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John Turner: An Intimate Biography of Canada's 17th Prime Minister
By Steve Paikin. 2022
In this masterful and engaging biography, acclaimed journalist Steve Paikin brings to life John Turner (1929-2020), one of the most…
glamorous and successful politicians in Canadian history. Born in England, raised in BC, Turner was a champion sprinter and a Rhodes scholar who captured the national imagination as escort for Princess Margaret on her 1959 Canadian tour. Elected to Parliament in 1962, he served in Prime Minister Lester Pearson's cabinet and as Pierre Trudeau's attorney general, minister of justice, and finance minister. In 1984, he won a hotly-contested Liberal leadership contest and served a brief four months as Canada's seventeenth prime minister before falling to Brian Mulroney in a Progressive Conservative landslide. In this surprisingly candid and personal book, Paikin draws on unprecedented access to Turner's personal and public papers to show how he struggled to meet the towering expectations that came with his abundant gifts, and keep his faith in Canadian democracy despite the challenges of his own careerOur Crumbling Foundation: How We Solve Canada's Housing Crisis
By Gregor Craigie. 2024
An urgent and illuminating examination of the unrelenting housing crisis Canadians find ourselves facing, by Balsillie Prize finalist and CBC…
Radio host Gregor Craigie, Our Crumbling Foundation offers real-life solutions from around the world and hope for new housing innovation in the face of seemingly impossible obstacles.Canada is experiencing a housing shortage. Although house prices in major Canadian cities appear to have topped out in early 2023, new housing isn’t coming onto the market quickly enough. Rising interest rates have only tightened the pressure on buyers, and renters, too, as rising mortgage rates cost landlords more, which are passed along to tenants in rent increases. Even with the recent federal budget commitment to bring more housing online by 2030, there will still be a shortfall of 3.5 million homes by 2030.Gregor Craigie is a CBC journalist in Victoria, one of the highest-priced housing markets in the country. On his daily radio show On The Island he's been talking for over 15 years to local experts and to those across the country about housing. Craigie has travelled to many of the places he profiles in the book, and in his interviews with Canadians he presents the human face of the shortfall as he speaks with renters, owners and homeless people, exploring their varying predicaments and perspectives. He then shows, through comparable profiles of people across the globe, how other North American and international jurisdictions (Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, Helsinki, Singapore, Ireland, to name a few) are housing their citizens better, faster and with determination—solutions that could be put into practice here.With passion, knowledge and vigour, Craigie explains how Canada reached this critical impasse and will convince those who may not yet recognize how badly our entire country is in need of change. Our Crumbling Foundation provides hope for finding our way out of the crisis by recommending a number of approaches at all levels of government. The prescription for how we’re going to house ourselves and do so equitably, requires not just a business solution, nor simply a social solution.A Year of Last Things: Poems
By Michael Ondaatje. 2024
One of the Globe and Mail's most anticipated books of 2024With A Year of Last Things, acclaimed novelist Michael Ondaatje…
returns to poetry, where he began his career over fifty years ago, and what a return it is.Born in Sri Lanka during the Second World War, Ondaatje was sent as a child to school in London, and later moved to Canada. While he has lived here since, these poems reflect the life of a writer, traveller and watcher of the world – describing himself as a "mongrel," someone born out of diverse cultures. Here, rediscovering the influence of every border crossed, he moves back and forth in time, from a childhood in Sri Lanka to Moliere’s chair during his last stage performance, from icons in Bulgarian churches to the California coast and loved Canadian rivers, merging memory with the present, looking back on a life of displacement and discovery, love and loss. At first sight it is a glittering collection of fragments and memories – but small, intricate pieces of a life are precisely what matter most to Ondaatje. They make an emotional history. As he writes in the opening poem: "Reading the lines he loves / he slips them into a pocket, / wishes to die with his clothes / full of torn free stanzas / and the telephone numbers / of his children in far cities". Poetry – where language is made to work hardest and burns with a gem-like flame – is what Ondaatje has returned to in this intimate history.The Probability of Everything
By Sarah Everett. 2023
“One of the best books I have read this year (maybe ever).” —Colby Sharp, Nerdy Book ClubNPR Books We Love…
