Title search results
Showing 1261 - 1280 of 1750 items
Stephen Harper
By John Ibbitson. 2015
Stephen Harper has made government smaller, justice tougher, and provinces more independent. Those who praise Harper point to the Conservatives'…
skillful economic management, the reformed immigration system, the uncompromising defence of Israel and Ukraine, and the fight against terrorism, while critics accuse the Harper government of being autocratic, secretive and cruel. Ibbitson explores Harper’s suburban youth, the forces that shaped his tempestuous relationship with Reform Leader Preston Manning, how Laureen Harper influences her husband, his devotion to his children--and his cats. Ibbitson explains how this shy, closed, introverted loner united a fractured conservative movement, defeated a Liberal hegemony, and set out to reshape the nation. Bestseller. Winner of the 2015 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. 2015.The pemmican eaters
By Marilyn Dumont. 2015
Combining free verse and metered poems, Dumont’s latest collection aims to recreate a palpable sense of the Riel Resistance period…
and evoke the geographical, linguistic/cultural, and political situation of Batoche during this time, through the eyes of those who experienced the battles. Included in this collection are poems about the bison, seed beadwork, and the Red River Cart, and some poems employ elements of the Michif language, which, along with French and Cree, was spoken by Dumont’s ancestors. Winner of the 2016 Alberta Literary Award. 2015.Hit and Run
By Kim Masters, Nancy Griffin. 1996
Hit and Run tells the improbable and often hilarious story of how two Hollywood film packagers went on a campaign…
to reinvent themselves as studio executives -- at Sony's expense. Veteran reporters Nancy Griffin and Kim Masters chronicle the rise of Jon Peters, a former hairdresser, seventh-grade dropout, and juvenile delinquent, and his soulless soul mate, Peter Guber -- and all the sex, drugs, and fistfights along the way. It is the story of the ultimate Hollywood con job and the standard by which every subsequent business blunder has been measured. Hit and Run delivers rock-solid business reporting liberally laced with inside gossip and outrageous scandal -- plus a new afterword bringing us up to date on the latest fallout from the Guber-Peters legacy.Ceremonies for the dead
By Daniel Heath Justice, Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, Giles Benaway. 2013
These poems examine the haunting themes of inter-generational trauma, cyclical abuse, and inherited grief. Four generations of the dead take…
turns narrating these themes, navigating from the Great Lakes through the Appalachian Mountains, and examining the fur trade, an exile from Minnesota, the experiences of West Virginia coal miners, and the legacy of mission schools. Black humour and satire fill the collection, illuminating a fierce determination to survive and resist colonization and the endurance of culture and identity under extreme duress. Winner of the 2014 Young Authors Award. 2013.Enlightenment 2.0: restoring sanity to our politics, our economy, and our lives
By Joseph Heath. 2014
Over the last twenty years, the political systems of the western world have become increasingly divided - not between right…
and left, but between crazy and non-crazy. What’s more, the crazies seem to be gaining the upper hand. Rational thought cannot prevail in the current chaotic social and media environment, where elections are won by appealing to voters’ hearts rather than their minds. Argues that we should nurture a new “slow politics.” The only way to restore sanity is by engaging in collective action against the social conditions that have crowded it out. Winner of the 2014 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. 2014.TOPGUN on Wall Street
By Patrick Robinson, Lieutenant Commander Jeffery Lay. 2012
A revolutionary business approach by Lt. Col. Jeffery Lay and #1 "New York Times" bestselling author Patrick Robinson, describing one…
manOCOs journey from the cockpit of F-14 fighter bombers to the scandalous boardrooms on Wall Street and why military practices can help stabilize corporate America. "The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia
By David E Hoffman. 2011
David Hoffman, former Moscow bureau chief for The Washington Post, sheds light onto the hidden lives of Russia's most feared…
power brokers: the oligarchs. Focusing on six of these ruthless men Hoffman reveals how a few players managed to take over Russia's cash-strapped economy and then divvy it up in loans-for-shares deals. Before perestroika, these men were normal Soviet citizens, stuck in a dead-end system, claustrophobic apartments, and long bread lines. But as Communism loosened, they found gaps in the economy and reaped huge fortunes by getting their hands on fast money. They were entrepreneurs. As the government weakened and their businesses flourished, they grew greedier. Now the stakes were higher. The state was auctioning off its own assets to the highest bidder. The tycoons go on wild borrowing sprees, taking billions of dollars from gullible western lenders. Meanwhile, Russia is building up a debt bomb. When the ruble finally collapses and Russia defaults, the tycoons try to save themselves by hiding their assets and running for cover. They turn against each other as each one faces a stark choice--annihilate or be annihilated. The story of the old Russia was spies, dissidents, and missiles. This is the new Russia, where civil society and the rule of law have little or no meaning.In the heart of the sea: the tragedy of the whaleship Essex
