years before his capture by the Mossad. Though once widely known by nicknames such as “Manager of the Holocaust,” in 1961 he was able to portray himself as an overworked bureaucrat following orders. How was this carefully crafted obfuscation possible? How did a central architect of the Final Solution manage to disappear? And what had he done with his time while in hiding? 2014. Uniform title: Eichmann vor Jerusalem.By Denise Chong. 2009
On May 23, 1989, as student protests raged, Lu Decheng and two other men hurled 30 paint-filled eggs at the…
immense portrait of Mao Zedong that dominates Beijing's Tiananmen Square. His poli-art stunt stranded Lu in prison for almost a decade, cost him his wife and daughter, and led to his eventual defection to Canada. While hoping to bring true democracy and to unmask the repression of Mao's reign, Lu learned that in China, preserving the Chairman's legacy mattered more. 2009.By James Loney. 2011
Iraq, November 2005. James Loney and three other men, all members of Christian Peacemaker Teams, were taken hostage at gunpoint.…
The Swords of Righteousness Brigade released videos of the men, resulting in what is likely the most publicized kidnapping of the Iraq War. One man was murdered, the rest held 118 days before being rescued. 2011.By Carol Off. 2017
Tells the gripping story of a family's desperate attempts to escape Afghan warlords, Taliban oppression, and the persecutions of refugee…
life, in hopes that both their sons and their daughters could dare to dream of peace and opportunity. In 2002, Carol Off and a CBC TV crew encountered an Afghan man with a story to tell. Asad Aryubwal became key to their documentary on the terrible power of thuggish warlords who were working arm in arm with Americans and NATO troops. When Asad publicly exposed the deeds of one particular warlord, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, it set off a chain of events from which there was no turning back. Asad, his wife, Mobina, and their five children had to flee their home. Their only chance for a peaceful life was to emigrate--yet year after year of agonizing limbo would ensue as they were thwarted by a Byzantine international bureaucracy and the decidedly unwelcoming policies of Stephen Harper's government. Winner of the 2018 British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. Bestseller. 2017.By Priscilla Galloway, Dawn Hunter. 2009
Presents accounts of three explorers who journeyed on the Silk Road: Xuanzang, a seventh-century Buddhist pilgrim from China; Genghis Khan,…
the early-thirteenth-century Mongolian conqueror; and Marco Polo, the late-thirteenth-century Venetian merchant who traveled to the Chinese court. Includes cultural facts about places along the various routes. Some descriptions of violence. Grades 5-8. Winner of the Norma Fleck Award for Canadian Children's Non-fiction. 2009.By Sara Daniel. 2006
"Ce livre est un journal de guerre. Récit personnel, témoignage engagé, ce texte est écrit par une journaliste qui, bien…
que mère d'une petite fille de deux ans, décide de partir en Irak dès le déclenchement de la guerre pour voir, savoir, tenter de comprendre. Portée par son désir de connaître et non de juger, Sara Daniel est acceptée et accueillie, tant du côté des "coupeurs de tête" de Fallouja et des membres de la guérilla, que de celui des soldats américains qui l'embarquent dans leur char. Chronique humaniste d'un échec programmé, d'un désastre qui ne cesse de s'amplifier, ce grand reportage nous plonge dans le quotidien et l'absurdité de cette guerre tout en nous permettant d'en comprendre les enjeux politiques et humains." -- 4e de couv. Titre uniforme: Voyage to a stricken land.By Mellissa Fung. 2011
October, 2008. Mellissa Fung, a long-time reporter for CBC’s The National, was leaving a refugee camp outside of Kabul when…
she was grabbed by armed men claiming to be Taliban, stabbed, stuffed into the back of a car and driven off into the desert. When the group finally reached a village in the middle of nowhere, her kidnappers pushed her towards a hole in the ground. For twenty-eight days, Mellissa Fung lived in that hole, which was barely big enough to stand up or lie down in, nursing her injuries, praying, writing in her notebook and, as a veteran journalist, interrogating her own captors. Some descriptions of sex and violence, some strong language. Bestseller. 2011.By Laura Hillenbrand. 2010
Details the life of Louis Zamperini (b. 1917), an Olympic runner and World War II bombardier, who survived a plane…
crash and forty-seven days adrift at sea only to become a POW in Japan. Relates Louis's later religious awakening under Billy Graham's ministry. Violence. Bestseller. 2010.By Serge Marc Durflinger. 2010
A history of Canada's war-blinded veterans and of the organization they founded in 1922, the Sir Arthur Pearson Association of…
War Blinded. Durflinger details the veterans' process of civil re-establishment, physical and psychological rehabilitation, and social and personal coping, and describes their public advocacy for government pension entitlements, job retraining, and other social programs. Captures the spirit of perseverance that permeated the veterans' community, and highlights the impact made by the war blinded as advocates for all Canadian veterans and for all blind citizens. 2010.By Jessica Dee Humphreys, Roméo A Dallaire. 2010
In conflicts around the world, there is an increasingly popular weapon system that requires negligible technology, is simple to sustain,…
has unlimited versatility and incredible capacity for both loyalty and barbarism - children. Believing that no one should tolerate a child being used in this fashion, Dallaire has made it his mission to end the use of child soldiers. He provides an introduction to the phenomenon, as well as solutions to eradicate it. Explicit descriptions of violence. c2010.The Iraq invasion of 2003 was only the latest in a long line of episodes of Western manipulation in that…
country, which owes its existence - and its complex and troubled demographics - to the designs of British imperialists. The brunt of Lando's argument is that the U.S. has routinely played Iraq for profit and strategic advantage yet consistently evaded responsibility for exacerbating the carnage of its destructive wars and humanitarian crises. Descriptions of violence and strong language. 2007.By Roméo A Dallaire. 2016
Roméo Dallaire, traumatized by witnessing genocide on an imponderable scale in Rwanda, reflects on the nature of PTSD and the…
impact of that deep wound on his life since 1994, and on how he motivates himself and others to humanitarian work despite his constant struggle. Though he had been a leader in peace and in war at all levels up to deputy commander of the Canadian Army, his PTSD led to his medical dismissal from the Canadian Forces in April 2000, a blow that almost killed him. But he crawled out of the hole he fell into after he had to take off the uniform, and he has been inspiring people to give their all to multiple missions ever since, from ending genocide to eradicating the use of child soldiers to revolutionizing officer training so that our soldiers can better deal with the muddy reality of modern conflict zones, and to revolutionizing our thinking about the changing nature of conflict itself. Bestseller. 2016.By Gérald Messadié. 2008