2023 | Publishers Weekly Best of 2023 | Winner of the Governor General's Literary Awards for Young People's LiteratureA heart-wrenching middle grade debut about Kemi, an aspiring scientist who loves statistics and facts, as she navigates grief and loss at a moment when life as she knows it changes forever.Eleven-year-old Kemi Carter loves scientific facts, specifically probability. It's how she understands the world and her place in it. Kemi knows her odds of being born were 1 in 5.5 trillion and that the odds of her having the best family ever were even lower. Yet somehow, Kemi lucked out.But everything Kemi thought she knew changes when she sees an asteroid hover in the sky, casting a purple haze over her world. Amplus-68 has an 84.7% chance of colliding with earth in four days, and with that collision, Kemi’s life as she knows it will end.But over the course of the four days, even facts don’t feel true to Kemi anymore. The new town she moved to that was supposed to be “better for her family” isn’t very welcoming. And Amplus-68 is taking over her life, but others are still going to school and eating at their favorite diner like nothing has changed. Is Kemi the only one who feels like the world is ending?With the days numbered, Kemi decides to put together a time capsule that will capture her family’s truth: how creative her mother is, how inquisitive her little sister can be, and how much Kemi's whole world revolves around her father. But no time capsule can change the truth behind all of it, that Kemi must face the most inevitable and hardest part of life: saying goodbye."My heart hurt as I raced through the last chapters of this unique book that shines a light on family, friends, grief, and love." —Lisa Yee, author of Maizy Chen's Last ChancePour Laïka: La chienne qui a rencontré les étoiles
By Kai Cheng Thom. 2022
Connaissez-vous la chienne Laïka, la première de tous les êtres vivants à avoir voyagé dans l’espace? Ce livre vous raconte…
son histoire et les raisons qui l’ont poussée à quitter sa meute pour aller à la rencontre des étoiles. Quelque part entre le conte et la leçon d’histoire, Pour Laïka est un hommage aux liens qui unissent toutes les créatures de la Terre - et de l’Univers.The Peace: A Warrior's Journey
By Romeo Dallaire. 2024
International humanitarian icon and bestselling author General Roméo Dallaire guides readers on a crucial and inspiring journey from past wars…
through post-modern conflict toward a vision of lasting peace.In The Peace, Roméo Dallaire shows us the past, present and future of war through the prism of his own life. Trained in classic warfare during the Cold War era of mutual deterrence, Dallaire in good faith commanded the UN’s peacekeeping mission for Rwanda in 1994, only to see the country abandoned and descend into the hell of genocide. The battered, tortured warrior who emerged from that catastrophe grew determined to help repair the new world disorder—to prevent genocide, abolish the use of child soldiers, and find ways to intervene in, even prevent, conflicts in defence of humanity. And so Dallaire helped advance the doctrines of Responsibility to Protect and the Will to Intervene only to witness those initiatives falter because of the same old power politics, national self-interest and general indifference that had allowed the genocide in Rwanda to unfold unchecked. In his final act, Dallaire has become a warrior working towards a better future in which those old paradigms are rejected and replaced. In The Peace he calls out the elements that undermine true security because they reinforce the dangerous, self-interested belief that "balance" of power and truces are the best we can do. Too often we say we are "at peace" because the bombs are falling elsewhere and we, ourselves, are not under attack. Dallaire shows us a path, instead, to what he calls "the peace," a state where, above all else, humanity values the ties that bind us and the planet together—and acts accordingly. This book is the cri de coeur of a warrior who has been to hell and back and hopes to help guide us to a better place.Beryl: The Making of a Disability Activist
By Dustin Galer. 2023
The story of a mid-century working-class housewife whose extraordinary physical transformation empowered her to become a dynamic social activist who…
fueled a movement to create a more inclusive future for people with disabilities.Nomadland: Surviving america in the twenty-first century
By Jessica Bruder. 2017
From the beet fields of North Dakota to the wilderness campgrounds of California to an Amazon warehouse in Texas, people…
who once might have kicked back to enjoy their sunset years are hard at work. Underwater on mortgages or finding that Social Security comes up short, they're hitting the road in astonishing numbers, forming a new community of nomads: RV and van-dwelling migrant laborers, or "workampers." Building on her groundbreaking Harper's cover story, "The End of Retirement," which brought attention to these formerly settled members of the middle class, Jessica Bruder follows one such RVer, Linda, between physically taxing seasonal jobs and reunions of her new van-dweller family, or "vanily." Bruder tells a compelling, eye-opening tale of both the economy's dark underbelly and the extraordinary resilience, creativity, and hope of these hardworking, quintessential Americans?many of them single women?who have traded rootedness for the dream of a better lifeHealth for All: A Doctor's Prescription for a Healthier Canada
By Jane Philpott. 2024
From one of Canada's most respected and high-profile health professionals (and former federal Minister of Health), a timely, practical, ambitious,…
