CELA will be closed from April 10 to April 13. Our office will reopen and our Contact Centre services will resume on Tuesday, April 14. Happy holidays!
As a result of a government directive, the production and delivery of DAISY CDs and physical braille are now on hold in an effort to combat COVID-19. Access to digital books, magazines and newspapers will continue.
Showing 1 - 20 of 1212 items
Braille (Contracted), Electronic braille (Contracted), DAISY audio (CD), DAISY audio (Direct to player), DAISY audio (Zip)
History
Le professeur décrit comment l'espèce Homo sapiens a réussi à survivre et à dominer la planète. Il poursuit son analyse… de l'humanité en expliquant la naissance de concepts tels que la religion, la nation, les droits de l'homme. Il s'interroge également sur l'évolution contemporaine à travers le poids de la bureaucratie ou de la consommation de masse, et s'inquiète pour l'avenir de la planète. 2015. Titre uniforme: Sapiens.
Braille (Contracted), Electronic braille (Contracted), DAISY audio (CD), DAISY audio (Direct to player), DAISY audio (Zip)
Canadian non-fiction, Canadian authors (Non-fiction), History, Canadian history
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Adventurers and explorers, History
From brilliant young polymath Andrew Rader-an MIT-credentialed scientist, popular podcast host, and SpaceX mission manager-an illuminating chronicle of exploration that… spotlights humans' insatiable desire to continually push into new and uncharted territory, from civilization's earliest days to current planning for interstellar travel. For the first time in history, the human species has the technology to destroy itself. But having developed that power, humans are also able to leave Earth and voyage into the vastness of space. After millions of years of evolution, we've arrived at the point where we can settle other worlds and begin the process of becoming multi-planetary. How did we get here? What does the future hold for us? Divided into four accessible sections, Beyond the Known examines major periods of discovery and rediscovery, from Classical Times, when Phoenicians, Persians and Greeks ventured forth; to The Age of European Exploration, which saw colonies sprout on nearly continent; to The Era of Scientific Inquiry, when researchers developed brand new tools for mapping and traveling farther; to Our Spacefaring Future, which unveils plans currently underway for settling other planets and, eventually, traveling to the stars. A Mission Manager at SpaceX with a light, engaging voice, Andrew Rader is at the forefront of space exploration. As a gifted historian, Rader, who has won global acclaim for his stunning breadth of knowledge, is singularly positioned to reveal the story of human exploration that is also the story of scientific achievement. Told with an infectious zeal for traveling beyond the known, Beyond the Known illuminates how very human it is to emerge from the cave and walk toward an infinitely expanding horizon.
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European history, History
The Victorians are often credited with ushering in our current era, yet the seeds of change were planted in the… years before. The Regency (1811-1820) began when the profligate Prince of Wales-the future King George IV-replaced his insane father, George III, as Britain's ruler. Around the regent surged a society steeped in contrasts: evangelicalism and hedonism, elegance and brutality, exuberance and despair. The arts flourished at this time with a showcase of extraordinary writers and painters such as Jane Austen, Lord Byron, the Shelleys, John Constable, and J. M. W. Turner. Science burgeoned during this decade, too, giving us the steam locomotive and the blueprint for the modern computer. Yet the dark side of the era was visible in poverty, slavery, pornography, opium, and the gothic imaginings that birthed the novel Frankenstein. With the British military in foreign lands, fighting the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and the War of 1812 in the United States, the desire for empire and an expanding colonial enterprise gained unstoppable momentum. Exploring these crosscurrents, Robert Morrison illuminates the profound ways this period shaped and indelibly marked the modern world.