By Nathaniel Philbrick. 2000
The epic true-life story of one of the most notorious maritime disasters of the nineteenth century which was the inspiration…
for Herman Melville's classic novel "Moby Dick". The author uses a hitherto unknown diary of one of the survivors discovered in an attic in Connecticut in 1998 to tell the tale. Winner of the 2000 National Book Award for Nonfiction. 2000.Peace pipe dreams: the truth about lies about Indians
By Darrell Dennis. 2014
Employing pop culture examples, personal anecdote and a cutting wit, Dennis deftly weaves history with current events to entertain, inform…
and provide a convincing, readable overview of First Nations issues and why they matter today. Winner of First Nation Communities Read 2015 - 2016. 2014.The Buy Side
By Turney Duff. 2013
The Buy Side, by former Galleon Group trader Turney Duff, portrays an after-hours Wall Street culture where drugs and sex…
are rampant and billions in trading commissions flow to those who dangle the most enticements. A remarkable writing debut, filled with indelible moments, The Buy Side shows as no book ever has the rewards - and dizzying temptations - of making a living on the Street. Growing up in the 1980's Turney Duff was your average kid from Kennebunk, Maine, eager to expand his horizons. After trying - and failing - to land a job as a journalist, he secured a trainee position at Morgan Stanley and got his first feel for the pecking order that exists in the trading pits. Those on the "buy side," the traders who make large bets on whether a stock will rise or fall, are the "alphas" and those on the "sell side," the brokers who handle their business, are eager to please. How eager to please was brought home stunningly to Turney in 1999 when he arrived at the Galleon Group, a colossal hedge-fund management firm run by secretive founder Raj Rajaratnam. Finally in a position to trade on his own, Turney was encouraged to socialize with the sell side and siphon from his new broker friends as much information as possible. Soon he was not just vacuuming up valuable tips but also being lured into a variety of hedonistic pursuits. Naïve enough to believe he could keep up the lifestyle without paying a price, he managed to keep an eye on his buy-and-sell charts and, meanwhile, pondered the strange goings on at Galleon, where tens of millions were being made each week in sometimes mysterious ways. At his next positions, at Argus Partners and J.L. Berkowitz, Turney climbed to even higher heights - and, as it turned out, plummeted to even lower depths - as, by day, he solidified his reputation one of the Street's most powerful healthcare traders, and by night, he blazed a path through the city's nightclubs, showing off his social genius and voraciously inhaling any drug that would fill the void he felt inside. A mesmerizingly immersive journey through Wall Street's first millennial decade, and a poignant self portrait by a young man who surely would have destroyed himself were it not for his decision to walk away from a seven-figure annual income, The Buy Side is one of the best coming-of-age-on-the-Street books ever written.From the Hardcover edition.Detachment: an adoption memoir
By Maurice Mierau. 2014
Mierau probes not only the process of adoption but what comes after - the challenges of becoming a family, the…
strain on his marriage. While one of his sons acts out and gets in trouble at school, Maurice feels removed, detached, thinking instead about his own emotionally distant father. Also born in Ukraine, Maurice’s father has a traumatic and mysterious past of his own. If Maurice can come to understand his father's life, perhaps he can start to make sense of his new sons. Winner of the 2015 Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-fiction. 2014.Living the Faith: A Life of Tom Monaghan
By James Leonard. 2012
Who is Tom Monaghan? Is he the four-year-old kid whose father died on Christmas Eve and whose mother sent him…
to an orphanage and then a juvenile detention home? Is he the entrepreneurial genius who built Domino's Pizza from a hole-in-the-wall pizzeria in Michigan into an American brand as world-conquering as Ford or Coke? Is he the religious visionary who sold Domino's for $1 billion to create an orthodox Catholic university, law school, and special interest law firm with the goal of transforming America to reflect his conservative values? He's all that and more. With extensive interviews with friends and enemies plus unprecedented access to the man himself, but wholly without his authorization, Living the Faith illuminates Tom Monaghan, the man and the myth. Living the Faith is the much-needed, definitive biography of one of the most fascinating and controversial figures in the realms of American business and religion. Through eighteen hard-boiled chapters, journalist James Leonard follows Monaghan on his path from a heartbroken kid who climbed into his father's coffin to the business tycoon who purchased the world-champion Detroit Tigers and spent a fortune on his own air force, navy, and island to the religious visionary who founded a university to make saints and a public interest law firm to overturn evolution. A sympathetic but critical perspective of the man and his works, this book is for believers, nonbelievers, and agnostics; for conservatives, liberals, and independents; for the rich, the poor, and the shrinking middle class. Mainly, however, this book is for those who want the facts about Tom Monaghan---and the truth about the effect religion had on one man and the effect that man had on the world.Billy Durant: Creator of General Motors