and deeply personal call for action on health that sets out the roadmap to our future well-being.Jane Philpott has spent her life learning what makes people sick and what keeps people well. She has witnessed miracles in modern medicine. She has also watched children die of starvation in a world that has plenty of food. With Health for All, she sounds a clarion call for a radical disruption in a health care system that is broken—but not beyond repair. The vision is rooted in a deep-seated commitment to health equity.Decades ago, a few visionary Canadian leaders put laws in place to ensure health care insurance for all. But the structures to deliver that care were never fully developed as envisioned. As a result, our health systems are not comprehensive or well-coordinated. In the wake of a pandemic, we risk it all falling apart. More than six million people have no family doctor, nor any other access to primary care. Emergency rooms are routinely closed. Exhausted health workers wonder if it will ever get better. Some say we should hand health care over to the private sector. But to abandon our commitment to publicly funded health care now would only lead to more expensive and less equitable care. Philpott outlines a different solution—an ambitious, once-in-a-generation reset of health systems with universal access to primary care teams.What sets this book apart is that it’s more than a prescription for better medical care. Philpott looks at the big picture of health for all. This includes an intimate look at the personal roots of well-being: hope, belonging, meaning, and purpose. Then, through real-life stories, she examines the impact of the social determinants of health. Finally, she explains that none of this will happen without the political will to do the hard work of rebuilding a healthy society. The remedy we await is serious leadership to implement what we already know and to put the well-being of Canadians at the top of the agenda.Who's Afraid of Gender?
By Judith Butler. 2024
Inflamed by the rhetoric of public figures, the "anti-gender ideology movement" has sought to nullify reproductive justice, undermine protections against…
sexual and gender violence, and strip trans and queer people of their right to pursue a life without fear of violence. Here, Judith Butler, the groundbreaking thinker whose iconic Gender Trouble redefined how we understand gender and sexuality, confronts the attacks on "gender" that have become central to right-wing movements today. Who's Afraid of Gender? examines how "gender" has become a phantasm for emerging authoritarian regimes, fascist formations, and trans-exclusionary feminists. In this vital, courageous book, Butler illuminates the concrete ways in which this phantasm of gender collects and displaces anxieties and fears of destruction, resulting in a movement that demonizes struggles for equality, fuels aggressive nationalism, and leaves millions of people vulnerable to subjugation. An essential intervention into one of the most fraught issues of our moment, Who's Afraid of Gender? is a bold call to refuse the alliance with authoritarian movements and to make a broad coalition with all those who fight against injustice. Imagining new possibilities for freedom and solidarity, Butler offers us a hopeful work of social and political analysis that is both timely and timeless—a book whose verve and rigor only they could deliver.This book examines social processes that have contributed to growing pesticide use, with a particular focus on the role governments…
play in urban aerial pesticide spraying operations.Beyond being applied to sparsely populated farmland, pesticides have been increasingly used in densely populated urban environments, and when faced with invasive species, governments have resorted to large-scale aerial pesticide spraying operations in urban areas. This book focuses on New Zealand's 2002–2004 pesticide campaign to eradicate the Painted Apple Moth, which is the largest operation of its kind in world history, whether we consider its duration (29 months), its scope (at its peak the spraying zone was 10,632 hectares/26,272 acres), the number of sprayings that were administered (the pesticide was administered on 60 different days), or the number of people exposed to the spraying (190,000+). This book provides an in-depth understanding of the social processes that contributed to the incursion, why the government sought to eradicate the moth through aerial pesticide spraying, the ideological strategies they used to build and maintain public support, and why those strategies were effective.Urban Aerial Pesticide Spraying Campaigns will be of great interest to students and researchers of pesticides, environmental sociology, environmental history, environmental studies, political ecology, geography, medical sociology, and science and technology studies.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.Why the Third Way failed: Economics, morality and the origins of the 'Big Society'
By Bill Jordan. 2010
In the wake of the economic crash, public policy is in search of a new moral compass. This book explains…
why the Third Way's combination of market-friendly and abstract, value-led principles has failed, and shows what is needed for an adequate replacement as a political and moral project. It criticises the economic analysis on which the Third Way approach to policy was founded and suggests an alternative to its legalistic and managerial basis for the regulation of social relations.Towards a more equal society?: Poverty, inequality and policy since 1997 (CASE Studies on Poverty, Place and Policy)