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General non-fiction, Medicine, History
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Emperor of All Maladies-a magnificent history of the gene and a response… to the defining question of the future: What becomes of being human when we learn to "read" and "write" our own genetic information? The extraordinary Siddhartha Mukherjee has a written a biography of the gene as deft, brilliant, and illuminating as his extraordinarily successful biography of cancer. Weaving science, social history, and personal narrative to tell us the story of one of the most important conceptual breakthroughs of modern times, Mukherjee animates the quest to understand human heredity and its surprising influence on our lives, personalities, identities, fates, and choices. Throughout the narrative, the story of Mukherjee's own family-with its tragic and bewildering history of mental illness-cuts like a bright, red line, reminding us of the many questions that hang over our ability to translate the science of genetics from the laboratory to the real world. In superb prose and with an instinct for the dramatic scene, he describes the centuries of research and experimentation-from Aristotle and Pythagoras to Mendel and Darwin, from Boveri and Thomas Morgan to Crick, Watson and Rosa Franklin, all the way through the revolutionary twenty-first century innovators who mapped the human genome. As The New Yorker said of The Emperor of All Maladies, "It's hard to think of many books for a general audience that have rendered any area of modern science and technology with such intelligence, accessibility, and compassion.An extraordinary achievement." Riveting, revelatory, and magisterial history of a scientific idea coming to life, and an essential preparation for the moral complexity introduced by our ability to create or "write" the human genome, The Gene is a must-read for everyone concerned about the definition and future of humanity. This is the most crucial science of our time, intimately explained by a master.
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Politics and government, History, Lifestyle
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "The single most important explanation, and the fullest explanation, of how Donald Trump became president of… the United States...?othing less than the most important book that I have read this year."-Lawrence O'Donnell How did we get here? In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, Kurt Andersen shows that what's happening in our country today-this post-factual, "fake news" moment we're all living through-is not something new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character. America was founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, and true believers, by hucksters and their suckers. Fantasy is deeply embedded in our DNA. Over the course of five centuries-from the Salem witch trials to Scientology to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, from P. T. Barnum to Hollywood and the anything-goes, wild-and-crazy sixties, from conspiracy theories to our fetish for guns and obsession with extraterrestrials-our love of the fantastic has made America exceptional in a way that we've never fully acknowledged. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams and epic fantasies-every citizen was free to believe absolutely anything, or to pretend to be absolutely anybody. With the gleeful erudition and tell-it-like-it-is ferocity of a Christopher Hitchens, Andersen explores whether the great American experiment in liberty has gone off the rails. Fantasyland could not appear at a more perfect moment. If you want to understand Donald Trump and the culture of twenty-first-century America, if you want to know how the lines between reality and illusion have become dangerously blurred, you must read this book. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE "This is a blockbuster of a book. Take a deep breath and dive in."-Tom Brokaw "[An] absorbing, must-read polemic...? provocative new study of America's cultural history."-Newsday "Compelling and totally unnerving."-The Village Voice "A frighteningly convincing and sometimes uproarious picture of a country in steep, perhaps terminal decline that would have the founding fathers weeping into their beards."-The Guardian "This is an important book-the indispensable book-for understanding America in the age of Trump."-Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci
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History, Journals and memoirs
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "The plot provided by the universe was filled with starvation, war and rape. I would… notcould notlive in that tale." Clemantine Wamariya was six years old when her mother and father began to speak in whispers, when neighbors began to disappear, and when she heard the loud, ugly sounds her brother said were thunder. In 1994, she and her fifteen-year-old sister, Claire, fled the Rwandan massacre and spent the next six years migrating through seven African countries, searching for safetyperpetually hungry, imprisoned and abused, enduring and escaping refugee camps, finding unexpected kindness, witnessing inhuman cruelty. They did not know whether their parents were dead or alive. When Clemantine was twelve, she and her sister were granted refugee status in the United States; there, in Chicago, their lives diverged. Though their bond remained unbreakable, Claire, who had for so long protected and provided for Clemantine, was a single mother struggling to make ends meet, while Clemantine was taken in by a family who raised her as their own. She seemed to live the American dream: attending private school, taking up cheerleading, and, ultimately, graduating from Yale. Yet the years of being treated as less than human, of going hungry and seeing death, could not be erased. She felt at the same time six years old and one hundred years old. In The Girl Who Smiled Beads, Clemantine provokes us to look beyond the label of "victim" and recognize the power of the imagination to transcend even the most profound injuries and aftershocks. Devastating yet beautiful, and bracingly original, it is a powerful testament to her commitment to constructing a life on her own terms.
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Royalty biography, European history, History
At his death in 1547, King Henry VIII left four heirs to the English throne: his only son, the nine-year-old… Prince Edward; the Lady Mary, the adult daughter of his first wife Katherine of Aragon; the Lady Elizabeth, the teenage daughter of his second wife Anne Boleyn; and his young great-niece, the Lady Jane Grey. In this riveting account Alison Weir paints a unique portrait of these extraordinary rulers, examining their intricate relationships to each other and to history. She traces the tumult that followed Henry's death, from the brief intrigue-filled reigns of the boy king Edward VI and the fragile Lady Jane Grey, to the savagery of "Bloody Mary," and finally the accession of the politically adroit Elizabeth I. As always, Weir offers a fresh perspective on a period that has spawned many of the most enduring myths in English history, combining the best of the historian's and the biographer's art.
