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 3091 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
Braille (Contracted), Electronic braille (Contracted), DAISY Audio (CD), DAISY Audio (Direct to Player), DAISY Audio (Zip), DAISY text (Direct to player), DAISY text (Zip), Word (Zip), ePub (Zip)
Women biography, Politics and government, History
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER"[The] rare biography of a public figure that's not only beautifully written, but also shockingly revelatory."… -- The AtlanticA vivid biography of former First Lady Barbara Bush, one of the most influential and under-appreciated women in American political history.Barbara Pierce Bush was one of the country's most popular and powerful figures, yet her full story has never been told.THE MATRIARCH tells the riveting tale of a woman who helped define two American presidencies and an entire political era. Written by USA TODAY's Washington Bureau chief Susan Page, this biography is informed by more than one hundred interviews with Bush friends and family members, hours of conversation with Mrs. Bush herself in the final six months of her life, and access to her diaries that spanned decades. THE MATRIARCH examines not only her public persona but also less well-known aspects of her remarkable life. As a girl in Rye, New York, Barbara Bush weathered criticism of her weight from her mother, barbs that left lifelong scars. As a young wife, she coped with the death of her three-year-old daughter from leukemia, a loss that changed her forever. In middle age, she grappled with depression so serious that she contemplated suicide. And as first the wife and then the mother of American presidents, she made history as the only woman to see -- and advise -- both her husband and son in the Oval Office.As with many women of her era, Barbara Bush was routinely underestimated, her contributions often neither recognized nor acknowledged. But she became an astute and trusted political campaign strategist and a beloved First Lady. She invested herself deeply in expanding literacy programs in America, played a critical role in the end of the Cold War, and led the way in demonstrating love and compassion to those with HIV/AIDS. With her cooperation, this book offers Barbara Bush's last words for history -- on the evolution of her party, on the role of women, on Donald Trump, and on her family's legacy.Barbara Bush's accomplishments, struggles, and contributions are many. Now, Susan Page explores them all in THE MATRIARCH, a groundbreaking book certain to cement Barbara Bush as one of the most unique and influential women in American history.
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History, Canadian history
Did you know pirates once sailed the seas around Atlantic Canada? Pirates might seem like fun in the movies, but… back in the 17th and 18th centuries—the Golden Age of Piracy—being a pirate was very serious business. From the Hackmatack award-shortlisted author of Oak Island and the Search for Buried Treasure comes the newest book from Nimbus's popular Compass series for young readers. Learn about what everyday life was like for some of the fiercest pirates of all time. Explore the history of piracy, from the ancient Romans and Greeks to modern-day pirates. How did pirates navigate the seas? What happened if they were caught? Did pirates really bury treasure? This full-colour non-fiction book includes highlighted glossary terms, informative sidebars, over 50 colour illustrations and historical photographs, an index, and recommended further reading.
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History
AS SEEN ON TV ONTARIO'S THE AGENDA WITH STEVE PAIKIN FINALIST FOR THE 2019 ARTHUR ELLIS AWARD FOR BEST NON-FICTION… CRIME BOOK Known to history as “The Fighting Parson,” Reverend J.O.L. Spracklin broke into a notorious Windsor roadhouse one chilly November night in 1920 and shot and killed barkeep Beverly “Babe” Trumble. Easily acquitted by reason of self-defense, he never served a day of time. A provincial liquor license inspector already known for his brash tactics, Spracklin’s audacious tactics solidified across North America the Detroit-Windsor borderlands’ reputation as the new Wild West—an uncivilized outpost where whisky flowed freely, warrants were forged on the spot, and ministers toted guns to keep the peace. To the rest of Ontario, a dry province, Spracklin was the saviour they’d been waiting for, the answer to the lawlessness of the Border Cities—that is, until he shot a man at point blank range. In this exploration of the period, decorated Ontario historian Patrick Brode unpacks this infamous piece of Prohibition lore and asks: Why did Babe Trumble die? What led to a hotheaded reverend taking the law into his own hands, killing a man, and getting away with it? Full of fire-and-brimstone preachers, crooked politicians, wily rum runners, grandstanding lawyers, and innocents caught in the crossfire, Dying for a Drink is a fascinating read that will captivate anyone interested in the real stories behind this fabled time.