By John Hills, Tom Sefton and Kitty Stewart. 2009
When New Labour came to power in 1997, its leaders asked for it to be judged after ten years on…
its success in making Britain 'a more equal society'. As it approaches the end of an unprecedented third term in office, this book asks whether Britain has indeed moved in that direction. The highly successful earlier volume A more equal society? was described by Polly Toynbee as the LSE's mighty judgement on inequality. Now this second volume by the same team of authors provides an independent assessment of the success or otherwise of New Labour's policies over a longer period. It provides: · consideration by a range of expert authors of a broad set of indicators and policy areas affecting poverty, inequality and social exclusion; · analysis of developments up to the third term on areas including income inequality, education, employment, health inequalities, neighbourhoods, minority ethnic groups, children and older people; · an assessment of outcomes a decade on, asking whether policies stood up to the challenges, and whether successful strategies have been sustained or have run out of steam; chapters on migration, social attitudes, the devolved administrations, the new Equality and Human Rights Commission, and future pressures. The book is essential reading for academic and student audiences with an interest in contemporary social policy, as well as for all those seeking an objective account of Labour's achievements in power.This is the first book to frame U.S. public diplomacy in the broad sweep of American diplomatic practice from the…
early colonial period to the present. It tells the story of how change agents in practitioner communities – foreign service officers, cultural diplomats, broadcasters, citizens, soldiers, covert operatives, democratizers, and presidential aides – revolutionized traditional government-to-government diplomacy and moved diplomacy with the public into the mainstream. This deeply researched study bridges practice and multi-disciplinary scholarship. It challenges the common narrative that U.S. public diplomacy is a Cold War creation that was folded into the State Department in 1999 and briefly found new life after 9/11. It documents historical turning points, analyzes evolving patterns of practice, and examines societal drivers of an American way of diplomacy: a preference for hard power over soft power, episodic commitment to public diplomacy correlated with war and ambition, an information-dominant communication style, and American exceptionalism. It is an account of American diplomacy’s public dimension, the people who shaped it, and the socialization and digitalization that today extends diplomacy well beyond the confines of embassies and foreign ministries.Managing Protected Areas: People and Places
By Niall Finneran, Denise Hewlett, Richard Clarke. 2024
This open access book brings together 16 specially commissioned chapters drawn from a range of different professional-practitioner and academic global…
perspectives on the importance of the relationship between people and green and blue spaces. It focuses on issues surrounding the importance of natural environments on public health and wellbeing, and the environmental, cultural, and social importance of green and blue spaces that can result through responsible and sustainable adaptive management processes. It explores how the Covid-19 pandemic forced reconsiderations of our relationship with these natural spaces and highlights the important impact of the pace of climate change. While not pretending to have the answers, the stimulating and imaginative contributions embrace rich perspectives drawn from backgrounds as diverse as heritage studies, tourism, conservation, geography, policy formulation, public health, environmental health, research methods, history, literature, art, and theology.Handbook for Management of Threats: Security and Defense, Resilience and Optimal Strategies (Springer Optimization and Its Applications #205)
By Konstantinos P. Balomenos, Antonios Fytopoulos, Panos M. Pardalos. 2023
In answer to the unprecedented challenges and threats that face today’s globalized world, the primary goal of this Handbook is…
to identify the most probable threats that have affected humanity in recent years and our world in years to come. The Handbook comprises mostly expository chapters that discuss tested methods/algorithms, case studies, as well as policy decision-making techniques surrounding threats and unnatural disasters, to evaluate their effects on people and to propose ways to mitigate these effects. In several chapters, new approaches and suggested policies supplement algorithms that are already in practice. The curated content brings together key experts from the academic and policy worlds to formulate a guide of principal techniques employed to gain better control over selected types of threats.This Handbook explores a wide range of technologies and theories and their impact on countering threats. These include artificial intelligence, machine learning, variational inequality theory, game theory, data envelopment analysis, and data-driven risk analysis. These tools play a vital role in decision-making processes and aid in finding optimal solutions. Additionally, a variety of optimization techniques are employed. These include (mixed) integer linear programming models for identifying critical nodes in complex