By Lawrence R Gustin. 2008
What explains Billy Durant's powerful influence on the auto industry during its early days? And why, given Durant's impact, has…
he been nearly forgotten for decades? In search of answers to these questions, Lawrence Gustin interviewed Durant's widow, who provided a wealth of previously unpublished autobiographical notes, letters, and personal papers. Gustin also interviewed two of Durant's personal secretaries and others who had known and worked with the man who created General Motors. The result is the amazing account of the mastermind behind what would become, as the twentieth century progressed, the world's largest company.Sam Walton
By Sam Walton, John Huey. 1992
Meet a genuine American folk hero cut from the homespun cloth of America's heartland: Sam Walton, who parlayed a single…
dime store in a hardscrabble cotton town into Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in the world. The undisputed merchant king of the late twentieth century, Sam never lost the common touch. Here, finally, inimitable words. Genuinely modest, but always sure if his ambitions and achievements. Sam shares his thinking in a candid, straight-from-the-shoulder style. In a story rich with anecdotes and the "rules of the road" of both Main Street and Wall Street, Sam Walton chronicles the inspiration, heart, and optimism that propelled him to lasso the American Dream.Stress Test
By Timothy F. Geithner. 2014
Stress Test is the story of Tim Geithner's education in financial crises. As president of the Federal Reserve Bank of…
New York and then as President Barack Obama's secretary of the Treasury, Timothy F. Geithner helped the United States navigate the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, from boom to bust to rescue to recovery. In a candid, riveting, and historically illuminating memoir, he takes readers behind the scenes of the crisis, explaining the hard choices and politically unpalatable decisions he made to repair a broken financial system and prevent the collapse of the Main Street economy. This is the inside story of how a small group of policy makers--in a thick fog of uncertainty, with unimaginably high stakes--helped avoid a second depression but lost the American people doing it. Stress Test is also a valuable guide to how governments can better manage financial crises, because this one won't be the last. Stress Test reveals a side of Secretary Geithner the public has never seen, starting with his childhood as an American abroad. He recounts his early days as a young Treasury official helping to fight the international financial crises of the 1990s, then describes what he saw, what he did, and what he missed at the New York Fed before the Wall Street boom went bust. He takes readers inside the room as the crisis began, intensified, and burned out of control, discussing the most controversial episodes of his tenures at the New York Fed and the Treasury, including the rescue of Bear Stearns; the harrowing weekend when Lehman Brothers failed; the searing crucible of the AIG rescue as well as the furor over the firm's lavish bonuses; the battles inside the Obama administration over his widely criticized but ultimately successful plan to end the crisis; and the bracing fight for the most sweeping financial reforms in more than seventy years. Secretary Geithner also describes the aftershocks of the crisis, including the administration's efforts to address high unemployment, a series of brutal political battles over deficits and debt, and the drama over Europe's repeated flirtations with the economic abyss. Secretary Geithner is not a politician, but he has things to say about politics--the silliness, the nastiness, the toll it took on his family. But in the end, Stress Test is a hopeful story about public service. In this revealing memoir, Tim Geithner explains how America withstood the ultimate stress test of its political and financial systems.From the Hardcover edition.Faithful and virtuous night: Poems
By Louise Glück. 2014
A new collection from the "fearless" (The New York Times) Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. A story of adventure, an encounter with…
the unknown, a knight's undaunted journey into the kingdom of death; a story of the world you've always known. Winner of the National Book Award. 2014.Stalin's daughter: the extraordinary and tumultuous life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
By Rosemary Sullivan. 2015
Born in the early years of the Soviet Union, Svetlana Stalin spent her youth inside the walls of the Kremlin.…
Communist Party privilege protected her from the mass starvation and purges that haunted Russia, but she did not escape tragedy--the loss of everyone she loved, including her mother, two brothers, aunts and uncles, and a lover twice her age, deliberately exiled to Siberia by her father. As she gradually learned about the extent of her father's brutality after his death, in 1967 Svetlana shocked the world by defecting to the United States. But she could not escape her father's legacy; her life in America was fractured; she moved frequently, married disastrously, shunned other Russian exiles, and ultimately died in poverty in Spring Green, Wisconsin. Winner of the 2015 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the 2016 British Columbia National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, and the 2016 RBC Taylor Prize. Bestseller. 2015.My Journey