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European history, History
AN ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag and the National Book Award… finalist Iron Curtain, a revelatory history of one of Stalin's greatest crimesthe consequences of which still resonate today In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivizationin effect a second Russian revolutionwhich forced millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history. At least five million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. But instead of sending relief the Soviet state made use of the catastrophe to rid itself of a political problem. In Red Famine, Anne Applebaum argues that more than three million of those dead were Ukrainians who perished not because they were accidental victims of a bad policy but because the state deliberately set out to kill them. Applebaum proves what has long been suspected: after a series of rebellions unsettled the province, Stalin set out to destroy the Ukrainian peasantry. The state sealed the republic's borders and seized all available food. Starvation set in rapidly, and people ate anything: grass, tree bark, dogs, corpses. In some cases, they killed one another for food. Devastating and definitive, Red Famine captures the horror of ordinary people struggling to survive extraordinary evil. Today, Russia, the successor to the Soviet Union, has placed Ukrainian independence in its sights once more. Applebaum's compulsively readable narrative recalls one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century, and shows how it may foreshadow a new threat to the political order in the twenty-first.
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History, Ancient history
The magnificent civilization created by the ancient Greeks and Romans is the greatest legacy of the classical world. However, narratives… about the "civilized" Greek and Roman empires resisting the barbarians at the gate are far from accurate. Tony Spawforth, an esteemed scholar, author, and media contributor, follows the thread of civilization through more than six millennia of history. His story reveals that Greek and Roman civilization, to varying degrees, was supremely and surprisingly receptive to external influences, particularly from the East. From the rise of the Mycenaean world of the sixteenth century B.C., Spawforth traces a path through the ancient Aegean to the zenith of the Hellenic state and the rise of the Roman empire, the coming of Christianity and the consequences of the first caliphate. Deeply informed, provocative, and entirely fresh, this is the first and only accessible work that tells the extraordinary story of the classical world in its entirety.
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General non-fiction, Medicine, History
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History
Another "dazzling epic" from the author of Brilliant, exploring an overlooked yet elemental force in our lives-silence-from contemporary Cistercian monks… to an extraordinary 19th-century prison. *Lev Grossman, Time The author of the "dazzling epic" (Time) Brilliant delivers an indelible view of the ways silence affects those who seek it and those who have it imposed upon them. Through her original, intertwined histories of the penitentiary and the monastery, Jane Brox illuminates the many ways silence is far more complex than any absolute; how it has influenced ideas of the self, soul, and society. Brox traces its place as a transformative power in the monastic world from Medieval Europe to the very public life of twentieth century monk Thomas Merton, whose love for silence deepened even as he faced his obligation to speak out against war. This fascinating history of ideas also explores the influence the monastic cell had on one of society's darkest experiments in silence: Eastern State Penitentiary. Conceived of by one of the Founding Fathers and built on the outskirts of Philadelphia, the penitentiary's early promulgators imagined redemption in imposed isolation, but they badly misapprehended silence's dangers. Finally, Brox's rich exploration of silence's complex and competing meanings leads us to imagine how we might navigate our own relationship with silence today, for the transformation it has always promised, in our own lives.
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History, Politics and government biography, World War II
Best-selling author Winston Groom tells the complex story of how Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin--the three iconic and… vastly different Allied leaders--aligned to win World War II and created a new world order. By the end of World War II, 59 nations were arrayed against the axis powers, but three great Allied leaders--Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin--had emerged to control the war in Europe and the Pacific. Vastly different in upbringing and political beliefs, they were not always in agreement--or even on good terms. But, often led by Churchill's enduring spirit, in the end these three men changed the course of history. Using the remarkable letters between the three world leaders, enriching narrative details of their personal lives, and riveting tales of battles won and lost, best-selling historian Winston Groom returns to share one of the biggest stories of the 20th century: The interwoven and remarkable tale, and a fascinating study of leadership styles, of three world leaders who fought the largest war in history.