systems, heuristics, approximation algorithms, and bilevel mixed integer programming for determining the most impactful links in dynamic networks. Furthermore, simulation tools are described that enable the quantification of societal resilience. These techniques collectively provide a mathematical framework capable of quantifying fundamental aspects of threats. They equip policymakers with the necessary tools and knowledge to minimize the impact of unnatural threats. The expected readership is wide and includes officials working in technical and policy roles in various ministries such as the Ministry of Defense, Civil Protection, Ministry of Public Order and Citizen Protection, United Nations, European Institutions for Threat Management, NATO, Intelligence Agencies, Centers of Excellence for Countering Threats, Think Tanks, Centers for Policy Studies, Political Leaders, the European Commission, National Institutes, International Organizations, Strategic Consulting Experts, Policymakers, and Foreign Affairs personnel. Some of these national or international organizations employ algorithms to measure resilience and enhance security. Quantification is challenging but crucial in the scenarios discussed in the book. This Handbook will also prove valuable to various universities (non-practitioners), studying systems engineering, leadership, management, strategy, foreign affairs, politics, and related disciplines.Affective Capitalism: For a Critique of the Political Economy of Affect
By Hangwoo Lee. 2023
Drawing on Tarde's and Deleuze’s monadology, this book investigates the affective turn of contemporary capitalism. The concept of affect provides…
critical insight to overcome the limitations of social constructivism and cognitive capitalism. Affective capitalism transforms the population’s everyday bodily experiences into quantitative metrics that can be observed, measured, and processed on a non-conscious register, turning them into dividuals prepared to react and be affected by specific information at a given moment. In an era where social wealth increasingly relies on the 'social factory,' algorithms and big data constitute the living labor beyond employment. This book argues that affect also holds a potential for dismantling today’s real subsumption of life by capital. The network effect, mostly actualized as a company's market capitalization, is constantly traversed by the molecular becoming of affect, leading to new assemblages, such as free software movement, decentralized platforms, peer-to-peer networking, blockchain, and universal basic income.Lived Institutions as History of Experience (Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience)
By Johanna Annola, Hanna Lindberg, Pirjo Markkola. 2024
This open access book focuses on institutions that were produced and formed by the emerging welfare state. How were institutions…
experienced by the people who interacted with them? How did institutions as sites of experience shape and structure people’s everyday lives? Histories of institutions have mainly focused on the structures and power relations produced by institutional settings. Likewise, despite an extensive historiography of the welfare state, reflections on individuals’ experiences of welfare are few. By using ‘lived institutions’ as its conceptual frame, this edited collection merges the fields of institutional studies, the history of the welfare state – and the novel and vibrant field of the history of experience.Spätestens seit der ausgerufenen „Zeitenwende“ muss Sicherheitspolitik nicht nur neu, sondern auch anders gedacht werden. Der Dreiklang von Sicherheit, die…
Frieden schafft und Entwicklung ermöglicht, ist nicht mehr im Sinne von humanitären Interventionen zu denken, sondern in einem unübersichtlichen und mannigfaltigen politischen Umfeld neu zu verorten. Dieses Buch leistet einen Diskussionsbeitrag zu den Herausforderungen, Zielen und Konflikten in diesen interdependenten Politikfeldern. Die unterschiedlichen Perspektiven aus Sicht der Friedens-, Sicherheits- und Entwicklungspolitik werden durch Fallbeispiele illustriert.Goodbye, Dear Friend: Coming to Terms with the Death of a Pet
By Virginia Ironside. 2014
Losing a pet causes real grief—this book provides real understanding, comfort, and support to help you heal.It’s not odd, crazy…
or maladjusted to cry and feel utterly lost when a pet dies. Often that pet has been a close friend, uncritical, loyal, and devoted—bringing us countless hours of peaceful companionship and joyful play. There is no need to keep grief hidden or wonder why we can’t immediately “replace” our dead pet. Feelings deserve understanding and respect—not dismissive comments like “it’s just a cat” or “why don’t you get another dog?” that, even if well-meaning, can cause enormous distress to those who are mourning a genuine loss.Goodbye, Dear Friend acknowledges both the extent and depth of grief of a pet. Based on an avalanche of letters about pet loss the author has received at her advice column, as well as the experiences of historical figures like Sigmund Freud and Sir Walter Scott, the book takes us through the process of grieving, delving into such topics as putting a pet to sleep; taking comfort in memorials; and whether there is a pet heaven. With a list of further resources included, Goodbye, Dear Friend is essential for every pet owner, young or old, and will bring great solace at a time when one can feel most alone.