By Donna Karan. 2015
In this candid memoir, renowned designer Donna Karan shares intimate details about her lonely childhood, her four-plus decades in the…
fashion industry, her two marriages, motherhood, and her ongoing quest for self-acceptance and spiritual peace. Donna Karan was born into the fashion business--her father was a tailor, and her mother was a showroom model and Seventh Avenue saleswoman--yet Karan dreamed of becoming a dancer like Martha Graham or a singer like Barbra Streisand. Fashion was her destiny, though. My Journey traces Karan's early days as an intern at Anne Klein, the creation of her Seven Easy Pieces (which forever changed the way working women dressed), and the meteoric rise of her company. Along with juicy industry stories, Karan candidly discusses her difficult mother and traumatic childhood, her turbulent romantic life, all the loved ones she has lost over the years, and the personal awakening that occurred just as she reached the height of professional and financial success. That awakening set Karan down a path of spiritual discovery and self-improvement. From est to Kabbalah, from silent retreats to leech therapy, Karan tried everything to find, as she writes, "calm in the chaos." But she also reveals how a chaotic life, fueled by endless curiosity and childlike impulses, helped her design seminal collections season after season for global powerhouse brands Donna Karan New York and DKNY. She also details how she has channeled her creativity (and her urge to solve problems and nurture others) into philanthropic work, particularly her early outspoken advocacy for AIDS awareness and research, and the creation of her Urban Zen Foundation, focusing on integrated healthcare and education as well as preservation of culture, which led to her current efforts in Haiti. Karan's life has been crowded with glamorous characters and adventures around the world. But she sometimes still feels like that awkward teen from Long Island who never fit in--which makes her all the more endearing. Brimming with Karan's infectious energy, My Journey is about much more than the fashion world: It is the story of a young woman whose vision and hard work made her a role model for women everywhere--a woman who dreamed big, fought to have it all, broke the rules, and loved passionately along the way.Advance praise for My Journey"Donna's creativity and passion as a committed philanthropist are matched only by her gift for friendship. Whether she's making the world more beautiful or giving a Haitian artisan the tools to create a sustainable business, Donna has always led with great heart and wonderful humor."--President Bill Clinton"What we take for granted often comes from the most revolutionary of sources. In New York in the 1980s, no one was more radical than Donna Karan. She created a way of dressing that was womanly, practical, and empowering."--Anna Wintour "My Journey is the story of an extraordinary personal, professional, and spiritual life. It's a journey defined by Donna's incredible resilience, her inward search for calm in the midst of success, and her insistence on always following her heart."--Arianna Huffington "Anyone who has ever watched Donna Karan in the dressing room with one of her loyal customers has witnessed a bond between designer and client that is as vital as an umbilical cord. That same bond is present on every page of this memoir."--Ingrid Sischy "Donna demonstrates unwavering passion and commitment to women, family, design and all of humanity with her immense philanthropic work. Her story is fascinating!"--Calvin KleinFrom the Hardcover edition.It was a time of unregulated madness, and nowhere was it madder than in Chicago at the dawn of the…
roaring 1920s. Speakeasies thrived, gang war shootings announced Al Capone's rise to underworld domination, Chicago's corrupt political leaders fraternized with gangsters, and yellow journalism only contributed to the excesses. Enter a slick, smooth-talking, charismatic lawyer named Leo Koretz, who enticed hundreds of people (who should have known better) to invest as much as $30 million in phantom timberland and non-existent oil wells in Panama. When Leo's scheme finally collapsed in 1923, he vanished and the Chicago State's Attorney began an international manhunt that lasted almost a year. When finally apprehended, Leo was living a life of luxury in Nova Scotia under an assumed identity. His mysterious death in a Chicago prison topped anything in his almost-too-bizarre-to-believe life. Bestseller. Winner of the 2016 Arthur Ellis Best Non-fiction Crime Book Award. 2015.Lake of two mountains
By Arleen Paré. 2014
Arleen Paré's second poetry collection is a portrait of a lake, of a relationship to a lake, of a network…
of relationships around a lake. It maps, probes and applauds the riparian region of central Canadian geography that lies between the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence Rivers. The poems portray this territory, its contested human presences and natural history: the 1990 Oka Crisis, Pleistocene shifts and dislocations, the feather-shaped Ile Cadieux, a Trappist monastery on the lake's northern shore. As we are drawn into experience of the lake and its environs, we also enter an intricate interleaving of landscape and memory, a reflection on how a place comes to inhabit us even as we inhabit it. Winner of the 2014 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry. 2014.