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European history, Politics and government, History, Asian history
In the eighteenth century, India's share of the world economy was as large as Europe's. By 1947, after two centuries… of British rule, it had decreased six-fold. Beyond conquest and deception, the Empire blew rebels from cannons, massacred unarmed protesters, entrenched institutionalized racism, and caused millions to die from starvation. British imperialism justified itself as enlightened despotism for the benefit of the governed, but Shashi Tharoor takes on and demolishes this position, demonstrating how every supposed imperial "gift"-from the railways to the rule of law-was designed in Britain's interests alone. He goes on to show how Britain's Industrial Revolution was founded on India's deindustrialization and the destruction of its textile industry. In this bold and incisive reassessment of colonialism, Tharoor exposes to devastating effect the inglorious reality of Britain's stained Indian legacy.
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History
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a leader and visionary of the civil rights movement, was first and foremost a preacher.… This unique collection features a selection of Dr. King's best sermons - some not heard since he first delivered them - recorded at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, and in other churches where he carried his ministry. They include "Rediscovering Lost Values," "A Knock at Midnight," "The American Dream," and "When Jesus Called a Man a Fool." Each is introduced by a distinguished member of today's spiritual community, including Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker, Dr. Joan Campbell, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
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History
Le regard de l'anthropologue est plus que jamais nécessaire pour redonner du sens à un monde qui s'étourdit de jour… en jour. C'est ce que nous offre Serge Bouchard en nous invitant à monter dans son camion et à rouler, avec lui, plusieurs milliers de kilomètres en Boréalie et dans toute l'Amérique. Il nous conduit là où l'histoire, petite ou glorieuse, est passée... Athabasca, Bon-Désir, Pointe-aux-Trembles, Ouisconsin, Gogama, Saguena, Gespeg, Chibougamau ou Caniapiskau. Cet antirécit de voyage nous révèle des pays métissés, autochtones et français, ceux de Jean-Baptiste Laboucane, Anadabidjou, Lucille Marie Raymonde Savoie, Sarah Petit Couteau, Joseph Robidoux, Black Hawk ou Ochaga. L'Oeuvre du Grand Lièvre Filou rassemble les chroniques que Serge Bouchard a tenues dans le magazine Québec Science entre 2009 et 2018. Observateur hors pair, il a su y partager son admiration pour les belles inventions de même que son indignation devant la bêtise humaine, la chimie pétrolière qui intoxique la planète ou l'architecture qui enlaidit les villes et les campagnes. Lire Serge Bouchard fait du bien. Il nous permet, à travers ses réflexions et sa démarche scientifique toute personnelle, de mieux nous ancrer dans la vie.
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Economics, History, Science and technology
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2017 by BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK, THE FINANCIAL TIMES, AND AMAZON A lively history seen through the… fifty inventions that shaped it most profoundly, by the bestselling author of The Undercover Economist and Messy. Who thought up paper money? What was the secret element that made the Gutenberg printing press possible? And what is the connection between The Da Vinci Code and the collapse of Lehman Brothers? Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy paints an epic picture of change in an intimate way by telling the stories of the tools, people, and ideas that had far-reaching consequences for all of us. From the plough to artificial intelligence, from Gillette's disposable razor to IKEA's Billy bookcase, bestselling author and Financial Times columnist Tim Harford recounts each invention's own curious, surprising, and memorable story. Invention by invention, Harford reflects on how we got here and where we might go next. He lays bare often unexpected connections: how the bar code undermined family corner stores, and why the gramophone widened inequality. In the process, he introduces characters who developed some of these inventions, profited from them, and were ruined by them, as he traces the principles that helped explain their transformative effects. The result is a wise and witty book of history, economics, and biography.
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History, Science and medicine biography
The author of more than 40 books, acclaimed historian Paul Johnson also writes for Forbes and theSpectator. With Darwin, Johnson… sheds new light on a man many regard as the most influential scientist in history. Darwin's theories of evolution transformed the world's view of biology. Here, in meticulous detail, Johnson describes Darwin's brilliance and the unfortunate circumstances that compelled him to support the eugenics movement.
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History
Entretiens avec des personnalités qui ont participé à des événements ayant façonné le présent. De la Seconde Guerre mondiale aux… mouvements féministes, de la décolonisation au Printemps arabe ou des attentats terroristes à New York à la crise des migrants, l'histoire contemporaine se dessine.
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True crime, History, Arts and entertainment