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History
Pour l'anthropologue Bernard Arcand, écrire Les Cuivas a été le projet de toute une vie: celui d'offrir à un large… public un portrait intime d'une petite population de chasseurs-cueilleurs nomades vivant dans les Llanos, en Colombie. À la fin des années 1960, à l'époque des ferveurs révolutionnaires, le jeune anthropologue a vécu deux ans avec les Cuivas, partageant leur quotidien et étudiant leur rapport au monde. Il a tiré de cette expérience une réflexion inspirante sur les problèmes classiques de l'anthropologie sociale : les causes de la richesse et des inégalités, l'origine de la hiérarchie, l'organisation de l'espace et du temps, l'identité collective ou individuelle
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History
Durant deux millénaires, les Celtes ont été oubliés mais, depuis quelques décennies, ils occupent le devant de la scène historique,… effaçant du même coup Gaulois et Germains. Qui étaient-ils en réalité ? Et ont-ils même existé ? Pour répondre à ces questions, l'auteur se livre à une vaste enquête, l'obligeant à remonter aux sources écrites les plus anciennes. Il apparaît ainsi que, depuis leur rencontre avec les voyageurs grecs, les Celtes n'ont cessé d'être l'objet des mythes les plus divers, des plus poétiques aux plus idéologiques voire raciaux. Parce qu'ils ont toujours paru indéfinissables, généalogie, histoire, linguistique, archéologie et comparatisme se sont emparé d'eux comme des exemples ou des modèles malléables à merci. Chacun peut s'imaginer ces hommes à sa manière et les utiliser dans des théories qui souvent ont peu à voir avec l'histoire objective. Il est temps aujourd'hui de rendre les Celtes à leur réalité et, dans les récits qui ont été donnés de leur histoire, de faire la part de l'invention
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Arts and entertainment, History, General non-fiction
Adapted from the Emmy-winning, multimedia interactive documentary of the same name, Highrise is an in-depth exploration of the world's highrises… and the people who live inside them. From the multi-story dwellings of Ancient Rome to the soaring glass skyscrapers of today, humans have used highrises for thousands of years to house the poor, protect the rich and sometimes narrow the gap between the two. Highrise first examines the history of vertical living in a 20-page chapter on the origins, technological triumphs, social failures and future of the highrise. The book then invites young readers into homes around the world. Through the lens of the highrise, readers will learn about 10 cities and hear stories that capture what life is like in these diverse places. The cities featured in Highrise: Ramallah, West Bank Mumbai, India Guangzhou, China Chicago, USA Tainan, Taiwan Johannesburg, South Africa Toronto, Canada Amsterdam, Netherlands Prague, Czech Republic Sao Paulo, Brazil. In addition to being windows on different cultures and experiences, the stories from these cities cover important and, at times, challenging issues that residents must face -- from a young mother in the West Bank who cannot visit her parents in Gaza, to an LGBTQ activist in China who must hide her sexual orientation from her family. Highrise is a bold and unique volume that illuminates life on our urban planet like never before. National Film Board of Canada Collection In the tradition of the NFB's creative and innovative storytelling on film comes the National Film Board of Canada Collection: a series of celebrated animated films, documentary films and media projects adapted for the printed page.
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History, Politics and government, General non-fiction
The CBC Massey Lectures, Canada's preeminent public lecture series, are for many of us a highly anticipated annual feast of… ideas. However, some of the finest lectures, by some of the greatest minds of modern times, have been lost for many years -- unavailable to the public in any form. Important thinkers whose Massey Lectures are lamentably out of print include the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, Jane Jacobs, Paul Goodman, and Eric Kierans. Each of these lecturers spoke on a subject at the heart of their intellectual and spiritual concerns -- King on race and prejudice, Galbraith on economics and poverty, Jacobs on Canadian cities and Quebec separatism, Goodman on the moral ambiguity of America, Kierans on globalism and the nation-state -- and their words are not only of considerable historical significance but remain hugely relevant to the problems we face today. At last, a selection of these "lost" lectures is available to a world so hungry for, and yet in such short supply of, innovative ideas. The Lost Massey Lectures includes an introduction by Bernie Lucht, who has been the executive producer of CBC Radio's Ideas and the Massey Lectures since 1984.
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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.